Thursday morning began with delusion. I had the idea I would face the day with careful planning. I slid open my closet to grab a pair of flight coveralls and for some reason realized my wardrobe was a pathetic representation of the unsophisticated. There was the one black Stafford suit that needed dry cleaning, half a dozen collared work shirts, jeans, and fifteen flight suits of every color available. At the end, next to the neglected dress suit, my fishing waders showed much more use. I grabbed a Nomex olive-green flight jumpsuit and consoled myself that my lack of style and grace wouldn’t matter for a year.
I managed to arrive at Genesis at a respectable 08:00A.M. to find the day already waiting for me with its own plans. The door to the Test Control Center was blocked open and as usual, the place was busy. Technicians were booting up for the day's practice drills and Terry was talking energetically to Danica. As I passed by on my way to the break room, she spotted me and I became a lock on her radar. I managed to grab a cup and the coffee pot and pour before she came banking around the corner.
She wore a black, one-piece hipster flight suit with the legs rolled up to the knee and tall, black, lace-up military flight boots. It met the criteria for regulation wear if not exactly the prescribed presentation, and it made it amply clear she was an independent woman. I braced. She came to me, took the cup from my hand and began sipping with a discerning stare. “You’ll be ready to go quick, right?”
“I get the feeling I will be.”
“I have another pilot for you, if you’re interested.”
“Really? What’s it going to cost me?”
“Just that it’s another… WOMAN!”
“There’s a joke in there somewhere, but I think I’ll let it pass.”
“She drives a Harley Davidson.”
“Well, knowing your standards I guess I don’t have to ask if she’s qualified.”
“Gosh, was that a compliment?”
“Whoops.”
“So should I tell her to come?”
“Is she flying?”
“Heavy cargo on a fixed run, based out of Atlanta. She’s bored to death.”
“Will we screw up somebody’s delivery schedule?”
“Bullshit.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m sorry. I should have said cow manure. She delivers compressed tons of it to the bio-fuel processing centers.”
“Wow! There’s actually quite a few jokes in there.”
”She’s heard them all.”
“Has she been in space?”
“Two tours, intersystem.”
“Hmm, that’s a little bit green, don’t you think? How about weightlessness?”
“She pukes as good as anyone.”
“Point taken. What’s her name so I can run it?”
“Shelly Savoie. So can I call her?”
“How do you know she’ll accept?”
“Cause I already called her.”
It made me laugh out loud. Danica stared, unsure if that was good or bad.
“So she’s already on her way?”
“Sort of.”
“What if I had refused?”
“Then she would have shown up and begged in person.”
“Danica, I have to tell you. I think I’m starting to like you whether I want to or not.”
“We haven’t flown together yet.”
“That will change this morning.”
“You’ll be ready quick, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She dashed off toward her office to make the call, and for a moment it bothered me that there was someone who seemed to love flying as much as I did. I managed to beat her to the simulator, took the copilot seat, and went through power up and the flight management computer set up. A short time later, she came hurrying through the door, stopped in surprise to find me there, and then continued her climb into the pilot seat without speaking.
I flipped up the toggles for the auxiliary power systems and tried to sound coy. “What took you so long?”
“Very funny.” She pulled out her checklist and went about the left seat setups.
When the lights were lit and the power levels nominal, we launched off the apron into an orbit that brought us below and behind the One-World Space Station, the largest assemblage on orbit, a big wheel that turned endlessly to give its civilian squatters time away from weightlessness when not working in the center hub laboratories. Rumors are that the new artificial gravity systems soon to come will be so power-efficient the big passive gravity wheels will no longer be needed. There will no longer be rotational linking of a spacecraft with a docking port or hanger bay. It will be the end of a space era. As we approached, I heard Danica singing Proud Mary under her breath, “big wheel keep on turning, proud Mary keep on burnin,” the adopted theme song of the place. The lights were on, the docking port open. The spokes of the big silver wheel turned with us as we closed in to the brightly lit center port.
Danica was in her element. She flew the Griffin as if it was an extension of her body. I could only sit back in the copilot seat and be impressed. But as we closed in to dock, something happened. The spacecraft began a slow roll to the left. Instinctively, Danica tapped at her control stick to bring in opposite thrusters. For a moment the roll slowed, but then resumed. Increased opposite thruster brought the same result.
“Hold on, something’s happening,” she said in a raised voice and she leaned forward tapping through different displays on the SICAS. As we rolled, I brought up the reaction control system diagram on my SICAS display. It showed the two starboard thrusters stuck open. I said nothing and waited for her to pick it up.
“Starboard thrusters all locked open. There can’t be multiple failures, that doesn’t happen. Adrian, bring up the fly-by-wire schematic.”
Our roll continued to speed up. We were sitting in a barrel that was rotating faster and faster. The world outside the windows was becoming a blurry swirl. The G-meter on my attitude display was flashing a big red 7. I did as she asked.
“There it is, failure in the thrust command distributor. Adrian, pull the breaker on that thing.”
By then the shiny metallic station outside our windows was rolling by so fast the view had become a solid eddy of gray. Danica was making her first mistake. I had seen this problem before. I quickly leaned back to the engineering panel behind my seat and snapped out the breaker for the malfunctioning thruster controller. Nothing happened. We were still spinning like a top.
“Shit! They didn’t close! Adrian, kill the fuel cutoff valve to all A-system thrusters.”
I smiled to myself. That was the right move. I reached back and tripped off the pressure valve. Our wild spin continued, but without the acceleration.
“Switching to Bs.” Danica jerked at her side stick. The swirl outside regained motion then became a blurred portion of the space station until finally we slowed to a stop. She glanced at me for a terse moment, tiny beads of sweat on her forehead, and then reoriented the spacecraft to the docking port. We had drifted well to port and below. There was silence on the headsets. The TD wasn’t commenting.
“Nice one, Terry. Remind me not to forget you’re down there,” she said when we were back in position.
“You are cleared to dock, Griffin.”
We docked, separated, and made our way down toward simulated Earth. As we dropped into atmosphere, she glanced over, “Did he get me?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. I didn’t see how bad the spin got.”
“Fuck,” she said.
When TDs do a debriefing, they always do it in the debriefing room. It is a place decorated in the most positive ways possible. There are murals of the sky from orbit, live flowers in large vases, subdued lighting, a big screen built into the wall for playbacks, along with soda, coffee and refreshments, and soft reclining chairs. You never do debriefings in anyone’s office. Sometimes difficult things must be said at debriefings that cause stressful emotions within those being debriefed, and those memories must not be associat
ed with any particular support staff or their place of business. Terry was waiting for us when we arrived.
Danica was beside herself. “Okay, let’s have it. How many Gs in the spin?”
Terry looked sympathetic but still impressed. “Twelve to thirteen. You may have taken too long. You may have lost consciousness.”
“No, I would have been awake.”
“How high have you rated in the centrifuge?”
Danica did not answer. We all waited.
“It’s not the same in real life. You can take more in an emergency than you can in the skin-stretcher.”
“That’s often true. More adrenaline pumping. Adrian, would you have gotten it?”
“I can’t say.”
“Well, Danica, this is why we do this. Next time you’ll go right for the feed shutoff. Actually, everything you did was correct. You isolated the problem and followed it right down to the cause. Beautiful troubleshooting, done very quickly. The only problem was you did not have time to do that. Once you knew it was thrusters, you should’ve killed the primary thruster system immediately. Nevertheless, the application of your knowledge of the system was very impressive. Just one little procedural refreshment here, that’s all.”
The rest of the debriefing felt unimportant. The atmosphere remained discordant. When it was over, we left Terry and headed down the hall toward our offices.
“You going to be okay with this?”
“Shit,” was all she said as she turned into her office.
In the break room, someone had ordered sub sandwiches for the entire staff. The place was abuzz with people coming and going, some talking in low tones about the morning’s flight. I grabbed the nearest sub and made it back to my office without getting waylaid.
Turkey, provolone, shredded lettuce, and the brightest red tomato slices I’d ever seen. Both mayo, and oil and vinegar. The damn thing tasted so good I sat back at my desk and gave it my full attention. Someone had left a new bottle of water on my desk. My guess was, the short skirted, open bloused Mary Walski. I washed the delicacy down, stared at the pile on my desk, and quickly lost the culinary contentment. I pushed some stuff aside and, using the space agency search engine, called up everything I could find on Shelly Savoie. Danica’s recommendation was not quite enough.
Savoie’s education history had a curious diversion within it. There was an associate’s degree in biology, then suddenly it all changed to aerospace engineering. There had to be a story there. The next thing that came up was a photo. Danica had not mentioned the large burn scar on the left side of Shelly’s face. She was attractive, even with it. In the photo, she was wearing a green flight suit, parachute still strapped on, helmet in the left hand. Her dark hair well past the shoulders, tangled from having been under the helmet. Deep brown eyes gave her slightly long face a kind of sullen look, the look you see in fighter pilots who are insistent in the idea that they will never allow anyone to shoot them down. She had rosy-red cheeks and precisely applied makeup, even though she had obviously just gotten out of an aircraft. The caption below the picture read ‘Tactical Electronic Warfare, Squadron 34.’
I backed up to the search listing, scrolled down and found one that said ‘Pilot Exonerated In Tanker Crash’. That set me back. Not many refueling tankers crash and no crewmembers survive when they do. The NTSB report read like science fiction. It was a high altitude refueling. The first part of the incident was captured on cameras attached to the aircraft being refueled. Something came out of the sky so fast you couldn’t see it. It cut the tanker in half in mid-flight. It went up in a blossoming fireball. The aircraft being refueled suffered damage but by some miracle was blown clear from the debris, spun down, recovered, and continued flying. The two pilots and two engineers on board the tanker all had ejection seats. They continued forward from momentum in a crew compartment without an airplane attached. The pilot in command initiated eject for all four seats as they went down. It must have looked like a bunch of roman candles popping out the top of a flight simulator. All of the seats came out okay, but Savoie got a patch of plastic explosive from someone else’s seat stuck to her oxygen mask. There wasn’t much air at that altitude, but that stuff doesn’t need it. It burned all the way down. All four crewmembers survived, with injuries. They never figured out what hit the tanker. A freak meteorite or space debris was suspected. After extensive reconstruction surgery, Savoie was transferred to Tactical Electronic Warfare. I sat back in my seat and rubbed my forehead. I couldn’t read anymore, nor did I need to.
Outside my high-bay picture window, the Griffin simulator rose up from its position at rest and then sat back down. It meant the system had been reset and was ready to fly.
I headed for the Test Control Center and stopped off at Danica’s office on the way.
“Ready?”
She dropped her half-eaten sub on a paper plate, took a quick gulp of her coffee and followed me down the hall. As we stuck our heads through the TCC doorway, Terry looked up and asked, “Ready?”
In the simulator, I took the pilot seat and strapped in. Danica followed and gave me a flat smile as she adjusted her seat. She remained sullen but tried to use the checklist steps to conceal it. Secretly, it made me admire her even more. Her absolute dedication to perfection was the most reassuring trait I could ask for. I knew that on the Nadir mission, when she was manning the pilot’s seat, I would sleep well.
This time our ascent to orbit was smooth and pleasant with no anomalies during docking or separation. We backed away from the hub of the big turning wheel and as I expected, a master alarm lit up and pulsed its annoying buzzer sound. I canceled the buzzer but the alarm light and SICAS display continued to flash.
It was a landing gear malfunction in space. The nose gear had deployed seemingly of its own accord. I had never seen such a thing happen and doubted I ever would. It was Terry trying to find something unexpected. Commands to retract were ignored. The only option was to deorbit in that configuration without allowing too much reentry heat to enter the wheel well.
You cannot actually slow down in orbit very much. It’s not just you streaking along at sixteen or seventeen thousand miles per hour, it’s also everything behind you. Bullets travel anywhere from 700 to 3000 miles per hour. It doesn’t take a Steven Hawking to figure out that if you slow your spacecraft down to say 1000 mph, some of the stuff coming up from behind will strike you at speeds five times faster than a bullet. At those velocities, that kind of energy disbursement from something as small as a penny becomes an explosion.
There are so many kinds of space debris, and so many dead satellites on orbit, there is nowhere safe anymore. My friend Perk Murphy once did a stint in low orbit gathering the big stuff up onto a tug and sending it to the sun. When he completed his tour, they had not even made a dent in the mess. They took the biggest stuff because when it collides with other stuff, it explodes into a million smaller pieces. There’s no way to collect those. There’s no fishing net that will capture metallic parts traveling at thousands of miles per hour. You have to wait for them to sink in orbit and burn.
So, we went down the hard way. We turned the spacecraft around backward to orbit, set the Collision Avoidance System to look forward for crap coming at us, waited for what appeared to be a clear spot, and made tiny deorbit burns to lower, slower altitudes. We were playing real live Pac Man with a spacecraft. Had the CAS been mistaken, or had we missed something on the screen, we would have seen the speeding debris coming straight at us but only for an instant.
After ten small deorbit burns, we began to pick up atmosphere. We cut in the air brakes and let the gravity repulsion system lower us back down to the space center. It was a very time-consuming and meticulous use of simulator, and in real life, the truth is I would not have risked it. I would have come down as quickly as possible with an open wheel well, let the gear burn, and set down a damaged spacecraft using the GRS.
As we left the simulator, Danica gave me an annoyed look and said, “You got off e
asy.”
Chapter 9