Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  The control crew called out a brisk takeoff clearance.

  The B-52 began its takeoff roll. It soon outstripped the ground vehicles, and the runway lights whipped away to either side of Deeke.

  Then the lights fell away beneath him, and the ride smoothed out.

  In the Flight Control Room in JSC’s Building 30, Barbara Fahy stood up behind her console, and surveyed her controllers. As they waited for the point, eight seconds into the ascent, where they would take over the management of the flight, the controllers cycled through their displays and spoke calmly on the loops to each other, to their back room teams, and to her. There was an atmosphere of competence, of calm.

  Each of the controllers had a little plastic Stars-and-Stripes on his or her console, a memento of the mission, America’s last manned spaceflight, in this year of Our Lord, 2008. The STS-147 mission patch was high on the wall of the room, a big disc bearing a stylized planet Saturn with a Shuttle orbiter looping through the rings. It was only the second mission patch not to bear the names of the crew: the first was Apollo 11.

  The launch events unfolded, eroding away to the moment of ignition.

  There were no malfunctions, no holds. She tried to put aside her gnawing anxiety.

  Jackie Benacerraf was almost late for the launch.

  She’d flown into Orlando and stayed overnight, and then driven out to the Cape straight along Interstate 50. But that was the wrong way; she was turned back by a guard on the road, and she had to go over a bridge to the south and drive north along Merritt Island. Then, for the first time, she got caught in traffic.

  The commentators had predicted a big turnout to watch this last Shuttle launch. It would be Apollo 17 all over again, the old-timers predicted. The nostalgia factor. Well, there was some heavy traffic here, but nothing like the density she’d expected.

  But there were some roadside parties, young people glittering with image-tattoos, writhing to arrhythmic rock, draped in softscreen flags. They looked like beings from the future, she thought, brought back in time to this site of monumental 1960s engineering.

  Maybe it really is over. Maybe people really don’t care any more, she thought.

  At last she got into the Space Center, by Security Gate 2 off U.S. 3. There was an orderly demonstration here, mounted by a creationist group from Texas called the Foundation for Thought and Ethics. Here was Xavier Maclachlan himself on a soapbox, all jug ears and ten gallon hat, steadily denouncing the manned space program for the sake of the cameras.

  At an office at the gate, after queuing, she picked up her orange STS-147 media badge.

  She parked in the big lot at the foot of the stupendous Vehicle Assembly Building. When she got out of the car, with her camera around her neck and her softscreen rolled up under her arm, she heard the voice of the public affairs officer drifting across the lot, from the big speakers close to the press stand… T minus Jour minutes and counting. As preparation for main engine ignition the main fuel valve heaters have been turned on. T minus three minutes fifty-seven seconds and counting; the final fuel purge on the Shuttle main engines has been started in preparation for engine start…

  Four minutes. Jesus, she’d cut it close.

  She spent a moment looking up at the VAB: that gigantic block, taller than a twenty-story tower, was as impressive, still, as when it had been built back in the 1960s. But it was showing its age, like the rest of the space effort. Its exterior was stained by the weather, and the big Stars-and-Stripes, painted on the building’s flank during the Bicentennial, was faded and had run.

  She locked her car and hurried past the network TV buildings, with their glittering glass carapaces, to the press stand. The faded wooden bleacher was no more than a third full, last mission or not. There were a couple of guys in the front row doing radio feeds. A hundred yards away there was a portakabin press office, but it turned out that the mission timelines and info packs hadn’t arrived yet.

  Her mother had fixed her an invite to the grander family viewing area, on the roof of the administration building. She’d decided she’d rather be here, in this battered old press stand, with working people, rather than drink with faded celebrities.

  She sat near the front of the stand. She was looking east. The sky was overlaid by lumpy, broken gray cloud. Before her was a big old-fashioned TV monitor showing a grainy image of the interior of the orbiter flight deck—an image of her mother the astronaut, for God’s sake—intercut with shots of the Firing Room here at the Cape containing the controllers who would run the first few seconds of the launch, and Mission Control at Houston, who would take over later.

  She looked around. The VAB was a big, visually dominating block over to her left. On a patch of grass before the press stand there were the press portakabins, a big rectangular digital clock, steadily counting down, and a flagpole. Beyond that was a stretch of water, the barge canal from the Banana River leading to the VAB. Behind the canal was a treeline, and beyond that, straight ahead of her, she could make out the two great launch complexes: 39-A to the right, forever empty now, and 39-B to the left, with Endeavour.

  The launch complex looked gray, colorless, like a piece of some industrial plant. Beside the gantry there were big hemispherical fuel tanks, and a water tower. And she could see Endeavour, the gleaming white of the orbiter against the orange of its External Tank and the battleship gray of the gantry. She could make out the orbiter’s tail, wings, windows.

  It looked, she thought, surprisingly beautiful, like a 1950s vision of a spaceplane, somehow futuristic. The curve of the wing was especially striking at its joint with the body, the only curve in the mountain of engineering, graceful against the blocky industrial gantry.

  To Jackie’s right there were more pads, stretching off to the south, towards what they called ICBM Row, a whole line of launch complexes facing the ocean. Among them were the pads which had launched the early Mercury and Gemini manned shots. Most were disused, dismantled. Already museum pieces.

  She could have brought the kids today, but neither of them had been interested. Both of them had preferred to stay behind for some out-of-school trip to a Disney-Coke net Island.

  That was fine by Jackie. She didn’t want to confront them with the reality of this. Her kids had been forced to say good-bye to their grandmother; what the hell could Paula expect from them?

  Gareth Deeke was suspended beneath the wing of a B-52, high in the brightening sky over the Atlantic seaboard.

  His head was enclosed snugly by the cockpit canopy. There was only just room for his helmet, and every time he moved, he brushed or banged his skull on a pad or the canopy structure. As the mailbox windows were right next to his head he had good vision ahead and sideways, but the widening fuselage beyond the windows restricted his downward vision. Because of the placement of the windows and the fuselage, he could see nothing of most of his airplane, the wings and nose, or indeed the ground.

  On most planes, the airframe could be used as a reference platform. Not in the X-15. It was disconcerting, as if he was suspended in the air in this glass bubble, as if his controls were connected to nothing at all.

  At twelve minutes to launch he started to activate the X-15.

  Inside the B-52 an engineer was working a panel. “Okay, Linebacker, you want to reset your altitude? I’ve got just a hair shy of a thousand feet per second velocity and maybe three hundred feet up. Eleven minutes to launch.”

  “Rog,” Deeke replied. “Attitudes look good.”

  “Do you want to try your controls again, Linebacker?”

  Deeke worked his stick. “Here’s roll, pitch, and rudder.”

  “Try your flaps.”

  “Okay, flaps coming down.”

  “Confirm that.”

  “And back up.”

  “We see flaps up.”

  “My aux cabin pressure switch is on. The inertial platform is going internal.”

  “That’s nominal, Linebacker,” the ground called.

  He went into a stab
ility augmentation system check. Then a generator reset. A hydraulic press check. And an electrical press check…

  His launch light came on.

  Everything was looking good. By God, it looked as if not even a malfunction was going to curtail this incredible flight.

  “Five minutes.”

  The ground instructed the B-52 to turn further eastward. Thus tar the ground path had been a broad circle inland. Now, Deeke knew, the B-52 was going to line itself up with the ground path of the Shuttle, which, after launch, would be driving eastward towards its orbital path.

  The B-52 crew called, “Two minutes.”

  “Okay,” Deeke said, “data is on. Tape to fifteen. Push to test ball nose. Looks good. Alpha is still about one degree, beta is about a half degree right.”

  “Calibrate, Linebacker?”

  “Confirm, I got a calibrate.”

  “One minute to go,” the B-52 said. “Picking up heading.”

  One minute. Now he had to activate the engine.

  “Emergency battery on. Fast slave gyro on. Ventral jet armed…”

  Even now, Deeke half-expected to be called back.

  The call didn’t come.

  “Prime switch to prime. Igniter-ready light is on. Precool switch to precool.” Now the priming sequence had commenced, and the precool switch increased the flow of lox to the turbopump.

  “Coming up on ten seconds. Pump idle.”

  When Deeke pressed his pump-idle button, the rocket engine’s turbopump came up to speed and forced propellants into a small chamber called the first-stage igniter, where they were burned by a spark plug. The igniter acted like a blowtorch, firing the propellant and oxidizer into the main combustion chamber.

  Deeke heard a deep, bass rumbling.

  The X-15’s flight path today was based on the old high-altitude profile used at Edwards. The only powered portion of the flight was the short rocket burst at the beginning, just after launch from the B-52, driving the bird into a steep climb out of the atmosphere. Then would follow a ballistic, unpowered trajectory up to a peak altitude, and a steep fall back into the atmosphere.

  Thus, Deeke would leave the atmosphere and would be weightless for several minutes. This flight was basically a short-duration spaceflight, comparable to the first suborbital Mercury lobs by Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, but fully under Deeke’s control.

  Not that it was recognized as such, by NASA.

  Maybe today would be a kind of vindication, Deeke thought.

  And now, the moment was approaching.

  “Everything looks good here.”

  “Manifold and lines looking good. Launch light going on.”

  Still no cancellation.

  “And we’ll call that three, two, one, launch—”

  “Three minutes. Orbiter main engines gimballed to launch positions. T minus two fifty-five. External Tank oxygen vents closed. Pressurization of the tank has started. You’re configured for lift-off. Two minutes. Set APU to inhibit.”

  Libet turned a switch. “APU auto shutdown to inhibit.”

  “Sound suppression power bus armed.”

  Angel said, “Visors down.”

  “Launch crew calls Godspeed, Endeavour.”

  “Thank you for that, Marcus.”

  Benacerraf pulled closed her big faceplate. It clicked shut, and the whir of the cabin’s pumps and fans was muffled.

  “Endeavour, control. Thirty-five seconds. Software mode 101 loaded. Hydrogen tank at flight pressure. APUs have started in the Solid Rocket Boosters. Go for redundant set launch sequence start. Twenty-five seconds. Smooth sailing, guys. Endeavour, control. You are on your on-board computer. Software mode now 102.”

  “Copy that.”

  Now the GPCs, the redundant general purpose computers on board the orbiter, had taken control of the launch sequence. Only one more command, for main engine start, would be sent from the ground.

  Bit by bit, Benacerraf thought, Endeavour was cutting her ties to Earth.

  Angel read off the continuing prelaunch events from his displays. “Pyrotechnics armed. Sound suppression system activated.”

  “Fifteen seconds,” Libet said.

  “SRB pyro initiation controller in its voltage limits… We got a live SRB destruct system.”

  “Endeavour, we have a go for main engine start.”

  “Rog,” Angel said. “Time to kick those tires and light that fire. Eight seconds. Position vector loaded…”

  The geographic location of the launch pad had been turned into positional data inside the orbiter’s computers. Endeavour had become aware of its location as an object in three-dimensional space, only temporarily and accidentally clinging to the surface of a planet.

  Angel said, “Engine flares ignited. Five, tour. We have main engine start.”

  There was a remote bang, a premonitory shudder.

  “There they go, guys,” Angel shouted. “Three at a hundred.”

  The orbiter cabin creaked. Benacerraf could feel the displacement of the twang, through all of two feet: the Shuttle stack, pinned to the pad by posts at the base of its SRBs, flexed forward as it accommodated the thrust of its main engines.

  Angel and Libet spoke at once. “Main engine pressure above ninety percent, all three.” “Engine status lights all green.” “Two, one. SRB ignition.”

  For a few seconds, Jackie could make out a shower of sparks, bursting from the nozzles of the orbiter’s three main engines. Now a mist of propellants—liquid hydrogen and oxygen—was injected into the sparks, and a bright clear white light erupted at the base of the orbiter, and white smoke squirted out to either side.

  The SRBs ignited. The plume of yellow light from the solid rockets was bright—dazzling, like sunlight, liquid light. There was a brief flash, as pyrotechnics severed the hold-down bolts pinning the stack to the pad.

  The stack lifted off the ground, startlingly quickly, trailing a column of white smoke which glowed orange within, as if on fire. The movement of the huge Shuttle stack seemed impossible, as if a piece of a cathedral had suddenly taken leave of the Earth.

  At the moment of launch there was a kind of release among the press flacks gathered in the stand. As one they stood, and there was clapping, cheering.

  Jackie lifted her face to the rocket light that, for a few moments at least, was banishing the gray of winter.

  It was, she conceded, a shame the boys weren’t here to see this.

  And then the noise came, not a single roar but a succession of coughs and barks and crackles, like the popping of some immense oil fire. The ground shook, a rattling she could feel through her feet, on the bleachers.

  To Benacerraf it was a shove in the back. It wasn’t a sharp spike of thrust—the Shuttle was much too heavy for that—more like riding an elevator of immense power, suddenly hurling her upward, but an elevator that would keep on going until it burst, cartoon-style, through the roof.

  The cabin shook violently, and the noise engulfed her. The cockpit was filled with yellow-white light, diffused from the rockets’ glare, eighty feet below her. She could see chunks of ice, breaking off the hull of the External Tank, clattering against the pilots’ windows.

  The mood of quiet calm which had characterized the preflight prep was dissipated in an instant. She was riding a rocket, and it felt like it.

  A new voice came on the loop. “Endeavour, Houston. Launch tower cleared. Eight seconds. All engines looking good.”

  “Copy that, Marcus.” Angel’s voice sounded thin, and it trembled with the vibration.

  Mission Control at Houston took control of the flight once the Shuttle stack cleared the launch tower. Marcus White, voluntarily brought out of retirement once more, was the capcom there today. It had been done as a PR stunt—a Moonwalker in Mission Control—by the NASA PAO, desperate to milk this last moment of attention for all it was worth. But to Benacerraf, immersed in noise and vibration, it felt comforting to have White’s gravelly tones on the other end of the line.

&n
bsp; “Eleven seconds,” Angel said. “Initiating roll maneuver.”

  The orbiter went through a hundred and twenty degree roll to the right and pitched over as it climbed, to ease the aerodynamic loads on the complex stack.

  Thus, thirty seconds after launch, she was suspended upside down, and hanging from her straps. The ground was visible above the heads of the pilots, receding quickly. Like her first flight, Benacerraf was surprised by the violence and speed of the maneuver.

  “Shit hot!” Libet shouted.

  It was like being shot downward, out of a cannon; it felt as it the X-15 had just exploded off the hooks.

  The violence of the moment was bracing, exhilarating, an intrusion of reality. My God, he thought. It’s real. We’re really doing this.

  Immediately the plane began to roll to the right. X-15 always had a tendency to do that, because of flow effects around the B-52’s launch pylon. He worked the left aileron to compensate.

  He was basically in free fall right now, falling away from the B-52.

  He felt adrenaline pump crisply into his system. It was time. He pressed his launch switch.

  There was an explosive noise, like a shout. The main combustion chamber had ignited.

  The bird was hurled forward.

  He was pressed back, hard, into his seat and headrest. Another memory he’d suppressed. And he started to develop tunnel vision, with blackness shrouding the periphery of his view. He tried to remember what kind of instrument panel scan pattern he used back then. So much he’d forgotten.

  The engine noise built up into a banshee squeal.

  He rolled his wings level and pulled his nose up to a ten-degree angle of attack. The acceleration swiveled around, from the eyeballs-in of the launch to eyeballs-down at pullup. He felt as if he was climbing straight up, or even going over onto his back, He knew he had to discount the sensations, and just watch his instruments.

  The B-52—flying at Mach point eight—just fell away behind him, as if it wasn’t moving at all.