Besides what happens on the ground — assuming I make it there in one living piece — there's the question of the next several minutes. I'm not getting any telemetry from Nashville. This is flying blind at its worst.
In the olden days, when a space capsule returned to Earth, it lost communication with Earth for several minutes because all the ionized air from the heat shield formed a kind of Faraday cage blocking radio signals. Reentry had to be carefully planned in advance and it was the pilot's job to make sure everything was on course.
Since the Space Shuttle had such a large surface area, there was actually a gap in the ionized bubble above it where they could send and receive communications via satellite, get telemetry and carry on conversations all the way down.
For smaller craft, like the Unicorn and the Soyuz, this problem persisted until the development of a laser-based system. It doesn't allow for huge data streams, but it's enough to get by. Having another set of eyes tell you everything looks fine is rather reassuring.
In the simulator you train for all kinds of situations, including having no support from ground control.
Theoretically, the Unicorn and Alicorn, the rocket that launches the Unicorn into orbit, can run entirely by themselves. If one second after liftoff a lightning strike took out mission control, the automatic systems would take the Unicorn to orbit and the Alicorn's two stages would either land on the pad if there was an okay to proceed signal, or dump themselves in the ocean.
So, yeah, I don't have to have anybody on Earth in order to land, but it would be kind of nice.
"David, we will lose contact during reentry. But I'm confident you'll know how to handle this. Put your parachute on now before reentry begins. Things will get bumpy."
I reluctantly slide the harness over me. The straps are wide enough to go over my suit. Peterson, or whoever packed her bag put a little more thought into this than the voice on the phone.
To make this work, I'm going to have to have my hand on the stick as I watch the altimeter and squeeze the throttle at the right moment, tilting the craft at an angle.
So I don't drop the side hatch on a schoolyard filled with children, I'll have to blow it right when I'm over the bay — a bay I don't even know the name of.
"Okay, I have your contact point. Once you land, go to the train station by the Maracanã football stadium. Someone will meet you there."
"Did you just decide this now?"
"We're trying to adjust to the situation."
"What if there's a problem?" Bennet taught me to always have a backup.
"Hold on… okay, if we lose contact on the ground look for more information from this Twitter handle…"
A text message pops up saying "@CapricornZero."
"Seriously? I'm trusting my life to someone who just decided to create a Twitter account based on an OJ Simpson movie?"
"Focus on reentry, David. That's all you need to worry about now. Once you make it to the station, everything will be fine."
I'm not sure if I like the totality of "fine." But there's no point in arguing that point right now. I'm about to dip down into the atmosphere and experience some severe turbulence.
If I hit it wrong, I can bounce back up and miss my intended landing zone, so I keep a careful eye on the display panel.
It starts to shimmy, then begins to jostle the craft like a speedboat crashing through waves — if the waves were hitting your hull at 17,000 miles an hour.
Below me, the heat shield is starting to absorb all that energy. I pray that the Russians didn't poke a hole in the surface. One tiny gap is all it takes and the whole ship is lost.
While the new Pica-Z material is self-healing and can fill in gaps created by micrometeorite strikes, I'm not sure if it has been tested for mad Russian lasers yet. I'll have to ask the iCosmos engineers if they really thought of every contingency…
The first part of reentry feels like an airplane trying to slow down after a landing — pressing me into my seat as my body's inertia pushes against the spaceship which is now being slowed down by the thin air it's slamming into.
Outside the window I can see the coronal glow of the ionized air. Technically speaking, the air is so hot the electrons leap out of their orbits and fly around like some kind of electric swinger party. Which means basically, I'm a giant neon sign right now.
Now is a good time to close my helmet in the event of a hull puncture that could instantly incinerate me.
I leave the phone next to my ear, although I haven't heard anything from my helper.
Whatever system he was using to communicate with me, ain't going to work during this period. So if I want to mutiny and choose my own path, now is the time.
I scan the options on my control panel and contemplate it.
I could still adjust my reentry and bring myself down somewhere where I speak the language.
It's crunch time, David. Yes, he probably saved me from the Russians, but that doesn't mean he's my pal.
While I trust he doesn't want me to die before getting to the ground, he seems very adamant that I don't link back up with iCosmos or US authorities. And that, my friend, is a tiny bit suspicious.
You have seconds to decide if you're going to say "Olá" or whatever the Brazilian-Portuguese version of hello is supposed to be, or try to land on US soil and pray the kill-sats are imaginary and the Russian ground teams don't reach you in time.
Screw it. Let's see if the senhoras are wearing their string bikinis this time of year.
If I don't die, it'll give me something to think about when I'm in Federal prison or locked up in some Siberian gulag.
14
Fly by Wire
As the Unicorn bashes around like a golfball in a dryer, I keep my heavy hand near the control stick and watch the altimeter, waiting to manually release the drogue chute. Do it too soon and it'll shred itself apart. Wait too long and I'll still be burning the retro rockets as I crater myself in Guanabara Bay — that's the name my satellite map is showing me where my trajectory is taking me.
Flying a spacecraft like the Unicorn isn't quite like anything else. Maybe the closest analogy is a helicopter, but even then the comparisons kind of end beyond up and down controls.
At the root level, all fast-moving vehicles have their similarities — whether it's a Lamborghini or a high-altitude glider. You need to use finely tuned instincts to keep yourself from making a split-second mistake that can end your life.
The first time I ever took control of a flying machine I was seventeen. The end of that summer, a few weeks after I had my eye surgery, I took a bike ride to the local airport on my one day off.
Looking through the chainlink fence I saw an old guy in a windbreaker wiping the windshield of a white and blue twin engine Cessna 310.
"You fly?" he asked me when he saw me watching.
Man, I can't tell you what that question meant to me in that moment. Here I was, a teenager on a rusty beach cruiser who couldn't even afford a car and this guy asked if I was a pilot. For a brief second I could have been a peer — not some Air Force and Navy recruitment office reject.
"No," I replied.
"You want to?" he said, dropping the wash rag into a bucket.
I got my first good look at him. He was tall, tan and in his seventies but looked like a healthy fifty-year-old. There was a confidence about him you see in pro football coaches and generals.
"Yeah. Some day."
"How about today?"
Today? "You mean right now?"
He checked his watch. "A couple more hours of daylight. Why not?"
Up until that moment I had been a bookish kid who played flight simulators and toyed with the idea of being a pilot, but the only ambitious thing I had done was make enough money to get my eyes fixed. Beyond that, it was a kind of "some day" dream.