Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  Fahy rode up the gantry elevator to the payload check-out room at the top of the stack. The elevator was an open metal cage, and it rose with bumpy rattles and clangs; she climbed past steel beams, cables, work platforms.

  When the elevator stopped, she stepped through the gate onto a railed catwalk. It spanned the gap between the elevator and the curving flank of the booster, with its open access panels. She looked down the complex, curved flank of the Saturn to the huge steel platforms far below, the flaring skirts over the big F-1 engines, diminished by perspective.

  An ocean breeze picked up, and there was a ponderous creak of metal. The catwalk seemed to tilt, and she had to grab a handrail for support. This huge mountain of steel was swaying.

  When she looked away from the booster, she had a panoramic view of the Atlantic coast. It was early evening, and the coastal towns strung out along the edge of the land sparkled like jewels. But the land itself looked flat, muddy, primeval, barely poking above the water, and the water of the ocean and marshes and canals shone like beaten metal. It was like, she imagined, the place where the first amphibian had crawled painfully, the air like fire in its new lungs, its belly and tail working at the sand, striving to get back to the water…

  In a few years, she reflected—when the pads and gantries were torn down and hauled away at last—maybe the sea, the ancient swamp, would swallow up this place once more.

  Marcus White got to the Launch Control Center of KSC in the predawn, a couple of hours before the launch.

  The Firing Room was a big hall, a third the size of a football field, with eight rows of consoles. White took his place in a glassed-in viewing area set off at an angle at the back of the Firing Room, and looked out through the big picture windows over the pads.

  AS-514 was bathed in a cone of light, set up by big searchlight beams that met at the tip of the stack, and the lights of its gantry gleamed like a ship’s lamps.

  The daylight started to come up. From the Firing Room, White was looking east, into the gathering dawn; soon Launch Complex 39-A was silhouetted against the sky. The breeze was blowing debris around the pad, and the wind meter at the top of the tower was spinning around. But the forecast said the windspeed would be within weather rules at launch time.

  The paintwork of the refurbished Saturn gleamed, and the booster, slim beside the blocky orange tower, looked oddly feminine, delicate. White felt a lump, unwelcome and painful, gathering in his throat. To hell with Titan. It was all worth it, he thought, just to see that old lady fixed up and with the lichen and moss and streaked paint scraped off, raised up to where she belonged.

  He followed the slow evolution of the count, under the control of the KSC Firing Room staff. Events were accelerating, as the tanks in the various stages went through their cycles of precool, till and replenish. It seemed inconceivable that AS-514 was going to lift on time. But there were no holds today. He sensed the buildup of the indefinable momentum that gathered about a mission, as it prepared for a crucial new phase.

  At ten minutes before the launch, the thrust chambers in the second and third stages, both powered by lox and liquid hydrogen, went into chilldown. Pyro devices were armed. Some of the gantry access arms were withdrawn.

  Still there were no holds.

  At T minus three minutes and seven seconds the firing command was given, and the tanks in all three stages breathed in the helium they needed to force their propellants into the pumps. At minus fifty seconds, the Saturn’s internal power took over; the bird was detaching itself from its dependence on the ground. With half a minute to go, the big turbine that drove the five engines of the first stage powered up.

  At minus nine seconds, an electrical signal was sent to the igniters, and four small flames lit within the combustion chamber of each of Don Baylor’s F-1s.

  In the Firing Room, the spectators in Management Row swiveled around and lifted binoculars to their eyes, and peered through the row of windows at the back of the Launch Control Center. White knew they could close protective louvers over the windows if the booster blew up. If it did, the explosion would be equivalent to a three- or four-megaton nuclear bomb. But he figured that if that happened, the guys in here would just keep watching anyhow.

  The familiar F-1 ignition process cut in. That rich flood of thick orange smoke burst out of the nozzle and bounced off the flame deflector under the launcher.

  Then the main fuel valves opened.

  The flame directly under the engines turned to an incandescent white, and the orange smoke billowed outward and upward, enveloping the base of the booster.

  The thrust of the engines reached ninety percent of maximum. Still AS-514 hadn’t moved.

  To White, the spectacle was unfolding in an eerie silence; the noise of the burn had yet to cross the miles to the Firing Room.

  The booster shuddered. An ice shower fell steadily, sheets and flakes of ice pouring away from the walls of the stages’ cryogenic tanks, vaporizing as they hit the smoke and flames billowing below.

  The booster lifted off the pad, its huge weight barely sustained by the thrust. It seemed impossible for anything so huge to move anywhere; it was like a building taking leave of the ground.

  Now five umbilical swing arms had to get out of the way. First the outermost section of each arm retracted, and the arms themselves began to swing, to get away from the flanks of the booster. It was a complex and unlikely mechanical ballet.

  The sound reached out across the marsh, and rammed into the windows of the viewing area: a series of staccato crackles, profound, physical, powerful. The glass shuddered in its frame, violently. Plaster dust from the roof showered down over him.

  It was a sound White hadn’t heard in thirty-five years, a noise he’d half-forgotten.

  The booster climbed, but the trail of flames just continued to lengthen, all the way down to the pad. It wasn’t until the booster was several hundreds of feet above the ground that the huge plume of flame lifted from the launch platform.

  He felt as if his rationality was softening, guttering; the understanding he thought he’d developed of the forces shaping his age fell away from him.

  How could we build a monument like this, and then turn our backs on it, let it rust on the lawn? Damn, damn. It made no sense. Maybe it never did.

  The booster hauled after it a spear of fire eight hundred feet long. Shock waves danced along the flanks of the rocket, blurring its outline in White’s binocular view. A mist of ionized gas expanded above the engines, a broad plume of flame in the thinning atmosphere.

  When the S-IC died, it was as if the sky dimmed.

  White could sec the burst of light from the first stage’s retro-rockets, and then the flare as the second stage ignited. The Saturn seemed to recede quickly now, heading east, diminishing to a star.

  It was visible, he knew, for five hundred miles around.

  White turned to follow the trajectory of the discarded first stage on the Firing Room’s big display screens.

  Tumbling, battering against the air, the S-IC quickly lost most of its forward momentum, and fell back to crash into the Atlantic, still carrying all of Don Baylor’s beautifully restored engines, its story finally concluded after four decades.

  White grinned. It was just, he thought, fucking unbelievable. Now, all we got to do is survive five more launches, and we can all retire for good…

  Rosenberg’s training for the mission began in earnest a year before the launch.

  He had to move to Houston. He had to become an astronaut, in fact, an employee of NASA, and hence of the government.

  Benacerraf put him up for a while in her house at Clear Lake, but they didn’t get on too well, and Rosenberg started to look for an apartment.

  But he gave that up, and moved into a room at the Nassau Bay Hilton. It was going to cost, and after a couple of months he began to run up a debt, but what the hell. He figured his money wasn’t going to be much use any more anyhow. He squared it with the hotel management that they would be
paid out of the government salary he would collect, in the years of his flight.

  At the start of his training, Bill Angel took him to a regular Monday morning meeting in the Astronaut Office at JSC. This was a plain-looking room populated by hard blue chairs, and with Shuttle mission plaques, more than a hundred of them, crowding the walls.

  There were more than a hundred astronauts in the corps, he learned, But only a couple or dozen showed up today. Nobody would speak to him. Or Angel, come to that.

  The thing of it was, nobody was going to get to fly again except for a couple of dull missions delivering components of the Titan mission to orbit—save for the Titan five themselves. And of those, one was a Brit—British-born, anyhow—and another was Rosenberg, a pony-tailed double-dome, who wasn’t even in the fucking corps.

  The resentment in that room was tangible, a living thing.

  The training was split between Houston and the Cape. The crew, working together, progressed through hierarchies of trainers, all the way to the full-scale simulators. At first Rosenberg enjoyed the sims—the crew zipped into their orange pressure suits and their white helmets inside the simulators themselves, the controllers in the FCR, and the competing team of simulation supervisors, throwing at them every combination of defect, training them all to cope. It was fun. Like a computer game.

  But the novelty soon palled, as they went over the same routine, over and again, toiling through jargon-laden checklists, jammed inside their stuffy suits.

  They flew to the Cape in T-38s, the neat little needle-nose two-man trainers the astronauts used. Pilots, like Libet and Angel, were expected to put in at least four hours a week of flight experience. Piloted by Angel or Libet, Rosenberg was whisked back and forth between JSC and Cape—over eight hundred miles, an hour and a half each way—three or four times a week, encased in a flight suit and with a parachute on his back, as if he was a jock hero astronaut himself, for God’s sake.

  He got his first view of the Cape from the air, in fact, from the cockpit of a NASA T-38. It was a place of shining water, spits and isthmuses of low, dredged-up marshy land, concrete splashes of pads and crawlerways, the whole remarkably primitive, like the slow recovery from an immense bombing raid.

  He was taken to see Shuttle orbiters in the Orbiter Processing Facility—PEOPLE MAKING DREAMS A REALITY, read the motto on the door—and in the Vehicle Assembly Building, and on the pad. He was stunned by the VAB, sitting in its car park like some immense department store, fifty storeys high. It was big enough to have assembled four Moon rockets at once, and it had doors tall enough to accommodate the Statue of Liberty. Inside was an industrial complex of riggings and girders and cranes, whole floors suspended like drawers in some immense piece of furniture, capable of being rolled forward and back as needed. And, suspended in the smoky, dim-lit air amid all this clunky scaffolding, he could see the shape of a Shuttle orbiter, unexpectedly graceful in this volume of right angles and pipes and tubes, upended and pinned like some huge white moth.

  He was stunned by the scale of it all, his first gut understanding, perhaps, of the huge energies and efforts that would be assembled under him to hurl his own fragile body into space.

  The staff who worked here, preparing spacecraft for launch, were a type of human being he hadn’t encountered before, either in the circles of scientists with whom he’d spent his working life, or among the closeted NASA engineers at the other centers, or even among the astronauts. These were people used to heavy work: dealing with millions of gallons of highexplosive fuel, with the slow controlled explosions of Shuttle launches, and doing it every few weeks, year in and year out. They must have a lot in common with oil-workers, he thought, or deep miners: hard-working, confident, muscled people.

  All the crew went through an abbreviated program of training on Apollo systems, at JSC and Kennedy. A basic curriculum was rapidly developed for them, based on 1960s material dug out of the archives. The simulations they were offered, working through key mission phases with teams of flight controllers in the FCR, were thorough, but they were fixed-based. The cost of adapting the motion-based simulators—which, with their six degrees of movement, afforded some of the sensations of spacecraft motion—was, it was said, too high. Rosenberg heard, however, that the real reason was that the motion-based sims were tagged to be a key attraction at the JSC visitors’ center, bringing in revenue long after the Titan mission was history.

  They were given briefings on the science aspects of the mission: the studies of the Sun, Venus and Jupiter they were expected to perform en route, what was being learned from Cassini and Huygens about the Saturn system, Titan itself.

  Carl Sagan came out of retirement to give them a pep talk about the studies he’d made, as far back as the 1980s, on synthesizing the organic haze on Titan. And he talked to them about cosmology: how the Solar System had formed, the planets coalescing from concentric rings of rock and ice, how the sun would blossom into a red giant at the end of its life, shedding warmth—briefly—over the chill worlds of the outer System. Sagan was in his seventies, and he was a little bent, that famous voice even more gravel-filled, and his hair white as snow; but he was still as handsome as all hell. The science was baby stuff, of course, for Rosenberg. Hut Sagan’s talk, brief as it was, turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole training program for him.

  Then there was all the surgeon stuff.

  A key objective for this mission, as far as the ground-based experts were concerned, was to find out once and for all how the human body adapted to long-duration spaceflight. Or not.

  Of course the experienced astronauts might already have suffered much of the harm to which they were susceptible; some studies of past astronauts suggested that the major damage to many of the body’s major systems happened in the first few hours of a spaceflight…

  Anyhow, to achieve a sound study the surgeons had to have some kind of baseline, an understanding of what condition their various bodies had been in before being subjected to the rigors of the flight. So the crew were put through a comprehensive medical study. They had to submit, every two or three days, to electrocardiograms, seismocardiograms and measurements of their breathing rates and volume; and once a week they had to spend a whole day on a much more thorough check-out, which included sampling of body fluids, measurements of the phases of cardiac contraction, heartbeat volume, venous pressure, vascular tone in different parts of the body, blood circulation in the head, and lung ventilation.

  After a few weeks of this Rosenberg figured that by the time he was launched there would be more of his body mass in test tubes in the labs around the country than aboard that Shuttle on the pad. And all the checkups meant a whole day lost out of every week, time which Rosenberg had no choice but to give up, but which he had to drag out of his continuing research, and other commitments…

  In all, eighty percent of his training time was taken up with Shuttle emergency procedures: mostly to do with problems during launch, or a forced landing.

  Apparently as part of NASA’s post-Challenger adjustment, the crew families were encouraged to come in and observe the emergency stuff, so they could understand what was happening, if and when it all unraveled. So here were Nicola’s aging parents from England, the mother with her prion-ruined face, and Paula’s grandchildren, two boys who watched with baffled incomprehension as their grandmother clambered out of windows and hatchways and shimmied down ropes and slid down wires to the little green car that would whisk her away in case the Shuttle blew up on the pad.

  There was nobody to come see Rosenberg, and he was more than glad of that.

  Some of the preparation was chilling, then. But some was mundane, almost comical, and yet delivered with the usual NASA cheerful high-tech gloss. The crew was taken to the Food Systems Engineering Facility, for instance, where they were given samples of Shuttle food packs to try out, so they could select their own preferences. No salmon, Angel insisted. The stink of fish, in the enclosed places of a Shuttle, was just unacceptable.
And then there was the john: the Waste Management Compartment trainer, where Rosenberg was trained, in all earnestness, how to go to the bathroom. It was an affair of rubber gloves he had to use to clean himself, and little plastic scraper tools, and tans that whirred noisily. There was even a little camera situated in the bowl, peering up at his ass, so he could tell if he was positioning his orifice correctly…

  But in the midst of all that, the stuff that was so easily mocked, he came across signs and symbols that showed him where he was: here, at the heart of NASA, the Agency that had put men on the Moon. Bits of 1960s technology, capsules and rockets, that looked so primitive they might have come from the 1930s. Pictures he hadn’t seen before, of Americans bounding across the surface of the Moon, working and joshing as if it was a field hike in Arizona.

  And the astronauts: the hard core of them, the big-boned, blue-eyed WASPs of the earliest recruitment rounds, many of them graying now, few of them still active, but still fit and tanned and with faces like craggy lunar rock. Before these men—who had, after all, been the first—Rosenberg felt intimidated, weak and insignificant. But every time one of them walked past there was a powerful stink of male deodorant which wafted after him down the narrow corridors, all human scents suppressed, his surface somehow shining and impenetrable, as if he was already half-way to orbit just standing there, as if his purpose, the purpose of his race, had been to guide humanity to the stars.

  Of his own crew, it was clearly Angel who aspired to membership of this élite group—which was, of course, impossible, for the role of hero astronaut had vanished long before Angel had joined NASA. But, anyhow, Angel walked through the space centers, mean-looking and tall, his muscles honed and hard, his language full of the dread-reducing jargon of contingencies and aborts. He even looked like them, with his blond-WASP hair and blue eyes, and he was almost schizoid, it seemed to Rosenberg, in his lack of reaction to the peril of his Columbia flight—and yet, despite that, there was a certain desperation in his empty eyes.