The Glass Lady (22 page)

“Thirty meters, Skipper. Nail her down.”

With a rapid series of thruster pops, Endeavor stopped ahead of LACE and slightly to the side of Soyuz.

As all three ships flew in precisely matched orbits, 130 nautical miles into the brilliant sky, each vessel was perfectly motionless relative to the others. In coming up and under LACE, Endeavor had kept her glass nose pointing toward LACE. As a result, Shuttle had pitched fully over backward when she came up ahead of LACE at the eastern limit of the range of the tracking station on Bermuda Island.

“Flight: We're all stop,” a weary Kentucky voice sighed. “Tell the boys in the backroom that M equals one.”

“Good news, Endeavor! We're about to lose you here. Everyone is breathing easier down here. After you catch your breath, you're Go to get the payload bay doors open. Well done, Endeavor. Configure . . .”

The white sun burned fiercely upon the black belly of Endeavor as the upside-down starship coasted across the Atlantic.

Eighteen hundred miles of blue sea, out of contact with ground stations, would be crossed in six minutes.

Thirty yards from Shuttle, the cylindrical black hulk of LACE rotated very slowly in the blinding daylight of what was mid-afternoon at sea. Twenty-five yards beyond that, Soyuz floated with her antennae bristling and her twin solar wings glistening in the sun. Energia, the world's mightiest rocket, had hurled Soyuz aloft twelve hours earlier. Since then, not a single word had been monitored from the Russians by American ground stations.

“And best take a barf bag with you, Jack. Try not to turn your head too abruptly.”

“One blue bag, Skipper. Check.”

Enright prepared to leave his seat. He grinned broadly in anticipation of his first free-flight in weightlessness an hour and fifty minutes since leaving Pad 39-A. He still wore his bulky pressure suit and its white helmet with the anti-laser visor opened so he could breathe cabin air.

“Okay, Number One: Gloves stowed; lap belt and shoulder harness disconnect; comm power off; O
₂
hoses disconnect; biomedical cables and vent hose disconnect. And, don't kick me, buddy.”

As the command pilot read off the seat egress checklist, the second in command's ungloved hands moved swiftly to free himself from his web of hoses, cables, and seat belts.

Gingerly, Enright floated up from his seat in the harsh glare of the cabin floodlights. The copilot pushed his seat backward along its floor tracks as he tucked his legs up into his middle. He heaved his weightless body over the broad center console between his seat and the Colonel, who remained strapped to the left seat.

The copilot's boots did not touch the flightdeck floor as he rose very slowly to face the forward windshield. He balanced in mid-air with a hand resting upon the back of each of the front seats. Everything in Enright's body longed to do a Zero-G backflip as he floated toward the back end of the cockpit only five feet from his empty seat. But fear of the pervasive, early-mission, spacesickness which plagued all previous Shuttle missions restrained his impulse to soar.

With his spacesickness medication, an ear-patch stuck to his head, Enright turned slowly to face rearward. Very gently, he pushed off from the forward seats. His body floated the 60 inches to the instrument displays at the back of the flightdeck which is barely 80 inches long from the front windows to the aft bulkhead.

“Man
can
fly, Skipper!” the copilot called through his open faceplate as he floated over the two 2-foot square, open hatchways which open into the roomy mid-deck beneath the flightdeck. There is one access hole behind each of the two forward flight seats. The lower mid-deck, Shuttle's basement, contains the ship's kitchen, sleeping hammocks, airlock leading into the payload bay, storage lockers, and the zero-gravity latrine.

Enright stopped his flight by grabbing the handrails along the ceiling when he reached the aft crew station. He floated with his back toward the command pilot and he faced the aft wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling instrument panels.

Enright locked his feet into the foot restraints secured to the floor. Then he plugged into his suit the communications cable for Endeavor's intercom. Into his waist, he locked two air hoses from a hastily rigged duct installed for the mission. Ordinarily, the rear flight controls are worked in unpressurized flight overalls, the intravehicular-activity flightsuits. There is no aft outlet for space suit air hoses. Before his helmetted face, two large windows looked into the dark and sealed payload bay through the aft bulkhead.

Raising his face to the aft ceiling, Enright looked out the 20-inch square overhead window directly above his head. There were two such aft windows overhead.

“Got me, Will?” Enright called into his lip mikes.

“Loud and clear, Jack.”

“Wish you could see the view from Window Seven. Breathtaking!” Enright craned his neck upward.

“Believe that, Number One.”

The two aft ceiling windows looked down from the upside-down Shuttle to the blue ocean 130 nautical miles below. The copilot wanted to play tourist for a while. But there was too much work to do if the huge doors of the payload bay were to be opened to expose the space-radiators to the cooling vacuum in the inverted ship's shadow.

“Okay, Will,” Enright radioed by intercom as he turned to face the rear instrument arrays along the wall beneath the starboard ceiling window. “At Panel Aft Right-15: Circuit breakers for payload bay lighting, and PS floods, OS floods and MS floods, all closed this side.”

Enright floated across the aft crew station to the panels along the side wall directly behind the Colonel's back.

“And, Panel Aft Left-9: Payload Station flood lights on.” As Enright threw a toggle switch, the banks of instruments behind the command pilot were bathed in harsh white light. Enright turned and floated back to the aft starboard panels behind his empty seat. There, he threw another switch which filled the right side of the rear station with light. “Panel Aft Right-10: Mission Specialist station floods on. And, Panel Aft-6, Orbit Station floods on,” he called as he flipped a toggle switch below the payload bay window at eye level looking rearward. The center of the rear instrument clusters illuminated.

The floating copilot faced the rear of the flightdeck. He took a half step to his right so he stood between the two large windows in the rear bulkhead which looked into the black payload bay. Above his head, the middle of the North Atlantic glowed brilliantly beyond the two ceiling windows. In the flightdeck's lights, the two windows into the closed bay were flat black.

“Ready to light the bay, Jack?” the intercom crackled inside Enright's helmet.

“Ready back here, Skip. And it's showtime . . . At Aft Panel-7, payload bay lighting: Aft starboard lights on; portside aft, on; lights amidships starboard, on; mid-section portside, on; and, forward bay section, starboard lights on and portside lights on . . . And it's daylight inside the bay, Skipper.”

“How's it look in there, Number One?” Parker asked from the left front seat.

Enright looked into the rear window directly behind his empty seat. Although the bay doors were tightly closed, the six floodlights created glaring daylight on the far side of the double-paned 11-by-14-inch aft window.

“Okay, Will, lookin' out Window Nine into the bay. Everything is still nailed down in there. Thermal blankets in place. Don't see any exposed areas of floor or walls. I can see the remote manipulator arm in its cradle, lookin' secure. Quite a few bits of debris floating around in there. Looks like a few pieces of the blankets or flakes of aluminum film off the thermal blankets. Nothin' much.”

“Okay, Jack. We're about two minutes from AOS Dakar. Let's get the doors open and the radiators outside.”

Into its second daytime, almost two hours since riding the fire into the sky, the ship's heat control systems were sweating from the freon coolant loops and the flash evaporators. It would soon be imperative to open the bay doors. Opening the long double doors would expose the space radiators mounted on the doors to the icy cold of space in the shadow of Shuttle's wings as the ship flew upside down.

Endeavor sped toward the Canary Islands 400 miles west of North Africa where it was 5 o'clock on a winter's evening. As the planet turns upon her axis once each day, the Earth turns a new face to each of Shuttle's orbits. Each revolution around the globe by Shuttle, which takes 90 minutes, will pass over a stretch of Earth which was not there on an earlier revolution. As Shuttle completed one Earth orbit every 90 minutes, the planet has turned through one-sixteenth of a day.

Jacob Enright raised his feet from the flightdeck floor. With his knees flexed, he hovered motionless in mid-air. With a tug on a wall handhold, he turned sideways without touching the cabin floor. He stopped at the rear displays mounted on the side wall behind his forward seat. Over his right shoulder, the payload bay lights illuminated the two rear windows. Over the copilot's head, the ceiling window was filled with blue ocean and the brown specks of the seven Canary Islands. Las Palmas on Grand Canary Island began its twenty seconds of crossing the overhead window. The pilot, still seated in the left front seat, glanced over his right shoulder toward Enright, who floated at the cabin's far diagonal corner.

“Ready to cycle the bay doors, Skipper.”

“You got it, Number One.”

“Okay, Cap'n. At Panel Aft Right-13A2 . . . Mechanical power, System One to on, System Two off. And, doors lever-locked open.”

Enright looked over his right shoulder. The center roof seam of the bay split open silently. An explosion of dazzling sunlight streamed into the bay as the two 60-foot-long doors spread slowly like white wings.

“Two in motion.”

“Got it, Jack.”

Slowly, each door swung open on its 13 electric hinges driven by 6 motors. The doors are not aluminum like the rest of Endeavor's skin. Instead, each door is composed of five sections manufactured from superlight, superstrong, graphite-epoxy composite.

The two doors gaped wide as each opened so far that it dropped out of sight over the sill on each wall of the bay. As the doors came to an automatic halt fully open, they stopped fifty inches from the upper surface of the ship's five-foot-thick wings.

Jack Enright consulted CRT Number Four, the green television screen mounted on the aft crew station. The CRT graphically displayed the track of the doors as they opened and locked into place outside.

“Doors stopped, Will.”

“Endeavor, Endeavor,” the pilot's headphones crackled. “Configure AOS via Dakar at 01 Hours 54 Minutes. Be with you about 5 minutes. Backroom wants to know the bay-door status.”

In the late afternoon twilight, Endeavor crossed the bleached terrain of the Western Sahara on the west corner of North Africa between Morocco's arid Atlas Mountains to Shuttle's north and Mauritania far to the south. The West African tracking station at Dakar, Senegal, does not have telemetry-receiving facilities but only crackling, UHF radio capabilities. The voice of Mission Control from Houston arrived in a wave of static.

“With you, Houston. Jack has the doors open and locked. No problems on cycling the doors. We have a small amount of debris in the bay; nothin' serious. Give us a minute to get the radiators outside, please.”

“Copy, Endeavor. We'll listen while you work.”

“Thanks, Flight . . . Ready on the radiators, Jack?”

Enright steadied his floating body at the side console across the cabin diagonal from the command pilot's back.

“At Panel Aft-13A2, Skipper: Radiator deploy System Alpha to deploy and System Bravo to deploy . . . Lights on, talk-back open.”

Outside in the open bay, two flat rectangular radiator panels swung outward over each side of the bay. Two radiator panels on the forward half of each open door rose over the bay sill and moved slowly toward the open doors.

In the eternal silence of space high above West Africa, the radiator panels moved out and downward toward the door. Each of the four radiators is 126 inches wide and 320 inches long and moved outward by six motors.

“And all stop . . . Latch control to latch on System A and System B . . . Okay, Skipper, we have four radiators deployed and latched open.” Enright tapped the 32 black keys of the computer keyboard just below the side console's television. To his coded inquiry, the CRT displayed the pictorial display of each of the four radiators. “And each radiator is latched 35 point 5 degrees above the bay doors. You can crank 'em up, Will.”

“You got that, Dakar?”

“Every word, Will. Lose you in two minutes. Let's get the ATCS on-line before you go over the edge if we can.”

“Okay, Flight. Powering up the Active Thermal Control System.”

The Aircraft Commander strapped into the left front seat reached over his helmeted head to touch the rows of round, black circuit breakers on the ceiling of the forward flightdeck.

“Main DC bus A, Overhead Panel-14, freon radiator controllers One and Two, breakers closed. Overhead Panel-15, radiator controllers One and Two, Main bus B, closed and closed.” The command pilot turned to the panel bristling with 134 circuit breakers behind his left shoulder.

“And, Panel Left-4, bus AC-1: Breakers freon Loop One, pump A, closed, closed and closed; freon Loop Two, pump B, all three breakers closed. Bus AC-2: Loop One, pump B, three breakers closed. And, AC-3: freon Loop Two, pump A, closed, closed and closed. freon signal conditioners AC-2 closed and AC-3 closed. Radiator controllers IB and 2B, bus AC-1, both closed. On bus AC-2, rad controller 1A, closed. And bus AC-3, rad controller 2A closed . . . Okay, Flight, moving to Panel Left-3.” The pilot studied the panel for the Atmosphere Revitalization System on the cabin wall at his left elbow. “freon pumps set to pump A, Loops One and Two; radiator controllers, Loops One and Two, set auto; outlet temperature to normal. And, bypass valves, Loops One and Two, set auto . . . And we're lookin' at four good radiators. Loop One outlet temp is 34 degrees Fahrenheit and Loop Two at 36 degrees.”