Project Rescue

by Mark Kelly

  Howard took a seat at one of the computer consoles and nodded. “Okay, I’ll get moving on those.”

  Mark looked at his brother, who shrugged, and then he looked at Egg. “Uh . . . there’s no such thing as a bad question, right?”

  “Did I say that? I never said that,” said Egg.

  “It’s Mr. Hackess who said that,” Scott reminded him.

  Mark fidgeted. “Okay. Well, never mind, then.”

  Egg crossed her arms over her chest. “Look. If there’s something you don’t understand, ask and I’ll explain. That is, if I can explain. It’s not like I know everything.”

  In their heads, Scott and Mark said the same thing at the same time: You just act like you do. But in real life, each one managed to keep his mouth from forming those words. Instead, Scott said, “Could you maybe remind us a little bit about that whole, uh . . . circularized orbit thing?”

  Egg said, “Sure. And that’s a good question.”

  Mark started to protest. “Didn’t you just say—”

  But Egg wasn’t paying attention anymore. “You know a parabola is a rounded symmetrical shape, right?” she said. “Except it’s not a circle because the points on it are not all the same distance from the center.”

  “Right,” said Scott.

  “Sure,” said Mark.

  “So Crazy 9’s orbit is a parabola,” Egg said. “And its apogee, which is the high point, is roughly halfway around Earth from launch, while its perigee, the low point of orbit, is over a place very near the launch site.”

  “Right,” said Scott.

  “Sure,” said Mark.

  “So, for the rendezvous with the Salyut to take place, we have to change Crazy 9’s orbit from a parabola to a circle. You do that the same way you make any kind of adjustment to the spacecraft’s flight path: you fire the rocket engines. What Howard is doing now is figuring out exactly when to fire and for how long.”

  As far as the twins could tell, Howard was completely absorbed in the green glow from his computer screen. But some part of him must have been listening, because he looked up. “Besides that,” he said, “I have to calculate the rendezvous burn to catch up to the Salyut. And I could use some help with that.”

  “Okay,” said Egg. “I can do that before I get going on the flight plan.”

  Mark nodded. “Hey, so cool. It’s impressive the way you guys manage to keep busy. As for Scott and me, an astronaut’s best preparation for spaceflight is recreation and relaxation. Scott?” He looked at his brother. “You want to take Grandpa’s boat out or something?”

  No one heard Scott’s answer. Egg was yelling too loudly. Finally, Scott managed to raise his voice above hers: “My brother was kidding!”

  Mark raised his eyebrows. “No, I—” he started to say, but Lisa interrupted.

  “You guys need to get to know your spacecraft,” she said.

  “We already do,” Mark said.

  “We read this magazine article,” Scott said.

  “Yeah—and it had diagrams,” Mark added.

  Lisa shut her eyes and shook her head. Both Scott and Mark were surprised how much her expression looked like one of their mom’s at that moment. “Unh-unh,” she said. Then she opened her eyes and took a deep breath as if it was possible to inhale patience. “Follow me,” she said.

  This time the twins actually were joking. In the long months after Project Blastoff, they had done plenty of research on the space program. They knew, for example, that before the NASA people launched anything, they prepared for months and sometimes years. Engineers ran tests on every piece of equipment. They simulated everything anyone could think of that could possibly go wrong so they’d be ready. Anytime something didn’t work right, it was fixed or redesigned and then tested again.

  Besides the engineers, the astronauts practiced for hours and ran their own tests and simulations, sometimes backed by the Mission Control team and sometimes on their own.

  In spite of all this, things sometimes went wrong. It was unavoidable. A spacecraft is built of so many parts that 99.9 percent perfection still means hundreds of problems.

  NASA controllers had their own word for a mysterious problem. They called it a “funny.” Some funnies did no real harm. Some could be identified and fixed right away.

  But others were not funny at all, as both NASA and the Soviet space agency had learned from hard experience. On an American two-astronaut mission called Gemini 6, the Titan rocket engines stopped suddenly after ignition but before liftoff. The problem, identified much later, turned out to be a plug that jiggled loose. When the loss of the electrical circuit told the engine something was wrong, it shut down.

  On a later Gemini mission, a short circuit made a thruster fire continuously, causing the spacecraft to spin so fast that the two astronauts onboard, Neil Armstrong and David Scott, almost blacked out. Had they done so, they could not have regained control of the spacecraft, and they probably would have died.

  On a moon launch in 1970, with the bad-luck name of Apollo 13, faulty insulation on an electrical wire triggered an explosion that did so much damage it almost left the three astronauts stranded in space.

  Small by themselves, each of those funnies had huge and nearly catastrophic consequences. And each one required an army of ground controllers, equipment designers, and engineers working tirelessly to keep the astronauts safe.

  Mark and Scott didn’t have a small army. They had Egg, Lisa, Howard, Barry, and starting tomorrow—Steve Peluso. They also had each other.

  With Lisa, the boys ascended in the clackety-clack elevator and crossed the gangway to the spacecraft. Then the three of them pulled open the heavy hatch and took a look.

  The Apollo command module was shaped like a bell, eleven feet tall, and thirteen feet wide at the base. The hull was made of steel and aluminum. To fit three astronauts, the gray interior was a lot bigger than the one-astronaut Mercury-size capsule in which Scott had flown before.

  Still, it was pretty darned small, the size of a passenger car. And it was crammed full of complex electronics, including navigation and guidance systems, and radar to assist with the rendezvous. There were five windows, numbered one to five, left to right. There was one window each to the left and right of the outside seats, and one each in front of those two seats. The fifth window was a circular porthole in the hatch above the middle seat.

  Scott climbed in first, grabbing the bar inside the hatch and swinging his legs inside, then crawling in a less than graceful way across the middle seat to the one on the left. Mark followed, taking the seat on the right.

  It required a couple of grunts and shoves before they had positioned themselves, their heads on the narrow rest behind and their legs up above. Tomorrow, when they were outfitted in their flight suits, their boots would be locked into clamps.

  This was not the most comfortable either of them had ever been, but comfort wasn’t what they were thinking about. They were thinking about the main instrument panel above their faces. On it was a constellation of switches, gauges, and displays—including 50 different warning lights, 800 crew controls and displays, and 300 telemetry measurements.

  On the walls to Mark’s left and Scott’s right were still more instruments. Mark’s job would also include navigating, and his tools, a sextant and a telescope, were in the navigator’s seat in the lower equipment bay. It was tucked under the middle seat, the one currently unoccupied but available for any stray cosmonauts the boys might encounter in their travels. Also underneath the seats lay a crawl space with lockers for food and equipment.

  The boys knew all this “above” and “below” stuff would be meaningless once they were in flight, but while they were on Earth it was hard not to think of the layout in up-and-down terms.

  “What do we have to do now?” Mark asked Lisa, who had remained outside to talk to them through the open hatch.

  “You need to check over all of the spacecraft’s critical systems—electrical, environmental, and reaction control,” sh
e said. “I’m going to head back to the Mission Control building now. I’ll communicate with you over the radio and monitor the operation remotely.”

  “She means she’s gonna spy on us, bro,” said Scott.

  “I mean I am going to help you,” said Lisa. “You guys will need to be looking for up or down arrows next to parameters on the panel. The arrows indicate if any of the metrics are out of desirable limits, either on the high or the low side.”

  “What do we do if we see one of those arrows?” Mark asked.

  “We’ll go to the checklist,” said Lisa. “With any luck, it will have the procedure we need to address the problem.”

  Sitting in an unnatural position in the tiny crew compartment of the spacecraft, Scott anticipated the day ahead. It was going to be tough. It was going to require hard work and concentration. This flight would be different from Crazy 8’s, the one he had taken in the fall. In comparison to the machine he now sat in, that one had been a tin can. All it did was go up and around the planet and come back down.

  But this spacecraft was the real thing. It was safer, for sure, but also a lot more complicated, and that would make it more difficult to understand and to operate.

  Today’s investment of time wasn’t going to be fun. Unlike spaceflight, it would totally lack thrills and excitement. Still, it was necessary to the success of Project Rescue.

  And something else was going to be necessary too. Lisa was right. They were going to need luck.

  Chapter 25

  * * *

  Traditionally, astronauts eat eggs, steak, and orange juice before a mission. But the next morning—launch day—Scott and Mark couldn’t ask their grandpa for such a fancy breakfast without making him suspicious. So, not knowing exactly when they would eat again, they each ate two bowls of Cap’n Crunch cereal instead.

  How long were they going to be gone? That would be determined by the information Howard got from Barry. Once Barry gave him the precise location of the Salyut, Howard could calculate when to launch in order to rendezvous quickly and with the minimum amount of fuel.

  Gulping the last of his milk, Mark thought of something else. Would Lisa remember to pack snacks? If she forgot, it could be a long, hungry day.

  Lisa’s dad’s Cadillac was expected right after breakfast, but that wasn’t the car that came up the driveway.

  Washing cereal bowls, Grandpa looked out the kitchen window. “Who is that driving, can you see?” he asked Scott, who was putting away the silverware.

  Scott grinned when he saw who it was. “Mr. Drizzle!”

  A minute later, the twins were blasting out the front door. Mr. Drizzle was their friend but also the science teacher at Egg, Howard, and Lisa’s school. His superpowerful solid rocket fuel, based on a unique composition of hydrocarbons chemically similar to sugar, had powered Crazy 8 so successfully that NASA had reengineered the Titan rocket at Greenwood Lake to run on Drizzle fuel too.

  Mr. Drizzle’s car was a beat-up twenty-year-old Ford Fairlane that, apparently, had once been blue. He emerged stiffly from the driver’s seat, stretched to his full height, and smiled. Mr. Drizzle had the flyaway pale hair and got-dressed-in-the-dark appearance associated with a mad scientist, but he was also friendly and good at explaining complicated things. Sometimes his explanations lasted longer than Mark, for one, would have liked.

  Howard, Egg, and Lisa climbed out of the backseat. From the passenger seat came Steve Peluso. He was stocky, with wavy brown hair, small intense eyes, and pale skin apparently untouched by sunshine.

  The twins’ reunion with Mr. Drizzle was enthusiastic and warm. With Steve Peluso, it was courteous. Even if he was Egg’s archrival, he was necessary for the good of the project. Scott and Mark both wished Barry were here. Barry was good at getting along with new and, uh . . . unusual people.

  “My dad was too busy to drive us, and Mr. Drizzle happened to be picking up his car,” Lisa explained.

  “It’s in the shop a lot,” said Mr. Drizzle.

  “I know whereof you speak,” said Grandpa, and right away the two of them started one of those endless, boring adult discussions—this one about what it was like to own an old, broken-down vehicle.

  Meanwhile the kids huddled and tried to bring Steve up to speed. “I know it’s a lot to take in at once,” Scott said.

  Steve’s expression said two things. First, he was thoroughly confused. Second, he didn’t want to admit he was thoroughly confused.

  “If my dad finds out I am helping you guys, he is going to have a cow,” Steve said. “He doesn’t like the Soviet Union. And he doesn’t like people who disobey rules, either. He won’t find out, will he?”

  Lisa looked at Steve sympathetically. “It’s tough to hide the launch of a rocket,” she said. “For one thing, it’s noisy. If you’re afraid of your dad, maybe you’d better quit now.”

  For a millisecond, Steve looked so anxious that Scott thought he might cry. Then his expression changed. “I’m not afraid of my dad,” he said firmly. “This is important and I’m going to do it. I feel for that guy in space. He’s alone, and I know what that’s like. Somebody has to help him.”

  “That’s great,” Mark said. “Egg and Howard will tell you what to do.”

  “But first,” Egg said, “I have some other news. While we were driving here, Mr. Drizzle said it was a darn shame NASA wasn’t using the spacecraft here at Greenwood to rescue the cosmonaut. Then after that, you know how it is, we kind of all got to talking about it, and, uh . . . well, one of us kind of mentioned maybe we were planning to rescue Ilya Ilyushin.”

  Scott’s face fell. “You didn’t.”

  “I never said it was me who mentioned it,” Egg said.

  “Well, was it?” Mark asked.

  Egg tossed her straight brown hair. “I don’t see that it matters, because what I’m trying to tell you is Mr. Drizzle says he’ll help. He said it’s the right thing to do, not only for the cosmonaut but to promote world peace.”

  Mark frowned. “Is Mr. Drizzle some kind of hippie?”

  “He can help us,” Egg said.

  “I can use him to pinpoint the Salyut’s orbit and help with rendezvous targeting,” Howard said.

  “Uh, excuse me. May I ask a question?” Steve asked. “How are we going to do that? Without the coordinates from the Soviet space agency, that is.”

  Egg answered. “Barry is going to give that to you. You remember Barry Leibovitz, right?”

  “I remember him.” Steve looked around. “Does he have a friend in the Russian space agency? Where is he, anyway?”

  The jarring sound of the telephone interrupted. By this time, Grandpa and Mr. Drizzle had begun poking around under the hood of Grandpa’s truck. “Excuse me,” Grandpa said to Mr. Drizzle. “I better get that. Be right back.”

  A few moments later he called through the window, “Mark? Scott? Can one of you—”

  The twins crashed into each other in their hurry to get through the front door. It was Tommy calling—had to be!

  But when Grandpa held out the receiver, he said, “Ask him if he’s taking good care of my coat.”

  Did that mean it was Barry on the line?

  Scott grabbed, but Mark was quicker. “Hello? Mark Kelly here. Who is this?”

  For a second, Mark heard no sound at all, then there was a hiss and finally a voice, faint but recognizable. “Hi. They won’t let me talk long, but I’m okay, and . . .”

  Scott, leaning his head against his brother’s, couldn’t hear what Barry said after that, but Mark listened intently. Finally, there was a crack and a click and then even the static went silent.

  “Hello? Hello?” Mark shook the receiver as if that would fix anything.

  “I think he’s gone,” Scott said, and the next sound was a dial tone.

  “What’s going on?” Grandpa was standing in the kitchen doorway. “Did I hear that right? Barry’s in Russia? He sure sounded far away.”

  Mark shook his head emphatically. “No. Unh-unh. Not R
ussia. Not exactly Russia. He’s in, uh . . . I think Secaucus. Secaucus, New Jersey. That and U.S.S.R.—they kind of sound the same.”

  “No, they don’t,” Scott said.

  Mark looked at his brother. “Sure they do. All those Ss. Also, the Caucasus Mountains. Aren’t they in Russia? Caucasus—Secaucus? I can see how you misunderstood, Grandpa.”

  “Mountains?” Grandpa scratched his bald head. “I never said anything about—”

  “Anyway . . .” Mark shoved his brother past Grandpa, into the living room, and toward the front door. “It’s cold in Secaucus, so Barry’s real grateful to have your coat.”

  Outside, Scott whispered, “Shouldn’t we have waited to see if he calls back?”

  “No time,” Mark said.

  “You must’ve heard him better than I did. What did he say?”

  “The Russian technicians are going to help him patch through to the phone line in our Mission Control center,” Mark said. “As soon as he can, he’ll talk to Howard, give him and Steve and Mr. Drizzle the information they need to compute the trajectories for the rendezvous.”

  Scott tried to picture his friend Barry, a kid he’d known since nursery school, on the ground with a bunch of Russian people at a secret military base called Star City. Apparently, he had managed to get there from the airport. Apparently, he had talked them into providing the help they would need—or maybe John Glenn’s influence had done that.

  Scott had flown into space only a few months before, but Barry’s situation seemed even crazier and more perilous. What had he and his brother gotten their friend into, anyway? Some people believed the Russians were sworn enemies of Americans. Would they treat Barry okay?

  Then he thought of something. The phone calls must be extreme long-distance. How much did they cost?

  “Did he say anything else?” Scott asked.

  “Yeah, one other thing, but I’m not sure I believe it,” Mark said.

  “What?”

  “He said the goat cheese in Switzerland tasted pretty good.”