Columbia was already too deep in the atmosphere, now, to manoeuvre like a spacecraft with its reaction thrusters. From now on the orbiter had to fly like an aircraft: elevons, flaps in the trailing edge of the wings, would now control the craft’s pitch and roll. If the hydraulics worked.
The sky was a rich, deep royal blue. Looking out, she could see the curve of Earth, and the closed curvature of the horizon. She could make out the whole of the western seaboard of the USA, it seemed, from San Francisco to Mexico.
Columbia broke into sunrise, abruptly. Earth was still dark below, and the plasma glow was fading back to orange. Against the black landscape, she could still see the plasma glow, but where the sun was rising, there was a blue stripe on the horizon before her. For a second she was looking through the atmosphere at the sun, and shadows of clouds fled across the ocean towards her. But then the cabin was flooded with light, forcing Benacerraf to shield her eyes.
… She’d felt like this once before. She rummaged through her memories.
1969. A wonderful family holiday, up in the woods of British Columbia; she was ten years old, the perfect age to be a child. She hadn’t wanted to come home, to climb back down.
She had the grim feeling that she would never, quite, get over the memory of all this wonderful light, and lightness.
The Gs continued to mount, impossibly heavy. The deceleration pulled her down into her chair, and she felt as if she couldn’t keep her neck straight, as if her head was a huge, heavy box filled with concrete.
The master alarm clamoured again.
Lamb punched it off. ‘What now?’
Angel checked. ‘We’re losing hydraulic pressure, Tom. Shit.’
And suddenly the orbiter dropped like a stone.
‘Flight, Egil. I got you a diagnosis on the APU situation.’
‘Go.’
‘We think we got a fire back there, Flight. In fact the system signature is looking a little like STS-9.’
STS-9 had been John Young’s last flight. During the final landing approach on that flight, the power units had caught fire; all but one had failed on the way to the ground.
Egil said, ‘Probably we have a hydrazine leak from one of the APUs. If that’s the case, we’ll have volatile hydrazine spraying over the hot surfaces in there.’
‘STS-9 was survivable,’ Fahy said. ‘The crew got down safely and walked away.’ That was true; the power unit fire – even a subsequent explosion – hadn’t been detected until the orbiter was back on the ground.
‘But on STS-9 the leak occurred just before touchdown. Here, the leak came a lot earlier, during entry …’
‘Flight, Prop. If we have had some kind of rupture of the OMS fuel lines, maybe that’s linked to these APU problems. The position of the APU tanks, in the tail section –’
‘Save it for the board of inquiry. Egil, Flight. What’s the worst case?’
‘That we’ll be looking at an APU loss scenario. We’ll have to recommend a ditch, Flight.’
Fahy remembered, now, that the orbiter on STS-9 had been Columbia.
For long seconds, it was like a roller-coaster ride – what the controllers called a phugoid mode – as the control system tried to stabilize the trajectory. When the oscillations stopped, the orbiter was still deep in blackout.
Lamb flexed his gloved fingers, and closed his hand carefully around his hand controller. ‘Let’s see how this mother flies.’
Benacerraf knew it was time for the first big manoeuvre in the atmosphere, a wide, banking S-turn. On a nominal descent, the automatic systems were generally allowed to fly the orbiter most of the way home. Today, it looked as if Tom Lamb wasn’t going to trust the automatics any more than he had to. Looking at the broad back of Lamb’s gloved hand wrapped around the control stick, Benacerraf felt obscurely reassured.
‘ADI rate switch to high. Roll/yaw switch to the control stick …’ Lamb clenched his hand. He pulled the stick to the left.
The orbiter banked to port. The Pacific tipped up, a glittering blue skin in the morning light. Shadows shifted across the cabin, sending complex highlights from the instrument surfaces.
The master alarm sounded. Angel killed it. ‘We lost another APU, number three. Number one still online.’
Lamb leaned into his control, and the orbiter pitched over further.
‘I’m only showing seventy degrees bank,’ Lamb said. ‘It’s all I can get.’
‘You figure the elevons are screwed?’
‘It’s that low hydraulic pressure. Or maybe the last APU is going down. God damn this. I’m at the edge of the envelope, here.’
Now, at Mach 18, Columbia rolled to the right. Below the prow, Benacerraf could see the coast of California, a brown line coalescing along the misty horizon, tipping up as the orbiter rolled.
‘– Houston. Columbia, Houston. Can you hear me, Tom?’
The blackout was over. Benacerraf felt a surge of relief, illogical, profound.
Lamb said, ‘Columbia, copy. Holy shit, Marcus, is that you? How do you read?’
‘Columbia, Houston. We read you fine. Tom, we read you low on energy, and off the ground track.’
‘Tell me about it. I went phugoid back there and came out low energy. Houston, we’re down to one APU up here, and I think we may be losing hydraulic press. The elevons aren’t responding too well. Going into the second S-turn.’ Lamb leaned to the left, dragging the control stick.
‘Copy that. We see you rolling right. We have you at a hundred and fifty thousand feet, Mach 9. Looking good. Just like barnstorming old Copernicus, huh.’
‘Like hell,’ Lamb said dourly. He pulled back on the speed brake handle. That opened flaps on the vertical stabilizer at the back of the orbiter; Benacerraf could feel the increased drag. ‘Brake indicator shows a hundred per cent. Initiating third roll.’ He pulled the stick across to the right, and the orbiter tipped again.
The coastline of America fled beneath the prow of the orbiter, impossibly quickly.
Bill Angel said, ‘What a way to visit California.’
Voices crackled on the air-to-ground loops of the PA.
There was a ragged cheer from the press stand. The blackout had seemed to last for ever, but here was physical proof that the orbiter was back in the atmosphere, at least.
Now four big rescue helicopters went flapping over the press stand. They were like metal buzzards, Hadamard thought.
A couple of people had climbed out of the press stand and had tried to get over closer to the runway. A NASA car was patrolling back and forth, keeping them back.
Hadamard began to calculate what the fallout would be, depending on how this damn thing worked out.
There were a number of scenarios: the crew could survive, or not; the orbiter could survive, or not.
If everything came through more or less intact there would be a lot of bullshit in the press about NASA’s incompetence, and Hadamard would be able to come down hard on whichever contractor had screwed up this time, and the whole thing would be forgotten in a couple of days.
At the other end of the scale – if he was looking at another Challenger, here – Hadamard expected to be facing some kind of shutdown. There would be inquiries, both internal and external, forced on NASA by the White House and Congress. And Hadamard himself would be thoroughly fucked