Shuttle

SHUTTLE

by

David C. Onley

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Bev Editions

ISBN: 978-0-9878146-3-0

Shuttle

Copyright 1981

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

* * * * *

Introduction

When my novel Shuttle became a bestseller in 1981, I had no idea that it would lead directly to my radio and television career as a news, science and space reporter. Nor could have I imagined that thirty years later, I would be watching the very final Shuttle launch, STS-135, from the Kennedy Space Center as a guest of the Canadian Space Agency. Yet there I was witnessing the end of an era of manned space travel, an era which had begun in 1961 with Alan Shepard aboard NASA’s tiny Mercury Redstone rocket. It was also the end of the shuttle program, a program that had grabbed our imagination and amazed us with live pictures from orbit, but had also shaken our very belief in the value of manned space travel through the two widely televised disasters of the Challenger and Columbia.

Above all, I could not have imagined that thirty years after first release, the ebook process would have swept the publishing world giving new life to my novel, an alternate telling of space exploration whose setting was based in the near future.

The 30th Anniversary re-release of Shuttle has presented an interesting conundrum for me — whether or not to edit in thirty years of technology, including cell phones, the internet, blackberries and personal computers or to leave the original technology frozen in time. I have chosen the latter. I hope older readers will smile and younger readers realize that the technology described was cutting edge for its time.

It will be left to the historians to determine the legacy of the Shuttle program. As for me; it set the trajectory of my career path and enabled me to meet astronauts, cosmonauts, scientists and experts all of whom were determined to learn, explore and dream of what the world could be like through the peaceful exploration of space.

Even now, entirely new concepts of space travel are being planned and tested, including hypersonic vehicles, space elevators and private enterprise spacecraft. The future is promising and as such, I dedicate this 30th Anniversary Re-release of SHUTTLE to all those young people who are dreaming of becoming astronauts and one day going into space."

—David C. Onley

December 31, 2011

Toronto, ON

Table of Contents

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

PART TWO

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

PART THREE

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PART FOUR

CHAPTER TWELVE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

* * * * *

SHUTTLE

PART ONE

Monday, May 11th

CHAPTER ONE

High above the Mojave Desert in California, a great bald eagle soared alone through the blue, cloudless morning sky. Farther from its rock-cliff eyrie than it had ever flown, the huge bird, searching, ever searching, studied the brown wastes below with an efficient predatory gaze. This territory, this vast wasteland of flat dry lakes and desert dunes, was new to it, and the air-currents, unnaturally strong for the time and place, buffeted and tested the creature’s purpose, but to no avail. Muscles taut, winds whistling past, the bird wheeled on unflinchingly, towering over its expanding empire. There was no certainty of success in its hunting, yet the bird was instinctively confident of its ability to discover and thus to provide.

Suddenly the bird felt itself under attack. Reflexively, the bird’s talons snapped to a menacingly defensive posture, its wings frantically beating the air. Desperately it searched for the foe. But the unseen attacker was embodied only in noise so unrelenting, so piercing that at last the bird abandoned its defiance, painfully twisted in mid-air, and with rapid, powerful thrusts of its great black wings, hastened to retreat. One last time the bird turned its head, screeching angrily, before it fled.

Far below, on Runway 22 of Edwards Air Force Base, the huge engines of the ominous black aircraft continued to blast their banshee scream across the desert. Flames spewing forth from the engines’ exhaust ports first blistered the runway’s surface into molten bubbles, then evaporated them, transforming them into torrents of gas.

Easily the most powerful aircraft in the world, the hypersonic jet’s harsh geometric proportions challenged the senses. From its blunt aerodynamic nose along its pencil-like tubular fuselage, across its vast delta-shaped wings and up its jutting twin tail rudders, the vehicle conveyed a humbling sense of rude and awesome power. The ship rocked up and down in an angry agonizing dance, a mechanical confrontation between the irresistible force of its five jet engines and the unyielding resistance of its massive disc brakes. This brute of a vehicle, the hypersonic jet named Yorktown, was ready to fly.

Inside the Yorktown’s cramped cockpit, the two-man astronaut crew, in standard-issue powder-blue, high-altitude flight suits, manipulated a bewildering array of switches and dials with efficient, practised grace. Impatiently gripping their controls, they waited for the magic words from Houston’s Mission Control: ‘Yorktown, you are clear for take-off and go for brake release.’ But Mission Control had one final checkout to make before ‘go’ was given.

The final checkout was not with the crew of the Yorktown, but with the crew of the ship bolted integrally to the Yorktown’s back. The Yorktown was a carrier mother-ship. Its passenger, the second space shuttle ever built, the first ever to fly in space, was the Space Shuttle Columbia. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had described their flight together as a proof of concept mission, a mission seeking to prove a bold hypothesis, which if successful, would forever change the lives of the crew, the future of NASA and that of the United States of America.

Checkout was confirmed. The Flight Director in Houston Mission Control spoke the magic words the crews had trained for eighteen months to hear, and the Commander of the Yorktown replied immediately, ‘Roger, Houston! Hold on, Columbia! Here we go!’ He released the brakes.

The raw fury of the Yorktown’s engines now fully unleashed, the black hypersonic jet with the Columbia on its back, rolled forward, slowly at first, then in seconds accelerating into a hurtling charge down the runway. Straining mightily, the two mated vehicles crawled uncertainly into the sky, cleared the field and began a shallow climb. Correcting course to a southeasterly direction, almost parallel to that of the United States’ Mexican border, and gaining speed every second, the Yorktown, Columbia on its back, disappeared into the sky. The Eighth Test Flight of NASA’s Airborne Launch Development Project had begun.

NASA had scheduled the shuttle Columbia’s ‘proof of concept’ flight into space to last thirty-seven hours, twenty-five Earth orbits, before returning to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Yorktown, after carrying the Columbia aloft, was scheduled to land near Houston within the hour.

Neither schedule would be met.

Neither ship would ever reach its destination. One would never return.

Within minutes, the lives of both crews, and indeed NASA’s very future as an organization, would be in doubt.

CHAPTER TWO

FOUR HOURS BEFORE THE YORKTOWN’S TAKE-OFF

The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas

Twenty-five miles south of Houston, Texas, just to the east of the Gulf Freeway, the little town of Clear Lake had yet to prepare for a new day. Running off the Freeway on NASA One, the odd delivery truck and police car rolled by in the gray, pre-dawn light. The quiet atmosphere befitted that of an average small southern community. But further along NASA One, a big-city traffic jam lurched bumper to bumper in one direction – the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, the sprawling 1,620 acre nerve centre of the American Space Program.

Dozens of utilitarian, concrete buildings poured from the same architectural mould, and as gray as the clouded skies, suggested a modern suburban college campus whose major discipline was accounting. Inside the entrance, however, just past the kiosk with the uniformed guards checking the identities of the endless stream of drivers, a roadside display announced a higher purpose to the place than mere learning: full-scale replicas of the Mercury Redstone Rocket which had carried Allan Shepherd, the first American into space, a Titan B Rocket from Project Gemini, and the colossal third stage of the Saturn V, which sent twelve men to a rendezvous on the surface of the Moon, stood as mute monuments to past glory.

The physical layout of the Space Center conveyed the sense of perfect order: a consciously designed mechanistic interrelationship between the buildings, enhanced by wide separations of meticulously manicured grass and trimmed shrubbery, shallow reflecting pools, and cobble brown pathways which connected the buildings’ electronic circuits.

Each of the sixty buildings had a name: Administration Building, Simulation Operations Facility, the Shuttle Avionics Building. But to use the names themselves was to identify yourself as a visitor. NASA personnel, who dealt with numbers all day in their jobs, referred to the building by their designated number. Every building in the Space Center down to that kiosk sentry box at the front gate, was numbered. Administration, Building #1; Simulation Operations, Building #5; Public Relations, Building #2; and on to #60. The facilities were numbered with a purpose, and at the geographic core for the Johnson Space Center, sat Building #30.

Thirty. 30. In journalism the numerical symbol for The End. In the space business, it represented the Alpha and Omega of each manned space flight, the beginning and the end, and all in between: the Mission Control Complex. It had been claimed, and it was never denied, that 10,000 miles of cables coursed their way through the innards of the Complex. Ten thousand was conservative; count had been lost long ago. The colour-coded cables and wires were, of course, numbered, and ran through the building’s two separate wings, through the Administration Wing with the smoke-black windows, to the second and third floor walkways and the main floor lobby connecting with the windowless Missions Operations Wing, with its exterior of gray chipped rock.

Like the nervous systems of the humans now filling the buildings, the cables began at the brain, the Real Time Computer Complex on the first floor of the Mission Operations Wing. Banks and banks of computers in a room larger than a football field, hummed and clicked and buzzed at decibel levels loud enough to force the human operators to wear headsets, to prevent ear damage and to enable them to communicate over the din.

And all of the cables, like roads to Rome, lead to a single room on the second floor of the Mission Control Complex, Building #30. All of the other buildings, whatever their number or name, and all of the theoretical technological and human competence, the very prose of NASA itself, was funneled into this one gray-walled, gray-carpeted room.

The red sign on the door spelled out MOCR in white block letters. Pronounced by the staff as Moe-kerr, understood to mean Missions Operations Control Room, it was known to the world as Mission Control.

Like every nerve-centre of historic decision-making, be it the Oval Office in the White House or the flight deck of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the huge amphitheatre-like room reeked of purpose and power. From the twenty-foot high, non-reflecting gray sidewalls, hung row upon row of colourful wooden plaques, insignias of past missions, dating back to the earliest days when national pride rode into the heavens with the six Project Mercury astronauts in their tiny capsules. Space history marched with the plaques, from the two-man Project Gemini to Project Apollo and the Moon, and the Skylab missions, through to the first Space Shuttle flights, and they hung like ancient battle flags over this present generation of Flight Controllers now assembled, reminding them that their duty as Flight Controllers carried with it the responsibility of upholding a tradition, a record of success and achievement.

The cables that had begun their journey at the Real Time Computer Complex, came to an end at four rows of computer terminal consoles on Mission Control’s floor and its three ascending tiers. Like the sixty individually numbered buildings, each of the twenty individually numbered consoles had its own precise purpose. For eighteen months, the team of twenty Flight Controllers had trained for this morning, this ‘proof of concept’ mission with the hypersonic jet Yorktown and the space shuttle Columbia. They were mostly young, most in neat short-sleeved shirts and ties. All were intellectually gifted in their own right, and all were possessed of keen reflexes. If they seemed more intense than usual, if their concentration on their TV-like video display screens seemed excessive, it was because of an unspoken, but all-pervading awareness that within a few short hours, the lives of four astronauts in two ships, would rest in their hands. It was therefore no coincidence that of all NASA personnel, the Flight Controllers, the elite of a select few, were more sensitive to matters spiritual than the average person. Nor was it coincidental that whatever the level of faith, the incidence of shot nerves and flaming ulcers was higher than that of any other group.

This NASA machine of numbered buildings, colour-coded cables and human servant-master cogs, was in effect an organizational pyramid. The pyramid’s firm foundation consisted of a global, five-continent network of tracking stations and research labs and a nation-wide team of private contractors and sub-contractors who assembled the Space Shuttle itself. On the next level rested the actual NASA Launch Facilities: Edwards Air Force Base, California, the site for experimental flights, the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, the original ‘launch pad’, and finally, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, NASA’s West Coast Space Shuttle Launch Facility. Above these came the Johnson Space Center itself, the Mission Control Building, the Mission Control Room, and the Mission Control Flight Controllers. The pinnacle of the pyramid, the capstone of the NASA machine, was one individual, the man who had handpicked the Flight Controllers, the Lead Flight Director.

NASA’s terse, two-sentence job definition, understated his authority: ‘The Flight Director provides overall management and authority for flight execution. All other Mission Control positions report to the Flight Director.’ Advanced degrees in engineering were, of course, technical pre-requisites for the Flight Director’s position. But because successful missions depended upon his Flight Controllers interacting as a team, being both independent and interdependent, the Flight Director required intimate knowledge of their roles, responsibilities, strengths, and weaknesses. It required a man of discernment, wisdom, judgement, tough nerves, mental, physical, and psychological stamina, a man whose intelligence was razor-sharp.

At the centre of the Mission Control Room, in the middle of the third row of computer consoles, sat Douglas Gordon Pierce, the Lead Flight Director for the Eighth Test Flight of the Airborne Launch Development Project. Lean and muscular, the Virginian’s physique was impressive. Pepper-and-salt straight hair, cut short but not severely so, jaunty aviator-style glasses bracketing angular features, Doug Pierce’s appearance belied his forty-one years. His confident unlined features were those of a contented bachelor, fulfilled in his work. While fate, chance or personal limitations trapped others in jobs of frustration and unfulfillment, Doug Pierce was exactly where he had wanted to be for as long as he could remember.

He was not merely a Flight Director of this particular team of Flight Controllers, but the Lead Flight Director of all NASA Flight Teams. He had not only chosen them, he had also chosen their designated colours: Blue, Red and Gold. The Blue Team shift ran from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., its personnel to be replaced by the Red Team from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. and Pierce’s own Team, now just about to begin their 8 hour shift at 6 a.m., the Gold Team.

His sense of patriotism would have preferred red, white and blue, but the framed scroll on the south wall of Mission Control to his left explained the choice. Apollo 13, 1970: the United States’ only accident in space. The lives of Apollo astronauts Lovell, Swiggert and Haise, threatened in their broken capsule Odyssey. Tense days of feverish improvisation on what ironically had been Pierce’s first Mission as a Flight Controller. And in the end, success. The Apollo 13 Command Module Odyssey returned safely to Earth, and the heroic competence of Flight Director Gene Kranz’s men was rewarded. White had been forever retired as a team colour.

But that was in the past, a sequence of events Pierce hoped he would never experience again. And so he had chosen the symbol of purity, value, strength and malleability – gold. By all accounts, his Team was that good, and so was Doug Pierce.

As the countdown moved closer to 6 a.m. and the formal start of the Gold Team’s shift, the Flight Controllers checked and rechecked tens of thousands of interrelated factors, and co-ordinated the data displayed on their screens with their ‘bibles’, the chronologically itemized Flight Plan. Their communications through small headset microphones proceeded with matter-of-fact crispness, an indication that the months of Missions Simulations, complete with scores of emergency scenarios, had brought them all to a finely-honed state of readiness.

Slowly Mission Control became increasingly quiet. Flight Controllers’ voices fell to subdued, almost reverential tones. One by one, as if on cue, they glanced over their shoulders or turned in their orthopedically-designed, padded, swivel chairs and looked towards the man at the centre console in the third row.

For one last time Douglas Pierce surveyed this room he knew so well before he began. On Mission Control’s front wall the centrally positioned 21-foot wide, 8-foot high aquamarine World Map glowed comfortably. A bold yellow elliptical line, starting at Edwards Air Force Base and looping the world, confidently predicted the Columbia’s first orbit. On either side of the World Map, pairs of smaller 8-foot by 8-foot rear-projection display screens threw up ever-changing charts, graphs and data. Above the screens, white digital chronometers counted down towards various important targets and deadlines. The centre chronometer above the World Map occupied Pierce’s attention: Five-fifty-nine-thirty a.m. Mission Control was about to go operational.

This is it, he thought, pressing a button labelled ‘P.A.’ Eighteen months of work, and this is it. Unconsciously unbuttoning his dark blue jacket, Pierce stood, scanned the sea of searching faces, then spoke in his resonant Virginian drawl, ‘All right, everyone ... we’ve come a long way. If you are all ready, let’s have a good mission ... and make some history while we’re at it.’

Six a.m. One more time around the ‘loop’, the communications line throughout Mission Control. One by one, Pierce called out the title of the Flight Controller’s position and one by one came the replies:

‘Surgeon ... Go.’

‘Propulsion is Go.’

‘Launch Vehicle Engineer – ready.’

‘Trajectory ... we are Go.’

There would be other Missions for Doug Pierce to lead, but not many. Advancing years would inexorably diminish his ability to cope with the Flight Director’s pressure-cooker job of instant life and death decision making. If this experimental mission did work, his near-legendary record as Flight Director at NASA would continue unblemished and he would remain odds-on favourite to succeed his mentor, Dr Benjamin Franklin Fleck, and become the top man at NASA, the Administrator. And Pierce wanted this one to work, badly. But apart from Pierce’s considerable private ambition, no other United States space flight, not John Glenn’s first three orbits of the Earth, not Armstrong’s first landing on the Moon, nor John Young and Bob Crippen’s inaugural space shuttle flight, came close to the importance of this one, astutely billed by the media as the most important manned flight in the history of the United States Space Program.

The checkout continued:

‘Communications, we are Go.’

‘Computer Engineer, Go.’

‘This is the Flight Director,’ said Doug Pierce. ‘We are Go.’

Mission Control was now operational. The final countdown for the Eighth Test Flight of the Airborne Launch Development Project had begun.

‘Doug, let’s take a look at the ships.’ There was anticipation and excitement in the high-pitched voice of Lt Commander Vince Torino, a dark-haired, swarthy, 38-year-old veteran astronaut, well liked by his colleagues. Pierce pushed a console display button labelled ‘Screen #4’. At the front of Mission Control, the far right-hand display screen flickered and snapped into focus, projecting an impressive picture of two unique aircraft. Torino shook his head slowly and bit his lower lip. ‘Shit,’ he muttered softly in disguised frustration.

Torino’s position at Mission Control was that of Capcom, a position essential to the flight’s success. A holdover term from the old days when Mission Control communicated with men in space ‘capsules’, the title of Capcom had remained the same, and so had the responsibility of maintaining constant communication with the crews and making certain they understood Mission Control’s orders, while at the same time representing the crews’ interest with the ‘desk jockeys’ in Mission Control.

But the peppery New Jersey-born Torino was not Capcom by choice. Eighteen months earlier, just after he had been chosen to be pilot of the space shuttle Enterprise for the next, the ninth, test flight of the project, fate had intervened.

While the shuttle Columbia would fly the ‘proof of concept’ flight today, Torino and Harwood had been scheduled even then to fly the Enterprise in the next week, in the ‘confirmation of concept’ flight. And then his heart, his damned heart, had picked up a slight flutter, and just like that, Vince Torino was out of it. No more the active astronaut, Torino had been grounded, replaced. Another colleague had been called off the bench, took his place, and left him on the sidelines.

To be left behind! It was all so infuriating! One stinking examination picking up a flutter would not have grounded a commercial airlines pilot or even a professional football player, for God’s sake, and that was it! He was dropped from the starting team.

Publicly, Torino had put on a brave face, a tough-guy nonchalance. Inwardly he was crushed, and on the day he had been informed of the Medical Review Board’s decision, he had gone home and wept like a baby.

But that was past history. Torino had determined to be the best damned Capcom going, to be so on top of it all, so indispensable to the Airborne Launch Development Project, that no one, not one person, could even consider the hierarchy of the project without him. Vince Torino was a dedicated team player.

Even so, Pierce appreciated his friend’s frustration. ‘Some day, Vince, maybe some day.’

‘Yeah, and when I do, I hope you are still running the show. You got us here, Doug.’

Pierce smiled, but said nothing, his silence discreetly confirming the accuracy of Torino’s statement. Had it not been for Doug Pierce, this Mission and the whole Airborne Launch Development Project never would have taken place.

Torino stared at the screen, at the ships at Edwards Air Force Base, the audacity and implications of today’s flight still amazing him. Far to the west, nestled on the edge of the Mojave Desert in California, Edwards Air Force Base was the home, both of the United States Air Force Test Pilots’ School and of NASA’s Pacific counterpart to the Johnson Space Center, the Hugh L. Dryden Flight Research Center. Situated on the vast expanses of Roger’s Dry Lake, and well away from prying eyes, Edwards was the world’s largest airport, either civil or military. Its surface was lined with a network of natural and man-made runways. To the north by the Control Tower called by the pilots ‘Eddy Tower’, Runways 15, 18, 23, 30 and 36 criss-crossed in a star pattern. To the south, aligned in a reverse ‘F’ pattern, were Runways 17, 22 and 25. Near Runway 22 were the objects of Doug Pierce’s and Vince Torino’s attention.

Two massive ships, one bolted to the other’s back, sat inside a structure three-storeys high, painted dull burnt orange, built meccano-like of steel girders, an open-air garage, euphemistically called by NASA, the Mate-Demate Device. There, the smaller, white, upper-most ship, the Space Shuttle Columbia, had been lowered and bolted to the larger black vehicle, the Yorktown and were now said by NASA to be in a ‘Mated Configuration’. The Columbia was the first space shuttle to have flown in space, and the backbone of NASA’s five-shuttle fleet. Illuminated by banks of Klieg lights in the pre-dawn desert air, its proportions were distinct. Over 122 feet long with a swept-back delta-shaped wingspan of 78 feet and with a single tail rudder stabbing 40 feet into the sky, the shuttle looked like a futuristic jetliner ready to carry passengers to another planet. Its black nose was rounded and only slightly tapered, in appearance rather like the nose of a 727 or a DC9. Extending up from the wings, the flat vertical sides of the fuselage curved gently to the middle, enclosing a hold called the Cargo Bay 60 feet long and 15 feet across, large enough to hold a Greyhound bus. In all, the Columbia was a purposeful looking vehicle, its intimidating 14-foot diameter rocket engines only hinting at its brute strength.

Half airplane and half space-ship, and despite its trouble-plagued beginnings, the shuttle had made space flight a routine and economic proposition, a part of the American experience – mom, apple pie and space shuttles in orbit. Unlike every one of its predecessors, the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules which were worn out after one flight, the shuttle was re-usable, capable of conducting over one hundred missions. And again unlike its predecessors which parachuted into the ocean, the shuttle could glide to a conventional airport landing. The very term ‘shuttle’ had slipped into the language and was as familiar as the words ‘satellite’ or ‘rocket’. Business around the world lined up to buy room in the shuttle’s Cargo Bay, with the first four years of flight sold out before the shuttle had ever flown. Conducting industrial, medical and technical experiments in near gravity had become routine and, for the companies involved, highly profitable. Companies quickly discovered the profits to be made from products which could only be manufactured