“Bill, unless we get this door open within the next thirty minutes or so, you won’t be able to come inside at all.”
Chow activated the voice link to mission control and brought them into the discussion, hoping against hope that one of the many NASA engineers would come up with something that would allow them to bring his friend inside before it was too late.
Chow ran through the entire procedure one more time with the same result—the red light would simply not go away.
“Houston, there has to be something else we can try,” Tony said and tried not to sound desperate.
“Okay, Mercy I. We’ve got another fix we want you to give a go.”
“Roger that, Houston. Let’s have it.” Tony had high hopes that the engineers back at NASA would figure this out. They always did.
“It looks like we’ve got several circuits interrupted, probably due to damaged systems, but, nonetheless, we aren’t going to trick the computers to depressurize the cabin. So, what we need to try is to cycle the inner docking hatch of the Orion. And then blow the Altair hatch out.”
“Can we do that with the Altair attached to the Orion?” Bill interjected.
“No, Bill, we can’t. So, we’ll have to attempt this when we jettison the Altair for the aerocapture maneuver. The timeline will be tight,” Houston responded.
“Hang in there, Bill. We’ll start prepping for this procedure.” Tony did his best to assure his commander, but he wasn’t all that confident himself.
“Tony,” Hui said vocally and not through the radio. “If the computer will not let us open the hatch because we’re not depressurized, then why will it let us undock the Altair?”
“The engineers down at Houston want us to give it a try. And, frankly, I’m not giving up on Bill without trying something.”
“Understood. Whatever I can do to help, just let me know.” Hui nodded sincerely at Tony, but he could see the concern, fear, and lack of optimism in her face.
“Bill, this is Tony. I’ve got to start the entry procedure checklists, and the engineers have a mile-long sequence of breaker flipping that I have to do before we undock.”
“Roger that, Tony. Do what needs to be done.” Stetson, not sounding at all like a man who had just been handed a death sentence, added, “Tony, one more thing I want you to understand.”
“What’s that, Bill?”
“No matter what happens out here, our first obligation is to get this crew and this ship safely home. Understood?”
“Understood.” Tony didn’t like the sound of that.
“Good. Get to it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Chapter 29
The mood in the Orion was morose. With two crewmembers injured, one incapacitated, and another trapped outside the ship, Anthony Chow was in command, and he didn’t like it. At least he wasn’t stranded on the surface of the Moon and left to die, as had been his biggest fear right up until they had actually left the Moon. Now, who knew? The likelihood of the aerocapture maneuver failing was pretty high, but Tony never had any fear of that part of the mission. Besides, he had way too many things going on to let his mind dwell on such negative things.
The Altair was about to be separated from the Orion on schedule, and they were less than two hours away from entering the outer portion of the Earth’s atmosphere. Chow was putting all his faith in those wizard engineers back home in mission control to come up with a magic spell that would save his ship’s captain, his friend. And that magic spell was a tedious one. It had taken him more than fifteen minutes of changing commands, throwing toggles, tapping icons, and physically flipping switches.
“That’s the last breaker. Check!” Tony reported.
“Roger that, Mercy I. Now, we need to do all this in very rapid secession, so make certain Bill is in the safe location and be prepared for rapid depressurization.”
“Roger that.” Tony looked around the cabin and saw that everybody was strapped in or tied off to something. “Bill, are you clear out there?”
“Roger that, Tony. I’m in the predetermined safe spot. It’s just me and my old solar-panel buddy out here. Let’s get on with this.”
“You got it, Captain.” Tony readied himself for typing in a rapid sequence of commands and for tapping toggle icons. “Everybody button up. We start rapid depressurization in ten seconds.” He waited until he got a thumbs-up from Hui and then tapped the first icon. Then he followed the sequence as the engineer at Houston called out the commands.
“That’s the last one, Tony. Now cycle the docking-ring hatch.” The engineer sounded confident that the sequence would work.
“Roger that. Cycling the hatch.” Tony nodded to Hui to hold on and hit the hatch cycle. The icon flashed green for a brief second and then orange. Then it cycled to red and popped up a window explaining that the exterior hatch was depressurized and that they couldn’t open the interior hatch without pressurizing the Altair first.
“Shit.” Tony’s heart sank. “Houston. I hope you have a plan C.”
“Uh, it didn’t work?” The engineer’s voice sounded surprised. “Mercy I, what is the status of the hatch? Our feeds show it as closed.”
“Roger that, Houston.” Tony hung his head as best he could in a spacesuit. “The hatch is closed and locked out.”
“Be advised that the Altair jettison sequence is in place and will continue.”
“Roger that, Houston. The Altair sequence is still green.”
“Sorry, Mercy I. Be advised that at this time there is no plan C.”
“Come on! Can’t you guys come up with something?”
“Sorry, Mercy I. The Altair has to jettison now in order for the proper orbital energy to be achieved following the aerobraking maneuver. We can’t postpone the Altair jettison any further.”
“Listen, Houston. Bill’s outside, thinking God only knows what, and you’re sitting down there giving me a lecture about the physics of aerocapture? I want to know what we can do to help him survive. Can he ride this thing out there? Can he tie down to the nose or something?”
Chow watched as the Altair jettison cycle completed, and he felt a slight shift as the Altair released from dock.
“Tony, I wish there was something we could do. In a few minutes, you’re going to skim the outer part of the Earth’s atmosphere at more than twenty thousand miles per hour. Let me put that another way, the relative wind velocity around the outside of the Orion will be twenty thousand miles per hour. And as you begin to enter the atmosphere, the atmospheric friction will superheat much of the atmosphere around the Orion to many thousands of degrees. There is simply no way an astronaut in a spacesuit can survive that. Even if Bill could find a way to anchor himself to the ship, he would be fried. I want him to come home, too, but there is simply no way we can find a quick fix to make that happen. If we can’t get the cabin to depressurize, we can’t open that hatch.” The voice on the other end of the radio connection was professional, with an appropriate amount of empathy thrown in. The combination angered Chow, who would have responded better to more anger and less sympathy.
Chow struck the control panel with his right fist and turned off the radio. He briefly looked up at the ever-present video camera and then toward Captain Hui.
“Dammit all to hell,” Chow said.
“We have to tell him.” Hui frowned.
“No, we don’t. He knows what it meant when the Altair drifted away and the hatch didn’t cycle.”
“Tony, this is Bill.”
“Bill?”
“You did your best. Now focus on the mission goal.”
“Roger that, Bill.” Tony had tears starting at the corners of his eyes. “It’s been an honor, Captain Stetson.”
“Honor’s all mine. I would like to talk to my wife if that could be arranged.”