Titan. Stephen Baxter
steering off. Entry roll mode off. Throttles full forward …’
‘Okay,’ Lamb said. ‘Loading the entry software.’ Confidently, as Benacerraf watched, he punched in OPS 304 PRO. Angel said, ‘Throttle to auto. Pitch, roll, yaw auto. Body flap to manual.’
‘Columbia, Houston. Rog. Moving right along, Tom. Nice and easy does it. We’re all riding with you.’
‘Roger that … Paula. Don’t miss the view.’
Benacerraf leaned forward and peered through the picture windows. She could see no stars, and Earth was a carpet of city lights below the prow of the craft.
She saw flashes of colour, red and green.
Angel grinned. ‘The lights of the reaction engines, reflected from the upper atmosphere. Pretty.’
‘Yes.’
Lamb said, ‘Houston, Columbia. Entry interface.’
Four hundred thousand feet, Benacerraf thought. The informal gateway to the atmosphere.
Home again.
The burn had knocked Columbia out of its orbit. But they were still more than five thousand miles from Edwards, still moving with a near-orbital velocity of Mach 25, and from now on without engines. After all they’d been through already – with a disabled engine system, and power units and RCS motors in an unknown condition – the key entry steps had still to come; the orbiter still had to shed most of its kinetic energy, and glide on home.
Now Columbia, with a rattle of reaction control solenoids, levelled its wings, and tipped up to a new angle of attack.
‘Columbia, Houston. Ready for loss of signal.’
‘Yeah. See you at Mach 12, Joe.’
A pinkish glow gathered beneath the windows, diffuse and pure, then deepening to orange. The orbiter was colliding with the thicker layers of air. The orange glow brightened, and turned white. In the corners of the windows, Benacerraf could see some kind of turbulent flow, swirls of superheated plasma. It looked like drops of rain on a car window.
Now, for the first time in sixteen days, Benacerraf felt a feather-touch of gravity, a soft pressure pulling her down into her seat.
The altimeter was steadily clicking off.
The telemetry on the controllers’ consoles turned briefly to garbage, then blanked out. A static hiss filled the air-to-ground loop.
All around the room, Fahy saw the posture of her controllers shift, subtly. They sat back from their terminals, from the suddenly empty screens, and stared at the big TV images of Edwards Air Force Base at the front of the room.
The plasma shield building up around the orbiter would soon block all transmissions, voice and telemetry, between the orbiter and the ground. The blackout would last twelve minutes, on a nominal entry anyhow. During that time the ground would have no way of influencing events on the damaged spacecraft.
And it was during the blackout that Columbia would become reliant on her aerosurfaces. It was entirely possible, Fahy thought, that if the power units failed now, Columbia wouldn’t emerge from her blackout at all.
It was going to be a long twelve minutes. Fahy felt past and future hinge around her.
It just shouldn’t be like this, Marcus White thought. We should never have built the Shuttle for the money they allowed us. We should have just refused.
When McDonnell’s DC-X experimental rocket project came along – a step towards a new generation of launch systems – White had just grabbed onto it.
He liked working with the McDonnell boys again. It was a relief after NASA. McDonnell had built both Mercury and Gemini, and it was on Gemini that White had cut his teeth. And with the DC-X, just like with Gemini, the guys at McDonnell had rolled up their sleeves and got on with it. They built their prototype for just sixty million bucks: less than the cost of two replacement microgravity toilets on Shuttle, for Christ’s sake. White liked to say that the DC-X’s liftoff weight was less than that of the paperwork required for each Shuttle launch. And so on.
But that had all changed, when the original McDonnell project ran out of money in 1993, and the DC-X was moved into the suffocating embrace of NASA. McDonnell had been forced to take the bird back to the factory at Huntingdon Beach, and bolt in all kinds of fancy modifications, like a new graphite epoxy hydrogen tank, a lox tank made from some kind of goddamn Russian aluminum-lithium alloy, and an oxygen-hydrogen reaction control system that used excess fuel from the main tanks.
It was all typical NASA. Not one of these ‘innovations’ had upgraded the bird’s performance, as far as White could tell; but they had all increased costs, reduced reliability, and sent the testing schedules spiralling off to eternity.
White wasn’t surprised when, at the end of a test flight in 1996, they let the damn thing fall over and blow up.
White just couldn’t understand it. To him, things were simple. You built ships, and you flew them. And you took the risks that went with it. That was all. He couldn’t see why the hell things should be any different.
The truth was – in White’s view – the US government was scared of developing cheap launch systems.
An SSTO, a single-stage-to-orbit new-generation bird, would come up against a lot of vested interests. It took an empire of nine thousand people to launch the Shuttle, and a lot of money went flowing out of NASA to the contractors. That was a lot of turf to be defended.
What if it was possible to demonstrate that you really only needed a launch and maintenance effort of a few per cent of NASA’s huge investment? What if it was demonstrated that every country in the world could afford its own SSTO launcher, flying out of existing airports?
The optimists said there would be an explosive expansion into space. Huge industrial efforts up there, new multinational stations, a fast return to the Moon. Blah blah. The military analysts said that von Braun visionary stuff was for the birds. What would be the military consequence of every tinpot country in the world having access to space? How about another Saddam Hussein?
Private launch contractors weren’t pushing too hard either. One or two SSTOs could mop up the whole of the world’s launch capacity, and force all the existing commercial operators out of business.
Nobody wanted SSTO. And that was why – as far as White could see – it was NASA’s job to kill programs like the DC-X: to kill it with bureaucracy, with study groups and change review boards and new, ineffective technologies.
NASA’s purpose, consistent over three decades, was to block access to space, not to build for it. Which was why Marcus White’s good buddy Tom Lamb was up there now, hanging out his hide trying to save a thirty-year-old piece of shit called Columbia, risking his life for a monumental lie.
It wasn’t good enough, for Marcus White.
As angry as he’d felt in years, White made a decision.
He marched out of the viewing area, and round into the FCR, and went straight up to Barbara Fahy. He’d been all the way to the Moon with Tom Lamb, he said, and now he was going to capcom Tom all the way home.
Benacerraf was forced deeper into her seat as the orbiter shed velocity.
Under the control of its guidance software, the orbiter tipped itself up, to change its angle of attack, and then banked slightly, to increase its sink rate into the atmosphere. Right now, the orbiter was flying blind, its external sensors overwhelmed by the plasma. Lights flickered over a panel ahead of Lamb, showing how the orbiter’s software was working the RCS jets.
The idea of the antique, crippled spacecraft doing its level best to survive, to bring home its human cargo, was somehow touching, to Benacerraf.
‘I got ten psi,’ Lamb said now. ‘Roll thrusters off. Here we go, twenty psi. Pressure