Kitabı oxu: «Titan»

STEPHEN BAXTER
TITAN
THE NASA TRILOGY

COPYRIGHT

HarperVoyagerAn imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 1997

Copyright © Stephen Baxter 1997

Cover photo © NASA

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Stephen Baxter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780006498117

Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007502066

Version: 2015-10-07

DEDICATION

For Tony, Christine and Catherine

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Book One: Landing

Book Two: Low Earth Orbit

Book Three: Cruise

Day 80

Day 169

Day 325

Day 504

Day 680

Day 1181

Day 2460

Book Four: Ground Truth

Book Five: Extravehicular Activity

Book Six: Titan Summer

Epilogue

Afterword

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for Stephen Baxter

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

After seven years of flight, after travelling a billion miles from Earth, the human spacecraft Cassini reached Saturn.

Cassini was about the size of a school bus. Thick, multi-layer insulation blankets covered most of the craft’s structure and radiation-hardened equipment. The blankets’ outermost layer was translucent amber-coloured Kevlar, with shiny aluminum beneath; the two layers together made it look as if the spacecraft had been sewn into gold.

But Cassini looked its age.

The blankets were yellowed, and showed pits and scars from micrometeorite impacts. The brave red, white and blue flags and logos of the US, NASA, ESA and the contributing European countries, fixed as decals on the insulation, had faded badly in the years since launch. Cassini’s close approach to the sun, with the intense heat and solar wind there, had done most of the damage.

A fat pie-dish shape, ten feet across, clung to the side of the Cassini stack, so that the craft looked like a robot warrior going to battle, clutching a shield. In fact, the shield was a combined aeroshell and heat shield for a separate spacecraft, called Huygens, which was designed to land on Saturn’s largest moon Titan. The results Huygens gathered would serve as ‘ground truth’, confirmation and calibration for the more extensive orbital surveys Cassini would perform of the moon.

Now Cassini reached a point in space almost four million miles from Saturn’s cloud tops.

From here, the planet looked the size of a quarter-inch ball bearing held at arm’s length. Spinning in just ten hours, the planet was visibly flattened. A telescope might have shown its yellowish cloud tops, with their streaky shading and complex, anti-cyclonally rotating cloud systems. The sun was off to the right, with its close cluster of inner planets, so Saturn, seen from the probe, was half in shadow. The ring system, tight around the planet, was almost edge-on to the spacecraft, all but invisible, and it cast sharp shadows on the cloud tops.

Titan – the largest of the moons, orbiting twenty Saturn radii from its parent – was a reddish-orange pinprick, well outside the ring system.

Titan appeared to lie directly ahead of the spacecraft.

It was time.

Pyrotechnic bolts fired, silently, releasing puffs of vapour that immediately crystallized and dispersed. Three springs pushed Huygens away from Cassini, and a curved track and roller made the released probe spin, at seven revolutions per minute.

The path of Huygens and its parent probe diverged, at half a mile per hour.

Two days after the release, with the two craft about thirty miles apart – each clearly visible from the other, as a bright, complex star – Cassini fired its main engine once more, to deflect its orbit. Now Cassini and Huygens parted more rapidly.

Cassini’s nominal mission was a four-year orbital tour of the Saturn system. Its objectives were to study Saturn’s atmosphere, the atmosphere and surface of Titan, the smaller icy satellites, the rings, and the structure and physical dynamics of the magnetosphere.

And while Cassini flew on, Huygens – dormant, unpowered, a mere ten feet across, spinning slowly for stability – fell directly towards the burnt-orange face of Titan.

It was November 6, 2004.

… It would be a second-generation star.

It formed from a spinning cloud, of primordial hydrogen and helium, polluted by silicon, carbon and oxygen: rock and snow, manufactured by the first stars, the oldest in the Universe.

The cloud was a hundred times the width of the Solar System, to which it would give birth.

The cloud collapsed, and spun faster. It heated up. At last, the cloud became unstable, and broke up into successively smaller fragments.

It shrank. The cloud became opaque, and the heat it generated as it collapsed could no longer escape.

The core imploded suddenly.

The collapse made the core, a protostar, shine brilliantly, ten thousand times as bright as the sun that would shine on mankind.

Eventually the core was so hot that hydrogen nuclei began to fuse to helium. The thermonuclear energy generated balanced the inward gravitational force. The protostar stopped contracting.

It was a star. The sun.

The remaining nebula cloud condensed into dust particles and snowflakes. The orbiting particles collided with each other, and – because of the stickiness of the ice, and the organic tars coating the dust – they formed a flat disc of swarming planetesimals, objects ranging in size from a few yards across to several miles.

The planetesimals collided; some grew in size, forming planets, and others fragmented.

Most of the nebula’s mass was lost in the process.

Earth formed in a million years. Earth was dominated by rock, its snow boiled away by the young sun’s heat, its surface pounded by planetesimals.

Further out, it was different.

Further out, everything was moving more slowly, and the nebula was less dense. It was cold enough for water, carbon dioxide, ammonia and methane to condense into ice. So while the inner planets were dominated by rock, the accreting planetesimals at Jupiter’s orbit and beyond swept up dirty snow.

Hundreds of millions of years after Earth, Saturn formed, gigantic, gaseous. It radiated heat as it collapsed, warming the orbiting fragments of nebula gas and dust.

Around Saturn, an accretion disc formed. Moons coalesced, from a mixture of water ice, silicates, ammonia, methane and other trace elements.

One of them was massive.

It was half rock, half ice. It heated as it collapsed, because of its huge mass; the primordial ices melted and vaporized. The rock settled to the center, because of its greater density. At last, at the core of the moon, a ball of silicate formed, overlaid by a shell of ice, six hundred miles thick.

An ocean gathered. It was a mixture of ammonia and methane. A dense atmosphere was raised over it. The new world was a cauldron, with pressures hundreds of times that of Earth’s sea level in human times, and temperatures measured in hundreds of degrees.

The high pressure and temperature were sustained, for millions of years. And in the organic soup of the ammonia-water ocean, complex chemistry seethed.

But the new ocean and atmosphere were not stable. Ultra-violet flux from the young sun beat down; planetesimals continued to fall, blasting away swathes of the air; the atmospheric gases dissolved in the ocean.

The atmosphere cooled and thinned. The pressure dropped.

The ocean froze over.

New methane lakes formed, which converted slowly to ethane. Sunlight broke up atmospheric ammonia, to release a new atmosphere of nitrogen.

The moon settled into its long freeze.

But it was not inert. Ultraviolet photons from the sun and charged particles trapped in Saturn’s magnetic field beat down on the thick layer of air. Chemistry continued in the new atmosphere, and complex organic deposits rained down on the frozen surface …

Thus, for billions of years, Titan waited.

An object looking a little like a comet streaked across the sky of Titan, battering atmospheric gases to a plasma twice as hot as the surface of the sun itself.

Cooling, it fell towards the surface slush.

A parachute blossomed above it.

Huygens was built like a shellfish, with a tough outer cover shielding a softer kernel, with its fragile load of instrumentation. When its job was done, the outer aeroshell broke open, like the two halves of a clam shell, and the main chute unfolded.

So, after being carried across a billion miles, the aeroshell was discarded. It had absorbed nearly a third of the probe’s entire mass.

The descent module, exposed, was built around a disc-shaped platform of thick aluminum. Experiments and probe systems were bolted to the platform. The equipment was shrouded by a shell of aluminum, with a spherical cap for a nose and a truncated cone for a tail. It looked something like an inverted clam. Now cutouts in the shell opened, and booms unfolded from the main body. Instruments peered through the cutouts, or were held mounted on the booms, away from the main body.

Tentatively, the lander sought contact with the orbiter.

Fifteen minutes after its unpackaging, the main chute was cut away, and a smaller stabilizer chute opened.

The probe began to fall faster, into the deep ocean of air. Vanes around its rim made it rotate in the thickening air.

Diaphragms slid back. A series of small portals opened in the protective shell of the craft, and sensors peered out.

At the base of Titan’s stratosphere, some thirty miles above the surface, the temperature began to rise a little. Gradually, the surface became visible. Downward-pointing imagers peered, in visible and infra-red light, and as the probe slowly rotated, mosaic panoramas were built up.

At last, the probe crashed into the slush. Slowed by Titan’s low surface gravity, and the density of the lower air – half as dense again as Earth’s – the impact was slow, as gentle as an apple falling from a tree.

The probe continued its battery of experiments, pumping telemetry up to the orbiter, which sailed onwards towards Saturn.

Huygens was primarily an atmospheric probe. It had not been certain that the probe would survive the impact. And the probe had actually been designed to float if need be, for none of its mission planners had been sure whether oceans or lakes existed here, or if they did how extensive they were, or whether the chosen landing site would be covered by liquid or not.

Just six minutes after landing, the probe’s internal batteries were exhausted.

Melted slush frosted over the buried portals of the inert, cooling lander. And a thin rain of light brown organic material began to settle on the upper casing.

The chatter of telemetry to Cassini fell silent. The orbiter passed beneath the horizon, and then turned its high gain antenna away from Titan, to Earth. Patiently, Cassini began to download everything the lander had observed.

Some of the results were unexpected.

Paula Benacerraf worked through her EVA suit checklist.

She connected her Snoopy hat comms carrier to the suit’s umbilical. She set the sliding oxygen control on her chest pack to PRESS. She put on her gloves and snapped home the connecting rings. Then she lifted her helmet over her head. The suit built up to an overpressure, and she tested it for leaks.

The ritual of checks was oddly comforting. It took her mind off what she was about to do.

Tom Lamb rapped on her backpack.

Paula Benacerraf turned, awkwardly. Foot restraints held them both in standing positions, packed in head-to-toe. In her EMU – her suit, her EVA mobility unit – she felt ludicrously bulky, awkward in the confines of Columbia’s airlock, which was just a cramped, cylindrical chamber in the orbiter’s mid deck.

‘That’s it, Paula. I think we’re go.’

She said, ‘Already?’

‘Already.’ Lamb grinned out of his helmet at her, and she could see silvery stubble in the creases of his leathery cheeks. ‘You’re an independent spacecraft now.’

Her heart was hammering under the tough surface of her HUT, her hard upper torso unit. ‘Spaceship Paula. It feels good.’

Tom Lamb had once been the youngest Moonwalker. Now, at sixty-two, he was one of the oldest humans to have flown in space.

And Benacerraf, forty-five, a grandmother, was one of the oldest rookies.

Benacerraf disconnected her suit from the wall mount.

Lamb said, ‘Houston, we’ve got the hatch closed and we’re waiting for a go for depress on time.’ His native Iowan twang was overlaid with a Texan drawl acquired over long years at Houston.

‘Affirmative, EV1; you have a go for depress.’

Lamb turned to the control panel and turned the depress switch to position 5. Then, with the pressure down to five psi, Lamb turned the switch to its second position. ‘Depress valve to zero.’

Benacerraf heard a distant hiss. She moved the oxygen control on her chest pack to its EVA position.

‘Pressure down to point two,’ Lamb said now. ‘Let’s motor.’ He kicked his feet out of their restraints. With a confident motion he twisted the handle of the outer airlock hatch. Benacerraf thought the hinges and handle looked old, like bits of a school bus, with the polish of long use.

Lamb pushed the hatch outward, and Paula Benacerraf gazed into space.

She was looking along the length of the orbiter’s payload bay. The big bay doors were gaping open, the silvered Teflon surfaces of their radiator panels gleaming, and the bay itself was a complex trench, crammed with equipment, stretching sixty feet ahead of her. There was no direct sunlight; the bay was in the shadow of a wing, and the light in the bay was like a diffuse daylight.

Tom Lamb moved out through the airlock’s round hatchway, and drifted over to the left payload bay door hinge. There was a handrail and two slide wires that ran the length of the big hinge, and Lamb tethered himself to the wires. She could see his bright EV1 armbands.

He turned and waited for her.

‘Houston, the hatch is open and EV1 is out.’

‘We see you, Tom.’

‘EV2 is halfway out, getting ready.’

Benacerraf, with her hands on the doorway, felt as if she was frozen in place, as if she really couldn’t step out there.

Lamb lifted up his big gold visor, so she could see his face. ‘Just stay with it, kid. One step at a time.’

She grunted. ‘Some kid,’ she said.

Somehow, though, Lamb’s gravelly words punctured her tension.

She kept her eyes down on the floor of the payload bay and drifted through the hatch, just as she had done a hundred times in training, in the big swimming pool in the Sonny Carter Facility at Ellington Field. She fixed her own tether in place. Now, at least, she wouldn’t go drifting off into space.

For the first time she looked up.

Columbia was flying with her instrument-laden payload bay pointing at Earth, so that the planet was a ceiling of light above Benacerraf, a belly of ocean strewn with white, shadowed clouds.

Earth flooded the orbiter with light.

When he saw she was tethered, Lamb pulled himself along the length of the payload bay with practised ease. He reached the far end, and, diminished, he performed a simple pirouette, his tether flailing around him slowly.

‘Hey, Paula,’ Lamb said now. ‘Look at your hands.’

She lifted up a gloved hand before her face. There was grease on the glove, from the payload bay door hinge.

When she’d first joined the astronaut corps six years ago Benacerraf had been in complete awe of Tom Lamb.

He was the last Apollo veteran still working in the program, all of thirty-two years since the last Lunar Module had lifted off that remote surface. Tom Lamb still called himself an aviator, Navy style. She knew he had some kind of antique aeronautics degree from some technology institute in Georgia. But as far as he was concerned, Lamb was primarily a graduate of the Naval Pilot Test School at Patuxent River, in Maryland. She knew he had been known as a superb stick-and-rudder man, and his specialism had been night carrier landings, the hairiest flying in the Navy.

And as a young teenager Paula Benacerraf had watched Lamb and his commander Marcus White bounce like sun-drenched beach balls over the rubble-strewn floor of Copernicus.

How could you meet, how could you work with, a man like that?

But the awe had soon worn off, for Benacerraf.

Benacerraf was an engineering specialist – her discipline was orbital construction techniques – and she’d come into NASA with a hatful of qualifications, awards and degrees. She’d worked as a ground-based contractor on a number of Space Station construction missions. It was only when, because of Shuttle launch wave-offs and Russian construction delays, the Station assembly sequence had started to fall drastically behind its timeline that the need had been identified to draft the right experience directly into the program.

So – against the advice of her daughter Jackie, against the resistance of her employers – Benacerraf had given up her fancy consultant’s salary and her nice apartment in Seattle, and moved down to the humid stink of Houston, on Government pay.

At first she’d worked as a specialist in the backrooms behind the Mission Control rooms, in Building 30 of JSC, the Johnson Space Center. Then she’d been promoted to work as a Mission Controller, in the FCR – the Flight Control Room – itself.

But it still wasn’t enough. It was pretty obvious that this construction project – if it was ever going to get back on schedule – needed foremen in space.

Benacerraf had been a space nut since watching Lamb and his buddies on the Moon, all those years ago. But the thought of actually going up there herself, in a dinged-up old Space Shuttle, pretty much appalled her.

Tom Lamb himself had been deputed to talk her round. He’d used all the grizzled charm at his disposal.

… But I’ve got two grandchildren, Tom.

Hell, so have I. And if I can still cut it, a couple of years off my pension, why not you?

She was given promises of cooperation, special provisions, fast-tracks through the training. Even bonuses, to compensate her for her dropped salary. You’ll be treated with respect, drawled Tom Lamb. We need you, kid.

The training maybe hadn’t been quite as smooth as she’d been led to believe – too much resistance from the Spaceflight Training Division for that, who had insisted she had to work her way through their hierarchy of trainers and simulators, fast-track or no fast-track. But the pumped-up pay had come in as promised.

She just hadn’t bargained for the respect.

As an ascan, an astronaut candidate, she was royalty – at the rank of princess, at any rate, until she flew. People around the JSC campus were truthfully in awe of her, and the deference with which she was suddenly treated embarrassed her deeply.

But if she was a princess, Tom Lamb was a king among kings. And he loved it. She would watch him stroll through the Public Affairs Office or the clinic or the Crew Systems Lab, and people come running to serve him. And Lamb just lapped it up. It was as if Lamb had spent the whole of his adult life preparing for this role. Which, in a sense, he had.

Her opinion about Tom Lamb had evolved rapidly.

She pulled herself tentatively along the slide wire.

The orbiter was like a splayed-open aircraft. Before her she could see the big delta wings, spreading out to either side of the payload bay. Straight ahead, at the far end of the bay, was the bulky, rounded propulsion system housing, with its tanks and the engine bells for the main engines and the orbital manoeuvring system. Behind her was the flat rear bulkhead of the cabin section, like the wall of a big roomy shack, which contained the rest of the crew.

The curve of the wings was elegant. But for her, the design was spoiled by the softscreen mission sponsors’ logos displayed there: the US Alliance, Boeing, Lockheed, Disney-Coke. She knew that stuff brought in a lot of money to NASA, but for her it was a step too far.

At the back of the bay she could see the EDO wafer, the extended-duration pallet with its supplement of lox and liquid hydrogen for the orbiter’s fuel cells, which would allow Columbia to stretch out this mission to sixteen days. One objective of this flight had been to test the new EDO wafer in extremes of temperature, so the orbiter had been aligned to keep the payload bay in shadow for hours at a time, longer periods than on most flights.

Tom Lamb approached her, along the starboard fuselage longerons. ‘You ready for the MMU?’

‘Sure.’

‘Houston, EV2 preparing to deploy MMU.’

‘Copy that, Tom.’

Benacerraf made her way to the MMU station. The Manned Manoeuvring Unit was a big backpack shaped like the back and arms of an armchair. Since launch it had been stored in its station in the payload bay against the rear cabin bulkhead, on the starboard side.

Lamb had got there first, and he ran a quick check of the MMU’s systems.

‘You ready?’

‘Let’s do it.’

Lamb held her arms. He turned her around, and she backed into the MMU. She felt latches clasp her suit’s backpack.

‘Houston, EV2,’ she said. ‘EMU latches closed.’

‘Copy that.’

She pulled the MMU’s arms out around her. She closed her gloved hands around the controllers, which were simple hand-controllers on the end of the arms. A fibre optic data cable plugged into her suit from the MMU.

Lamb released the tethers which still clipped her to the payload bay slide wires, and reached around her. ‘Captive latches released.’

‘Copy.’

He shoved her gently in the back, and she floated away from the bulkhead. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s just like the sims.’

… Suddenly she didn’t have hold of anything, and she was falling.

‘Oh, shit.’

‘We didn’t copy that, EV2,’ the capcom said humourlessly.

Lamb ignored him. ‘Come on, Paula. Turn around.’

She had two big nitrogen-filled fuel tanks on her back now, and there were twenty-four small reaction control system nozzles. She grasped her right-hand controller, and pushed it left. There was a soft tone in her helmet as the thruster worked; she saw a faint sparkle of nitrogen crystals, to her right. In response to the thrust, she tipped a little to the left.

The controller was intuitive; moving it up or down made her pitch, her feet tipping up; left or right gave her a yaw, a sideways tilt. She twisted the handle, and made herself roll about an axis through her head to her feet.

The payload bay rotated around her.

‘It’s heavy,’ she said. ‘I can feel the unit’s inertia as I roll.’

‘You mass more than seven hundred pounds, suit and all, Paula.’

She blipped the RCS thrusters again, and slowed her roll. She finished up facing Lamb, where he clung to the aft cabin bulkhead. She pushed her left-hand controller, which drove her forward and back. There was a gentle shove, and her drifting slowed.

The MMU seemed to be working well, but its scuffs and scorch marks showed its age. And things most definitely did not feel the same, up here, as in the tethered sims on the ground. When she started moving, she just kept on going, until she stopped herself. She was in a frictionless, three-dimensional environment, like a huge ice-rink, where Newton’s laws held sway in their bare simplicity.

No wonder the Station assembly has proceeded so slowly, she thought. We just aren’t evolved for this environment.

‘Okay, Paula,’ Lamb called. ‘You ready for your one small step?’

No, she thought.

‘Let’s do it.’

‘Houston, EV2 is preparing to leave the payload bay.’

‘We copy, Tom.’

Benacerraf tipped herself up so she was facing Earth, with the orbiter behind her.

Earth, before her, was immense, overwhelming. The overall impression was of blue sea and white clouds, the white of an intensity that hurt her eyes. When she looked towards the horizon she could see the atmosphere, a thin blue shell around the planet.

She gave herself a single, firm thrust with the RCS. She felt a small, definite shove in the small of her back.

She rose out of the bay towards the face of Earth; she saw the big silvered doors to either side of her recede.

A tone sounded softly in her helmet, startling her.

‘Oh-two alarm, EV2.,’ the capcom reported.

An oxygen leak. Holed fabric, maybe. ‘Houston, EV2.. Should I come back? I—’

‘Belay that, EV2,’ Lamb said. ‘Paula, just take a couple of deep breaths. Relax. You’re safe and snug in there.’

She became aware of her breathing, which was shallow and rapid. Her suit monitors had misinterpreted her high oxygen consumption as a leak.

Deliberately, she slowed her breathing; she tried to unclench her muscles, to relax in the warm cocoon of the suit.

‘Just look at the view, kid.’

She looked at the view.

She was flying up towards Africa. The clouds piled over the equator seemed to reach down towards her, clearly three-dimensional and casting long shadows. She could see the Nile, and the ribbon development along it, surrounded by the baked-hard surface of the desert; the dependence of the people on the Nile’s water was clear.

She was extraordinarily comfortable. The suit was quiet, warm, safe. She could hear the whir of her backpack’s twenty-thousand rpm fan – it sounded like a pc fan. She heard squeaks and pops on the radio, as she drifted over UHF stations on the ground. In her bubble helmet she had a hundred and eighty degree vision, and she had a great sense of freedom. She knew that when she returned to the cabin, after the EVA, it would seem constricting, absurdly confining.

As she gazed at Earth – at all of humanity, save for the six on orbit with her on Columbia and a handful on Station – she felt some of the tension drain out of her, as if it was being drawn up to the planet. She felt lifted out of the web of concerns that dominated her life: the difficulties of her career, the frustrating pace of the space program, her unsatisfactory relationship with Jackie, her daughter, the blizzard of hassles that made up every day, mail and balky technology and her car and her apartment and accounts she had to pay and …

No wonder people get hooked on this, she thought.

‘Okay, EV2, Houston. Coming up to your three hundred feet limit.’

‘Copy that.’ Three hundred feet was as far as she could allow herself to travel. Moving away from Columbia, Benacerraf was actually entering a slightly different orbit. If she went much further, return to the orbiter would become a full-scale rendezvous, a matter of complex course correction manoeuvres.

She passed out of the shadow of the wing, and into sunlight; her EMU seemed to glow.

‘I see your light, Paula,’ Lamb called.

‘I’m pleased to hear it, Tom.’

‘EV2, Houston. Confirming your ground-to-MMU direct link is operational.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And your transponder beacon is functioning.’

‘Copy that.’

‘EV2, Houston. You have a lot of green-eyed people watching you; looks like you’re having a lot of fun.’

‘Sure. This is working very nicely. Ah, I’m glad I’ve got old Brer Rabbit out here with me, out in the briar patch where he belongs.’

She heard Lamb chuckle at that, back in the payload bay. She was aping the first words he’d spoken on the Moon.

Most astronauts got off the active list after four or five flights. They moved out into industry, or up into some kind of program management position within NASA. What kind of man was it who would keep on subjecting himself – and his family – to the grind of training, two years for every Shuttle mission, the enormous dangers of the missions themselves, flight after flight, year after year, logging up the spaceflight hours well into his sixties, endlessly defying the survival odds?

She’d even formulated the thought that maybe Lamb wasn’t actually good for anything else. To stay in the office you had to resist promotion, after all. You had to demonstrate sustained mediocrity. John Young, the other great surviving Moonwalker, had been taken off the active roster when he’d been so vocal in criticizing NASA safety procedures after Challenger.

BOOK ONE Landing

As the pilots prepared for the landing, Columbia’s flight deck took on the air of a little cave, Benacerraf thought, a cave glowing with the light of the crew’s fluorescent glareshields, and of Earth. Despite promises of upgrades, this wasn’t like a modern airliner, with its ‘glass’ cockpit of computer displays. The battleship-grey walls were encrusted with switches and instruments that shone white and yellow with internal light, though the surfaces in which they were embedded were battered and scuffed with age. There was even an eight-ball attitude indicator, right in front of Tom Lamb, like something out of World War Two; and he had controls the Wright brothers would have recognized: pedals at his feet, a joystick between his legs.

There was a constant, high-pitched whir, of environment control pumps and fans.

Lamb, sitting in Columbia’s left-hand commander’s seat, punched the deorbit coast mode program into the keyboard to his right. Benacerraf, sitting behind the pilots in the Flight Engineer’s jump seat, followed his keystrokes. OPS 301 PRO. Right. Now he began to check the burn target parameters.

Bill Angel, Columbia’s pilot, was sitting on the right hand side of the flight deck. ‘I hate snapping switches,’ he said. ‘Here we are in a new millennium and we still have to snap switches.’ He grinned, a little tightly. It was his first flight, and now he was coming up to his first landing. And, she thought, it showed.

Lamb smiled, without turning his head. ‘Give me a break,’ he said evenly. ‘I’m still trying to get used to fly by wire.’

‘Still missing that old prop wash, huh, Tom?’

‘You got it.’

Amid the bull, the two of them began to prepare the OMS orbital manoeuvring engines for their deorbit thrusting. Lamb and Angel worked through their checklist competently and calmly: Lamb with his dark, almost Italian looks, flecked now with grey, and Angel the classic WASP military type, with a round, blond head, shaven at the neck, eyes as blue as windows.

Benacerraf was kitted out for the landing, in her altitude protection suit with its oxygen equipment, parachutes, life-raft and survival equipment. She was strapped to her seat, a frame of metal and canvas. Her helmet visor was closed.

She had felt safe on orbit, cocooned by the Shuttle’s humming systems and whirring fans. Even the energies of launch had become a remote memory. But now it was time to come home. Now, rocket engines had to burn to knock Columbia out of orbit, and then the orbiter would become a simple glider, shedding its huge orbital energy in a fall through the atmosphere thousands of miles long, relying on its power units to work its aerosurfaces.

They would get one try only. Columbia had no fuel for a second attempt.

Benacerraf folded her hands in her lap and watched the pilots, following her own copy of the checklist, boredom competing with apprehension. It was, she thought, like going over the lip of the world’s biggest roller-coaster.

On the morning of Columbia’s landing at Edwards, Jake Hadamard flew into LAX.

An Agency limousine was waiting for him, and he was driven out through the rectangular-grid suburbs of LA, across the San Gabriel Mountains, and into the Mojave. His driver – a college kid from UCLA earning her way through an aeronautics degree – seemed excited to have NASA’s Administrator in the back of her car, and she wanted to talk, find out how he felt about the landing today, the latest Station delays, the future of humans in space.

Hadamard was able to shut her down within a few minutes, and get on with the paperwork in his briefcase.

He was fifty-two. And he knew that with his brushed-back silver-blond hair, his high forehead and his cold blue eyes – augmented by the steel-rimmed spectacles he favoured – he could look chilling, a whiplash-thin power from the inner circles of government. Which was how he thought of himself.

The paperwork – contained in a softscreen which he unfolded over his knees – was all about next year’s budget submission for the Agency. What else? Hadamard had been Administrator for three years now, and every one of those years, almost all his energy had been devoted to preparing the budget submission: trying to coax some kind of reasonable data and projections out of the temperamental assholes who ran NASA’s centers, then forcing it through the White House, and through its submission to Congress, and all the complex negotiations that followed, before the final cuts were agreed.

And that was always the nature of it, of course: cuts.

Hadamard understood that.

Jake Hadamard, NASA Administrator, wasn’t any kind of engineer, or aerospace nut. He’d risen to the board of a multinational supplier of commodity staples – basic foodstuffs, bathroom paper, soap and shampoo. High volume, low differentiation; you made your profit by driving down costs, and keeping your prices the lowest in the marketplace. Hadamard had achieved just that by a process of ruthless vertical integration and horizontal acquisition. He hadn’t made himself popular with the unions and the welfare groups. But he sure was popular with the shareholders.

After that he’d taken on Microsoft, after that company had fallen on hard times, and Bill Gates was finally deposed and sent off to dream his Disneyland dreams. By cost-cutting, rationalization and excising a lot of Gates’s dumber, more expensive fantasies – and by ruthlessly using Microsoft’s widespread presence to exclude the competition, so smartly and subtly that the anti-trust suits never had a chance to keep up – Hadamard had taken Microsoft back to massive profit within a couple of years.

With a profile like that, Hadamard was a natural for NASA Administrator, in these opening years of the third millennium.

And even in his first month he’d won a lot of praise from the White House for the way he’d beat up on the United Space Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed consortium that ran Shuttle launches, and then on Loral, the company which had bought out IBM’s space software support division.

Hadamard planned to do this job for a couple more years, then move up to something more senior, probably within the White House. The long-term plan for NASA, of course, was to subsume it within the Department of Agriculture, but Hadamard didn’t intend to be around that long. Let somebody else take whatever political fall-out there was from that final dismantling, when all the wrinkly old Moonwalker guys like Tom Lamb and Marcus White got on the TV again, with their premature osteoporosis and their heart problems, and started bleating about the heroic days.

Hadamard was under no illusion about his own position. He wasn’t here to deliver some kind of terrific new Apollo program. He was here to administer a declining budget, as gracefully as he could, not to bring home Moonrocks.

There had been no big new spacecraft project since the Cassini thing to Saturn that was launched in 1997, and even half of that was paid for by the Europeans. There sure as hell wasn’t going to be any new generation of Space Shuttle – not in his time, not as long as a couple of decades’ more mileage could be wrung out of the four beat-up old birds they had flying up there. The aerospace companies – Boeing North American, Lockheed Martin – did a lot of crying about the lack of seedcorn money from NASA, the stretching-out of the X-33 Shuttle replacement program. But if the companies were so dumb, so politically naive, as not to be able to see that NASA wasn’t actually supposed to make access to space easy and routine, then the hell with them.

The car turned onto Rosamond Boulevard, passed a checkpoint, and then arrived at the main gate of Edwards Air Force Base. The driver showed her pass, and the limo was waved through.

He folded up his softscreen and put it in his breast pocket.

They arrived at the center of the base, the Dryden Flight Research Center. The parking lot was maybe half full, and there was a mass of network trucks and relay equipment outside the cafeteria.

He shivered when he got out of the car; the November sun still hadn’t driven off the chill of the desert night. The dry lake beds stretched off into the distance, and he could see sage brush and Joshua trees peppered over the dirt, diminishing to the eroded mountains at the horizon. Hadamard looked for his reception.

Barbara Fahy settled into her position in the FCR – pronounced ‘Ficker’, for Flight Control Room. She was the lead Flight Director with overall responsibility for STS-143, and the Flight Director of the team of controllers for the upcoming entry phase.

Right now, Columbia was still half a planet away from the Edwards Air Force Base landing site at California; the primary landing site, at Kennedy, had waved off because of a storm there. Now Fahy checked weather conditions at Edwards. The data came in from a meteorology group here at JSC. Cloud cover under ten thou was less than five per cent. Visibility was eight miles. Crosswinds were under ten knots. There were no thunderstorms or rain showers for forty miles. It was all well within the mission rules for landing.

Everything, right now, looked nominal.

She glanced around the FCR. There was an air of quiet expectancy as her crew took over their stations and settled in, preparing for this mission’s final, crucial – and dangerous – phase.

This FCR was the newest of the three control rooms here in JSC’s Building 30; the oldest, on the third floor, dated back to the days of Gemini and Apollo, and had been flash-frozen as a monument to those brave old days. Fahy still preferred the older rooms, with their blocky rows of benches, the workstations with bolted-in terminals and crude CRTs and keyboards, all hard-wired, so limited the controllers would bring in fold-up softscreens to do the heavy number-crunching. Damn it, she’d liked the old Gemini mission patches on the walls, and the framed retirement plaques, and the big old US flag at front right, beside the plot screens; she even liked the ceiling tiles and the dingy yellow gloom, and the comforting litter of yellow stickies and styrofoam coffee cups and the ring binders full of mission rules …

But this room was more modern. The controllers’ DEC Alpha workstations were huge, black and sleek, with UNIX-controlled touch screens. The display/control system, the big projection screens at the front of the FCR, showed a mix of plots, timing data and images of an empty runway at Edwards. The decor was already dated – very nineties, done out in blue and grey, with a row of absurd pot-plants at the back of the room, which everyone ritually tried to poison with coffee dregs and soda. It was soulless. Nothing heroic had happened here. Of course, Fahy hoped nothing would, today.

Fahy began to monitor the flow of operations, through her console and the quiet voices of her controllers on their loops: Helium isolation switches closed, all four. Tank isolation switches open, all eight. Crossfeed switches closed. Checking aft RCS. Helium press switches open …

Fahy went around the horn, checking readiness for the deorbit burn.

‘Got the comms locked in there, Inco?’

‘Nice strong signal, Flight.’

‘How about you, Fido?’

‘Coming down the center of the runway, Flight, no problem.’

‘Guidance, you happy?’

‘Go, Flight.’

‘DPS?’

‘All four general purpose computers and the backup are up, Flight; all four GPCs loaded with OPS 3 and linked as redundant set. OMS data checked out.’

‘Surgeon?’

‘Everyone’s healthy, Flight.’

‘Prop?’

‘OMS and RCS consumables nominal, Flight.’

‘GNC?’

‘Guidance and control systems all nominal.’

‘MMACS?’

‘Thrust vector control gimbals are go. Vent door closed.’

‘EGIL?’

‘EGIL’ was responsible for electrical systems, including the fuel cells. ‘Rog, Flight. Single APU start …’

And so it went. Mission Control was jargon-ridden, seemingly complex and full of acronyms, but the processes at its heart were simple enough. The three key functions were TT&C: telemetry, tracking and command. Telemetry flowed down from the spacecraft into Fahy’s control center, for analysis, decision-making and control, and commands and ranging information were uploaded back to the craft.

It was simple. Fahy knew her job thoroughly, and was in control. She felt a thrill of adrenaline pumping through her veins, and she laid her hands on the cool surface of her workstation.

She’d come a long way to get to this position.

She’d started as a USAF officer, working as a launch crew commander on a Minuteman ICBM, and as a launch director for operational test launches out on the Air Force’s western test range. She’d come here to JSC to work on a couple of DoD Shuttle missions. After that she had resigned from the USAF to continue with NASA as a Flight Director.

As a kid, she’d longed to be an astronaut: more than that, a pilot, of a Shuttle. But as soon as she spent some time in Mission Control she realized that Shuttle was a ground show. Shuttle could fly itself to orbit and back to a smooth landing without any humans aboard at all. But it wouldn’t get off the ground without its Mission Controllers. This was the true bridge of what was still the world’s most advanced spacecraft.

She’d been involved with this mission, STS-143, for more than a year now, all the way back to the cargo integration review. In the endless integrated sims she’d pulled the crew and her team – called Black Gold Flight, after the Dallas oil-fields close to her home – into a tight unit.

And she’d been down to KSC several times before the launch, just so she could sit in OV-102 – Columbia – and crawl around every inch of space she could get to. As far as she was concerned the orbiter was her machine, five million pounds of living, breathing aluminum, kapton and wires. She liked to know the orbiter as well as she knew the mission commander, and every one of the four orbiters had its own personality, like custom cars.

Columbia, especially, was like a dear old friend, the first spacegoing orbiter to be built, a spacecraft which had travelled as far as from Earth to the sun.

And now Barbara Fahy was going to bring Columbia home.

‘Capcom, tell the crew we have a go for deorbit burn.’

Lamb acknowledged the capcom. ‘Rog. Go for deorbit.’

The capcom said, ‘We want to report Columbia is in super shape. Almost no write-ups. We want her back in the hangar.’

‘Okay, Joe. We know it. This old lady’s flying like a champ.’

‘We’re watching,’ the capcom, Joe Shaw, said. ‘Tom, you can start to manoeuvre to burn attitude whenever convenient.’

‘You got it.’

Lamb and Angel started throwing switches in a tight choreography, working their way down their spiral-bound checklists. Benacerraf shadowed them. She watched the backs of their heads as they worked. The two military-shaved necks moved in synchronization, like components of some greater machine.

Lamb grasped his flight controller, a big chunky joystick, in his right hand. ‘Hold onto your lunch, Paula.’

‘Don’t worry about me.’

Lamb blipped the reaction control jets.

Columbia’s nose began to pitch up. Benacerraf watched through the flight deck’s airliner-cockpit windows as Earth wheeled. The huge, wrinkled-blue belly of the Indian Ocean dominated the planet, with the spiral of a big swirling anticyclone painted across it.

Now Columbia flew tail-first and upside down.

‘Houston, Columbia. Manoeuvre to burn attitude complete.’

‘Copy that, Tom. Columbia, everything looks good to us. You are still go for the deorbit burn.’

Lamb replied, ‘That’s the best news we’ve had in sixteen days.’

Angel said, ‘The Earth is real beautiful up here, pal. I wish you could see how beautiful it was …’

‘Okay, let’s go for APU start,’ Lamb said. ‘Number one APU fuel tank valve to open.’

‘Number one APU control switch to start. Hydraulic pump switches to off.’

‘Confirm I got a green light on the hydraulic pressure indicator. Houston, Columbia. We have single APU start, over.’

‘Copy that …’

The APUs were big hydrazine-burning auxiliary power units. They powered the orbiter’s hydraulics system. During the launch, they had swivelled the big main engines, and now they would be used to adjust Columbia’s aerosurfaces during the descent. During its glide down the orbiter would be reliant on the APUs; without them, and without engines to provide power, it would have no control over its fall to Earth. The power units were clustered in the orbiter’s tail, beneath the pods of the OMS – rhyming with ‘domes’, the smaller orbital manoeuvring system engines which would slow Columbia out of its orbit.

‘Okay, let’s arm those babies,’ Lamb said. ‘Digital pilot to auto mode.’

‘Left and right OMS pressure isolation switches to GPC. Engine switches to arm/press.’

‘Gotcha. Houston, OMS engines are armed, over.’

‘Roger, you are go for burn countdown.’

Lamb scratched the silvery stubble on his cheek. He looked sideways at Angel. ‘What do you say? Shall we fire these old engines, or take another couple of swings around the bay?’

‘Aw, I’m done sightseeing.’

Lamb pressed the EXEC button on his computer keyboard. ‘Five. Four. Three. Two.’

There was a jolt, and a remote rumble, and then a steady push at Benacerraf’s back.

The CRT displays cycled between a complex display of the orbiter’s horizontal position, and a burn status screen.

‘… Hey.’ Angel shifted; something about his body language changed. He was looking at a panel in front of him. ‘I got a warning on prop tank pressure, in the right OMS engine pod.’

‘High or low?’

‘High. Two eighty-five psi.’

Lamb grunted. ‘Well, the relief valve should blow at two eighty-six. Anyhow, we only need another few minutes.’

The burn continued.

Fahy’s controllers saw the excess pressure immediately.

‘Flight, Prop.’

‘Go.’

‘I’ve got some anomalies in the right-hand OMS engine pod. The relief valve has just blown and resealed, the way Tom said. That brought us down to the operating range. But now I’m seeing a pressure rise again.’

‘Will we get through the burn?’

‘Uncertain, Flight. The trend is unsteady.’

‘All right. Anyone else got anything in that OMS engine pod? EECOM, how about you?’

‘Flight, EECOM. The temperature in there looks okay. I guess the heaters have been functioning.’

‘You guess?’

‘Flight, the data looks a little flat to me …’

That meant the environment control people thought they might be seeing some kind of instrumentation fault with the wraparound heaters which kept the fuel lines from freezing up.

Fahy wasn’t too worried by the anomaly, obscure as it was. At the back of the orbiter, in the OMS engine pods, was a complex, interconnected system of engines and fuel and oxidizer tanks. For safety the tanks were situated in the two separate OMS engine pods, on either side of the orbiter. But they could feed, through isolation valves and crossfeed lines, both the big orbital manoeuvring engines and the smaller reaction control engines in either pod.

Even if there were a real tank defect of some kind in the right pod, it was highly unlikely that it could affect the left pod. The left pod’s tanks could then keep feeding both left and right OMS engines through the pod crossfeed lines. If the defect were severe enough to kill the right OMS engine itself, the left engine could keep firing to complete the burn. And even if both OMS engines were lost, the smaller reaction control engines manoeuvring jets could fire and maintain the burn, using up the excess OMS propellant.

There was a lot of redundancy in Shuttle.

It was a nagging worry, though.

She knew that those OMS engine pods, and their contents, were rated for a hundred flights; the pods flying today had completed eight and nine flights respectively. But the refurbishment schedule had been cut down in the last couple of years, by the United Space Alliance, the private consortium to which Shuttle ground operations had been outsourced.

She made a mental note to recommend the strip-down of that right OMS engine pod, maybe the left as well.

There were only a couple of minutes left in the burn anyhow. She watched the big mission clock on the display/control screen at the front of the FCR, counting down to the end of the burn.

That was when the master alarm sounded.

The flight deck was filled with a loud, oscillating tone. Four big red push-button alarm lights lit up on the instrument panels around the cabin.

Lamb pushed a glowing button on a central panel, above a CRT; the lights and the tone died. ‘Now what the hell?’

Benacerraf heard her breath scratch in the confines of her helmet.

A master alarm. Shit.

… But, she realized, the tone hadn’t been a siren, which would have been set off by the smoke detection system, or a klaxon, which would have meant loss of cabin pressure.

Whatever was coming down, it couldn’t be as bad as that, at least.

She tried to steady her breathing. She was supposed to be here to help, after all.

At the center of the cockpit consoles there was a forty-light caution /warning display. A small panel marked ‘right OMS’ glowed red. The engine, then.

Angel said. ‘I think –’

There was a jarring bang, sharp and abrupt.

The orbiter shuddered; Benacerraf felt the rattle through her canvas seat, and she heard the creak of stressed metal. Long-wavelength vibrations washed along the structure of the orbiter, powerful, energy-dense.

She could feel it. The thrust of both OMS engines had died, halfway through the burn.

The master alarm sounded again. Now both left and right OMS lights on the caution/warning light array glowed red.

Lamb killed the noise with a stab at a red button. ‘Goddamn squawks.’

Angel seemed to have frozen; he turned to Lamb, his mouth open. ‘That bang was like a howitzer in the back yard. What was it, some kind of hard light?’

Lamb was pressing at an overhead panel. ‘Losing OMS pressure,’ he barked. ‘Losing OMS propellant.’

Angel seemed to come to himself. ‘Okay. Uh, Houston, we seem to –’

‘Houston, Columbia,’ Lamb broke in. ‘We have a situation up here. We lost OMS.’

The master alarm sounded again; Lamb killed it again.

It was like the worst simulation in the world, Benacerraf thought.

Tell me this isn’t happening, Fahy thought. She stared at the numbers on her screen, at the flickering alarm indicators, unable, for the moment, to act – unable, in fact, to believe her eyes.

The capcom said, ‘Can you confirm that, Columbia?’

‘We lost both OMS, halfway through the burn.’

‘Copy that.’

The capcom – a balding trainee astronaut called Joe Shaw – turned and looked to her for guidance, for instructions on what to say next.

Fahy tried to think.

‘EECOM, tell me what you got.’

‘I see a sealed can, Flight.’

EECOM was telling her that the spacecraft was intact; the crew still had a life-sustaining environment. That was always the first priority, in any situation like this. It gave her time to react.

‘DPS, how about you?’

‘We think there’s maybe a telemetry problem with a wraparound heater.’

‘Where?’

‘On one of the right OMS engine pod propellant lines.’

‘EECOM, you got a comment on that? It’s your heater.’

‘It’s possible, Flight. That heater might be down. We don’t have the data.’

In which case that fuel line could be frozen. Or melting, depending on the situation.

‘All right. Prop, talk to me.’

‘Prop’ was the propulsion engineer. ‘I’ve lost nitrogen tet and hydrazine pressure in the OMS tanks,’ Prop said miserably. Nitrogen tetroxide was the oxidizer, monomethyl hydrazine the fuel for the OMS engines. ‘If my telemetry’s right.’

‘Which tanks?’

‘Both.’

‘What? Both pods? But they’re on opposite sides of the bird.’ And besides, the OMS engines – because of their importance – were among the simplest systems in the orbiter. They were hypergolic; fuel and oxidizer ignited on contact, without the need for any kind of ignition system, unlike the big main engines. There was hardly anything that could go wrong. ‘How the hell is that possible?’

‘We’re working on that, Flight.’

‘How much of a loss are you seeing?’

‘I’m down to zero. It’s as if the tanks don’t exist any more. There has to be some telemetry screw-up here.’

But we have that report from Lamb, she thought. We know the OMS have shut down. This is something real, physical, not just telemetry.

Another call came in. ‘Flight, EGIL. I got me an unhappy power unit. Number two is in trouble.’

‘What’s the cause?’

‘We can’t tell you that yet, Flight.’

‘Can you keep it on line?’

‘For now. Can’t tell how long. Anyhow performance should still be nominal with two out of three APUs.’

‘Could that be linked to this OMS issue?’

‘Can’t say yet, Flight.’

Christ, she thought.

‘Flight, Capcom.’ Joe Shaw, at the workstation to her right, was still looking across at her. ‘What do I tell the crew?’

For a moment she listened to her controllers, on the open loops. Every one of them seemed to be reporting problems, and batting them back and forth to their backrooms. Fido and Guidance were worried how the orbiter was diverging from its trajectory. EECOM was concerned about excessive temperatures in the main engine compartment at the rear of the orbiter. He was shouting at DPS, worrying about the quality of the rest of his telemetry following the heater defect. And Egil, in addition to his worries about the power units, thought the warning systems, pumping out their multiple alarms, were giving false readings.

Thus, most of the controllers seemed to think some kind of instrumentation problem or flaky telemetry was screwing their data. They couldn’t recognize the system signature they were getting. In such situations controllers had a bad habit of retreating into their specialisms, thinking in tight little boxes, blaming the data.

Except there had also been a crew report. Something real had happened to her ship up there.

Behind her, the FCR’s viewing gallery was starting to fill up. Bad news travelled fast, around JSC.

STS-143 was falling apart, and on her watch.

Another call: ‘Flight, Prop. I’m reading RCS crossfeed. It’s Tom Lamb, Flight. I think he’s going to burn his reaction thrusters.’

He’s trying to complete the burn, Fahy thought.

Lamb thumbed through a checklist quickly. ‘All right, Bill, I’m going to feed the RCS with my left pod OMS tank. I’m assuming I’ve still got some pressure in there, despite what these readouts say … Here we go. Aft left tank isolation switches one, two, three, four, five A, three, four, five B to close, left and right …’

Lamb was, Benacerraf realized, intending to burn the reaction control engines, without waiting either for the okay from Houston or even for burn targets. He was just, in his can-do 1960s kind of way, going ahead and doing it.

Angel was watching Lamb. He was working switches on an overhead panel. His gestures were hurried, careless, Benacerraf thought. His blue eyes were shining; he grinned, and his face was flushed. He was enjoying this, she realized, enjoying being stuck in the middle of a deorbit burn with two failed engines. Relishing a chance to show off his competence.

She felt a deep and growing unease.

Lamb grasped his flight control handle. ‘Initiating burn.’ He pushed the handle forward, keeping his eye on his displays. ‘Houston, Columbia. RCS burn started.’

‘Copy that.’

‘Please upload burn targets for me.’

‘We’re working, Tom. Hang in there.’

Benacerraf said, ‘Are we committed to the deorbit yet? Maybe we could just abort the burn and stay up a little longer.’

Tom Lamb glanced back at her, still holding down the flight stick. ‘The rear RCS bells are back in the OMS engine pods, remember. If something big has taken out the OMS, we don’t know how long we’ll have the RCS.’

My God, she thought. He’s right. We have to use the reaction control system while we have it, use those smaller thrusters to try to complete the burn. Because it’s all we have, to get us home.

Her perspective changed. It was, she realized, perfectly possible that she wasn’t going to make it through; that suddenly – so quickly – it had become her day to die.

For the first time since the events of this incident had started to blizzard past her, she felt real fear.

And, she thought, Lamb figured all of that out, in the first couple of seconds, in the middle of this roller-coaster ride. And made the right choice, took the appropriate action.

‘Okay, Columbia, Houston.’

‘Reading you, Joe,’ Lamb said.

‘We want to confirm you’re doing the right thing. We’re figuring those burn parameters now. Uh, I have the targets. They’re being uplinked now. And I’ll voice up the parameters to you, Tom.’

Lamb nodded at Angel, who fumbled for a scratch pad, and copied down the timings the capcom read up.

The residual burn lasted a full seven minutes.

‘Okay, Columbia, Houston. Counting you down out of the burn.’

‘Good. My arm’s getting kind of stiff, Joe,’ Lamb said.

‘Ten. Five. Three, two, one.’

Lamb released the flight control stick. He checked the orbiter’s attitude, altitude and velocity using his analogue instruments, and compared them to the CRT. ‘Hey, we got a good burn. How about that.’

‘Copy that, Columbia. Residuals are three-tenths. You’re a little off US One, a little delayed, but we figure you can recover on the way in.’

Benacerraf found she was gripping her checklist so hard her fingers hurt.

Is that it? Is it over?

The master alarm sounded, jarring.

More lights appeared on the caution/warning array, and on another display to Angel’s right hand. Lamb killed the alarm.