Cameron managed to shake the thought away, and his eyes focused on his war decorations, also framed, next to the photograph. His hypocritical ribbons and medals, as he thought of them. Decorations given to him after he had left Skergan to die at the hands of the savage Vietcong. Cameron didn’t deserve them. Skergan did. The private had been the one that had offered to die to save Cameron. He had been the one that had convinced Cameron to save himself.
War decorations. Nothing but meaningless scraps of cloth and metal that reminded him of his past, yet he had kept them for all these years. He loathed their sight, but he had hung on to them to remind himself of past sins. Cameron saw them as a path to atonement, a path to redemption through self-inflicted mental punishment.
Cameron glanced at the photograph once more. As he eased himself on the bed and he closed his eyes, Skergan’s face filled his mind again. Go Cameron. You can make it on your own…
CHAPTER THREE
SSMEs
A tall female senior engineer walked past the guard station that led to the Mobile Launch Platform. She flashed her badge and waved at the guards, who smiled and waved back.
“Morning, Vera.”
She knew them both. Vera Baumberger had been a Rocketdyne engineer since the summer of 1972, when Rockwell International won the 2.6-billion-dollar contract to design and build the space-shuttle orbiter, mandated to fly one hundred times each, and capable of six flights per year. The contract, Vera recalled, included system-integration responsibility, where Rockwell would guarantee that all components — including Martin Marietta’s External Tank, Morton-Thiokol’s Solid Rocket Boosters, and Rocketdyne’s Space Shuttle Main Engineers — worked together.
She limited herself to saying “Hello” as she made her way under the colossal platform resting on six twenty-two-foot-tall pedestals over the concrete pad. Kennedy’s three MLPs, initially built for use in the Apollo/Saturn V program, were 160 feet, long 135 feet wide, and stood twenty-five feet high. The single square opening in the center of the platform that allowed hot exhausts from the Saturn V to escape into the flame trench during lift-off had long been replaced by three openings — two for Solid Rocket Booster exhaust and one for SSME exhaust. Vera walked toward the orbiter engine-service platform, which had been positioned beneath the MLP and raised by a winch mechanism through the SSME exhaust hole to a position directly beneath the three engines.
Vera approached the base of the service platform and started going up the steps. This section of the pad was fairly crowded, and with good reason, she decided. With the launch less than forty-eight hours away, people moved in all directions performing final checks. Each inspection team had responsibility for a specific section of the orbiter. In Vera’s case, she was the team leader responsible for all three Space Shuttle Main Engines.
Vera had been with the SSME design and test team from the start of the project back in 1972. From that point on the engineering crew had faced an uphill battle to iron out numerous flaws in the original design of the powerful engine, particularly in the turbopumps. The SSME was essentially an engine which put out highly pressurized steam obtained by burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The high pressure was generated by the rapidly burning fuel going through the nozzle and erupting at the throat of the engine at very high velocity. This concept required special pumps to accelerate the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen through the nozzle. Rocketdyne’s solution to the problem became the high-pressure turbopump, which, although it worked beautifully on paper, turned out to be plagued with design flaws. The pump had two main problems: a whirl mode — instability caused by vibration of the turbo blades when rotating at very high speeds — and a lack of adequate cooling for bearings. These two problems tended to mask each other and were extremely difficult to identify. To make matters worse, the only way to check the results of a design improvement was by test-firing an engine.
Vera frowned when she recalled the dozens and dozens of SSME firing tests she’d participated in at the National Space Technology Laboratories in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The pump experiments caused SSME explosion after explosion, damaging so many engines that NASA had to double the number originally ordered. By 1980 the whirl problem had been resolved and Rocketdyne had developed an efficient way of delivering a sufficient amount of coolant to the bearings to avoid the disastrous turbopump overheating.
Vera shifted her gaze up and watched three members of her team standing on the elevator platform that extended upward to the engine bells. From that platform, several access scaffolds went up to the base of the engines.
“Hi, Vera,” said one of her technicians when he saw her.
“How’s the system check going?”
“Fine. No problems yet.”
“Good. Let me take a look.” She easily climbed up the twenty-foot-tall vertical ladder to the elevator platform, walked to the access scaffold under the number-three SSME, went up the scaffold, and reached her team on the platform.
“All right. Let me take a look at the manifold valves. You and you, get a lifter and bring my equipment up here.”
“Right away,” responded two members of her team as they went down the scaffold, leaving her with one young technician still in training. Almost ignoring him, she moved around him on the platform and leaned over and peeked inside the space between the nozzle’s base and the open heat shield. Her hands moved automatically, doing what they did best. She manually performed one final check as her trainee looked on.
“We’ve already checked the entire system three times today,” he noted.
“You can never check these engines enough times. Now hand me a flashlight, please.”
Her subordinate handed her a black flashlight. Vera grabbed it with her right hand and trained the flashlight on the manifold valves that controlled the flow of liquid hydrogen through pipes that ran all around the nozzle. They appeared normal. Next she inspected the high-pressure turbopumps. The larger ones for liquid hydrogen, the smaller for liquid oxygen. They looked normal. She lowered the beam of light until it reached a black box. It had a tube coming out the front. The tube went into the hydrogen turbopump at one end and came out the other, returning to the back of the box. The tube carried precious coolant to the pump’s bearings. The black box was the coolant pump.
Vera raised an eyebrow when she noticed a small white cylinder strapped to the side of the coolant pump, almost out of sight. The cylinder — whatever it was — definitely did not belong there. She set the flashlight over a wide pipe to her right and used both arms to pull herself through the one-meter opening.
The main engine compartment was crowded with pipes and wires. Recovering her flashlight, she trained it on the small cylinder, and blinked twice in silent astonishment when she realized what it was. The cylinder had a small digital readout indicating 00:04:00. She had found a timer with a small actuator motor. The arm of the motor was connected to the manifold valve on the side of the coolant pump that controlled the flow of coolant to the liquid hydrogen trubopump’s bearings. If her guess was correct the timer would shut off the valve four minutes after lift-off, at a time when Lightning would be at a very critical phase of its ascent. Without coolant the bearings would overheat in a fraction of a second, overheating the turbopump and inducing a fire which would result in a tremendous explosion. She had seen those explosions many times before.