Ben’s up there. What in hell is going on?
Gregory Dana, in the Viewing Room, could see the spacecraft icon drifting from its programmed trajectory on the big plot board, and he could follow enough of the controllers’ terse exchanges to figure out that something catastrophic had happened to Jim’s ship.
Now the Viewing Room was steadily filling up – as was the MOCR amphitheater itself – as off-duty personnel came hurrying in, responding to the deepening atmosphere of crisis.
Dana was joined at the window by one of the astronaut corps, Ralph Gershon, whom Dana had met a couple of times through Jim.
Gershon stared out at the frantic huddles in the MOCR and snorted contempt. ‘Jesus. Look at them huddling up. They always go through the same thing. What happened? Where are we? What are we going to do about it? They’re so damned slow, and restricted in the way they think. And meanwhile the bird drifts around the sky, broken-winged.’
Broken-winged.
The problems must be with the nuclear engine. Everything, every anomaly, had flowed from that moment.
They have to get the crew away from that damn booster. Dana couldn’t understand why that hadn’t been done already.
He glanced around. He couldn’t tell if any of this was being broadcast on the public networks. What if Mary, and Jake and Maria, were seeing this on TV? What about Sylvia?
Silently, his lips moving, Gregory Dana began to pray.
The NERVA has blown. That’s got to be it.
Jim Dana, lying in his couch, thought he could feel the tingle of radioactive particles within his body. It was a thin wind, working its way into his bones. His face and chest felt as if they were on fire. He felt a burning sensation and a tightness about his temples, and his eyelids were smarting, as if they had been doused with acid.
With every breath, he must be filling his lungs with radionuclides.
His throat hurt, and he began to cough.
Wednesday, December 3, 1980
International Club, Washington
The Executives Group were about to take dinner at the International Club on 19th Street. Vice President-elect Bush attended, along with members of the Senate and House who held key positions on the Space and Appropriations Committees; and now they were standing around with drinks in their hands.
Under the surface of talk and networking, Fred Michaels was running over the events of the day.
Michaels had inherited the idea of the Executives Group from his predecessors at NASA. The Group consisted of the space program’s top people: Michaels and his NASA senior managers, and the prime contractors’ senior executives, from Rockwell, Grumman, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, IBM. It was an elite club that Michaels liked to bring together four or five times a year.
Today had been a good day, he decided. The Executives Group session had gone well, and Bush’s closing address had been encouraging. Michaels had worried about losing outgoing veep Ted Kennedy, who, with his brother, continued to support the space program. Today, though, Bush seemed to be positioning himself as – if not an advocate – then at least as an ally.
Yes, a good day. But Michaels was tensed up, his big stomach growling. He always found it impossible to relax in the middle of a mission. Any one of a hundred thousand malfunctions could, he knew, spell the end of the flight, and maybe cost the lives of the crew, and conceivably put a bullet to the head of the whole Mars initiative – and, incidentally, Michaels’s own career. How the hell could anyone relax through that? And tonight there were not one but two American crews beyond the atmosphere, one floating around the Earth with a nuke on their tail, and the others bouncing off the Moon with those Russians. What a situation.
Still, the S-NB seemed to be functioning well, so much so that Hans Udet – the most senior of Marshall’s Germans on the project – had felt able to take time out to be here with the Executives tonight. Michaels could see him now, glad-handing a brace of Congressmen with all the Prussian charisma and charm at his disposal. Udet looks confident enough. Why the hell shouldn’t I be?
That was when the phone calls started coming in. Afterwards, Michaels would never be sure who got the first call.
He saw the president of Rockwell in excited conversation with another man. Then all the Rockwell executives left the Club’s main room, and returned a few minutes later, visibly distressed. They began to go through the room, seeking out others; Michaels could see the news – whatever it was – spreading through the Executives Group like a contagion of dismay.
Then Michaels himself was paged to take a call from Tim Josephson, who was still at NASA Headquarters a few blocks away.
‘Fred, the crew has lost the NERVA. The technical parameters got out of their nominal boundaries. Ah – in fact, the thing might have exploded.’
‘Jesus Christ. And the crew?’ Michaels snapped. ‘What about the damn crew, Josephson?’
Josephson’s voice was even, analytical. ‘It’s hard to say from here, Fred. The updates are patchy. I’d say we’re looking at a potential crew loss situation.’
A waiter paged Michaels with another urgent call. This time it was Bert Seger from Houston. Seger, his voice high and clipped, gave him more details: some kind of runaway in the NERVA reactor, extensive damage to the Service Module, damage unknown to the Command Module –
Michaels cut him short. No American astronauts had been killed in space before. No previous Administrator had lost a crew. ‘Bring them home, Bert.’
Michaels felt someone grabbing at his arm. It was Udet; the tall German was smiling, a little flushed with the drink. Udet wanted to introduce Michaels to a portly Senator.
Michaels drew Udet to one side, and told him the news.
Udet’s smile evaporated. He seemed to withdraw into himself; he held himself straight and erect, his face a mask. With precision, he put his glass down on a waiter’s tray.
‘What must we do?’
‘Hans, I want you to call the White House and tell them what’s happened. Tell them I’ll be in contact as soon as I can. And then I want you to get the hell out of here and back to Marshall.’
The German nodded his head, and walked stiffly from the room. Michaels watched him go.
He thought back. Seger’s telephoned voice had been distant, light, oddly false; Michaels felt a stab of worry. But the guy is under incredible pressure. Of course he’s going to sound strange. As long as he stays in one piece long enough to get the bird down. Seger’s mental state was something Michaels could deal with later. Christ. I’m going to have a few crazies on my bands before we’re done with this damn business.
Michaels walked back to his guests in the reception room. Obviously word was continuing to spread amongst them. Hell, they only need to look at my face to see that. He even saw one man crying.
In the dining room the waiters were laying out dinner; nobody was paying any attention to them.
Michaels found Bush, and spoke briefly with him. Then he called for quiet, and broke the news officially to the rest of the guests.
After that the Group broke up quickly. The contractors who had hardware involved in the accident left to find planes to take them to Houston.
Michaels made his apologies to Bush, left the Club, and ordered his driver to take him to NASA Headquarters.
Wednesday, December 3, 1980
Apollo-N; Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston
The Astronaut Office was quiet that night. Ralph Gershon was here, though, in the Office. As a MEM specialist he didn’t have any specific assignments to do with the current shots. Most of the pilots were wrapped up in work in support of the flights in the simulators, or working at contractors’ plants around the country.
But Gershon had heard something about the problems on the NERVA flight today. He’d gone over to the MOCR, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do there. He was just in the way, radiating anxiety all over everybody else. So he made sure his location was known, in case he was needed, and now here he sat in the office he shared, q
uietly going through his in-tray.
The phone rang. He picked it up on the first ring.
‘Ralph? I’m glad I caught you.’
‘Natalie? Are you still on shift?’
‘Yeah. Rolf Donnelly asked me to call you. I –’
‘Yes?’
‘We think we might lose the crew.’
Gershon could hear voices in the MOCR behind her, taut, shouting.
York wanted Gershon to arrange for astronauts and wives to go to the homes of the crew.
Gershon agreed straight away, and York hung up.
It was a tradition, dating back to Mercury, that if you had to receive bad news like this, you’d get it from an astronaut, or his wife – someone close enough to the risks and pressures to understand how you’d be feeling.
Gershon dug out his phone book. He’d start with people he knew lived close to the families.
The assignment was going to be as hard a mission as he’d performed in his life.
He began to dial.
Venting gas.
Donnelly understood the implications of that observation as well as anyone.
On the loop he said, ‘Okay, now, Indigo Team, let’s everyone keep cool. We’re going to stick to the mission rules, and remember the priorities.
‘Let’s go back to basics. EECOM tells me that right now we still have a sealed can.’ An airtight ship, a place to keep the astronauts alive. ‘We’ve faced situations like this many times in the sims’ – but never for real, damn it – ‘and you know that having a sealed can is always the number one requirement; as long as we have that, at least, we have some time to figure things out. We’re going to solve this problem, but we don’t need to make things worse by guessing. Now, let’s get to it.’
It seemed to do some good; the atmosphere in the MOCR, the angle of hunch of the white-shirted shoulders, seemed to ease a little. Donnelly nodded to himself, pleased; maybe he’d lanced the boil of panic that had been building up.
Donnelly knew he had to work systematically. He was going to ‘down-mode,’ in the jargon, move from one set of options to another, more restricted set. He had to preserve as many of the mission objectives as he could without further endangering the lives of the astronauts. If you can’t land on the Moon, can you at least orbit it? And he didn’t want to close out any options he didn’t have to, because he didn’t know what else was likely to be thrown at him, and he needed to keep contingencies open. For example, it was conceivable they might have to use the S-NB engine to direct a reentry, if the problems turned out to be with the Service Module after all.
Tread lightly, lest ye step in shit. That was the motto. The trouble was, Donnelly was quickly running out of options altogether.
In the background, her heard Natalie York talking to the crew. ‘Apollo-N, we’ve got everyone working on this. We’ll get you some dope as soon as we have it, and you’ll be the first to know.’
Good girl.
Chuck Jones replied. ‘Thank you, Houston.’ On the air-to-ground, Jones’s voice sounded dry, weak.
In response to the sound of Jones’s voice there was a brief, distressed silence in the MOCR, despite the array of amber lights before Donnelly.
He scanned the MOCR. Each of his controllers was staring into his own screen, digging deeper and deeper into the problems he saw in his own area. As if his own problems were somehow separate from the rest.
Donnelly had a pang of doubt, suddenly. Am I handling this the wrong way? The controllers were getting isolated from each other and from the real spacecraft up there; some of them were probably still convincing themselves that there was nothing worse here than a booster shutdown and some funny instrumentation glitches.
But we know that isn’t true. The crew heard a bang. And they can see gas venting.
He needed to start talking to his controllers again, to try to keep them thinking as a team.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I want to get everybody on the loop. Retro, Guidance, Control, Booster, GNC, EECOM, INCO, FAO. Give me an amber, please.’
An amber light on the Flight’s console indicated talk-and-listen; it meant that controller wanted attention. One by one, the lights turned from listen-only green to amber.
Except Booster.
‘Goddamn it,’ Donnelly snapped. ‘Booster, Flight. Give me an amber, please.’
‘Acknowledge,’ Mike Conlig said quickly. The last amber lit.
‘All right, people, tell me where we stand. What’s your most urgent item? Who wants to start?’
‘Flight, Guidance. That attitude drift –’
‘Rog. Capcom, please inform the crew that they need to maneuver out of a threat of gimbal lock.’
‘Acknowledge,’ said York.
Now Bert Seger came stalking down from Management Row, gaunt, intense, every gesture stiff with nervous energy. He stopped at Donnelly’s elbow. He plugged into a console and listened in to the controllers’ loops.
‘Flight.’ Now it was EECOM. ‘I think the best thing we can do right now is start a power-down. Maybe we can look at the telemetry, and then come back up.’
That sounded damned optimistic to Donnelly. ‘Hold on that, EECOM.’ He wanted to keep the Command Module’s systems powered up for now, so he had available the option of bringing the crew down quickly. ‘Okay, who’s next?’
That asshole at Booster, Mike Conlig, still wasn’t speaking to him.
‘It’s the NERVA,’ Seger said in his ear.
‘Yes. I –’
‘The fucking nuke has blown on us. And it looks like it’s disrupted the Service Module as well. That’s obvious even to me. Rolf, you’re moving too slowly. You got to get them away from that thing, and get them home.’
‘But –’
‘Do it, Rolf, or I’m going to override you.’
Donnelly closed his eyes, for one second. Jesus. There goes my career.
‘Capcom, please relay new instructions to the crew.’
Apollo-N continued to pitch and yaw. Metal groaned, and Priest could feel the motion, as a wrench at his stomach.
‘We got to ditch the NERVA,’ Chuck Jones said. His voice was a rasp. ‘These rates are killing us. Do it, Jim.’
Dana didn’t respond.
Priest looked to his left.
Jim Dana, in the center couch, seemed to have lost consciousness. His face, under his helmet, was severely blistered; in some places strips of flesh were hanging loose, drifting in the air. He looked as if he had vomited; globs of thin, brownish liquid clung to the inside of his faceplate.
Priest reached across to Dana’s station. Separating Apollo-N from the S-NB booster stage was a routine maneuver, something any of them could handle. But Priest’s thinking seemed to be cloudy, and he was having trouble seeing the panel before him. He couldn’t feel the switches through his pressure-suit glove. He fumbled at the glove, but his hand seemed to have swollen up, and the glove was tight. Finally he got the glove off, and let it drift away.
He looked at his bare hand, puzzled. The skin had turned a deep, uniform brown. A nuclear tan. How about that.
He snapped switches.
There was a series of sharp bangs, a shudder.
‘Houston, we’ve got separation,’ Jones said.
The Earth slid more rapidly past the windows, as the freed Apollo-N tumbled away from the S-NB. With separation, the tumbling seemed to ease; maybe, Priest thought, gas venting from the S-NB had been causing some of the pitching.
Jones worked at hand controllers which should have operated the RCS clusters on the Service Module. He was trying to kill the residual rates, the unwanted tumbling. ‘Zippo,’ he said. ‘Still nothing, Houston; we don’t have any attitude control.’
‘Acknowledged, Apollo-N,’ Natalie York said. ‘We’re working on it. Watch out for gimbal lock.’
Priest could see the red warning disk painted on the 8-ball, drifting into the ball’s little window, the warning for incipient gimbal lock.
‘Well, hell,’ Jones gr
oused, ‘I don’t see I can do much about that, Natalie.’
Now the tumble brought the discarded nuclear booster into Priest’s view. The slim black and white cylinder looked almost beautiful as it drifted away from him, silhouetted against the Earth’s shining skin, highlighted by sunlight. But he could see that a panel had blown out of the pressure shell surrounding the reactor core, at the base of the hydrogen tank. Inside the shell, Priest could see a tangle of pipes and Mylar insulation. And the hydrogen tank itself had been ripped open; a thin wisp of gas still vented from it.
Priest wondered vaguely if they ought to be focusing a TV camera on the booster.
Jones began to describe the S-NB to Houston. ‘There’s one whole side of the damn thing missing. I can see wires dangling, and the base of that hydrogen tank is just a mass of ripped metal. It’s really a mess …’
Now, as the S-NB rolled, Priest could see through the base of the ripped-open tank, all the way through to the NERVA reactor itself. And in there, he saw a point of light, white-hot. That’s the goddamn core. The reactor’s blown itself apart, and exposed the core. There was no sign of the biological shield, which must have been blown away. Perhaps that was what they had seen, in red-hot fragments, founting past the Command Module’s windows.
As he stared into the wreckage he thought he could actually feel heat on his face: heat radiating from the core itself, as if it were a tiny, captive sun.
He glanced at the radiation dosimeter number on his DSKY. Thirty thousand roentgens an hour were now spewing out of the core, and through the spacecraft, in an invisible hail of gamma and neutron radiation.
Thirty thousand. It was a hard number to believe. The safe limit, according to the mission rules, was one thousandth of a roentgen per day.
‘I guess we’re kind of privileged,’ Priest said. ‘Nobody in the history of mankind has ever got up so close to an exposed nuclear reaction before. The victims of Hiroshima were killed by heat and the shock wave rather than by radiation …’
Jones cackled, and he closed his eyes. ‘Another first for the space program. Oh, thank you, Lord.’
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