Back to the Moon-ARC

by Travis S. Taylor

  The first stage, then fully separated from the rocket-powered Dreamscape, began its glide back to the Nevada desert. Operated by onboard automatic pilot and with constant monitoring by engineers in the Space Excursions control room back at the launch site, the first stage was on target for a landing back at the location from which its voyage began. So far the Dreamscape was doing everything just right.

  The acceleration from the main burn continuously pushed Paul back into the webbing that secured him to his seat. He could feel the skin on his cheekbones being pulled back toward his ears. He could hear his heartbeat and feel the kick to his abdomen as the Dreamscape’s engine engaged at a little over twenty thousand feet. The whine of the engines was only momentarily loud before the cabin’s active soundproofing kicked in and diminished it to something just short of a deafening dull roar. The sound may have diminished a bit, but the g-forces slamming Paul into the seat were far from over. At the moment he was feeling over five gravities and would endure it for a few moments more. Paul grunted against the crushing weight of his chest and forced himself to breathe through it.

  He was on his way to orbit. Once he got there, he’d circularize his orbit and then crank his inclination up to match the International Space Station. Then he would chase the ISS until he docked with it. Upon docking with the space station, he’d offer the rescued astronauts a ride home. At least that was the plan with which he’d started.

  Chapter 32

  “Mercy I, this is mission control, copy?

  “Mercy I, this is mission control, do you copy?

  “Come on, guys, this is Houston, come in?”

  Bill would have sworn he was having a bad dream. No, a nightmare would have been more like it. He’d been stranded outside a spaceship for hours, only to make it inside the thing just in time to go careening through the Earth’s atmosphere at over fifteen kilometers per second. The ship had shaken him to his bones. His teeth and jawbone ached from having clenched so tightly. Somewhere in there he had passed out. That had probably been for the best. He imagined that the ride may have even been worse after he’d passed out.

  “Uh, roger…ahem…roger, Houston,” he said weakly. Bill shook his head and squinted his eyes as best he could in his suit. He reached up and tapped the control screen and brought up the ship diagnostics. Cabin pressure was good, so he popped his faceplate. Just doing that nearly exhausted him. He let his arms fall back down beside him, and they actually fell. He had a bit of a dizzy sensation also. “Uh-oh. That can’t be good.

  “Houston, this is Mercy I, over.” Bill reached up and switched on the internal microphone. “Hey, anybody with me in here?”

  “Zhi and myself are awake, Bill,” Hui answered. “Xu and Ming are alive but still out.”

  “Tony?”

  “Huh, what, hey?” Tony startled as he awoke.

  “Easy, Tony.”

  “Bill, I feel like I’m gonna throw up,” Tony said.

  “Yeah, me, too. I think we’re spinning or tumbling. I’m trying to figure it out.” Bill carefully moved one hand and tapped the commands to bring up the flight-command suite. The digital direction gyroscopes, Global Positioning System, and attitude determination and control systems seemed to be all functional and online. The gyro was rolling counterclockwise. And that meant that the Orion was spinning like a top.

  “Good to hear your voice, Bill,” mission control replied. “We need to assess the ship and telemetry data. We show an induced roll?”

  “Roger that, Houston. We’re rolling pretty darn quickly. My guess is we’re pulling about three gees.” Bill worked his hands out of the gloves and did his best to stow the gloves out of the way without getting sick on himself. Then he eased his left hand around the stick.

  “Copy that, Mercy I. We show your rate of spin to be conducive to a three point two one gravity load.”

  “Why hasn’t the automated attitude control and stabilization system kicked in?” Tony asked.

  “Good question, Tony.” Bill tapped the screen. “Holy crap. Uh, Houston, I’m looking at the boards for the attitude control and stabilization system, and it is all orange and red across the board. I’ve got alarms on the ACS PROP, Main Guidance Processing, and a P&P Alert on RP. Any advice there?”

  “Copy that, Mercy I. Hold one for that.”

  Bill considered just taking the manual controls and trying to straighten out the ship. The problem with that would be that if they had suffered some damage during the aerocapture maneuver, or Tony’s target practice, then putting power to the thrusters could start a fire, cause an explosion, or do nothing. They could withstand the merry-go-round for another minute or two. But not much longer than that.

  “Hey, didn’t something like this happen to Neil Armstrong?” Tony asked.

  “Gemini 8. Neil and David Scott docked with the Agena target vehicle, and apparently the attitude-control systems for the Gemini capsule and the Agena kept firing, and they couldn’t seem to get them to stop. They ended up aborting the mission and using the Gemini capsule’s reentry thrusters to straighten them out, if I recall. But I think they were spinning head over heels, not round and round like we are.” Bill squinted his eyes. The roll rate was getting worse. Maybe it just felt worse.

  “Okay Mercy I, we believe that the P & P alert is the key. The pressurants and pressurization algorithm is telling us that we’ve got either an ACS roll thruster stuck open or there is a leak in the propellant line that is rapidly venting. But since the thrust appears to be very stable and directional, our best guess is the thruster.”

  “Uh, okay, Houston. What is our work-around?” Bill inched his hand closer to the manual-control switch.

  “Bill, you need to see if you can reboot the ACS. The PROP team thinks that there might be a valve stuck open, and the reboot will close it.”

  “Okay. Roger that. Start with the reboot sequence.”

  “Roger that, Mercy I. Here we go. ACS SEQ 999GGH3…”

  It took Stetson more than seven or eight very long minutes to type in the commands. During that time Tony Chow began retching and heaving into a barf bag as best he could manage. The Chinese crew members seemed to be handling the situation a little better.

  “Alright, Houston, hitting reboot now.” Bill tapped in the final command code. When he did, everything went black. “Jesus!”

  “What the…?” Tony forgot his barf bag when the lights flickered out.

  “Houston, we’ve had a complete power failure here. All my boards are out.” Bill started tapping at reset switches and breakers, but nothing seemed to happen. For some reason, the communications system was still up.

  “Mercy I, we’ve lost all feeds but the Ku-band links. No telemetry whatsoever is making it to us. We are looking into it.”

  “Roger that, but we are still spinning up here.” Bill was beginning to think that the ship was about to come apart at the seams. They had comm-system power. That meant something. They needed the ACS back online if he was going to stop the spin.

  “Bill, my screen is coming on!” Tony shouted.

  “What does it say?” Bill tried his best to move his head in that direction, but the spin kept him from doing so.

  “It’s a hard reset! I think the entire system shut down and is now starting to boot back up.” Tony reached up and tapped the enter key on the console, and his screen lit completely up and started loading the operating system. Then the lights flickered back on, and Bill could hear the carbon dioxide scrubber fans start up again.

  “Houston, be advised that we’ve got systems coming back online.” Bill’s screen blinked back on and began loading the mix of drivers loaded onto it to command the spacecraft. “Any idea what just happened?”

  “Uh, we’re working on that, Mercy I. Right now we believe we had a main power-bus failure and back-up power has kicked in,” Houston replied.

  “Roger that. Now we need to stop this rolling.” Bill waited as the system came completely back up. “Houston, I have an initial idea that will
help.”

  “Go ahead, Bill.”

  “I want to redeploy the solar arrays.” Bill understood that they were spinning about the roll axis just like a figure skater on ice doing an axel. When figure skaters let out their arms, it slowed their rate of spin due to the law of conservation of angular momentum. Extending the solar arrays should have the same effect. It probably wouldn’t stop the spin, but it would slow it to something a little more tolerable.

  “We agree with that, Bill. Go ahead and cycle the solar arrays, over.”

  “Roger that, Houston. I’m making my way through the procedure now.” Bill tapped several commands, and then the graphic of the exterior view of the ship showed the solar panels extending. Bill could feel some vibrations from the gimbal motors. The lights turned green for both arrays, showing that they had been fully extended. He held up his arms. They didn’t feel as weird as they had before.

  “Did it work, Bill?” Tony asked.

  “Don’t know. I feel different, but we’ll have to wait until the gyro is fully back online. Another minute will tell.” So they waited.

  And waited.

  When the Orion completely rebooted itself and all systems were back online, the directional gyro showed that the ship was still spinning, but at about half the speed it had been before. That was a little more tolerable.

  “Okay, Houston, we show that our roll rate has dropped to a constant speed. Also note that the roll thruster appears to have turned itself off during the reboot.” Bill hit the auto ACS icon and activated the automated-control system.

  Bang! Bang! Bang, bang, bang!

  Several attitude-correction thrusts were initiated by the computer, and then the roll rate showed zero on the directional gyroscope. The ship had stopped spinning. And not a moment too soon, as Tony Chow was reaching for his barf bag once again.

  “Houston! That worked. We’ve stopped spinning, and now I believe we are back in business. I’m setting up a full diagnostic run now to see what shape we are in. That should only take a few minutes.” Bill tapped in several key sequences and then leaned back to look out the docking windows. Earth filled the view, and it was awesome. From the look of things, Bill was guessing that they were somewhere over China at the present moment.

  “Hey, everyone. Take a look out the window.” Chow, Hui, and Stetson each took a turn unbuckling and floating up to the windows and peering out at Earth—at home.

  Bill watched as his home planet rotated beneath them. From the looks of the size of things, it seemed about right. He’d been in low Earth orbit many many times now and knew what it looked like. One thing didn’t seem to add up, though. If he had his bearings straight, then it appeared to him that they were flying much closer to an equatorial orbit than the orbit of the International Space Station.

  “Uh, Houston, is there something else you need to tell us?”

  Chapter 33

  “Mercy I, something went wrong on aerocapture.” Mission control started in with the bad news. “You might have figured out by now that you aren’t at a fifty-two degree inclination in your orbit.”

  “I was beginning to wonder about that, Houston.” Bill replied. “So, where are we?”

  BANG! Bang, bang, bang! A big jolt resounded through the ship, followed by three ACS bursts. Then there were more ACS burns. Bang, bang, bang. Bang, bang.

  “Holy crap!” Bill grabbed at his armrest with one hand to steady himself. With the other he tapped at the attitude-control diagnostics and the directional-gyro screen. “Houston, we’ve got something going on here. We’re rocking and rolling like crazy, and the ACS is trying to keep up with it.”

  Bang. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Bang, bang. All the ACS thrusters seemed to be firing to correct for something, and the ship continued to rock with each bang.

  “Mercy I, we show P & P PROP warning again, and the fuel level in ACS is dropping rapidly.”

  “Roger that, Houston. The ACS is firing almost continuously now.” Bill considered taking control, but he had no idea what the ship was doing and why the computer felt it needed the ACS control thrusters to fire. Something was pushing them. “Tony, can you see anything out your window? I’ve got nothing on this side.”

  “Bill! There’s something spewing sparkly stuff in a jet out the side over here.” Tony sounded upset.

  “Alright. Take it easy, Tony.” Bill didn’t like the sound of that. It was never a good idea to be spewing anything out of the ship if you didn’t have to. “Houston, we’ve got something leaking out of the capsule near the starboard side up at the nose.” He didn’t have to remind anybody that that was the location where Tony had taken up target practice before the aerocapture. That big noise they heard during the capture process might have been something coming loose up there.

  “Copy that, Mercy I.”

  Bang, bang. Bang, bang, bang.

  “Houston, be advised that the P & P PROP warning light is not resetting. Also, it looks like we’re gonna run out of fuel in the ACS thrusters if we don’t do something soon.” Bill was getting concerned. They were off their orbit and running out of fuel. They didn’t die on the Moon, or on the way back to Earth orbit, and he hoped they wouldn’t get stranded in Earth orbit just to die before they could get back to the space station. Home was just a few hundred miles beneath them. Somehow, they had to survive long enough to cover those last few hundred miles. Those last ones were just as deadly as the first half million.

  “Sorry, Mercy I. We haven’t come up with a solution yet. Keep trying to reset the flow system and get that warning light back to green.”

  “Roger that, Houston.” Bill didn’t like it. Houston always came up with something to at least try. “Tony. We’re on our own. We’ve got to fix this.”

  “Bill, we don’t even know what is wrong.”

  Bang, bang. Bang. The attitude-control system continued to fire correction burns.

  “Everybody, faceplates on. I’m going outside to see what is going on,” Bill ordered the crew.

  “Bill, shouldn’t we run that by Houston first?”

  “They don’t have any idea what is going on, Tony.” He hadn’t come this far to fail now.

  “We’re not even sure the hatch will cycle, Bill.”

  “Well, I sure as heck don’t want to get stuck outside again. If it cycles, we’ll leave the hatch open until I come back in.”

  “Makes sense,” Tony agreed.

  “You still see that stream of stuff on your side?” Bill stretched to look out his window but didn’t see anything.

  “It’s still going strong.”

  “Figures.”

  Bang. Bang.

  Bang. Bang. Bang, bang.

  The hatch had opened without a glitch this time. Resetting it before the aerocapture maneuver must have fixed the software problems, at least temporarily. With the ship rocking back and forth, Bill thought it would be wise to stay in intimate contact with it. Had he let himself float freely about it, one of the ACS burns might rock the ship into him and knock him out, damage his suit, or damage the ship even further.

  “Whoa! Are you seeing this, Tony?” Bill moved his head back and forth so the camera in his helmet could see all the damage.

  “It’s amazing we made it through aerocapture,” Tony replied.

  Bill surveyed the damage as he held on to the bucking bronco. Each time there was an ACS burn, which was now about one every couple of seconds, he would nearly lose his handhold on the ship. A section of the multilayered insulation (MLI) blankets was charred black and peeled away from the hull, exposing an aluminum panel that had been superheated and flexed outward. The nose of the spacecraft on that side looked a little bit like a partially peeled banana. The bent panel was no longer than a piece of printer paper, but it was angled outward enough from the ship that it must have been causing all sorts of drag during the aerocapture. The bent panel had likely acted just like a flap on an airplane wing. Bill understood why their orbit was wrong. It dawned on him that he never did get the rest of
the information from Houston as to how wrong it was.

  “Look at that.” Bill whistled as he reached the forward-roll thrusters. The stream of sparkling stuff was fuel jetting out of the plumbing that fed one of the little rocket engines. One of Tony’s bullets had loosened the exterior panel enough so that it moved around during the aerocapture maneuver. Apparently it moved enough to bang into the little metal tube that carried the propellants to the thruster. The tube was spewing around randomly like a high-pressure water hose with no one holding on to it. It really wasn’t quite that bad, but the little metal tube, no bigger than a drinking straw in diameter, vibrated around several inches in any direction. That was the culprit imparting random thrust to the spacecraft and totally messing around with the ship’s attitude control.

  “Can we clamp that off?” Tony asked.

  “I’m gonna try, Tony.” Bill reached down into the panel and slid his fingers in behind the tube. “I’ll see if I can bend it over shut.”

  Bang. Bang. Bang, bang. He paused to adjust his hand- and footholds a bit better. Instinctively, he double-checked his tether. He was strapped on to the ship just fine.

  Confident he wasn’t going to get thrown from the ship, he set back to work. He did his best to work his gloves into the crevice between the tube and the ship’s structure. It was a tight fit, but he managed. First he tried to squeeze the tube between his thumb and forefinger, but that didn’t work at all. Then he tried bending the tube over with the strength of his fingers, but there just wasn’t enough dexterity with his spacesuit gloves on. He cursed the spacesuit technology for about the millionth time on the mission.

  Not having much luck here, he said to himself just as he felt the tube give. Then the little tube bent at the tip of his thumb, and he managed to get both hands down to bend the tube the rest of the way over. When he did, the spewing gas slowed to a small trickle out the end of the tube. Bill continued to bend the tube back on itself until there was no more visible sign of the gas leaking. “I think I got it stopped.”