He couldn’t visualize Karen at all.
What a mess he’d made of his life – the warm heart of it anyhow – by his negligence, his focus on his career, his indecision. And all for these few hours in space.
He’d change things when he got back down, and back to health. By God, I will.
Now the thrust sighed to silence, and he had a couple of minutes of blessed relief in the smooth balm of microgravity.
There was a muffled rattle, all around the base of the cabin. That would be the ring of pyrotechnic bolts at the base of the conical Command Module, firing under command from Houston, and casting off the messed-up Service Module.
He might be able to see the Service Module as it drifted away. His duty, probably, was to find a camera and photograph the damn thing. Sure. He couldn’t even close a fist; every time he tried, the pain in his hand was like an explosion of light.
There was something rising above the Earth’s atmosphere now; it was golden-brown, serene. The Moon. Right slap in the middle of his window. He thought of Joe Muldoon and his crew up there with the Soviets; probably Muldoon would be following the progress of this reentry.
The couch kicked him, gently; fresh pain washed over his skin. That was the Command Module’s own small attitude controllers: Houston, or the onboard computer, was trying to keep the Command Module in its forty-mile-wide reentry corridor.
Through the pain, Priest felt a kind of security settle over him. As best he could tell, this was about the point in the reentry sequence when the automatics were supposed to kick in anyway. Apollo-N was back on its flight plan, for the first time since the NERVA core had blown.
‘You got that Pre-Advisory Data ready yet, Retro?’
‘Not yet, Flight.’
It was getting damned late. Something is wrong. What isn’t he telling me?
Rolf Donnelly had thought that the most dangerous moment in this reentry would be when the Command Module dug deep into the atmosphere, when it would be totally reliant on its heatshield. And if that shield had been cracked during the explosion, the craft was going to split open and burn like a meteor. He couldn’t do anything about that; it was a question of waiting and hoping.
As yet they’d barely grazed the top of the atmosphere. But, right now, totally out of the blue, he feared already he was about to lose the Command Module.
The controller called Retro, down in the Trench, was in charge of controlling the Command Module’s reentry angle. Just before the Service Module separation, Retro had been telling Donnelly that Apollo-N’s angle of attack was right in the middle of the entry corridor. It could hardly have been better, in fact. And that meant that the Pre-Advisory Data Retro had prepared earlier was still valid. The Pre-Advisory Data contained the final vector that would control the spacecraft’s degree of lift while it fought the atmosphere.
But Retro still had to feed the final Pre-Advisory to the Command Module’s onboard computers. And now, minutes before the atmosphere started to bite, Donnelly could hear Retro arguing with FIDO, the flight dynamics controller, who was passing Retro updated predictions on the spacecraft’s trajectory.
Retro blurted: ‘I don’t believe you, FIDO!’
Donnelly felt acid spurt into his stomach. ‘Clarify, Retro. You want to tell me what’s going on over there?’
‘The trajectory is shallowing, Flight. We’re up by point three one degrees.’
Still within the corridor. But that was a heck of a lot of shallowing at this point. And if the shallowing continued, Retro was going to have to revise the Pre-Advisory Data. ‘You have any idea what’s happening up there, Retro?’
‘No idea, Flight.’ Now there was tension in the voice, and Donnelly could see Retro peering over the shoulder of FIDO, next to him, trying to get the latest trajectory updates.
Was the trajectory going to shallow any more? That depended on the cause. If, say, one of the attitude thrusters was stuck open, the shallowing would continue. But if propellant or coolant was boiling off from some flaw in the hull, then the cause might dwindle and the shallowing stop.
The trouble was, nobody knew. None of them was sure about the extent of the damage the Command Module had suffered in the core rupture.
Donnelly, if he had to lose the crew, would prefer an undershoot, a burn-up. If the Command Module skipped off the atmosphere and was left in orbit, circling for months or years up there with a cargo of three radioactive corpses, the space program would be dead.
He took another poll of his controllers. None of them had any data to feed him on the trajectory. And besides, the telemetry was starting to get uncertain, as ionization built up around the Command Module.
It’s a gamble. I just have to leave it to Retro. Does he change his figures, or not?
Now Retro spoke again. ‘The rate of shallowing is slowing, Flight.’
‘I need that Pre-Advisory Data, Retro.’
‘Yeah.’ Again Donnelly could hear the tension in Retro’s voice. That controller was a very young man approaching the key moment in his life, a decision which would live with him forever.
Donnelly breathed a silent prayer; the only thing he couldn’t accept right now was indecision, freezing. Like that fucking asshole, Conlig.
‘We’re still shallowing. I’ll stick with the Pre-Advisory Data figures.’
‘Say again, Retro.’
‘I’ll stick with the original Pre-Advisory Data. If the shallowing continues, we won’t tip up by more than another tenth of a degree.’
Suddenly Donnelly became aware that he’d been holding his breath; he let it out in one huge explosion of stale air. ‘Rog, Retro.’
Now there was a haze beyond his window, a soft, pink glow, like a sunrise. At first he thought it might be something to do with the thrusters. But then he realized the glow was ionized gas, atoms from the top layer of Earth’s atmosphere, broken apart by their impact with Apollo-N’s heatshield.
There was a soft pressure over his lower body – subtle, but enough to make his pain blaze anew. He thought he cried out. The cabin vibrated. Earth’s atmosphere was snatching at the Command Module, and Apollo-N was beginning to decelerate, hard.
Suddenly the pressure mounted, climbing fast, crushing him into the couch. He could feel his skin crumple and break open inside the pressure suit. He felt as if he was deliquescing, as if his body had no more substance than a piece of lousy fruit.
A cold white light flooded his window now; misty, it glared into the cabin, drowning out the instrument lights.
The last moments before radio blackout seemed almost routine. As if this had been just another nominal mission, instead of the most dangerous and uncertain reentry since Apollo 13. The silence was broken only by occasional updates on the Command Module’s trajectory and attitude, and the disposition of the emergency recovery forces, and by the steady voice of capcom York as she tried to reach the crew.
You’d never know, Donnelly thought.
Then telemetry from Apollo-N was lost.
The MOCR fell silent. Now there was nothing to do but wait.
It was possible that any small crack in the heatshield would heal itself as the heatshield ablated in the heat of reentry. Possible. But it was another unknown. If, alternatively, the shield was damaged and failed, they would lose the bird anyway.
Priest, suffused by pain, lay on his back, buffeted, compressed, while the cabin rattled around him and fire lapped up from the base of the Command Module behind him.
The glowing chunks of heatshield falling upwards past his window were big. Maybe something was wrong. Maybe the shield was failing.
If we’re really reentering. If I’m not hallucinating; if we’re not dead already.
Anyway, he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
Ben Priest, falling to Earth butt-first, waited for sun heat to sear through the base of Apollo-N and engulf him. It would be a relief.
‘Network, no instrumentation aircraft contact yet?’
‘Not at this time, Flight.’<
br />
Four minutes passed. Five. That should have been enough time to reacquire after the blackout.
On the loops there was nothing but a hiss of static – ‘ARIA 4 has acquisition of signal, Flight.’
‘Rog,’ Donnelly said, barely recognizing his own voice.
There was a stir around the MOCR, a shifting of tired shoulders, weary, tentative grins.
It was an odd feeling, a kind of half-relief. Acquisition didn’t mean the crew was alive – and it was still possible that the electronics of the parachute system might be shot – but at least the Command Module wasn’t a cinder.
He heard York calling the crew, over and over, patient and plaintive.
The glow had died, fading out to an ordinary sky blue, and the G meter read 1.0, and he was falling toward the ocean at a thousand feet per second. The events of the splashdown ticked by, clear in his sharp, fragile thoughts.
There was a crack: that was the parachute cover coming off from the tip of the conical Command Module. And now another sharp snap, as the three small drogue chutes were released. He saw bright streams of fabric beyond the window.
He took a kick in the back as the drogues plucked at the air, stabilizing the fall of the Command Module.
There was a loud hiss; that would be the vent opening to let the cabin’s pressure equalize with the air outside. Any second now and –
There. Another bang. That had to be the mains, the three eighty-footers which would lower Apollo-N gently to the ocean surface.
As the mains filled with air, the cabin was jolted. Priest was rocked in his couch, and the pain climbed off the scale.
Through his window he could see a slab of blue sky, wisps of cloud.
There was a distant voice in his head, brisk, friendly, competent. ‘Apollo-N, Apollo-N, Air Boss 1, you have been reported on radar as south-east of your recovery ship at thirty miles. Apollo-N, Apollo-N. Welcome home, gentlemen; we’ll have you aboard in no time.’
Priest wanted to reply. But he was too far away now, too sunk into the shell of his body.
The big screen at right front of the MOCR lit up with a TV picture of Apollo-N. Its three ringsail mains were safely deployed, three great, perfect canopies of red and white.
The cheering was so loud it drowned out Donnelly’s headset, and he had to call for quiet.
There was a lot of radio traffic, chattering remotely in his headset. ‘This is Recovery 2. I see the chutes. Level with me at precisely four thousand feet.’ ‘Affirmative, we do have a capsule in sight …’
There was a checklist the crew were supposed to follow now, Priest recalled vaguely. They should be closing that pressure relief valve, for instance, and setting the floodlights to post-landing, and getting set to cast off the mains after splashdown, so that the Command Module didn’t get dragged through the water.
But there was nobody to do it.
Priest tried to relax, to submit to the pain.
Now there was a huge impact, an astonishing eruption of agony throughout his battered body.
Water poured in through an open vent above him, showering Priest, so much of it that he thought the Command Module’s hull must have cracked open.
And now the Command Module tipped. He could feel the roll, see the ocean wheel past his window.
When the windows dipped into the sea water, the cabin went dark. Priest found himself hanging there in his straps, with cabin trash raining down around him: bits of paper, urine bags, discarded washcloths. Stable 2, he thought. Upside down. Chuck will be furious. We screwed up. Nobody cut loose the mains.
He hung there like a bat in the inverted cabin, and the darkness, broken by just the Christmas-tree lights of the instrument panel, was kind of peaceful. In a moment the flotation bags would flip the Command Module upright, to the Stable 1 position.
He closed his eyes.
Sunday, December 7, 1980 NASA Headquarters, Washington
The first image showed the five crew in their Snoopy flight helmets, sitting on their T-cross chairs around the small table in Moonlab’s wardroom. Joe Muldoon sat at the center of the group, holding a piece of onion-skin paper.
This is the crew of Moonlab, coming to you live from lunar orbit. The five of us – our guests Vladimir Viktorenko and Aleksandr Solovyov, and Phil Stone, Adam Bleeker and myself – have spent the day following our flight program, and taking pictures, and maintaining the systems of our spacecraft …
Tim Josephson, sitting in his Washington office and watching the small TV on his desk, found he needed a conscious effort to keep breathing. Keep it bland, calm, unexceptionable. This will do, Muldoon.
In turn, the five astronauts spoke briefly about the work of the day – in the Telescope Mount, on the biomed machines, working on troublesome Moonlab equipment.
Interest in the previous telecasts from this mission – save for the original ‘handshake’ – had been minimal. None of the major channels had carried live coverage, and the astronauts’ families had been forced to come into JSC to follow what was happening up there.
But all that changed as soon as the NERVA blew, and people grew morbidly fascinated anew by the spectacle of humans risking their lives, out there in space. It’s our biggest TV audience since Apollo 13, Josephson thought now. Don’t foul it up, Joe.
… We’re a long way from home, and it’s hard not to be aware of it. If the Earth was the size of a basketball, say, then the Skylabs would be little toys orbiting an inch or two from the surface. But the Moon would be the size of a baseball, all of twenty feet away, and that’s where we are right now.
Our purpose is to do science out here. You may know we’re on an inclined orbit, so we’re seeing a lot more of the Moon than was possible during the old Apollo landing days. We’re carrying a whole range of cameras, both high-resolution and synoptic, and we have a laser altimeter and other non-imaging sensors, all of which has allowed us to map the whole surface of the Moon at a variety of scales.
And we’ve made some neat discoveries. For instance we’ve found a huge new impact crater on the far side of the Moon, fifteen hundred miles across – that’s nearly a quarter of the Moon’s circumference. I’m told that the Moon is turning out to be a much more interesting place than it was thought to be, even when Neil and I first walked on the surface.
In fact, just at the moment we’re sailing over the Sea of Tranquillity itself. If you look at the disk of the Moon from the Earth, that’s just to the right of center. So you can look up at us and see where we are, right now. And in our big telescopes, I can sometimes make out the glint of our abandoned LM descent stage.
Now, for all the people back on Earth at this difficult time, the crew of Moonlab has a message we would like to send to you.
Oh, Christ, Josephson thought. That sounds bad. What now?
Adam Bleeker drifted out of his seat toward the camera. He took the camera, his outstretched hand foreshortened to grotesque proportions, and swiveled it so that it was pointing out of the wardroom’s window. The image settled down; it was low quality and a little blurred, but Josephson could clearly see the blue crescent Earth, rising above the unraveling, monochrome desolation of the Moon.
The next voice was Phil Stone’s.
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me …
Stone’s voice, made harsh by the radio link, was clipped, brisk, almost efficient. Next came the heavily accented tones of Solovyov, high and nervous.
Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O thou who changest not, abide with me …
What in hell is Muldoon doing? When the Apollo 8 astronauts had done a Bible reading from lunar orbit, NASA had actually been sued by an atheist, for violating constitutional prohibitions against
the establishment of religion. The Soviets have banned religion altogether! – and now here’s a cosmonaut reading out some old hymn from an American space station. My God. What a mess.
And yet – and yet …
Adam Bleeker read, simply and confidently.
I need thy presence every passing hour;
What but thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?
Who like thyself my guide and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, O abide with me …
And yet there was something beyond Josephson’s calculation here. The old, simple words seemed electric, alive with meaning; it was impossible to forget who these men were, what they had achieved, where they were.
Vladimir Viktorenko’s gruff, heavy English took over.
I fear no foe with thee at hand to bless;
Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.
Where is death’s sting? where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if thou abide with me …
Joe Muldoon read the last verse.
Hold thou thy Cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies;
Heaven’s morning breaks, and Earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.
And from the crews of Apollo and Soyuz, we close with goodnight, good luck, and God bless all of you.
The image of Earth faded out.
Tim Josephson found his eyes welling over with tears. He bent over his paperwork, embarrassed, glad he was alone.
Monday, December 15, 1980 Cape Canaveral
Bert Seger set up camp at Hangar ‘O’ at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
The hangar had been loaned to NASA by the USAF as a site to run the checking-out of the Apollo-N Command Module, now that it had been recovered and brought to the Cape.
The Command Module itself was a victim, rather than a cause, of the accident, of course. But nevertheless the CM was the only portion of the Apollo-N stack that the investigators were going to be able to get their hands on, and it was expected that it would contain a lot of clues about how the accident had come about. So the spacecraft was going to have to be disassembled piece by piece.
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