Voyage (39 page)
Authors: Stephen Baxter
Reliability was essential, on long-duration missions. Many of Apollo’s systems had redundant backups – straightforward copies, to be substituted in case of a failure – but the old triple-redundancy design paradigm they’d used to get to the Moon wouldn’t work, it had been found, on long-duration missions. Enough redundancy to achieve an acceptably low level of risk over such a span of time would have resulted in a spacecraft of immense weight and complexity.
So the designers had got smarter. In addition to simple redundancy, some functions could be performed by dissimilar components, or by components from different subsystems, to reduce the chance of a single failure mode knocking out many functions altogether – as had happened in Apollo 13. And the maintenance capabilities of the crew weren’t ignored, either. The whole ship was more modular and accessible than in its first design, so that components could be reached, repaired or replaced comparatively easily, and there were isolation valves, switches, test equipment and fault diagnosis tools. Some of the components contained their own BITEs, microelectronic built-in self-test units.
Hauling an Apollo all the way to Mars also provided some abort options. On return to Earth the Apollo, with the Mission Module, was due to be inserted into a highly elliptical orbit around the planet: two hundred by a hundred thousand miles, a swooping curve that would take the stack half-way out to the Moon and back, an orbit accessible to Ares at relatively low expenditure of fuel. The Command Module would be able to take them down to the surface of Earth from such a trajectory; the reentry heating would be less than a return from the Moon. And if Apollo were to fail, the crew could survive in their high orbit until rescue came, in the form of another five-man stretched Apollo.
If they couldn’t make Earth orbit at all – for instance if the J-2S, the single engine of the final MS-IVB booster stage, were to fail – they could attempt a direct entry from the interplanetary coast. The heatshield on the Command Module’s underside had been thickened and toughened up, so that it would at least give them a
fighting chance of surviving a direct reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The velocity would only be around fifteen percent faster than a lunar return.
And, if the Mission Module’s life support were to fail inflight, it would even be possible for the crew to retreat to the Command Module and use it as a shelter. A lifeboat. Right now, with Gershon alone in here, the Command Module seemed pretty roomy; it wasn’t like that with three of them aboard, and things would be pretty tough if they had to spend weeks, or even months, cooped up in here.
But it was better than dying.
Every aspect of the mission had been designed with failures in mind, to give options at every point, to leave no ‘dead zones’ where there was no abort capability. The designers had almost succeeded.
Gershon hummed along with Mozart as he worked.
This fifty-day checkup was a chore, of course, but
everything
on this fucking flight was a chore for Gershon. And it was the same on every long-duration spaceflight.
Gershon’s moment was going to come, when he took that MEM down through the thin air of Mars itself. But he’d basically be working at peak effectiveness for, what? – forty, fifty minutes? – out of a flight that was going to last a year and a half.
Not much of a payload ratio, Ralph
. But that was okay. It was a bargain that Gershon was prepared to accept. Because here he was, on an odyssey to Mars.
The first time he’d come across the name ‘Ares’ had been in a battered old book he’d picked up from a dime store in Mason. It was a collection of science fiction stories, by someone called Stanley Weinbaum. The title story was ‘A Martian Odyssey,’ and it featured a ship called Ares, and four men exploring the surface of an exotic, mysterious Mars. Weinbaum’s magical words were alive in his memory, still, after all these years; it was as if he could feel the stiff, yellowing pages of that battered old paperback in his hands now.
When he’d heard they were going to use Weinbaum’s name for the mission, Gershon had whooped.
He’d worked his way through the science fiction canon as he grew older, and he’d ridden many other ships to Mars. Bradbury had been elusive, with his hinting descriptions of silver locusts – pulsing with fire, swarming with men – falling to the surface of a beautiful, inhabited planet. Clarke’s Ares, on the other hand, had
been described in great detail. It was a dumbbell shape of two huge spheres, separated by a hundred yards of tube-way. The rear contained atomic motors – serviced by AEC robots – and the leading sphere was living quarters, with cabins and a huge dining room and an observation gallery …
Sitting in the canvas frame couch, Gershon sucked some more juice out of his tube, and ran his hand over the surface of the grimy instrument panel before him. He grinned.
Dining rooms, huh
.
Gershon thought of Apollo technology the way, he supposed, other guys might think of classic cars. Like a Corvette, maybe. Apollo was a beautiful machine, and it worked, and it had achieved great things. And even after all these years it was still better than anything the Russians could put up …
And it seemed entirely appropriate to him that the first mission to Mars – for real – should be conducted not in some lost von Braun-type dream of the 1950s, but in a handful of strung-together Apollo-application cans.
Still, he knew that this voyage was a fulfillment of more dreams than just his own. As Ares followed its long, spiralling trajectory to Mars, he felt that it wasn’t alone: it was accompanied by a fleet of ghostly ships, huge silver forms, from the pages of Clarke and Heinlein and Asimov and Bradbury and Burroughs …
The Mozart floated around the cabin, and Gershon worked patiently through his checklist.
APOLLO-N
Apollo-N; Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston
Rolf Donnelly swung his car into his space outside Building 30, the Mission Control Center. He got out, whistling.
There was a new sign up, in a car park space close to the building: MCC M&O EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH. Donnelly laughed. Welcome to government work! You’re in Mission Control, and your prize for a good job well done is a loan of a parking space!
He took a breath of the muggy autumn air. It would be his last fresh air for a while; one of the few things he didn’t like about working in Building 30 was that it was completely enclosed. He walked slowly by the big air-conditioning grilles on the outside of the building; in the spring, birds nested in there, but he couldn’t see any activity now.
Donnelly was still whistling as he turned into the building. He was a Flight Director, and now he was going to be lead Flight for the Apollo-N mission.
The big display screens at the front of the room bore spectacular images from Kennedy, of climbing metal, billowing smoke, flames as bright as the sun.
The Saturn VN lifted smoothly off the pad.
A few seconds into the Apollo-N flight, the Mission Operations Control Room was an amphitheater of calm, of control, of patient work. From his position in the command and control row of the MOCR, third from the front, Donnelly could see everything: the rows of blocky benches, the workstations with their clumsy old CRTs and keyboards bolted into place, manned by the controllers that made up his flight team.
Indigo Team
. The workstations were littered with ring binders of mission rules, polystyrene coffee cups, yellow notepads.
‘Roll and pitch program,’ Chuck Jones’s voice called down on the air-to-ground loop. His voice was shaking, barely audible to Donnelly. ‘Everything’s looking good. The sky is getting lighter.’
On the brown-painted walls there were mission patches, dating all the way back to Gemini 4; and there were plaques, framed in the team colors of retired Flight Directors. There was a big Stars-and-Stripes at the front of the room. The light was low, the colors gloomy; but the CRTs glowed brightly.
The booster passed the launch tower. And, smoothly, Indigo Team took control of the mission from the Kennedy Firing Room.
Donnelly could feel adrenaline surge in his system.
The Saturn VN pitched itself over, arcing east over the Atlantic. The booster was flying itself, gimballing its engines so that it neatly followed its pre-programmed trajectory; for now the crew, Jones, Priest and Dana, were passengers, their nuclear rocket just payload.
Natalie York, capcom for the shift, called up to the spacecraft. ‘Apollo, Houston … You’re right smack dab on the trajectory.’
‘Roger, Houston. This baby is really going.’
‘Roger, that.’
Numbers scrolled across CRT screens, and Donnelly’s controllers talked quietly to each other on their comms loops.
It was York’s first assignment as capcom. She sounded calm, controlled; Donnelly was pleased.
The flight was going well. Rolf Donnelly could feel it. Right now he didn’t have to do a thing.
There were a lot of unique features about this mission. It was the first time the US had tried to maintain
two
ambitious flights at once, with no less than six astronauts above the atmosphere: Jones, Dana and Priest climbing to orbit for their NERVA test flight on top of the Saturn VN, and Muldoon, Bleeker and Stone already out in lunar orbit in Moonlab, waiting for their rendezvous with the Russians. It was also the first time NASA had operated both its MOCRs at once.
And this was, of course, the first manned flight of the S-NB, the new Saturn booster third stage with its NERVA 2 nuclear engine.
Management Row, behind Donnelly in the MOCR, was full today. For instance, there was Bert Seger, just over Donnelly’s shoulder, his trademark carnation a glare of white. And in the Viewing Room behind the glass wall at the back of the MOCR, Donnelly had spotted Fred Michaels himself, puffing on one of his cigars, watching the numbers unroll with baffled anxiety. This was a very important, and very public, flight.
But Donnelly wasn’t concerned; not right now. He had a lot of faith in his people. The controllers in this room were actually leaders of the teams, three or five strong, who worked in the back rooms clustered around the MOCR; to get as far as this room, the controllers had had to work in the back rooms on a good number of missions. That was the way Donnelly had come up, himself. The controllers would often get poached away by the higher salaries offered by the aerospace companies: a spell in Mission Control looked good on your resume. But that was all right; it kept down the average age in here.
Anyway, Donnelly had no such ambitions. The MOCR was much closer to the center of gravity of decision making, on any flight they’d launched to date, even than being in the cabin of the actual spacecraft. This was where things were run; in this room, Donnelly was in control. As far as he was concerned, it was better than flying.
One minute into the flight.
The vibrations of the launch smoothed out
Jones shouted, ‘This goddamn bird doesn’t ring right …’
Jim Dana couldn’t see Jones’s face inside his helmet.
There wasn’t time to think about it. Gs were piling on Dana, as the five heavy engines of the S-IC stage continued to blast.
Two, three, four
G … he could feel his chest flattening.
But this was about as bad as it would get. In fact, the Gs were oddly reassuring. They were coming right on schedule. Maybe Jones was wrong. So far this was just like the sims.
Almost …
Suddenly he was thrown forward against his seat restraints.
What the
…? The smooth build-up was gone. Could an engine have failed? But now he was hurled back, deeper into his couch; and then forward again, so hard he could feel his straps bruise his stomach and chest through the suit’s layers. Then back again –
‘Pogoing!’ Jones shouted. ‘Hang onto your hats, guys.’
Now the vibrations, forward and back, were coming at the rate of five or six a second, and their violence was astonishing. How many Gs? And oscillating all the time –
Dana could no longer see; the craft was a blur around him, and he felt as if he was being pummeled about the chest, head and legs.
We’ll have to abort. We can’t survive this. It’ll shake us to pieces
. He tried to turn his head, to see if Jones was reaching for his abort handle.
The pogoing didn’t show up in the MOCR.
To the controllers there, the first-stage burn looked nominal. It was only apparent in the Marshall engineers’ equivalent of Mission Control, called the Huntsville Operations Support Center.
On a closed loop from Marshall, a warning was whispered to Mike Conlig in Houston. ‘The S-IC is pogoing. The accelerometers are showing plus or minus eight G.’
Conlig was sitting at the left-hand end of the Trench – the front row of the MOCR at Houston – working as the Booster controller for this launch, with special responsibility for the new NERVA stage. The pogo had to be occurring because the natural vibration
of the thrust chambers of the F-1 engines was close, somehow, to the structural vibration of the stack as a whole.
Christ,
he thought.
But we put in absorbers to de-tune the vehicle; this shouldn’t be happening
. Evidently those assholes at Marshall hadn’t done enough resonance testing on the new Saturn VN stack, with its nuclear third stage.
We could lose the mission because of this
.
He prepared to report to Flight.
But now the whisper from Huntsville came through again. ‘Amplitude diminishing.’
Conlig held his breath, and waited.
The pogoing faded, as suddenly as it had begun.
By comparison, the steady pressure of three or four Gs on Dana’s chest was a welcome relief.
He saw the mission clock, hovering before him.
Ten seconds. That’s all it was. Ten seconds
.
He turned his head to see the others; there was a zone of blackness around his vision. He focused on Chuck Jones’s face. ‘Chuck? Ben? Are you okay?’
Jones’s hand was closed tight around the abort handle; Dana wondered what effort of will it had taken to keep from turning it. Jones said, ‘Houston, we’ve been a-pogoing. But we is still here, like three dried peas in a tin can.’
‘Roger.’ Natalie York sounded puzzled. It was possible the Houston people didn’t know, yet, what the crew had gone through. They didn’t see the accelerometer readouts. Dana just hoped they were watching the rest of the telemetry.
But now the events of the launch sequence came rushing on them. ‘Three minutes,’ Jones called. ‘Get set for staging, boys.’
Dana shook his head, and the darkness at the edge of his vision began to disperse. He thought uneasily of the additional stress the staging would place on the pogo-rattled S-NB.
Rolf Donnelly had
not
enjoyed the pogoing. He had also not enjoyed not knowing about it until the crew’s verbal report came through.
At this stage of the flight, the Marshall people were more or less in control; they had the best understanding of the status of their bird.
But I don’t know why we didn’t abort during that damn pogo. They must be really keen to get their nuclear stage into orbit
.
Ascent to orbit was always the most difficult and dangerous phase of a mission: the phase when a hell of a lot of energy was being
expended, to get those tons of metal up to an orbital speed of five miles per second. Reentry was infinitely easier, when you could dissipate all that energy at your leisure. Ascent was the phase when you were buying the most risk, the phase when Donnelly always braced himself for problems.
He felt he needed more control than he’d had on this flight so far.
The trouble was, the Marshall Germans had developed their skills in an era of automated, unmanned vehicles. You couldn’t send a command to a V-2 once it was off the pad. And even now, the thought of trying to control a bird in flight was alien to them. So the Germans had done their best to turn their controllers, the people involved, into robots – extensions of the machine.
Don’t improvise. Be disciplined. Follow the book: you’re paid to react, not to think
.
Donnelly made a silent vow that he would campaign to have procedures changed. He didn’t want to be put in the position of having to trust the judgment of the Marshall people again.
Still – although the Saturn was riding a little above its planned path, on the big trajectory plot at the front of the room – the crew seemed to have ridden out the pogo, and the booster’s telemetry looked nominal. The stack had survived its first staging, the discarding of the spent S-IC, and the second-stage burn looked smooth.
Maybe we’ll get away with this …
Donnelly could feel a pressure on his back. There were men in that Viewing Room, among the VIPs and celebrities and headquarters people and politicians and crew families, who would know things were going wrong. There was Fred Michaels himself, with his nose practically pressed up against the glass. And beside Michaels was Gregory Dana, Jim’s father. Donnelly didn’t know Dana Senior personally, but he understood he was some kind of mission specialist from Langley. The pressure exerted by the man was worse even than anything induced by the presence of Michaels.
Goddamn it, that’s my son up there
.
Donnelly was a man on the climb. He looked forward to a bright future – a few more years here in the arena, then maybe a move up into program management. And when he’d pulled off this complex and difficult mission, it would be one
hell
of a feather in his cap.
He loved his job. He wanted to go a lot further; he wanted to run the flight to Mars. He did
not
want this mission to fail.
But now it was time to light the nuke.
Apollo-N shuddered as explosive bolts severed the spent S-II second stage. Dana drifted, weightless, waiting for the next kick.
‘Here we go again,’ Jones said. His Tennessee twang was calm and relaxed –
as if he does this every day
.
Well, Chuck Jones could play-act his calmness all he liked; but even he had to be wound up tight as a watch spring now, Dana thought, because the most important moment in the flight was approaching. The third stage of this stack was not the old reliable S-IVB which had carried the Moon missions to Earth orbit and beyond; it was an S-NB, with the first operational NERVA engine. And the damn thing was going to have to work now to get them to orbit, Dana knew, or they were going to be flying across the Atlantic to a hard landing in the goddamn Sahara.
York called up: ‘Apollo, Houston, you are go for orbit. You are go for orbit.’
For long seconds the spacecraft soared, without acceleration; and then, at last, Dana was kicked in the back.
‘She’s lit,’ Chuck Jones breathed. ‘How about that. We’re flying a goddamn nuke.’
The NERVA burn was nothing like so jarring as the second-stage ignition six minutes earlier; the ride now was crisp and rattly, with just two hundred thousand pounds of thrust pressing a full G into his back.
And then Earthlight strobed past Dana’s window. The Apollo had dipped toward the ground.
He was thrown forward against his restraints, the breath knocked out of him.
My God. What now?
The nose of the craft pitched up again. Metal groaned, and Earth’s brilliant face swooped past his window. His helmet thumped against the sparse metal frame of his couch. Blue light flashed over his visor.
Chuck Jones’s voice was dry. ‘We’re riding a bronco here, Houston. Please advise.’
‘Booster, Flight. Tell me what you got.’
To Donnelly, it looked as if the little Saturn icon on the plot board was drunk, as it wandered crazily around its programmed trajectory. A dozen voices jabbered in Donnelly’s ear at once; he listened to them all, somehow simultaneously, trying to piece together what was happening.
But the most important voice wasn’t there. Mike Conlig wasn’t speaking to him.
