Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Here we go again,’ Jones said. His Tennessee twang was calm and relaxed – as if he does this every day.

  Well, Chuck Jones could play-act his calmness all he liked; but even he had to be wound up tight as a watch spring now, Dana thought, because the most important moment in the flight was approaching. The third stage of this stack was not the old reliable S-IVB which had carried the Moon missions to Earth orbit and beyond; it was an S-NB, with the first operational NERVA engine. And the damn thing was going to have to work now to get them to orbit, Dana knew, or they were going to be flying across the Atlantic to a hard landing in the goddamn Sahara.

  York called up: ‘Apollo, Houston, you are go for orbit. You are go for orbit.’

  For long seconds the spacecraft soared, without acceleration; and then, at last, Dana was kicked in the back.

  ‘She’s lit,’ Chuck Jones breathed. ‘How about that. We’re flying a goddamn nuke.’

  The NERVA burn was nothing like so jarring as the second-stage ignition six minutes earlier; the ride now was crisp and rattly, with just two hundred thousand pounds of thrust pressing a full G into his back.

  And then Earthlight strobed past Dana’s window. The Apollo had dipped toward the ground.

  He was thrown forward against his restraints, the breath knocked out of him. My God. What now?

  The nose of the craft pitched up again. Metal groaned, and Earth’s brilliant face swooped past his window. His helmet thumped against the sparse metal frame of his couch. Blue light flashed over his visor.

  Chuck Jones’s voice was dry. ‘We’re riding a bronco here, Houston. Please advise.’

  ‘Booster, Flight. Tell me what you got.’

  To Donnelly, it looked as if the little Saturn icon on the plot board was drunk, as it wandered crazily around its programmed trajectory. A dozen voices jabbered in Donnelly’s ear at once; he listened to them all, somehow simultaneously, trying to piece together what was happening.

  But the most important voice wasn’t there. Mike Conlig wasn’t speaking to him.

  ‘Booster, Flight,’ he repeated. ‘You got anything you want to say?’

  Even without Conlig he could follow the bones of what was happening. The S-NB seemed to be working nominally, in fact. This pitching must be due to left-over problems from the pogoing. The vehicle had been tipped up too high when staging came. So when the S-NB cut in, it found itself pointing too far into space. It had gimballed its nuclear engine, and tried to point its way toward the center of the Earth. For long seconds the guidance system battled with the limits of gimbal on the engine. And then the S-NB seemed to figure that its path had gotten too low, so it pitched itself up again …

  And on, and on, in a wild feedback process, as the S-NB’s instrument unit strove to bring the ship back to an unreachable flight path.

  Where the hell was Conlig?

  ‘Booster, Flight. Booster.’

  Christ, Fred Michaels thought, watching from the Viewing Room at the back of the MOCR. I do not want this bird aborted.

  This would be a very bad time to foul up.

  The new Reagan Administration was shaping itself up after its landslide, and Michaels was already gloomy about the future. He figured it was Ted Kennedy’s defection from Carter during the primaries that had done for the peanut farmer, although Michaels suspected Carter’s time might have been up anyhow. And here came Reagan, rattling his saber at the Russians over Poland and Afghanistan, and promising to get the hostages out of Iran … Maybe Reagan would be gung-ho about space; nobody knew.

  Meanwhile Michaels had lost a close political buddy in the White House, and his Kennedy card was looking a little worn.

  Anyhow, the Apollo-N flight had so far gotten NASA some extensive coverage – some of it even favorable, as it showed the elaborate precautions the Agency was taking over its nuclear materials. It had even crowded out the ‘Who Shot JR?’ hoopla that was so fascinating everybody. Michaels did not want to turn those front pages into damning coverage of another Apollo disaster; not now, not ever …

  Bert Seger, a few rows back from Michaels in the Viewing Room, knew this was NASA’s most controversial flight since the military crews of Skylab A. There had been a march and protest rally by campaigners at Kennedy today, people with kids, and banners saying REMEMBER THREE MILE ISLAND. The Cape security people had kept them well away from the launch site, and from the main public viewing areas. But Seger, hot-footing it back from Tyuratam for this launch, had had to work his way past it all.

  Seger had been cocooned in the project for years now. He’d found the anger he’d witnessed in those massed faces, on the news programs and on NASA’s closed-circuit loops, startling, deeply troubling.

  Of even more concern to him was the grumbling he’d heard from inside the Agency. Some of the astronauts, that loudmouth Joe Muldoon for instance, had been getting a little too vocal about the flight-readiness, or lack of it, of NERVA. Fortunately, however, Muldoon was safely out of the way right now, on the other side of the Moon.

  But Muldoon, and the others, had planted seeds of doubt in Seger. Had he been pushing too hard? If anything went badly wrong today, then after bulling through the protests, NASA might after all smear nuclear fuel all over the eastern seaboard.

  Yesterday, in the Operations Building at Kennedy, the Apollo-N crew had given Seger a small, informal photo, in a brass frame. It showed the three of them in their spacesuits, smiling, and was signed by them all. The inscription was: To Bert – In Your Hands.

  ‘Booster, Flight. Booster, damn it.’

  Donnelly’s voice was persistent in Conlig’s headset, like a buzzing insect. It made it hard to think.

  The mission rules were clear enough. In the event of a failure like this at such a point in the launch, Conlig, as Booster, should push his abort switch. The little icon representing the Saturn continued to deviate from its path. But …

  But the deviation wasn’t as bad as it had looked at first. And there clearly wasn’t any tumbling.

  The S-NB was a smart bird. It could exert a lot of control over its trajectory by gimballing its engine bells. It looked as if the booster was doing all it could to keep to its target path. The trajectory was still under control.

  Conlig forced himself to reply to Donnelly. ‘Uh, Flight, Booster.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Booster. Go.’

  Conlig took a deep breath. ‘Flight, Booster. We seem to have good control at this time.’

  Now calls began to come in from the other controllers: guidance, flight dynamics, the systems guys in the row behind Conlig. Apart from this oscillation around the trajectory, everything was performing nominally.

  Donnelly said: ‘You sure, Booster?’

  Are you really sure you have this bird under control? Are you sure you shouldn’t ask for an abort?

  Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Conlig?

  Conlig felt as if the room, the world, was closing in around him; the headset seemed to burn on his ears, and the little Saturn icon on the plot board was like an image of his own wavering determination.

  I should abort. But the thing is flying.

  ‘You sure, Booster?’ Donnelly pressed.

  ‘Data indicates it, Flight.’

  ‘Roger.’ I’ll trust you, Conlig.

  Conlig stared at the icon, willing it to keep on climbing, up toward orbit.

  He knew it was in nobody’s interests to abort, if they didn’t have to.

  The burn lasted two and a half minutes. Apollo-N was boosted five miles higher and another two hundred and fifty miles downrange.

  Then the S-NB stage shut down its NERVA engine.

  Jones read off the DSKY display before him. ‘Natalie, you can tell the boys at Marshall that their rascally bird performed beautifully. Except that we’ve ended up in orbit ass-backward.’

  ‘Roger,’ York replied laconically. ‘I’ll relay that, Chuck; thanks.’

  Mike Conlig was aware of Natalie sitting, as capcom, just a few yards
away from him.

  I should have aborted. But I didn’t. I got away with it.

  He didn’t turn; he didn’t want to meet Natalie’s eyes.

  Donnelly felt some of the tension drain out of him.

  He went round the horn, polling his controllers; they all reported a ship that was, in spite of everything, reasonably close to nominal. We got through it. How, I’ll never know.

  Bert Seger knew they had been lucky. He determined to poke a hot stick up the asses of those guys from Marshall over this. The S-IC had pogoed. The Saturn first stage should not be letting them down, not after more than a decade of experience, not after so many flights.

  Seger walked into the MOCR and leaned over Donnelly’s station. ‘I want you to make damn sure you’re confident about that NERVA engine of Marshall’s. Otherwise, bring those guys straight back down.’

  Friday, November 28, 1980

  Apollo-N; Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston

  They shoved their pressure suits into net bags and crammed them under their couches; now Jim Dana was wearing only a pair of Beta-cloth coveralls over his long johns.

  He was a hundred miles up, a thousand miles downrange from the Cape, and covering five miles every second. Here in his center couch, his feet pointed up at the stars, he was peering at his home planet through the Command Module’s window.

  He couldn’t get over how beautiful the sunlit Earth was. It was a wall of color and light, gently curving, which divided the universe in two; cloud lay across land and ocean in brilliant white plumes, like feathers.

  Ben Priest, to Dana’s right, was grinning at him. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Like I was born to be up here.’

  Chuck Jones unbuckled his seat belt, and pushed himself out of the left-hand couch. He floated up toward the instrument panel. ‘Hot dawg,’ he said. ‘We is in orbit, gentlemen. Welcome to the astronaut corps. Now all we’ve got to do is figure out if we can stay here.’

  Priest and Jones set to work on checking out the craft’s flight path and velocity estimates with the ground stations and instrumentation aircraft. Dana could hear Jones humming as he worked. Meanwhile, Dana’s job was to make sure the guidance platform was aligned.

  He floated up into the air and folded back his couch, the center of the three. In microgravity, the cramped cabin seemed roomy. Dana pushed a finger-tip against an instrument panel; it was enough to launch him slowly down past the others into the equipment bay under the couches.

  He drifted among coolant pipes and storage compartments. There was room to stretch out here, for the first time since the launch, with his feet by the hatch and his head pointing at the floor. As he stretched he felt twinges at his stomach, chest and knees: the aftermath of the pogoing. It was actually less painful than he’d expected; his pressure suit had evidently protected him.

  Dana floated down to the Inertial Measuring Unit. The guidance device was a metal sphere the size of a beach ball. Inside the casing a platform was maintained in position by three nested spheres. The whole thing was like a table on a boat, gimballed to remain level regardless of the boat’s heeling. The system was the spacecraft’s way of being able to sense where it was relative to a reference trajectory. Checking the alignment was a routine chore; it was a checklist item on every flight. But there was a big fear, now, that the pogoing and wild gyrations Apollo-N had suffered during the launch might have thrown the platform out of line.

  To align the platform Dana had to take sightings on various stars through a small optical telescope and sextant. The idea was to pick a couple of stars from a standard list, and then tell the spacecraft to find them. If the star wasn’t exactly centered in the cross hairs of the telescope, Dana would make an adjustment to correct it, and the computer would enter the adjustment into the platform, which would then reset itself.

  He selected the constellation of Orion, with its distinctive three-star belt across the middle. He shielded his eyes more carefully from the glare of the Earth and the cabin lights, and he pointed the ’scope where he knew Orion ought to be. At last he made out the three faint dots, and bright Sirius nearby, right where they were supposed to be …

  He grinned. The alignment was fine. Maybe the worst was over, and the rest of the flight was going to work out.

  After all, the first objective of the flight test had already been achieved: to prove that the S-NB could loft itself, and a crewed spacecraft, into orbit. Now the mission was to show that NERVA could safely be restarted several times. During the week-long flight Apollo-N would be sent on thin, elliptical orbits, looping a hundred thousand miles into space – half-way to the Moon.

  There would be plenty of science to do, with an extreme ultraviolet telescope, helium observations, high-altitude atmospheric studies, and Earth observation and photography; there was equipment inside the Command Module, and various external experiments and sensors stored in an instrument bay in the Service Module. But the science was nominal, Dana knew. The real purpose of this mission was simple: make sure the damn NERVA works, and can be controlled from the spacecraft, without smearing nuclear waste all over everything.

  When he’d taken his star readings, he used the sextant to measure the angle between two fixed stars. This was a check of the platform’s memory; Dana had to get his calculations to agree to within a ten-thousandth of a percentage point: the goal, in fact, was to get five balls, a perfect reading of.00000 on the star angle comparison.

  Dana scored.00003: four balls and change.

  Meanwhile he was getting used to microgravity. When he put his hands out he found he could make himself spin in the air, like a sycamore seed.

  The feeling was wonderful. He felt like laughing.

  Rolf Donnelly was at the center of a web of information, argument and extrapolation, a web that swept across the country: from the Marshall people in Alabama, to Rockwell at Downey with their intimate understanding of Apollo, to Boeing who were doing some hard analysis of the telemetry data from their balky S-IC first stage, to a dozen or more groups here in the MOCR, and the back rooms, and in Building 45. He imagined phone lines singing, as the ground controllers and the crew worked through comprehensive checklists covering the propulsion systems, gimbal systems, gyros, computers, life support, spreading their findings out across the country.

  Slowly the answers were coming in, filtered and assembled by Indigo Team.

  The S-IC pogo was, it seemed, down to an unexpected resonance mode of the Saturn VN, the new Saturn/NERVA stack. It should have been anticipated by somebody, long before the stack was assembled for launch.

  What the hell happened to quality control on this program? Donnelly understood how everyone involved was under great time pressure. But still: It won’t fail because of me. It sounded like some assholes at Boeing or Marshall had kind of forgotten that motto; and there couldn’t have been a worse mission to forget it on.

  Anyhow, what now?

  The logical thing to do was just to abort, to bring the crew home. After all, the spacecraft hadn’t been designed for the treatment it had received during launch.

  But Donnelly had started out as a physicist, and he remained, at heart, a scientist. Never mind the mission rules, or the politics: what does the data tell you?

  The failure had been Saturn’s, not NERVA’s. And now Saturn had been discarded, and the Booster people were assuring him that everything was fine, that the pogoing hadn’t hurt the S-NB nearly as badly as it might have. Besides, the S-NB had already worked – and well, given the situation it had found itself in when it had tried to find its flight path. Meanwhile, the other subsystem teams were continuing to click off the items in their checklists as sweet as honey.

  Behind him, in Management Row and the Viewing Room, there were more little clusters of senior management, worrying themselves to death. There was Bert Seger, with the directors of Flight Operations and Crew Operations; and behind Seger, beyond the Viewing Room glass, Donnelly recognized Tim Josephson.

  The strategic
importance of the flight was obvious to everyone: NERVA’s nuclear technology had to succeed – it had to be demonstrably safe – because if public hostility wasn’t assuaged, and if the nuclear program was cut back or even terminated altogether, well, hell, you could kiss good-bye to Mars.

  Donnelly had to make the right call. By tradition only Flight, or Surgeon, the mission doctor, could call an abort. NASA senior management had never before overridden a Flight Director’s decision during a mission.

  It was a first Donnelly didn’t want to happen on his watch.

  Natalie York, as capcom, was sitting in the workstation row in front of Rolf Donnelly. She watched the faces of the controllers around her. She’d got to know them all, during the intensive training for this mission, the long, complex integrated sims, the frenetic drinking sessions later. They were all men, all very young. They shared a brand of intense, fragile intelligence which made them socially awkward, maybe temperamental, ultimately unstable.

  They’d all had a tough time during the flight to orbit, and they faced equally tough decisions now.

  Mike sat in the Trench, the row in front of her, a little to her left. He was hunched over his console now, his posture redolent of tension, his hair loose and greasy at his neck. He was bent in some huddled discussion with a colleague from Marshall.

  She remembered all her old doubts about Mike’s temperament – whether he was suited to high-pressure situations like this, involving erratic boosters and manned spacecraft and rapidly unraveling missions …

  She had an impulse to reach out and touch him, to try to reassure or calm him. But she knew that her intrusion wouldn’t be welcomed. Mike was off on some trajectory of his own, now, as out of her control as had been the Saturn/NERVA stack, guiding itself into space.

  Anyhow, she ought to be concentrating on herself. This assignment was a big moment for her. York was an ascan no more. She was now officially on the flight roster, and this capcom posting was her first operational duty: quite a vote of confidence.