Orbit Page 4
He looks at Bill for confirmation that he hasn’t missed it all, but the astronaut is busy triggering his transmitter.
“We have negative release, Deliverance. Select prime backup and confirm.”
“Shit!” Is the singular response from above, as another voice intones “Eight seconds in the window.”
“Primary backup selected, counting two, one, release.”
Something shoves them around, or so Kip thinks, but they’re still merely a mechanical appendage of the 1011.
“Selecting secondary,” one of the pilots above says, the slightest trace of stress in his voice.
“Three seconds to abort,” another intones.
“Pressurizing.”
“Two, one, release, dammit!”
This time the whole world changes. Whooshing sounds of a pneumatic backup system force the jaws of the four primary hooks open in slightly staggered fashion. Intrepid’s nose drops first as the forward hooks release, followed by an uneven release of the rear two. In an instant Kip’s stomach has declared itself in freefall. His fingers dig a deathgrip into the armrests of his seat as he watches Campbell’s right hand holding the primary ignition control.
“Intrepid away,” Campbell says.
“Deliverance in pitch mode,” is the response, the 1011 sharply turning and slowing to get out of the way.
Aren’t we going to ignite our engine? Kip’s mind is screaming.
“Cleared for ignition,” says someone somewhere on the ground, and suddenly ignite is exactly what the rocket does—the engine kicking the living hell out of his back as Kip hangs on and wonders how Bill Campbell can even react, let alone casually look up and back as he checks his controls.
“Ignition confirmed.”
“Cleared to climb, Intrepid. Godspeed.”
“Roger.”
They’re being propelled forward with incredible force and speed and suddenly they’re also pitching-up, on their own, like a teenager driving away in his new car for the first time, leaving stunned parents waving from the sidewalk.
The previous pitch-up while they were attached to the mothership, Kip thinks, was sandlot ball compared to a round with the Yankees.
This is amazing!
They’re almost vertical now. He can see the little black dot in the attitude indicator coming into the center of Bill’s target, and while he knows it’s only three-and-a-half g’s he’s feeling, it seems infinite.
And the shaking! Nothing in the ride up on the 1011 even remotely prepared him for the crackling and shuddering and bouncing of the little craft as it streaks straight up. He’s too frightened to be scared.
“Passing Mach 2, one hundred thousand feet.”
“Copy,” says the same voice on the ground.
Mach 2, Kip thinks. That’s…that’s about twelve hundred miles per hour!
He can feel his heart racing, almost pounding out of his chest, his head locked forward by the ground-school caution that if he turns his head to look out the window, he’ll never be able to turn it back.
But in his peripheral vision, he can already see the Earth’s curvature.
“My…God!” is all he can manage as he moves his eyes as far right as possible to take in the sight.
“So far,” Bill continues, “I’ve been flying the controls like an airplane, but now they get strange, and things almost reverse. When we get up higher, we’ll have only the reaction control jets to keep us pointed in the right direction. Okay, passing one hundred fifty thousand feet, and Mach 3.”
Kip knows that’s about as fast as they’re going to go before pitchover, before they’re so far above the denser air molecules of the atmosphere that increasing speed won’t cause frictional heating problems.
“Two hundred thousand feet, Mach 3.2,” Bill intones, adding a postscript. “That’s thirty-two nautical miles, Kip. We’re technically not in space yet.”
It sure looks like space to me, Kip thinks, keeping his eyes on the horizon as the g-forces decrease.
“Are we slowing?” he asks. They’ve already taught him the answer, but he can’t help it. The last thing he’s going to pretend to be up here is a seasoned professional blasé about the details.
“Not yet,” Bill is saying. “We’ll start our throttle-back at sixty miles and reduce speed as we climb to two hundred miles, then do the pitchover and accelerate.”
“Got it.” He wants to yell, “Whee-oooh!” as loudly as possible, but it would be undignified and might startle the pilot. Not a good idea, he decides, to startle the pilot while flying an eggshell into space.
The Earth’s surface curves away like a huge ball now, even though they’re just passing the so-called threshold of space, around sixty-five miles. The steady force in his back begins to lessen as Bill pulls the throttle to half thrust, using the ship’s immense momentum in the absence of most air resistance to partially coast, partially thrust, up to the three-hundred-mile point.
Five minutes go by slowly, but on the other end of it Kip feels Bill pushing the craft over, using the control jets now, throttling up as soon as he hits the right attitude, the g-forces reasserting themselves as the nose continues to drop slowly in relation to the horizon.
“Now the speeds get really industrial strength,” Bill is saying. They pass through four thousand miles per hour, then six, then eight and ten, the actual digits familiar from training but incredibly difficult to accept. Faster than a speeding bullet. In fact, far faster.
Take us into orbit, Mr. Sulu!
The gravity he feels now isn’t gravity at all, but the acceleration of the engine as it thrusts Intrepid through the airless void toward seventeen thousand four hundred miles per hour. His mind replays every Star Trek clip he can recall of the Starship Enterprise streaking toward the speed of light. This feels like that looked.
“Stand by for a bit of a shock,” Bill calls.
“What? Is there a problem?” Kip’s reply is too sharp, too instantly concerned, and it triggers a laugh from Campbell.
“No, no. It’s just time to throw it into neutral.” He pulls the throttle back and cuts the rocket motor, the sudden disappearance of thrust and acceleration leaving Kip feeling like he’s falling again, but forward, this time. Bill Campbell hears the anticipated gasp.
“We’re weightless,” Bill announces. “And congratulations, man.” He’s reaching back now to shake Kip’s hand. “You have officially arrived on orbit above our planet.”
“We’re here?” Kip turns to stare out his side window before Bill can answer.
“We sure are. We’re almost welded up here in an orbit so stable it might not decay for forty or maybe as many as sixty years, give or take a few sunspots.”
Kip falls into awed silence, his hands still death-gripping the armrests, his stomach still confused about which way is up. At long last he lets himself breathe, a runner exhaling at the end of a long jog. Sixty years, he thinks, missing the reference to the sunspots.
“Magnificent.”
“Sorry?”
It takes a few seconds to find his voice, and Bill waits in a familiar indulgence.
“For this moment at least,” Kip says, “I feel like the luckiest guy in the world.”
Chapter 4
HEARING ROOM, SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE ON SPACE, HART SENATE
OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 17,
8 A.M. PACIFIC/11 A.M. EASTERN
The administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration stares in abject disgust at the U.S. senator from Massachusetts, wondering if the inane slip in his last question is the result of a momentary distraction, or the pickling of too many brain cells from too many years of excessive drinking.
Geoff Shear loves being the head of NASA, but he hates like hell having to deal with the worst of the hypocrites on the Hill—senators and congressmen who convince the public that they support the space program while behind closed doors trying to emasculate it.
He scoots a bit closer to the microphone, letting
the full force of the senator’s embarrassing mistake impress itself on the rest of the subcommittee and the media. The man is apparently unaware of what he’s said, and his staff seems equally confused.
“Senator,” Geoff begins, forcing a puzzled look on his face, “I’m sorry, but I may have missed something. I’m singularly unaware of any U.S. policy that supports funding the goal of eventual human colonization of Venus. If I’d known, I would have recommended against it—especially since the surface temperature on Venus is hot enough to melt lead.”
Good! he thinks. The senator looks befuddled as a horrified staff member rushes forward to whisper the right information in his ear. The aging liberal jerks his head around, wholly disbelieving, then grasps what he’s done to himself and that the NASA administrator has gleefully added to the embarrassment.
“I, ah, think you know very well, Mr. Shear, that I meant Mars, when I said Venus by mistake. I meant Mars. Of course we’re not going to go to Venus.”
“Only taking you at your word, Senator,” Geoff replies. “I thought I could do that safely.” Take that, you duplicitous SOB, Geoff thinks to himself as the senator mumbles a retort and returns to his staff’s list of questions. It’s the tiniest of paybacks for the senator’s leading a fight to all but scuttle NASA’s budget, but it feels good. No, it feels damn good, and he doesn’t need the windbag anyway. The senator is part of the disloyal minority now, his opposition to NASA programs essentially impotent.
Geoff all but sleepwalks through the remainder of the hearing, the thrust of the opposition’s efforts completely blunted. His budget figures are correct, and he is not, he tells them, going to stop turning to the media to complain about Congress every time it cuts down the space program.
The subcommittee’s Democrats and a few of the Republicans make it known that they are shocked and offended at the administrator’s defiant tone, but it’s obvious the media doesn’t care, and the opposition’s artificial outrage ends abruptly.
Geoff gathers his papers and stands confidently, knowing that the President approves of his pugnacious tactics. Even better is knowing that his methods are having the desired effect and putting unsupportive lawmakers in a corner.
“Eventually,” Geoff tells the two staff members who’ve shepherded him to the hearing, “those who vote no are going to have to do so in front of the same constituents who have listened to them praise every launch and every success NASA has ever had.”
Confidence is good, Geoff thinks, making sure the expression on his face mirrors serene self-assurance.
But minutes later when he’s alone and in the backseat of his chauffeured government car, he catches himself once again wondering how much longer he can continue using the Joseph Goebbels method, the big lie, presenting mediocre NASA programs as grand “accomplishments.” He can’t be the only one who sees that the world’s preeminent space agency is dying.
No question that NASA’s record over the past decade is wimpy at best: No return to the moon, a manned mission to Mars about to be scuttled in the wake of the Russian space agency’s impending mission to the red planet, the man-in-a-can excuse for an international space station still an expensive facade, the space shuttle replacement program in deep and probably terminal trouble, and a growing, dangerous feeling on the part of the American public that private corporations can do space better and cheaper than a huge, hidebound government bureaucracy.
And then there’s Richard DiFazio’s ASA and DiFazio’s personal campaign to undermine NASA at every turn. Bad enough that the fabled Burt Rutan—admittedly an aeronautical genius—always referred to NASA as “Nay Say,” but DiFazio has made a career out of embarrassing Geoff Shear. What’s worse, the public believes him.
The fact that DiFazio is probably right about privatizing space is immaterial. It’s Shear’s mission to keep NASA funded, alive, and relevant in the public eye, regardless. But there are times he wishes the job of NASA administrator brought with it a license to kill. No question who’d be first on his list. In too many ways, winning the private versus public battle has become his personal war.
Welcome to my life! he thinks, acutely aware that the agency is living on the edge and no more than one accident or scandal away from programmatic oblivion.
His driver swings smoothly into Washington’s afternoon traffic, heading back toward NASA Headquarters at 300 E Street SW as Geoff pulls out a sheaf of briefing papers he has yet to study, recognizing the top one immediately as the one thing he does not want to see.
Especially today.
Dammit to hell!
He’s known for weeks that if Newsweek decides to disregard the warnings from NASA’s friends and run a particularly hated article as a cover piece, the damage will be cruel. And now here it is, as bad as he expected, it’s pseudo-question begging its own conclusion:
CAN NASA COMPETE WITH PRIVATE SPACEFLIGHT COMPANIES? How the pioneering space agency is losing the battle for relevance and cost-efficiency.
He scans the four pages of verbiage before yanking out his cell phone and punching the speed dial for his secretary and instructing her to pull in his department heads for a war council. DiFazio has to be behind this one, too. The rag will hit the stands in four days, and he’ll need a preemptive strike to defuse what they’ve written.
His headquarters slides into view and the car stops, but he isn’t ready, and the driver knows better than to ask. He imagines the man now waiting for the magic phrase. “Okay, Billy,” he’ll say, and the chauffeur will get out and rush back to open his door. For now, though, he can sit in silence and think.
And what he’s thinking is disturbing. The whole nightmarish subject is out of his control, but there it is, still in his head, the same image that dawned like a revelation while he was fly-fishing in Colorado just two weeks ago.
What if, he’d thought then, one of their shoe-box, slapped-together, backyard, two-bit excuses for a spacecraft goes down? What if American Space Adventures—what a stupid name for a supposedly professional organization—has an accident and loses one of their only two pretend-a-shuttles? Their stock would crater and their business dry up, and the world would have graphic confirmation that the extreme dangers of spaceflight simply must be left to the might and wisdom of the U.S. government.
No, no. To hell with convincing the world. All he needs to do is convince Congress.
Standing in the middle of that peaceful stream, he’d let an attack of conscience bring him up short, a moment of uncertainty, the horror of someone actually learning his terrible thoughts. My God, of course he didn’t really want anyone to die just to convince Congress to fund NASA! The corrective edit had coursed through his mind and it had distracted him long enough to miss hooking the trout who’d picked that exact moment to nibble on one of his best flies.
But he had no control over a private spacecraft. It wasn’t, after all, a wish, merely an observation, and one that made him very squeamish. Moral compunction thus satisfied, he’d yanked the line hard enough on the next nibble to hook a fat rainbow and flip the startled fish completely out of the water with the same motion.
Geoff Shear looks around, aware that he’s been lost in thought. The staff will be waiting for him upstairs.
If a private spacecraft goes down, he’ll need to be ready, he’ll need the right things to say, words already drafted and rehearsed with the right statistics to cite. Maybe he should even be ready to recommend that Congress put stringent restrictions on anyone but NASA attempting spaceflight?
No. That would anger the President.
The White House is too committed to the free market. No, if the worst happens, Geoff concludes, NASA will simply be there in sorrow to sympathize, and then soldier on for all mankind.
The last line to his favorite Robert Frost poem springs to mind, a phrase he’s driven himself with for years: “But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”
He leans forward, sorry to lose the solitude.
“Okay, Billy.”
THREE HUNDRED TEN MILES ABOVE THE ATLANTIC OCEAN,
MAY 17, 8:32 A.M. PACIFIC
A sharp, almost metallic “plink” echoes through the interior of the spacecraft.
Kip doesn’t want to tear himself away from the reverie of what he’s seeing out his window, but the sound is too loud to ignore, and he feels a pressure fluctuation in the cabin.
He begins to turn his head back forward, realizing at the same moment that something wet has sprayed the back of his neck.
“Bill, what was that?”
Campbell is facing forward, but not answering. Kip can see the astronaut’s headset askew, his hands sort of floating up in front of him.
What on Earth?
“Bill?”
No answer.
“Bill!”
Is he pulling a joke? If so, this is not funny.
“Bill, come on, answer me!”
Kip leans toward him. There is a spot, almost like a hole, in the back of the pilot’s seat toward the top, and there’s a reddish mist floating around in the zero-g atmosphere of the cabin. He feels his stomach twisting up as he looks behind and spots a splatter of red on the aft bulkhead, along with what has to be another hole.
He begins clawing at his harness to release it so he can lean forward. Bill Campbell is still silent. Why?
The seat harness mechanism gives way and he launches himself forward too fast, floating over Campbell’s right shoulder, twisting like the zero-g amateur he is, his back coming to rest against the instrument panel with a soft thud, his eyes fixating on his companion’s blank expression.
Bill’s eyes are open wide and fully dilated, and in the middle of his forehead is a small, red-tinged hole.
“Oh, God!” Kip hears himself gasp as he claws for something to hold on to, aware he may be kicking dangerously sensitive controls. He grabs hold of something with his left hand and shakes Bill with his right, praying for a quick and cogent response.