Titan (27 page)

All the crew went through an abbreviated program of training on Apollo systems, at JSC and Kennedy. A basic curriculum was rapidly developed for them, based on 1960s material dug out of the archives. The simulations they were offered, working through key mission phases with teams of flight controllers in the FCR, were thorough, but they were fixed-based. The cost of adapting the motion-based simulators—which, with their six degrees of movement, afforded some of the sensations of spacecraft motion—was, it was said, too high. Rosenberg heard, however, that the real reason was that the motion-based sims were tagged to be a key attraction at the JSC visitors’ center, bringing in revenue long after the Titan mission was history.

They were given briefings on the science aspects of the mission: the studies of the Sun, Venus and Jupiter they were expected to perform en route, what was being learned from
Cassini
and
Huygens
about the Saturn system, Titan itself.

Carl Sagan came out of retirement to give them a pep talk about the studies he’d made, as far back as the 1980s, on synthesizing the organic haze on Titan. And he talked to them about cosmology: how the Solar System had formed, the planets coalescing from concentric rings of rock and ice, how the sun would blossom into a red giant at the end of its life, shedding warmth—briefly—over the chill worlds of the outer System. Sagan was in his seventies, and he was a little bent, that famous voice even more gravel-filled, and his hair white as snow; but he was still as handsome as all hell. The science was baby stuff, of course, for Rosenberg. Hut Sagan’s talk, brief as it was, turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole training program for him.

Then there was all the surgeon stuff.

A key objective for this mission, as far as the ground-based experts were concerned, was to find out once and for all how the human body adapted to long-duration spaceflight. Or not.

Of course the experienced astronauts might already have suffered much of the harm to which they were susceptible; some studies of past astronauts suggested that the major damage to many of the body’s major systems happened in the first few hours of a spaceflight…

Anyhow, to achieve a sound study the surgeons had to have some kind of baseline, an understanding of what condition their various bodies had been in before being subjected to the rigors of the flight. So the crew were put through a comprehensive medical study. They had to submit, every two or three days, to electrocardiograms, seismocardiograms and measurements of their breathing rates and volume; and once a week they had to spend a whole day on a much more thorough check-out, which included sampling of body fluids, measurements of the phases of cardiac contraction, heartbeat volume, venous pressure, vascular tone in different parts of the body, blood circulation in the head, and lung ventilation.

After a few weeks of this Rosenberg figured that by the time he was launched there would be more of his body mass in test tubes in the labs around the country than aboard that Shuttle on the pad. And all the checkups meant a whole day lost out of every week, time which Rosenberg had no choice but to give up, but which he had to drag out of his continuing research, and other commitments…

In all, eighty percent of his training time was taken up with Shuttle emergency procedures: mostly to do with problems during launch, or a forced landing.

Apparently as part of NASA’s
post-Challenger
adjustment, the crew families were encouraged to come in and observe the emergency stuff, so they could understand what was happening, if and when it all unraveled. So here were Nicola’s aging parents from England, the mother with her prion-ruined face, and Paula’s grandchildren, two boys who watched with baffled incomprehension as their grandmother clambered out of windows and hatchways and shimmied down ropes and slid down wires to the little green car that would whisk her away in case the Shuttle blew up on the pad.

There was nobody to come see Rosenberg, and he was more than glad of that.

Some of the preparation was chilling, then. But some was mundane, almost comical, and yet delivered with the usual NASA cheerful high-tech gloss. The crew was taken to the Food Systems Engineering Facility, for instance, where they were given samples of Shuttle food packs to try out, so they could select their own preferences. No salmon, Angel insisted. The stink of fish, in the enclosed places of a Shuttle, was just unacceptable. And then there was the john: the Waste Management Compartment trainer, where Rosenberg was trained, in all earnestness, how to go to the bathroom. It was an affair of rubber gloves he had to use to clean himself, and little plastic scraper tools, and tans that whirred noisily. There was even a little camera situated in the bowl, peering up at his ass, so he could tell if he was positioning his orifice correctly…

But in the midst of all that, the stuff that was so easily mocked, he came across signs and symbols that showed him where he was: here, at the heart of NASA, the Agency that had put men on the Moon. Bits of 1960s technology, capsules and rockets, that looked so primitive they might have come from the 1930s. Pictures he hadn’t seen before, of Americans bounding across the surface of the Moon, working and joshing as if it was a field hike in Arizona.

And the astronauts: the hard core of them, the big-boned, blue-eyed WASPs of the earliest recruitment rounds, many of them graying now, few of them still active, but still fit and tanned and with faces like craggy lunar rock. Before these men—who had, after all, been the first—Rosenberg felt intimidated, weak and insignificant. But every time one of them walked past there was a powerful stink of male deodorant which wafted after him down the narrow corridors, all human scents suppressed, his surface somehow shining and impenetrable, as if he was already half-way to orbit just standing there, as if his purpose, the purpose of his race, had been to guide humanity to the stars.

Of his own crew, it was clearly Angel who aspired to membership of this élite group—which was, of course, impossible, for the role of hero astronaut had vanished long before Angel had joined NASA. But, anyhow, Angel walked through the space centers, mean-looking and tall, his muscles honed and hard, his language full of the dread-reducing jargon of contingencies and aborts. He even looked like them, with his blond-WASP hair and blue eyes, and he was almost schizoid, it seemed to Rosenberg, in his lack of reaction to the peril of his
Columbia
flight—and yet, despite that, there was a certain desperation in his empty eyes.

On it went, and Rosenberg became steadily more enmeshed in the procedures and practices and jargon of this huge organization. And yet, he thought, if you looked at it sideways, the whole Titan program was a remarkable event: here was a bureaucracy, dry and sane, devoting itself to the surreal: a gigantic adventure which everyone was committed to, but whose purpose and logic and meaning nobody could agree upon.

T
he hulking form of the B-52
sat on its runway in a puddle of light cast by a circle of big portable floods. Trailers and carts were clustered around the bomber. A fog of crisp liquid oxygen vapor shrouded the contours of the big plane, and people moved through the mist, speaking to each other calmly, working on the aircraft.

The X-15 itself hung from bomb shackles under the wing of the B-52, black and sleek, dark even in the glare of the floods, as if it actually absorbed the light.

There was a pungent stink of ammonia, which reached Gareth Deeke even across a hundred yards.

The smell, suffusing this gray January dawn, triggered his memories sharply, and he felt the years fall away from him; it was as if he was back at Edwards, preparing to burn off another vodka hangover in the exhilaration and terror of a high-altitude flight.

But as he walked towards the B-52, the ground crew parted before him and avoided his eyes; there was none of the good-natured bull which he recalled from his days at Edwards. As if we are all doing something different now, he thought. Something wrong.

Here at Canaveral Air Force Base, he was only ten miles or so to the south of Kennedy Space Center, where
Endeavour
was being prepared for the last Shuttle launch of all. He peered into the north. Maybe he’d be able to pick out the illuminated pad: on clear nights the visibility of the pad’s lights, looming on the horizon, was a symbol of the failure by Hartle and his contacts to impede or even slow the preparations for the final Titan launch, to stem the tide of public support which still seemed to be flowing, generally, in favor of the mission. Certainly, on launch day, this whole damn area would be flooded with rocket light. But today the mist was lingering in the cold January dawn, and to the north there was only darkness.

He reached the bomber.

X-15 looked more like a missile than a plane. Big frosted pipes lay on the surface of the runway, feeding liquids and gases into the rocket plane. But the black lines of the X-15 were spoiled by the attachment of a slim white cylinder, round-nosed and tinned, under the center line of the forward fuselage.

It was an ASAT.

Gareth Deeke, heart pumping, walked around his bird. X-15, restored from the museum where it had waited out the decades, looked ready to fly, but today was not its day; this morning, under cover of darkness, the ground crew were rehearsing the procedures they would use to mount and fly the bird.

If it came to that.

The rocket plane was just a big propellant tank, made of a tough heat-resistant nickel-steel alloy, with a cockpit on the front and rocket engine on the back end. The tanks were nested cylinders, with a long, skinny pipe containing high pressure helium pressurization gas embedded within the big liquid oxygen tanks towards the front of the aircraft. The fuel tank, containing anhydrous ammonia, made up the rear section of the airplane.

Deeke walked past the frosted-up walls of the lox tank. He didn’t get too close; the tank seemed to suck the warmth out of the air around him, cold as it was already. You could always tell how much lox was left in the tank by the level of frost on that outer skin. He could make out the three main fittings holding the rocket plane in place, and the quick-disconnect lines snaking out of the B-52 which topped up X-15 with nitrogen and liquid oxygen. Reaction control jet nozzles gaped in the hull around the nose, two on top, two on the bottom, and two to cither side. Beside the nozzles there was a stenciled notice saying
BEWARE OF BLAST
.

He reached the cockpit, an aluminum box which would be pressurized with nitrogen to thirty-five thousand feet equivalent, and suspended inside the hull of the aircraft itself, isolated to keep it cool. Behind the cockpit was a big pressurized bay containing over a thousand pounds of instrumentation, to measure airspeed, altitude, pitch, yaw and roll rates, control surface positions, bending loads, temperatures… He had been assured that the handling characteristics and controls of the plane would be just as they had been back in 1961, though he didn’t know how the hell they had got all that antique electronics to function again after forty years. Maybe they had cannibalized X-15A-2, the other surviving X-15, which was mothballed at the USAF museum at Wright-Patterson AFB.

He reached the engine compartment at the back of the plane. The XLR-99 rocket nozzle gaped at the back of the aircraft, two feet long. The rocket, which hadn’t been fired in anger for forty years, looked as fresh as if it had come out of the Thiokol factory yesterday.

He allowed himself a stab of anger. He’d long lost count of the number of press releases he’d read which said the Shuttle’s main engine was the world’s first truly throttleable engine. The XLR—99 engine was a throttleable, restartable, reusable rocket engine, with almost as much thrust as the throwaway Redstone booster which had thrown Shepard and Grissom up on their first Mercury suborbital lobs. The USAF had been happily flying the thing ten years before the Apollo Lunar Module’s much-vaunted throttleable rockets had carried men to the Moon, and twenty years before Shuttle had first launched, years before NASA had started pronouncing you couldn’t build such a thing.

We threw all this away, he thought, all the possibilities summed up in the sleek black hide of this thing, because of stupidity and greed, and fear of the Russians, and damn bureaucratic infighting, a millennial madness reaching its final flowering over on Pad 39-B even now.

In its flight days the X-15 had borne USAF decals on its wings and fuselage, and big NASA strip decals on its tail. But today, the hull was a bare black, unmarked save for information and warning stencils, and its serial number, AF 5-6670.

And that, Deeke reflected sourly, was entirely appropriate.

The mist cleared a little. There were stars in the sky. One of them, bright and clear, passed smoothly through the constellations, directly above him. That was the Shuttle orbiter
Discovery,
its wings reshaped for Titan’s thick air, already in orbit with its cluster of fuel tanks and equipment, waiting for its crew.

It had to be stopped.

Determination surged in him. He put aside the doubts and qualms of the ground techs. He had no doubts.