Project Rescue

by Mark Kelly

  “Well, without gravity, they spread apart, and the muscles around them have to stretch to make them fit. The stretch is what you’re feeling. If we were in space long enough, you’d get used to it. You’d get taller, too,” Scott said.

  “I wouldn’t mind being taller,” Mark said.

  “The uncool part is your bones get weaker,” Scott said. “Bones need weight on them to stay strong. That’s one of the reasons the Skylab astronauts in space for weeks had to work out every day. They were trying to fool their bones into thinking they were still on Earth.”

  Scott’s lesson on bone density in space was interrupted by a crackle of static. Someone was trying to talk to them. It couldn’t be their Mission Control. They were on the wrong side of the planet for radio signals to get through.

  “Crazy 9? Come in, please. This is the Soviet Union Mission Control center in Moscow. Crazy 9, do you read?”

  Barry!

  And he sounded closer than he had on the telephone. Well, the truth was that he was closer—only about two hundred miles straight down, thousands of miles less than the earthbound distance from New Jersey to Moscow.

  Mark and Scott both wanted to ask how he was, what the U.S.S.R. was like, if the Soviets were being nice to him. But all that would have to wait. Now they had to stick to business.

  “Moscow, this is Crazy 9. We read you. Have you talked to Ilya Ilyushin? Is he expecting company?”

  “Hi, Scott! Good to hear your voice. Uh, well, actually that’s a negative on Major Ilyushin.”

  Scott’s heart skipped a beat. If Barry hadn’t talked to Major Ilyushin . . . did that mean they were too late?

  Barry must have read his mind. “Crazy 9, don’t panic. We have reason to think the cosmonaut is okay. The atmosphere in the Salyut should still be good. There doesn’t appear to be any damage to the ship. Best we can figure it, the trouble is with communications. We are still working on it.”

  “Roger,” said Scott. “Uh, so what do you want us to do?”

  “We are go for rendezvous at approximately 06:30:00 hours MET,” Barry said. “Worst case, you can knock on the door, and we hope he lets you in. We have a secret code for you to use when you knock. Mark, are you ready for instructions?”

  A secret code? Mark thought. How cool is that? Even with its hard work and discomfort, this space rescue thing really was a blast. “Roger, Barry—that is, Moscow. Go ahead.”

  Totally prepared to commit a complex sequence to memory, Mark was surprised when Barry revealed it: “Long, short-short, long, long, rest, long, long.”

  Mark tapped his knee to try it out. “Hey, wait a sec. Isn’t that shave-and-a-haircut, the old-fashioned rhythm Grandpa taught us?” he asked.

  “Roger,” said Barry. “I guess the Russians and Grandpa do have some stuff in common.”

  Scott had an anxious thought. “Barry, are you sure you’re understanding everything they’re telling you? No offense to your grandma, but your Russian isn’t that good.”

  Barry laughed. “Roger that, but it gets me plenty of caviar. There’s an interpreter here who was married to their top space guy, the one who died. Her English is really great, plus she knows a lot about science and engineering.

  “We’ll be losing radio contact soon,” Barry went on. “Flight control here says as of now, the distance between Crazy 9 and Salyut station is six hundred and forty miles. Do you read?”

  “Roger,” said Scott.

  “Howard will be instructing your onboard navigation system to lift the apogee of your orbit to two hundred and twenty-two miles with perigee one hundred and forty-four miles.”

  Circling the globe roughly every ninety minutes, the twins went from day to night and back again until their bodies were thoroughly confused. How long had they been in space anyway?

  They were once again over New Jersey, where it was late Monday afternoon, when Mr. Drizzle’s voice came on the radio. “Crazy 9? I have you tracked on the ground radar. Looking good, but we’re going to need a few adjustments. Oh my, but this is so much fun!”

  Scott grinned. “Roger, Mr. Drizzle. Yeah, we’re having fun too. Uh—what were those adjustments exactly?”

  Up till now, Scott and Mark had allowed first the Titan launch vehicle and then the computer to do the flying. Now Scott, in the left-hand seat, had to demonstrate his own piloting skills. Protruding from the instrument panel was a T-shaped translational controller. A translation is a change in orbit; in other words, nearer to Earth or farther away.

  On Scott’s right armrest was the attitude controller, which was kind of like the stick on a jet or an airplane. Attitude is the vehicle’s orientation in three-dimensional space. When Scott pushed the attitude controller, the nose of the spacecraft rotated down. When he pulled it, the nose came up. Push the controller right, it rolled right, and left made it roll left. Twisting the controller caused a left or a right flat turn, which is called a yaw.

  With Mission Control watching their every move, Scott followed Mr. Drizzle’s directions, and they began to close the gap on the Salyut, now 460 miles away.

  It was nighttime again and Crazy 9 was over the eastern Pacific when at last Mark spotted a tiny blinking light out the window. Of course, there were stars all around, but if this had been a star, it would have shone steadily. It’s Earth’s atmosphere that makes stars appear to blink. From Mark’s current vantage point, they shone steadily.

  That meant the blinking light could only be one thing, the Salyut space station.

  Chapter 29

  * * *

  At this point they were close enough that Mark needed to take on a new responsibility: navigator. He unbuckled his harness, pretzeled himself in two, then alternately climbed, crawled, and dove down to the lower equipment bay, where the navigator’s seat was located. On arrival, he enjoyed a brief, full-length stretch. This was the only place in the CSM where that was possible.

  Then he went to work. His job was to help his brother, Commander Scott, zero in on Crazy 9’s location in relation to the Salyut. To do that, he peered through a sextant built into the hull of the ship. Using it, Mark scanned the sky till he located three stars, Schedar, Hamal, and Vega. Then he measured the angles between them and the horizon.

  The stars’ unmoving position in the universe is known to the computer. Using trigonometry, it found the spacecraft’s position in relation to them, and then compared it to what it knew about the rendezvous target, the Salyut station.

  The computer display read 000.00. “Five balls!” Mark announced, the nickname the Apollo astronauts had given the display when they were perfectly on course.

  Out the window, the Salyut grew from a blinking dot to a human-made satellite, one that was a whole lot bigger than the CSM. Now all Scott had to do was avoid crashing into it, which would not only be fatal, it would be embarrassing.

  To prevent that, he got constant updates from Egg on the distance to the target, also known as “range,” and the speed at which they were closing in on it, the “range rate.” When both reached zero, the rendezvous had been accomplished—hopefully without any crashing involved.

  As Scott used his controllers to keep Crazy 9’s nose pointed at the Salyut, Mark continually measured the rate at which the CSM’s angle above the horizon changed. When the computer told him the moment was right, he told Scott to translate to the Salyut’s orbit, and the altitude difference between the two ships began to shrink.

  As Crazy 9 closed to within a couple of miles, the Salyut changed from a flashing light to a shiny blob to a sixty-foot-long cylinder with two sets of twin solar panels like insect wings. Inside, the boys knew, were three compartments for cosmonauts and one for the engines and control equipment.

  While the Apollo CSM had been built for basic transportation only, the Salyut was effectively a very fancy mobile home, and its three interior compartments were plenty big enough for standing up (if there was an up) and moving around.

  “Coming up on one minute,” Scott reported to Greenwood, �
��chamber pressure is holding, gimbals good, attitude good, rates are damped out.”

  “Roger, Crazy 9,” said Egg. “Steady as she goes.”

  Mark felt his heart racing. He and Scott had studied the Apollo program and the spacecraft itself. They both knew plenty about how the CSM was supposed to fly and how a rendezvous was supposed to work. But this was the moment of truth.

  Mark peered through the sextant again, this time using it and a clock to measure how fast the Salyut appeared to be growing, which gave him a rough measure of the rate at which they were closing in on it.

  “Range 250, rate 50,” Mark said, meaning they were 250 feet away and were moving at 50 feet per second—only 5 seconds to crunch. “Slow it down a little, bro.” He tried to keep his voice calm.

  “Roger.” Scott fired the forward-facing thruster jets, braking the CSM.

  “Range one hundred and fifty, rate thirty,” Mark said—still five seconds. “Better.”

  Scott waited for a count of three. Now they were sixty feet away, then fifty, then forty, then thirty. . . . The Salyut loomed huge in the windows, blocking out the sky.

  “Uh . . . what are you waiting for, bro?”

  Scott’s answer was to fire the forward-facing thrusters again. The braking effect was not as fast as Mark would have liked, and he closed his eyes, expecting any second to hear a horrible crunch of metal on metal.

  There was no Nando’s repair shop in space, no tow trucks either. If Scott had miscalculated, they had just made things a whole lot worse for the stranded cosmonaut—not to mention the pickle they were in themselves.

  But there was no crash.

  Mark opened his eyes.

  Crazy 9 was parked about ten feet away from the Salyut hatch. The red Soviet flag with the yellow hammer and sickle was plainly visible on the side, as was the closed hatch. Without realizing it, Mark had been holding his breath. Now he breathed.

  “Sheesh,” he said to his brother. “You cut it a little close, didn’t you?”

  Scott was grinning. “I didn’t want you to have to walk too far.”

  Chapter 30

  * * *

  Essentially, Crazy 9 was now a taxi from the USA parked outside a big Soviet mobile home. As they reached the Pacific, the sun appeared once again over the horizon. They would be back in radio contact with Greenwood Control shortly. With luck, Barry would have called in by now to say that communications were back, and Ilya Ilyushin was expecting them.

  But before that, Scott had something he wanted to say.

  Capped by his success in maneuvering the CSM to its position beside the Salyut, this day had been the most emotion-packed of any he could remember—more emotional even than when he had gone into orbit on his own. Now, watching his brother work, he felt his chest tighten.

  Just go ahead and say it, he decided. No preliminaries. “Look, bro,” he said at last, “uh . . . I won’t leave you out here.”

  Mark wasn’t really listening. He was pulling out the AMU, the astronaut maneuvering unit, which would serve as a jetpack for his EVA. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said, then something about Scott’s tone made him add, “Wait, what do you mean?”

  “I mean,” Scott said, “if anything happens, if you get stranded like Major Ilyushin is, if there’s some kind of malfunction, if you can’t get back . . . You know that’s possible, right? The EVA is the most dangerous part of the mission.”

  Mark felt uncomfortable. Not scared. By this point a certain amount of scared seemed normal. What made him uncomfortable was this kind of talk, especially from his brother. “I know it’s dangerous,” he said cautiously.

  “Okay, then,” said Scott. “So here’s the thing. I am not leaving you. I am not going home—I am not facing Mom and Dad—without you.”

  Mark didn’t hesitate. “Oh yes, you are. If I can’t get back, there’s no point in you, uh . . . not getting back too. It’ll be up to you to tell Mom and Dad and Grandpa and everybody, uh . . . to tell them . . . that they’re really great, and I was thinking of ’em. Okay? Is that a deal? You have to carry the message. And you have to promise, too.”

  This was not the way Scott had wanted the conversation to go, but now he saw his brother was right. “Okay,” he said reluctantly. “I promise. I guess. And now you’d better get ready to EVA to the rescue, or there was no point in either of us coming up here in the first place.”

  From the storage bay beside the AMU, Mark retrieved a white nylon zippered disk with a diameter of around forty-eight inches. He had identified this piece of equipment only the day before, when he and his brother were getting to know their Apollo spacecraft. At first, it was a mystery to him, but testing it, he found it reminded him of the pop-up dome tent his family sometimes used for camping.

  Naturally, it had been Egg who explained.

  “It’s a personal rescue ball,” she said. “At least, I think it must be. As far as I know, NASA has never actually used one yet, but they must have had prototypes manufactured. It makes sense, I guess. One of the reasons they stationed the spacecraft at Greenwood Lake was for rescue purposes.”

  “Okay,” Mark had said, “but what is it?”

  “The idea is an adult curls up in a ball and climbs in,” Egg said “Then you pressurize it and the oxygen keeps him alive during the space rescue. I’m not sure for how long.” She had recommended he take it with him to the Salyut.

  “It’s not like it’s heavy, right?” she said.

  “Well, it won’t be in space,” Mark said, “because out there nothing’s heavy. But Ilya Ilyushin has a space suit, doesn’t he?”

  “We don’t know what kind of shape he’ll be in, or it, either,” said Egg. “The rescue ball might be useful as a backup.”

  Even though only Mark was going to leave the cozy confines of the spaceship to venture into space, both boys would be putting on their space suits. These were the ones they had tried on in the white room, different from the flight suits they wore for launch and reentry in that they were fully pressurized and carried their own oxygen supply. In preparation for Mark’s departure, Scott would vent the atmosphere in the CSM till the interior pressure was zero—same as in the near vacuum of space.

  After that, they would open the hatch. On Earth, it was so heavy it took at least two people to do this. In space, once the latches had been released, the hatch rose with the tiniest pressure.

  Putting on space suits, venting the oxygen, and opening the hatch—it all sounded quick and easy. But it took almost two hours to accomplish. The fifty-step checklist, developed by NASA, had to be followed exactly. A missed hose connection, a buckle left unbuckled, a glove improperly attached—any of these things would cause catastrophe.

  The boys understood this and, as goofy as they could be on Earth, they took the process seriously. Both of them planned on having futures, even if that did mean they would have to grow up.

  “You’d think weightlessness would make things easier, wouldn’t you?” Scott asked as—for what seemed like the hundredth time—he went looking for his copy of the flight plan Egg had given them.

  “It’s more like the opposite, isn’t it?” Mark agreed. “When there’s no down, you can’t exactly set something down. And every time I do, it just floats away.”

  “Yeah, in theory stuff would just stay put,” Scott said. “But with the air currents from the fans, stuff gets pushed all over the place. Have you seen my flight plan?”

  Mark was having troubles of his own. Securing a strap, he had let go of a pencil, and now it was gone. “You should keep better track of your stuff,” he answered irritably.

  “What are you? Turning into Mom?” Scott wanted to know.

  When at last they were suited up, Mark announced, “I don’t think getting dressed for school is ever going to bother me again.”

  Scott agreed, “Yeah, it’s funny how you don’t appreciate little things, like gravity and atmosphere, till you have to live without them.”

  “On the other hand, look at this!�
� Mark said. In the lower equipment bay, there was just space to do a somersault. Now he tucked himself into a ball and set himself spinning . . . and spinning . . . and spinning. It was fun for the first few fast rotations, and then he got dizzy. By the time he heard Egg’s voice, he realized spinning had not been the best idea.

  “Crazy 9, Greenwood Lake, do you read? Crazy 9, come in, please. Are you go for the EVA?”

  Scott answered. “Roger, Greenwood. Uh, hi, Egg. We are all set. Have communications been reestablished? Is Major Ilyushin expecting company?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Egg said. “And the problem remains unidentified. In the best case, it’s just signal interference. You should know, though, that there may be some risk we’re not aware of.”

  “We read you, Greenwood, and yes, we’re go. We haven’t come this far just to wave off.” Scott was confident he was speaking for his brother, and—even though spinning had made him feel a little nauseated—Mark gave a thumbs-up to confirm.

  Chapter 31

  * * *

  “Crazy 9, you are go for cabin de-press.”

  “Roger, Greenwood. We read you. Venting the cabin now.”

  The designers and engineers who built the Apollo spacecraft did not want it leaking oxygen everywhere, so the depressurization procedure was tricky and, like everything else, required a checklist. Item by item, Scott and Mark went through it, flipping switches, twisting controls, and watching regulator displays.

  As the air was released from the cabin, the pressure in their suits made them balloon and stiffen. Scott remembered what Lisa had said about turning into a snowman. There was definitely some truth to this.

  Greenwood Mission Control ran a last check on all systems, then Egg sent up official permission for Scott to open the hatch. Scott reached for the big handle over his head. He was about to ask his brother if he was ready, when Mark spoke up. “Uh, wait a sec,” he said. “Remind me again how we know everything in here, including you, isn’t about to get sucked into space?”