Encounter With Tiber Read online

  In the middle of the story, I saw Mom stop and squint for an instant, looking right at the TelePrompTer, and then she said, “This just in. We’re going live to Houston, where there’s apparently big trouble on the Space Shuttle Endeavour.”

  The picture jumped and bounced for a second, and then we were looking at Mission Control; instead of the usual laid-back atmosphere, everyone was leaning into his screen, and there was a lot of shouting. One thing I do remember vividly is that Grandma’s hand was suddenly on my shoulder, clenching hard enough to hurt, and yet I didn’t complain; I needed her touch just then.

  To the extent that the television news organizations were bothering to cover a story that had grown stale and routine to them, they were billing this flight as the one that would “finish” the International Space Station (ISS), even though there were several flights to go after it before the station would be fully operational. The reason why they thought this was sitting in the cargo bay: the U.S. Hab Module, the American living quarters for the station. For almost four years, the station had been tenanted by a Soyuz crew of three in rotation (with an additional American, Japanese, or European in the mix). With the U.S. Hab, the constant occupancy could go up to six, and Chris Terence was going to be one of the first “real” scientists to serve a hitch there.

  The mission was to take Endeavour up and rendezvous with the ISS, then dock the shuttle to the forward node, the cylindrical pressurized vessel that joined the U.S. Lab Module, the European Space Agency’s Columbus Lab Module, and the Japanese Experiment Module. The node sat in the middle of the enormous truss, its ends festooned with solar panels and its center hung with pressure vessels and solar panels, that was the International Space Station. With the Russian crew, the American team would take the U.S. Hab out of the shuttle cargo bay, attach it to the central node by its hatch, lock it into place, pressurize it, and finally open the door from the node so that the U.S. Hab would become a permanent part of the crew space at the International Space Station.

  Liftoff was absolutely normal; NASA engineers could discover nothing wrong afterwards, no matter how many times they played the tapes. The images that had been well-known to Americans for twenty years, by that time, looked the same as ever. In the familiar clear, deep blue light of early evening at Canaveral, Endeavour sat on her tail, pressed against the immense external tank that dwarfed her and the two solid rocket boosters beside her. Wisps of fog, caused by the terrible cold of the liquid hydrogen fuel in the external tank, swirled around. The countdown reached zero.

  With a shuddering thunder, a white-hot ball of flame, welding-arc bright, appeared beneath the shuttle and grew swiftly into a great column of fire, carrying the shuttle aloft. The exhaust of the solid rockets forming glowing buttresses on that cathedral of light, Endeavour roared up into the evening sky, on her way to orbit. The hundred or so people sitting in the guest bleachers—mostly foreign tourists—applauded wildly, but even three miles from the launch site, the thunder of that liftoff drowned out their clapping and shouting. Few noticed at the time, in the reading off of routine information to the crew, that seas were rough in the Eastern Atlantic along its flight path; if all went reasonably well, there would be no need for the information, and all had been going reasonably well for many flights now.

  Endeavour rolled over onto her back and continued downrange, shedding the solid rocket boosters, and throttling up engines to 106 percent. Normally the shuttle took off running its main engines at 104 percent of their rated power. With the heavy load of the hab module in its cargo bay, the shuttle was taking off at 106 percent. This had been done several times before; theoretically they could operate at 109 percent without risk.

  The mission commander was Lori Kirsten, my father’s closest friend from astronaut training, on her own second mission. She’d made her reputation by being the youngest woman ever assigned to a combat squadron, amplified it by transferring in short order to being a test pilot, moved to NASA well before her thirtieth birthday, and flown as the youngest shuttle pilot ever on her first mission. Hotshots are expected to be abrasive, for some reason, which I think is the only thing that saved her politically, because she had a knack for yanking people’s chains (which was the surest way to earn Dad’s respect). She sat in the left-side seat at the front of the highest of Endeavour’s three decks, the flight deck.

  Chris sat in his seat behind her, to the right, tensely watching over Henry Janesh’s shoulder. Janesh was on his first mission as pilot, but his reputation was good and no one was expecting any trouble.

  NASA has had two kinds of astronauts since the early days: pilots and mission specialists. Every astronaut can fly, but not every astronaut is a pilot—a person whose job is to get the spacecraft to where it’s going, and back. Most are mission specialists—they could fly the craft if they had to, if a pilot were disabled, but their main function is actually to carry out scientific research or do engineering construction in space. Chris, as the number one mission specialist, was in a different structure of authority than Henry, the pilot; both of them were answerable directly to Lori but not to each other. So Chris was watching over Henry’s shoulder not because it was any of his business but just to have something to do—his job didn’t really begin until they reached orbit. He listened as routine information came in over the headsets; at four minutes and five seconds into the flight, Mission Control told Henry that they were now “Negative Return,” a routine warning. Henry acknowledged that they were now past RTLS, Return to Landing Site, the last possible point at which Endeavour could turn around and fly back to the Cape.

  Any abort now would have to be a TAL—TransAtlantic Landing. Right now they were at a speed and altitude where as long as only one engine failed at any time in the future, they could make it to the emergency landing field near Zaragosa, Spain. As they gained more speed and height, in twenty-five seconds they would reach the point where up to two engines could fail and still leave them with enough momentum to get all the way across the Atlantic. If the first engine failed during these twenty-five seconds, they would then have to have the remaining two engines for the rest of the flight, and a second engine failure might prevent their reaching Zaragosa. If the first engine failed after those twenty-five seconds, then even a second engine failure would not keep them from a successful TAL. Thus during those brief seconds they would be passing through an area where if trouble started, they couldn’t quite make it back to Canaveral, and everything would have to go right for them to reach Zaragosa. It wasn’t so much a time of maximum danger as of minimum slack, but that was just enough to make Chris pay a little more attention over Henry Janesh’s shoulder.

  Chris did have one good professional reason for wanting to know instantly about any trouble during launch: he was the jumpmaster for this mission. Not every shuttle mission had one—emergency evacuation procedures were to some extent up to individual crews, who based what they did on a standard Egress Cue Card, a list of the tasks that would be necessary to get astronauts out of a shuttle that was headed for a crash. How they implemented the card was up to the mission commander, and as it happened Lori was a strong advocate of having a jumpmaster.

  When she had been rotated through her turn at desk duty, she had been assigned to “contingency abort development”—figuring out what to do when the shuttle was in serious trouble—and like everything else she did, she had thrown herself into it eagerly, becoming convinced that evacuation would work best if there were a jumpmaster, someone whose job would involve getting the whole crew out safely. Several other crews had had them, so the idea itself was nothing new; whether a jumpmaster would be useful in a bailout was of course an unsettled question, because no bailout had happened yet. Still, it seemed to Lori that if anything unpredictable went wrong with the bailout procedure, it would be a good thing to have someone right there whose job was to fix it, because shuttles come down very fast, and there might not be much time if anything should hang up. After long study of the positions people sat in and what the
y would have to do, she had decided that the jumpmaster ought to be Mission Specialist Number One, who had the optimum combination of a clear pathway to the door and a clear view of every other crew member.

  Chris might have gone along with it anyway, just because it was Lori asking him to do it, but after the volume of drill she’d made him work through on the subject, he had caught something of her sense of urgency about it.

  Still, Chris relaxed a little when they passed “Negative Return,” because the maneuver involved in getting the shuttle turned around and headed back was difficult and dangerous. They really needed to keep all three engines for the next twenty-five seconds to preserve some margins for dealing with trouble, but after that they would be in a position for a safe TAL even with multiple engine failures, and thus they would face no more than the usual dangers. Things were looking good.

  The solid fuel boosters for the shuttle had never quite lived up to their potential; to compensate for thrust that was not quite up to the job, NASA had chosen to run the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs), the big engines that burned the liquid hydrogen from the external tank, at 106 percent for a heavy load like the U.S. Hab today. It wasn’t much outside of what the SSMEs were supposed to be able to do without danger or damage; furthermore government high-tech hardware, especially aerospace equipment, is often drastically overbuilt. Thus they were running a risk, but a slight one, and one that many others had run before. In the event of an engine out, you’d have to go to 109 percent on the remaining two SSMEs; and tests at 109 percent had worked well enough in the past.

  It wasn’t much different from a family that is spending everything it earns, deciding that it is entitled to a little luxury, and spending a bit more, with the help of a credit card, and then a bit more than that, with the same card, because after all it’s Christmas, and it’s only a little more. It works for a while, and when it stops working, it seems very sudden and unfair.

  Probably none of that was passing through either Henry or Lori’s mind when Number One Main Engine flared and died. Per standard procedures, Henry powered up Number Two and Number Three, taking them to 109 percent, to inhibit SSMEs Two and Three from complete shutdown, since it was now vital that they keep running for the rest of the flight.

  “Houston,” Lori said, her voice level and calm, “we’ve got Performance Yellow; powering up Two and Three to one oh nine.”

  “Roger, Endeavour, you are go for TAL.”

  It was disappointing not to make it to orbit, Chris thought to himself, but after all, there would be other missions. So far there was cause for concern but not for alarm. The two still-running engines would just have to run a bit longer, against somewhat greater resistance, at 109 percent instead of 106 percent of design load.

  “Roger, Houston, we are pressing on to Zaragosa with two engines.”

  Everyone was tense; you didn’t need to have spent as much time as Chris and Lori thinking about ways things could go wrong to be aware that they were now at great risk. The seconds crept by as they climbed higher and higher on the two engines, gaining the forward momentum they would need to reach Zaragosa, in the northeast corner of Spain, most of the way across Iberia. Chris stole a glance to the side to nod at Dirk Rodriguez, the Second Mission Specialist, who smiled back. Probably they were each trying to reassure the other. He hoped Sharon Goldman, Harold Spearman, and J. T. Murphy, the mission specialists sitting down on the mid deck, were all right as well and ready to move if necessary, but there was no way to check with all of them tied into their chairs, and comm lines needing to be kept clear for more urgent purposes.

  There was an abrupt change in the feel of the ship; the power output from Engine Three fell to zero. At 350,000 feet, moving at Mach 17, Endeavour had two engines out.

  “Shit,” Henry muttered, but his hands were already triggering the software that would control the ship for this emergency abort. “Houston,” Lori said, “this is Endeavour. We are at Performance Red. Do you confirm negative TAL—we’ll have to bail out?”

  The emergency abort software kicked in, whipping Endeavour around to stand on its tail. The one still-working main engine continued firing straight down at the Earth; the computer had already estimated that they would need all the altitude they could get to carry them as close as possible to the coast of northern Portugal, to make things easier for the rescue crews.

  As the Endeavour stood up, she rotated slowly to “get the wind on her belly,” putting the huge external tank under her, and to tilt slowly forward into a steep fifty-degree angle of attack—leaning high against the wind.

  Even with the engine firing, the ship sank terribly fast; in a matter of seconds they reached the 280,000-foot altitude. Deceleration was now 2.9 g’s, making everyone and everything feel almost three times as heavy as normal. Henry activated the “pitch forward” to get rid of the tank; slowly Endeavour began to level off, dropping her nose at four degrees per second, two-thirds the speed at which the second hand of a clock moves. When Endeavour was far enough forward, the remaining engine continued firing until the last moment, getting every last bit of fuel out of the tank and every last bit of velocity and altitude available. When they reached the point where Endeavour had to jettison the tank to reduce wind resistance for the rest of the flight, the shuttle itself flew a little forward and up, the wind drag pressed the tank downward, and with a thud the tank separated and fell away from them, hurtling down to the Atlantic far below.

  The more nearly level flight slowed their rate of descent; deceleration was still increasing but not as terribly as before. At 250,000 feet, as they were crushed into their chairs at the moment of peak deceleration, Lori turned slightly and flashed them all a ghastly grin. “Well,” she said, “now we’re in good shape. From here on out it’s just a regular reentry.”

  “Except we’re going to miss the abort field by a few hundred miles,” Henry added. “I guess here’s where we find out if your abort procedure works.”

  “Oh, it’ll work,” Lori said. “I’ve trained that jumpmaster.” She half-turned and poked Chris’s leg through his pressure suit; he barely felt it through the heavy fabric. “It’ll be almost twenty minutes till we’re at jump height; everyone start checking your sea survival gear. In ten minutes I’ll give a warning, and then five after that we put visors down and get ready to go.”

  The time seemed to race by as Chris and Lori confirmed, over and over, that everyone knew what to do, and everyone had a full, working kit. It seemed to Chris that the warning came almost right away; there was almost no time before Lori called for visors down, and they began the process.

  By now they had slowed down enough to be moving at subsonic speeds as they came down through 45,000 feet. The sky was blue again and the sun shone on the ocean below them—but not for much longer. “Looks like we’re going in past the terminator line,” Lori said, her voice crackling in everyone’s headphones. “Doesn’t make much difference. Water is water whether there’s light on it or not, and by the time the C-130 gets out there to pick us up, it will be dark and they’ll have to use the radar beacons anyway.”

  Still, as they flew on away from the Sun, the dark rushed toward them over the sea terribly fast.

  “Houston, we are beginning bailout procedures,” Lori said, over the radio.

  “Roger, Endeavour, we’re tracking you and the C-130 is on its way out of Zaragosa right now. Weather on the North Atlantic is looking a little rough, but it’s within design limits for your dinghies. Good luck!”

  Lori turned back to Henry Janesh and said, “All right, start venting at forty, door jettison at thirty. Chris, plug in your long line, and as soon as the door goes, move to assist. By my procedure on this one, Henry, you go before Chris, I go last.”

  “Roger,” Chris and Henry said, simultaneously.

  While he waited for them to reach the 40,000-foot level, Chris made sure his long line would work; it was the comm line that would allow him to speak to all the others on board while also moving around do
wn on the mid deck. Story Musgrave, the astronaut who had refined and developed the role of the jumpmaster, had come up with that device as a way to let the jumpmaster both communicate and assist at the same time. Chris thought a silent thanks to Story, who had also been one of his instructors in training.

  Chris had just made sure for the third time when Lori said, “Forty thousand feet,” and Henry said, “Venting,” at the same time. Henry began to release the air pressure from the cabin; with their visors down, none of them could hear anything, but the fit of their suits changed subtly as the air pressure in the cabin equalized with that outside.

  “Thirty thousand,” Lori said, as Henry said, “Door jettison.” Chris felt a sharp lurch as Henry triggered the charges that blew the door; the door whirled off into the darkening evening sky, out of sight in an instant. “Deploying the pole now,” Henry said, dispassionately. Chris had just a moment to see the fourteen-foot pole move into place at the top of the yawning doorway, sticking out into the dark night, but he was busy releasing himself and getting down onto the mid deck.

  He undid his lap belt and then threw his harness back over his head. He disconnected the tube that supplied him with breathing oxygen from the place where it entered his suit on his left thigh. He made sure the extra-long comm line was still in place and had not snarled in his harness. Then he unhooked the hose that supplied cooling water to the suit from the thermal electric cooling unit under the seat. He should be free now; he tried to stand up. “Comm check,” he said.