Warp Speed (13 page)

T-minus nine minutes and holding. I woke up to, "Dr. Clemons . . . Anson!"

"Um hem . . . Payload Specialist Clemons is go, Flight!" I snapped. Tabitha held back a giggle.

"Glad to hear it, Anson. I was beginning to think you were going to sleep through the whole mission." I could just imagine the smile on her face. I didn't respond further. The next eight or so minutes were exciting. The vocal traffic picked up between launch control and the commander and pilot seats.

To me it was mostly a great big blur. At T-minus four minutes I recall hearing something about "Verify SSME valve movement in the close direction."

"Verify SSME valve movement in the close direction. Check!" Major Donald replied.

Then at T-minus two minutes and fifty seconds there was something about terminating the GOX vent hood purge. And transfer the PRSD to internal reactants. Tabitha ordered all of us to close our visors and then rechecked the LH2 replenish. Then a lot of things on the checklist began zooming by, very fast.

RETRACT GOX VENT HOOD GLS CGLS (Auto)
T-MINUS 02 MINUTES AND 35 SECONDS PRSD TRANSFER TO INTERNAL REACTANTS GLS CGLS (Auto)
T-MINUS 02 MINUTES AND 00 SECONDS CLOSE VISORS
T-MINUS 01 MINUTES AND 57 SECONDS TERMINATE LH2 REPLENISH GLS CGLS (Auto)
CLOSE LH2 TOPPING VALVE GLS CGLS (Auto)
CLOSE LH2 VENT VALVE GLS CGLS (Auto)
T-MINUS 01 MINUTES AND 46 SECONDS INITIATE LH2 PREPRESS GLS CGLS (Auto)
T-MINUS 00 MINUTES AND 55 SECONDS PERFORM SRB FWD MDM LOCKOUT GLS CGLS (Auto)
T-MINUS 00 MINUTES AND 50 SECONDS GROUND POWER REMOVAL
T-MINUS 00 MINUTES AND 48 SECONDS CLOSE LOX & LH2 OUTBOARD FILL & DRAIN VALVES GLS CGLS (Auto)
DEACTIVATE SRB JOINT HEATERS
GLS CGLS (Auto)
T-MINUS 00 MINUTES AND 31 SECONDS GLS GO FOR AUTO SEQUENCE GLS CGLS (Auto)
ARM CUT OFF GLS CGLS (Manual)
INITIATE RSL5 GLS CGLS (Auto)
ORB VENT DOOR SE9 START GPC CGLS (Auto)

You get the idea.

Finally, at twenty seconds things started to happen that I could feel, physically through small vibrations or large jolts. Down below us the launch pad exhaust reflection pool was being flooded with water to suppress the sound waves from the lift-off. Just ten seconds later the SRB safety inhibits were removed. Three point four seconds after that main engine three was given the start command. My teeth started chattering as I was lunged forward then backward violently. The ship had jumped about a meter. I had been warned that the Shuttle would sway a meter or two at main engine firing. We affectionately refer to this as the "twang" because the initial reaction of the spacecraft structure is to "twang" like a tuning fork when it is struck. To an outside observer, the shuttle seems to sway a bit. But to an inside observer . . .

"Sway hell," I mumbled to myself. It was more like being thrown in a car wreck.

Nine seconds later I couldn't hear a thing and I felt like I weighed five hundred and seventy pounds or more. What a ride! I tried to raise my arms once just to test how heavy they were. It wasn't easy. I was even more impressed by the space jockeys in the front two seats. I could barely blink. How the heck were they flying this thing? A few seconds later we went through throttle up and then to SRB separation and I couldn't remember a happier day in my life. This is what I had always wanted to do since I was a kid.

A moment of calm came over me. I was in a daze and things around me seemed like they weren't real but more of a dream. When the final jolt from the External Tank being dropped hit me, I was sure this was real. As the Orbiter made its way to a stable orbit in low earth orbit (LEO) I really had nothing to do, for the next few minutes anyway. So, I went back to sleep.

When Fines finally woke me up we were at stable LEO and were given the okay to get out of our flight gear. We helped each other with our suits as we played with the microgravity effects on things. Like my stomach for instance. I lost my steak and eggs almost immediately. Fines wasn't amused. So, I threw up on him again.

This time he was amused to the point where he lost his breakfast. We had a lot of fun repeating this procedure for the next hour or two. Finally, the nausea subsided to drunken spins. I wished that I had some of my grandmother's "dizzy pills." I hadn't spun like that since playing quarters with tequila that night in undergraduate school after we won the Iron Bowl.

After several hours of the spins followed by nausea followed by a severe pain in my ego, all of the symptoms disappeared and I felt wonderful. I even offered to help clean up but the flight surgeon had ordered both Fines and myself to take a shot of motion sickness medication and try to take a nap. I slept like a baby. In other words, I pissed and moaned the whole time.

A few hours later Tabitha wandered, or drifted rather, back to see me. I was absolutely fine at this point, showing no symptoms other than feeling like a kid on his birthday. In fact, I was near the aft viewport looking down at the Earth in awe. She actually startled me when she came up behind me.

"Feeling better?"

"Yeah, lots!" I assured her. She put her hand on my shoulder and steadied herself. I still hadn't been able to do that. What a pro this Colonel Ames was.

"Beautiful, isn't it? I'll never get tired of seeing that." She looked at me with her puppy-dog eyes then kissed me on the cheek. She whispered in my ear, "Feel better." Tabitha kicked of the wall and did a backward flip into a Superman style flight in the other direction. She looked back over her shoulder at me. "Since you seem to be feeling up to it, why don't you contact your ground support console and go through a postlaunch and preflight check of your experiment hardware as per the mission schedule? You're about four hours behind. And do me a favor."

"Yeah, sure. What do you need?" I asked.

"Stop looking out the window until you're caught up and back on the mission timeline," she scolded me with the Colonel voice. I was tempted to say, "Yes, Colonel!" but thought better of it.

I found my way to my laptop and brought it online for check-lists. Velcroing in and donning my headset, I punched up the frequency for my ground support console operator. We were somewhere over the Indian Ocean at the time but either ground relay or TDRS would patch the signal back home. Jim was riding the console back at the Huntsville Operations Support Center or HOSC as it is affectionately referred to.

"Hi Jim! I guess I need to make up some lost time here and get the postlaunch and preflight started," I told him.

"I hear you are bulimic these days, trying to fit in a new prom dress," Jim kidded me.

"Just trying to watch my girlish figure. You know how it is. Actually, I think the colonel slipped some ipecac into my steak and eggs. How's everyone dirtside?"

"For the most part better than you. Let's get started."

"Roger that, Jim. Okay, I've got no outside tolerance range parameters from my sensor suite here. Does your telemetry agree?"

The postlaunch and preflight took the next three or so hours to assure each of us that the components of the warp drive demonstrator, we had been calling Zephram, had indeed survived the launch and the exposure to the space environment at LEO. No powered tests other than the motherboard of the spacecraft bus and the sensor suite could be made because the fields created by the ECC devices would be so large that the internal instruments of the Orbiter would be affected. That would be bad. Also, the device was in five separate pieces in the Payload Bay and wasn't an integrated spacecraft at this point. Jim and I wished Zephram a good night and I said I would chat with Jim in two sleep cycles.

We had to make a pit stop at the ISS before construction of Zephram could begin. I had completed my checklists and I was now a fifth wheel. I located Colonel Ames in the middeck eating area.

"Payload Specialist Clemons on schedule Colonel," I saluted her and laughed. She didn't seem amused.

"Can it, Anson. Have you eaten anything?"

"Uh, not sure that's a good idea." I hesitated at the thought of nausea and spins coming back.

"We don't need you passing out from low blood sugar. Eat!" she more or less ordered me. I wondered if she was giving the other astronauts as much of her attention or if I was just being a big baby--the word
rookie
came to mind.

"Okay, I'll eat. Just stop pampering me, okay."

"Anson." She clenched her jaw and I could tell she was changing her mind about what she was going to say. She started over.

"Listen. Just do your job, okay? No ego. If you feel the least bit funny, I don't want you on an EVA barfing all in your suit. Just do your job. I
am
doing mine by telling you this."

"We have nearly two days. I have acclimated almost completely now. I'll be fine," I told her. To prove it I squeezed out a bite of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and watched it float in front of me at over eighteen thousand miles per hour. Since I was moving along at the same speed and Newton's First Law--or in General Relativity speak, we were on the same geodesic--was working as expected, I leaned forward and then gulped it down. No problem. I finished my first meal in microgravity and prepared for a sleep cycle. Tabitha didn't say two more words to me that day.

Fines, on the other hand, must have been feeling better, too. He must also have been bored. He talked endlessly about his super polymer that when super cooled allowed for state-of-the-art piezoelectric micromotion control. His work would enable a whole new era of pointing accuracy. Not only would it be beneficial to military applications but to any space based platform. A modification of the Next Generation Space Telescope with his device would increase the camera long-term exposure times by a factor of ten to a hundred. This in turn would increase the number of objects that deep sky astronomy would be able to image by orders of magnitude.

It was all very interesting and exciting. But, thank God he finally shut up! I presently dozed off for my first real sleep cycle in space. The nap I had previously didn't count because I'd been sick out of my mind. This time I had no trouble getting comfortable and dozing off. What a relief from the past few weeks.
Tomorrow the ISS
, I thought calmly.

CHAPTER 8

I was looking out the window whether Colonel Ames liked it or not. The International Space Station loomed over as we approached the Universal Docking Module. Television just doesn't give you a feel for how immense the ISS really is. As you get closer you can tell that parts of it were made by different countries. The Russian components are either black or shiny. ESA and NASDA modules are shiny. The majority of the space station is white, these sections being made by the United States of America. Although the space station looks like a jumbled mish mash made by several different manufacturers, it does look like it was designed with some sort of madness to its designer's method.

I held on to a computer terminal stand as we docked, expecting a jolt. I never felt a thing. Ray and Tabitha knew what they were doing up front. A period of protocol passed (I assumed pressure equalization) and we were all allowed access to the station. I roamed wherever I could go. I bumped into a fellow from Japan and I realized that I was in the Japanese Experiment Module. I asked if there were any experiments going on outside mounted to the "back-porch."

Wang Che, as I gathered was his name, told me that, "We had a marfunction on the Lemote Manipuratol system yestelday. It damaged the terescope plimaly millol and seized the tlacking motols togethel."

"You don't say," I responded. "What caused it?"

"Not sule. But, we are wolking on it," he replied.

My trek through Russian territory was about the same, so I returned to American soil, uh aluminum and composites, and just hung out. Tabitha finally relaxed a little. She introduced me to one of the astronauts who would be going home with us, since Carla and Roald were staying behind.

"Anson Clemons, this is Tracy Edmunds. Tracy has been up here for going on three months," Tabitha informed me.

"Wow! Are you ready to go home yet?"

"Yeah, I miss my husband and kids," she told me with a smile. Tabitha giggled a bit.

"Anson, this is Malcom Edmunds, Tracy's husband." Tabitha laughed. Getting the joke, I shook Malcom's hand.

"Nice to meet you. You better hurry home. I think your wife is looking for you. Are your kids here, too?"

"The eight-year-old really wanted to come, believe me."

Tracy shrugged, winked at Malcom and said, "I don't know why they wouldn't let me bring her."

I could tell that Tabitha must have known the infamous eight-year-old, since she responded with an outburst of laughter and then, "ISS ain't ready for that type of malfunction yet."

We talked for a while longer and then Malcom and Tracy began to ingress to the Space Shuttle.

Tabitha held my arm. "Wait a second, Anson."

"What's up?"

"I want to know what you think about something." She looked at me seriously. I couldn't tell if these were her Colonel eyes or her Tabitha eyes. She'd make one hell of a card player. Actually, I had heard she
was
one.

"Well,
something
is a rather broad topic. Not sure what I think about it. Could you narrow it down a little?"

"Okay smart guy. The Japanese wrecked the telescope on the 'back-porch' yesterday." Colonel Ames (not Tabitha) said. That solved that.

"I know. Wang told me. Or is it Che? Do Japanese use their first name as their first name or their last name as their first name?" I asked, and then repeated it to myself to make sure I said it correctly.

"Wangche is his surname. And he's not Japanese, he's Chinese--it's a political thing. And Wangche was supposed to use that telescope tomorrow to image a planned rendezvous of two satellites. They're meeting up for the first in-space robotic satellite repair." Tabitha spoke as if she were giving a debriefing.

"Hold on a minute. Does it have to happen tomorrow? I mean, why can't they wait?" I was perplexed by the dilemma.

"The microspacecraft has used up most of its fuel supply to achieve a matching orbit with the satellite. More than a few more days of attitude corrections would use all of its fuel and not leave enough for the orbit raising to the GEO disposal or junkyard orbit."