Island of Clouds: The Great 1972 Venus Flyby (Altered Space Book 3)

by Gerald Brennan

  “One of his laws states that a body set in motion will stay in motion, unless acted on by another force. This is the law of inertia. Now on Earth, this can be hard to see, because we’re used to other forces getting in the way. If you throw a ball, gravity will pull it down, and friction will make it roll to a halt. But if you throw it in space…” I’ve been holding a small rubber ball; I turn towards our little hallway and give it a toss. It flies straight and true, not slowing down or arcing to the ground but heading straight to the curtain around the toilet.

  Shepard doesn’t film it.

  “I thought you were gonna get that,” I say, annoyed.

  “This isn’t live, Buzz. They’re gonna edit it together.”

  “All right, I guess we’ll do it again.” While Shepard repositions himself, I float down the hallway. The ball has ricocheted off the curtain and a locker handle; energy dissipated, it’s floating lazily back towards us. I pluck it from the air and float back. “Act One, Scene One. Buzz throws the ball. Take Two.”

  From right in front of the camera lens, I toss the ball gently. This time Shepard pushes himself off the bulkhead and follows the ball with the camera.

  “Ohh, tracking shot. Getting fancy there, Stanley Kubrick,” Kerwin observes.

  We head back to the mess area. “We are not immune to gravity here in space. When we were orbiting Earth back on my Gemini mission, the force of gravity was still 87% as strong as it is at ground level. But we could still observe this same weightless behavior. Why is that? Well, on Earth, if you’re standing on something solid, it is pushing against you, and you feel that force. In orbit, gravity pulls you and you’re falling, but the spacecraft is falling, too, so there’s nothing to push against you. To stay in low-earth orbit, the spacecraft has to travel so fast that, by the time it falls, the surface of the planet has fallen away, too. Here we…”

  “Here we,” Joe is talking over me.

  Shepard stops filming.

  “I thought I was going to take this part,” Kerwin says.

  “I was on a roll.”

  “But I feel dumb just floating there while you talk.”

  “The silent partner,” Shepard says.

  “I can pick up from there, talk about the trajectory.”

  “There’s gonna be a discontinuity…”

  “They’re gonna edit it together,” Shepard points out.

  “What are you, the cameraman and the director?” I force a strangled smile. “There’ll be a discontinuity. If I’m talking, and there’s a cut, and it’s still looking at us, and you’re talking…”

  “They’re gonna edit it together,” Shepard points out.

  “Yeah, they do stuff like that all the time,” Kerwin adds. “All those artsy movies. Whatsit, French New Wave? I think that’s a jump cut.”

  “What are you, the cinematographer? This isn’t…French New whatever,” I point out. “This is a classroom documentary.”

  “They’re gonna edit it together,” Shepard points out. “Probably put in some graphics. Drawings or something. Man’s gonna be on camera, he should get to talk. What are you, the star?”

  “Yes.” I laugh, at last. “And I…can’t…work under these conditions!” I throw my hands in the air, a mock tantrum.

  The others chuckle, too. Again the tension dissipates. “Hey, if you stay too long in space, I guess you get to act like a star,” Shepard says.

  “You want the part?” I ask Kerwin. “All right. Al’s right, we should switch off more.”

  Kerwin runs through the lines about falling around the Earth. Then: “We’ve escaped from Earth’s orbit, but we haven’t escaped gravity. Essentially now we are in solar orbit, on a lopsided trajectory that will speed up as our planetary flyby draws near, in what we call a gravitational slingshot. So we’re falling around the sun, and falling towards Venus.”

  •••

  I end up sitting in on Al’s communication window that night. He has business to transact, real-estate wheeling and dealing, and I’ve become a partner of sorts for those discussions.

  For a navy man, Shepard spends a lot of time thinking about the land. Not casually like the rest of us, but professionally, with a keen eye for what can be bought and sold, both above and below. When Mercury was winding down and NASA was moving to Houston, the astronauts found themselves getting invited to various social events by a host of local businessmen, car dealers and bank presidents and what-not, who were eager to meet the town’s new elite. And it turned out Shepard was an ace at networking and socializing, all that stuff that makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little. When his ear condition developed and he went off flight status, he had time to burn on those side pursuits, and he did very well for himself indeed. Once he was back in the rotation, he had to dial it back a little, but by then he’d already established himself in a way most of us are waiting to do until after we leave NASA. Rumor has it he was a millionaire long before he went to the moon.

  Given the length of our current voyage, one would think Shepard would’ve finally had to choose between being an astronaut and being a tycoon. But he’s never been the type of man to be forced into anything. He gave his wife power of attorney to act as his proxy in his business dealings, and once we started getting far enough from Earth, he recruited me to sit in and listen during his consultations with her, to cut down on the back-and-forth.

  “There were some hiccups with the strip mall on Westheimer,” Louise says as we get down to business.

  “Hiccups?” Shepard mouths the words and looks at me; he knows it would be counterproductive to say anything at all, and impossible to interrupt.

  Indeed, even as he’s doing that, Louise is continuing. “The Italian restaurant is having problems with their…” (Crackles.) “…ey have to do a lot of remodeling, and bring in a new pizza oven, but the order’s been delayed, and they can’t open the restaurant until that work’s done, so they’re not bringing in any revenue yet. They’re asking for a rent reduction. They’d like three months at fifty percent. The other partners want to give it to them, because it would take a long time to get in a different tenant, so it’d be counterproductive to force these people out of business. They want your OK, though.”

  Shepard is jotting down notes, neat and legible: 1) Tenant rent reduction request – 3 mos. 50%. COUNTER. 2 MOS. 60%

  “The next item’s about the horses. We’ve gotten an offer on Jupiter from a stud farm in Kentucky. Six thousand dollars, and they’ll pay to transport him back there. Given his age and the stabling costs, I think it’s a decent deal. I think we paid a thousand for him.”

  Shepard jots: 2) Jupiter - $6000. NO.

  “And finally,” Louise continues. “Most importantly. The wells outside of Odessa. Between the two of them, we’ve spent $350,000 on equipment and drilling. One of the holes is at 8,100 feet, and the other’s at 7,900. Frank says…” (Static.) “…ly normal for the Permian Basin, but Mark says with oil at three-and-a-half dollars a barrel, we may be facing a loss even if they do start producing. He thinks we should investigate other options…” (Indecipherable.) “…ompletion costs. Maybe just halt the drilling. Or sell them.”

  Shepard writes: 3) Odessa wells. HELL NO. Keep drilling.

  I’m watching him write, but he catches me, and gives a look I don’t much care for.

  “That’s it for now,” Louise continues. “I’ll stand by for your direction. Over.”

  “She did say six thousand on the horse, right?” Shepard asks.

  “Yes, that’s what I heard, too.”

  “OK. And three months’ rent reduction for the restaurant at 50%. And the wells, I won’t even bother with that. Jesus Christ, people think because I’m in space for a year I’m gonna be a pushover. All right, you’re free to go.”

  “You’re all set?”

  “I’m all set. Thanks, Buzz.”

  He’s been friendly, somewhat: the friendliness of a man who knows he’s asking for a favor that falls outside the normal strictures of co
mmand and control, one where you have every right to say no. But the dismissal still feels abrupt: the curtness of a man who would prefer not to ask for any favors at all.

  As he turns away, I remove my headset and move towards the passage to the sleeping chamber, but slowly, on the off chance I’ll be able to catch a little of his side of the conversation. I do want to know how they talk to one another when no one’s around.

  Shepard’s just about to start talking when he looks over his shoulder and catches me lingering: “Are you going to head down there, or what?”

  The tone stings. I don’t speak; I just pull myself down out of earshot. To do anything else would be to acknowledge I’d been curious about the rest of the conversation. But I know I should know better. Shepard’s never been the type of guy to let you know more than he has to.

  •••

  On Sunday, we’re making filmstrips again.

  “Gyroscopes provide yet another way for Sir Isaac Newton’s laws to govern our lives,” Kerwin says, back alone in front of the camera. “Just as bodies in motion try to conserve their momentum, rotating objects try to maintain their angular momentum. You can see this with a child’s top: the faster the spin, the less the wobble, the more quickly it steadies itself. Even in zero gravity, it wants to stay in place.” He’s brought one up here, a metal string-pull top with a large central disk; he pulls the string to set it spinning and it floats in the air in front of him, a miniature space station. After I zoom in for a close-up, he nudges one end with a pencil to set it moving. It stays upright and doesn’t tumble.

  “Our guidance system operates around this principle. We have a gyroscope not unlike this, a metal disk spinning at a tremendous rate. And the axle points are set in a metal ring, which connects with a different set of axle points to another ring, which connects with yet another set of axle points to still another ring. When you rotate the spacecraft, the disk tries to stay level. It’s like it’s invisibly glued to the heavenly firmament by physics.”

  “So the disk stays in place, and the rings rotate instead. The system measures the rotation in each axis, and sends these measurements to our control panel so we can see our orientation relative to three-dimensional space. We call this orientation ‘attitude.’ This is different than altitude, which is your height above something. There’s a good way to remember the difference: when your teacher tells someone they have a bad attitude, that person sometimes rolls their eyes. And as our spacecraft moves, the attitude indicator, which we call an ‘eight-ball,’ rolls around, and it looks like when a kid rolls their eyes. Trust us, as parents, we’ve seen it a lot.”

  I suppress a little snicker.

  “We use gyroscopes for more than guidance, though. We use another set to actually control the spacecraft’s attitude. We call them ‘control moment gyros.’ With these, you actually try to move the gyros. When you apply power to them to push them in one direction, it causes the spacecraft to rotate in the opposite direction. It’s a great system for long missions like this one. Rather than firing our thrusters all the time and worrying about running out of fuel, we can reorient the spacecraft using electricity, which we’re always generating via...”

  I put down the camera. All of it seems just…off.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You think that’ll work?” I ask.

  “Sure, why not?” he says.

  I’m not sure, but I think I roll my eyes.

  “Too wordy?” he asks.

  I shrug, like: yeah, well, kinda. “I don’t think we have enough for a good film lesson about the control moment gyros.”

  I half-expect him to make some lame joke about my attitude. Instead, I see a segment of a smile. “You know what? We could probably use some more visuals in this part.”

  “Yeah, like maybe pushing against something that’s fixed, and rotating the other way.”

  “Or maybe…I could show why we need to control the spacecraft’s attitude. How we have to keep the solar panels and sunshade towards the sun. Maybe…” (He rummages around in his pockets.) “…get a flashlight, put a sheet of paper like it’s one of the panels.” (He places the objects neatly in the airspace in front of him.) “Then we can show how the paper catches the most light when it’s perpendicular to the flashlight.” (He places the paper in front of the flashlight beam and angles it back and forth.) “And explain how we need to do that with the panels to keep a full charge. Whaddaya think?”

  “I guess we can try.”

  We reshoot the scene, but it still doesn’t seem like we’ve done enough. Shepard comes over to check on our progress.

  “We got a little more footage,” I tell him. “I’m trying to think of something else we can do.”

  “Maybe give the kids some shots of the spiderweb experiment,” he suggests.

  A couple schoolkids had suggested this experiment a year or so before, and NASA had given its blessing, the end result being that we now have a small metal box screwed to the wall, and a window through which we can observe two spiders and their webs. There had been some pre-launch speculation about whether or not they could work in space, but within a couple days of launch, the spiders had gotten the swing of things and started spinning their weightless webs every bit as effortlessly as if they’d been born up here.

  Shepard takes over the camera and puts it up to the glass while Kerwin ad-libs some dialogue, something about how the spiders are adapting well and keeping a good attitude.

  “That’s still not a lot of footage,” I point out when they’re done.

  “Well, do you have any suggestions, Mr. Attitude?” Shepard asks, a little more coldly than I care for.

  “Actually, I’ve got another idea.” Kerwin floats off and comes back with a drink container and the piece of string from the metal top we’d used for the gyro demo. Then he releases a giant globule of water that shimmers suspended in the air in front of his face. (How can there still be those crazies who believe we’ve never been in space? A minute of footage of a floating water blob is enough to prove them wrong. Nobody can do that on Earth, not even Kubrick.) “Here, get a shot of this.”

  “Sure thing.” Shepard lines up to film.

  “You can see tension at work here in the blob of water,” Kerwin says. “Surface tension means the water molecules adhere to each other. They try to pull towards each other so there’s as small a surface area as possible. Water has a stronger surface tension than many liquids. And without gravity, there are fewer forces to counteract it; it’s almost like there’s an elastic skin around the water.” Kerwin moves a piece of string very slowly through the water; the surface tension keeps the blob from re-forming on the other side. Working carefully, he splits it in half, the way a man at a deli might cut a block of cheese with a piece of wire. “It can make it difficult for us when we spill something; if a blob of water hits the wall, there’s no gravity to make it drip down, so it clings, and it’s harder to clean up. But tension also keeps things interesting.”

  He breathes gently on one of the globules, blowing it back together until the two reassemble. Then we stab straws into the water and drink from it as Shepard films. When he’s done, the remnant’s about the size of my fist. For as long as we’ve been up here, this is still a mesmerizing sight, strangely relaxing; I watch the blob for a full minute as it hangs there, shivering and ghostly.

  •••

  Monday is a big day, perhaps the most important prelude to the great fly-by. We’re shooting Venus in the side from a distance of more than a million and a half miles.

  The probes have been nestled for the past four months in a series of metal canisters at the bottom of the manned module. All told, we’re carrying three thousand pounds’ worth: an orbiter, two floaters, six dropsondes, two landers. (Or penetrators, depending on who you’re talking to.) The landers are fat metal kamikazes on a fast one-way mission; after the initial fiery plunge into Venus’s atmosphere, they’ll be descending to the surface as rapidly as parachute technology will allow, taking
pictures as they go, monitoring temperature and pressure, and surviving just long enough to snag a soil sample and transmit back some basic data. The dropsondes are smaller probes, similar to the ones weathermen launch from aircraft into hurricanes; like the landers, they’re carrying heat shields to survive, but they’ll deploy slower parachutes and take more thorough atmospheric readings during a more leisurely descent. And the floaters will also use heat shields to aerobrake; they’ll stabilize themselves with a smaller parachute, then inflate a large Mylar balloon to stay aloft. They’ll measure wind speed and weather conditions at altitude; more importantly, they’ll capture atmospheric dust and analyze it for metabolic processes—signs of life.

  (If all of this sounds complicated, that’s because it is. The Venus probes are more than 10% of the module’s mass budget, and their employment has been very elaborately choreographed, with everything sequenced and timed precisely. Because the landers and the dropsondes may not survive for long, they need to transmit data at a high bitrate via our spacecraft and its high-gain antennae. So they’re equipped with solid rocket motors; a 1050 fps burn 132 hours before periapsis will allow them to reach Venus several hours ahead of us and transmit back to us during our approach, while we’re still within line-of-sight. But the metabolic analyzers on the floaters will take several days to register their results, by which time our spacecraft will be long gone, so they’ll be arriving at a more leisurely pace and transmitting data to the orbiter, which will send it all back to Earth.)

  We need to deploy everything successfully, or else the mission will be a failure. We also need to keep from shooting ourselves in the face.

  While Kerwin and Shepard have been readying the probes, I’ve been upstairs in the command module, turning it back on. I work methodically through the checklist, pushing circuit breakers, watching instruments and panel lights revive, scribbling calculations based on the manned module’s guidance platform, plugging the results in to the command module’s platform, rotating the spacecraft stack, keeping everyone appraised via headset. “And we’re back up,” I say at last. “Attitude program is complete. Still nominal on all propellants. Disabling all quads.”