‘Clock is running –’
Zero.
There was a jolt: mild, easy. The explosive pins holding down the boosters had snapped.
Nothing as heavy as a Saturn VB was going to leap into the air.
The cabin started to shake, the couch restraints and fittings rattling.
‘Climbout,’ Stone said evenly. ‘Here we go.’
Ralph Gershon whooped. ‘Rager! Going full bore!’
Liftoff. Good God. I’m off the ground.
She felt excitement surge in her; the grainy reality of the motion pressed in on her. ‘Poyekhali!’ she shouted. Let’s go! – the spontaneous cry of an excited Yuri Gagarin.
The lurching continued.
York was thrown against her harness, to the right; and then to the left, so that she jammed up against Gershon.
The Saturn VB was inching its way upwards past the launch tower, almost skittishly, its automated controls swiveling its five first stage engines to correct for wind shear. Right, left, forward, back, in a series of spasmodic jerks hard enough to bruise her.
No simulation had even hinted at this violence. It was like riding out of an explosion.
‘Access arm,’ Stone called. ‘Clear of the tower.’
John Young, Houston capcom for the launch, came on line.
‘Ares, Houston. Copy. You are clear of the tower.’
York felt a lurch forwards. The whole stack had pitched over; she was sitting up in her couch now, the huge rattling thrust of the first stage pushing at her back.
‘Houston, we have a good roll program,’ Stone said.
‘Roger the roll.’
The Saturn was arcing over the Florida coast, toward the Atlantic.
Down there on the beaches, she knew, children had written huge good luck messages into the Florida sand. GODSPEED ARES. York looked up and to her right, toward the tiny square window there. But there was nothing to see. They were cocooned; the boost protective cover, a solid cone, lay over the Command Module.
The Command Module’s interior was the size of a small car. It was small, dingy, mechanical, metallic. Very 1960s, York thought. The walls, painted gray and yellow, were studded with gauges, dials, control switches and circuit breakers. There were scraps of notes, from the crew to themselves, and emergency checklists, and hundreds of tiny round-cornered squares of blue Velcro stuck to the walls.
The three crew couches were just metal frames with canvas supports. York lay on her back, in the Command Module’s right hand seat. Stone, as commander, was in the left hand seat; Ralph Gershon was in the center couch. The main hatch, behind Gershon’s head, had big chunky levers on its inside, like a submarine’s hatch.
‘Ares, Houston. You’re right smack dab on the trajectory.’
‘Roger, John,’ Stone said. ‘This baby is really going.’
‘Roger that.’
‘Go, you mother,’ Gershon shouted. ‘Shit hot!’ York could hear his voice shaking with the oscillation.
‘Ten thousand and Mach point five,’ Young said.
Mach point five. Less than thirty seconds into the mission, and I’m already hitting half the speed of sound.
John Young didn’t sound scared, or nervous. Just another day at the office, for him.
John had ridden around the Moon in Apollo 10, back in 1969; and if the later Apollos hadn’t been canned, he probably would have commanded a mission to the lunar surface.
In fact, if he hadn’t been so critical of NASA following Apollo-N, Young might have been sitting in here himself.
The vibration worsened. Her head rattled in her helmet, like a seed in a gourd. The whole cabin was shaking, and she couldn’t focus on the oscillating banks of instruments in front of her.
‘Mach point nine,’ Stone said. ‘Forty seconds. Mach one. Going through nineteen thousand.’
‘Ares, you are go at forty.’
Abruptly the ride smoothed out; it was like passing onto a smoother road surface. Even the engine noise was gone; they were moving so fast they were leaving their own sound behind.
‘Ares, you’re looking good.’
‘Rog,’ Stone said. ‘Okay, we’re throttling down.’
The engines cut down to ease the stack through max-q, the point when air density and the boosters’ velocity combined to exert maximum stress on the airframe.
‘You are go at throttle up.’
‘Roger. Go at throttle up.’
The pressure on York’s chest seemed to be growing; it was becoming more difficult to breathe, as her lungs labored against the thrust of the stack.
Stone said, Thirty-five thousand feet. Going through one point nine Mach. SRB combustion chamber pressure down to fifty pounds per square inch.’
‘Copy,’ John Young said from the ground. ‘You are go for SRB separation.’
‘Rog.’
She heard a faint, muffled bang; the cabin shuddered, rattling her against her restraints. Separation squibs had fired, pushing the exhausted solid boosters away from the main stack. She felt a dip in the thrust; but then the acceleration of the MS-IC’s central liquid boosters picked up again, and she was pressed back into her seat.
‘Roger on the sep,’ Young said.
‘Smooth as glass, John.’
The solid boosters would be falling away like matchsticks, dribbling smoke and flames. The strap-on solid boosters were the most visible enhancement of the VB over the core Saturn V design; with their help the VB was capable of carrying twice the payload of the V to Earth orbit.
‘Five thousand one hundred feet per second,’ Stone said. ‘Thirty-three miles down range.’
She glanced at the G-meter. Three times the force of gravity. It wasn’t comfortable, but she had endured a lot worse in the centrifuge.
Cool air played inside her helmet, bringing with it the smell of metal and plastic.
With the SRBs gone, the ride was a lot easier. Liquid motors were fundamentally smoother burners than solids. She could hear the mounting, steady roar of the MS-IC’s engines, the continuing purring of the Command Module’s equipment.
Everything was smooth, ticking, regular. Right now, inside the cosy little cabin, it was like being inside a huge sewing machine. Whir, purr. Save for the press of the acceleration it was unreal: as if this was, after all, just another sim.
‘Three minutes,’ Stone said. ‘Altitude forty-three miles, downrange seventy miles.’
‘Coming up on staging,’ Gershon said. ‘Stand by for the train wreck.’
Right on schedule the first stage engines shut down.
The acceleration vanished.
It was as if they were sitting in a catapult. She was thrown forward, toward the instrument panel, and slammed up against her restraints. The canvas straps hauled her back into her seat, and then she was shoved forward again.
The first stage engines had compressed the whole stack like an accordion; when the engines cut, the accordion just stretched out and rebounded. It was incredibly violent.
Just