We made one last minor change in our course—a burn of a few seconds with our little thrusters—and I headed back to the optics to check star alignments and confirm we were perfectly on course. We could have come back fine without firing the thrusters, but the small maneuver placed us in the middle of our reentry corridor. All looked good.
“I thought we’d let you know, from our preliminary tracking, you’re sitting right in the center of the corridor now,” mission control confirmed.
“Great! That’s a nice place to be!” Dave replied.
We grew busier inside the spacecraft, checking all the systems. Batteries would feed power to explosive devices that hurled out our parachutes, and they needed to work in a precise and accurate sequence for us to survive. I tested Endeavour’s reentry thrusters. They eventually responded with a reassuring snapping sound, and I could see the flashes of flame outside the windows as I pulsed them.
It was time to separate from the enormous service module which, in addition to the SIM bay, had carried our main rocket engine and all of the consumables we needed for the trip. I flipped a switch, and in a carefully orchestrated and speedy sequence, pyrotechnic devices neatly severed the water, oxygen, and electrical connections between the two modules. Then I heard a thunk as the service module separated and drifted away from us. “We got a good sep,” I reported to mission control.
I turned the lights down in the spacecraft a little and looked out of the windows. I hoped to use Earth’s horizon to orient myself. By now we were racing toward the shadowed side of the globe, a black sphere against a black sky. And yet if I looked carefully, I could see the milky, faintly glowing horizon looming in my window.
The explosive separation from the service module had jolted some little items loose from hiding places in the cabin, and some of them now floated by our faces. “Here, my friend, is a lunar rock,” Dave noted, spotting a moon nugget that must have lurked somewhere in the spacecraft for days.
All that remained now of the enormous rocket launched from Florida was our little Endeavour command module, its heat shield exposed for the first time during the mission and pointed firmly in our direction of flight. We plunged down into the darkness at more than thirty thousand feet per second and waited for the first sign that we had reached the outer fringes of Earth’s atmosphere.
“Look out the window, and you see ionization,” Jim remarked. The heat shield behind our backs was hitting the first wisps of air. Faint yellow-orange glowing tendrils appeared outside the windows as we pushed through the atmosphere and lit the air into hot plasma.
We broke into daylight. “Oh, that’s the Earth down there, baby!” I cried, as I peered through the glow and began to see familiar features. I could clearly see Alaska, down to Japan and beyond, a huge sweep of the Northern Hemisphere.
“Can you see it?” Jim asked us, straining for a view from his couch.
“Sure as hell can,” Dave confirmed. “It’s big and real!”
I had angled the spacecraft precisely so that our heat shield dug into the atmosphere. I began to feel a very gradual deceleration, a little like putting on the brakes when driving. I watched the earth zip by below us unbelievably fast. “Oh, man, are we moving, too!” I cried. “Son of a gun! Shee-hoo!”
Endeavour was designed with an offset center of gravity, so it had a little bit of lift. Not much, but enough to maneuver. By digging into the atmosphere, we made sure we didn’t skip back out into space again. The glow outside our windows increased, as did the feeling of deceleration. Looking up, I could see a long glowing trail behind us, like a lit neon tube, with flashes of pink, green, red, and yellow. We were slowing dramatically after our plunge through space, but still raced across the face of the planet.
“Sure are a lot of mountains down there,” I exclaimed, fascinated. “How about that!”
“I think that’s Alaska out there,” Jim added, staring at upside-down peaks. “That would be right, wouldn’t it?”
The ionization built up until we lost the ability to transmit radio signals to Houston. Not that they could help us now. The G-forces increased, and the fiery orange glow outside the spacecraft brightened. I could see the trails of glowing gases swirl as they changed path around our blunt spacecraft and twisted away behind us in corkscrewing patterns.
After almost two weeks of floating freely, the deceleration built until I weighed six times as much as on Earth. Lying in the couch, however, meant the force was on my chest so I didn’t really notice it. Besides, I was too excited. But Jim wasn’t doing so well and felt like he was unable to move and close to blacking out. There was nothing he could do but endure.
Once there was no danger we’d skip out of the atmosphere, I followed a precise course to take us to our targeted splashdown site. Closely monitoring my instruments, I pulsed our thrusters to roll the spacecraft, using the heat shield as a kind of wing to change our lift. The pressure on our chests eased a little. Leveling off our path, we eased our downward plunge and slid through the atmosphere as I maneuvered left and right.
Mission control could hear us on the radio again. “Everybody’s in fine shape,” Dave reported with relief.
“Good to hear you again!” Bob Parker replied.
We slowed to ten thousand feet per second. “One hundred miles to go,” I reported, as condensation rained down from the docking tunnel above us and soaked Dave in the center couch. Soon I was not able to maintain any more horizontal movement; gravity pulled our slowing spacecraft down. We dropped like a rock.
Around twenty-four thousand feet above the ocean, the heat shield cover at the top of the spacecraft whipped away and two small drogue parachutes fired out to reduce our speed. “Good drogue,” I reported, feeling the tug on Endeavour as I saw the reassuring shapes open above us through my window. As we fell into thicker atmosphere, the pressure outside grew, and fresh air began to squirt into the cabin through a special valve.
Once the drogue chutes had done their job, they were released at around ten thousand feet. Three more small parachutes then popped open and pulled out our large red-and-white main parachutes. “And the mains are out—three,” I reported. “The mains are opening.” I felt the spacecraft slow and sway as the chutes smoothly opened.
“CM propellant to dump,” Jim added. The fuel lines of our now-useless thrusters were still full of dangerous chemicals, and flight planners believed it was safer to vent them before we hit the water. The chemicals would burn as soon as they touched each other, and if we ruptured a fuel line on splashdown, we could have a nasty fire or explosion. Venting had worked fine on every prior mission. A large rising red cloud of gas obscured my view of the parachutes as we dumped the propellants overboard.
Helicopters from the USS Okinawa, the assault ship sent to recover us, had us in sight and circled as we fell closer to the ocean. “It appears that one of your main chutes is streaming,” one pilot reported on the radio, alarmed. “I can only see two main chutes, and one appears to be streaming.”
Oh, shit. “Do we have three, Al?” Jim asked me with concern.
“We got two!” I told him. The red cloud had cleared, and I thought I could see widening holes in one of our parachutes, collapsing it into a useless strip of cloth. “We’ve got a streamer on one.”
I can only guess what happened. There was very little wind that day, and when we vented the propellant, the corrosive, toxic cloud rose right up into the chute and ate away the material and shroud lines. We prepared ourselves for a hard landing.