No one moved. Enright dared not look at the NASA brass surrounding him with wide eyes. But he did turn to face Colonel Parker at his elbow.
When William McKinley Parker nodded his genuine pleasure, his smiling partner felt knighted. At long last, Jacob Enright knew that he had arrived. He was one of The Icemen.
“You put Neil Armstrong’s ‘one small step’ to shame, Number One!” the tall pilot laughed with his arm around Enright’s shoulders. “Or should I say ‘Tonto?’ ”
“‘Number One’ still sounds just fine to me, Skipper,” Enright smiled. The chicken-wire elevator bounced to a stop 180 feet above the concrete base of launch pad 39-A. The pair in blue flightsuits stepped into the White Room wrapped tightly around the nose section of the erect Shuttle Endeavor.
Only the side of the vertical starship could be seen in the White Room’s sterile, surgical atmosphere. The side hatch through which they would crawl tomorrow was open wide. Thick covers protected the one-foot wide, round window in the center of the thick, crew-access hatch. One story higher in the 20-story-high tower, engineers in airtight helmeted safety suits serviced the Reaction Control System’s sixteen jet thrusters in Endeavor’s black tiled nose. As soon as Parker and Enright leave the White Room, the two RCS tanks in Endeavor’s nose will be topped with 930 pounds of monomethl-hydrazine fuel in one tank and 1488 pounds of nitrogentetroxide oxidizer in the other tank. The two small helium tanks in the nose RCS pod which pressurize the two propellant tanks were already full of gas.
“A work of art, Number One,” the pilot in command said as he touched the ship’s heat-absorbing, pure glass tiles around the open side hatch. The glass brick felt like a styrofoam coffee cup. After other flights into space by Endeavor, the coded fabrication numbers etched into each brick of silica remained clearly readable.
Beyond the White Room’s walls, technicians were installing the many explosive charges which power the inflight separation mechanism on the two Solid Rocket Boosters. Each SRB, 149 feet long and 12 feet thick, each packed with one million pounds of rubbery, high explosive fuel, would do their work tomorrow for 122 seconds before being cast off into the sea. Strapped to Endeavor’s belly, also unseen beyond the gantry wall, the empty external tank, 155 feet long and 28 feet wide, with 36,000 inches of welds, was being serviced. The ET would be filled during the pre-dawn darkness with 1,337,358 pounds of liquid oxygen oxidizer and 224,458 pounds of liquid hydrogen fuel, each super-cold at nearly 250 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.
“Always awesome, Will.”
The taller pilot nodded.
“When you boys are done with your fifty-cent tour, after you’ve kicked the tires, we can taxi up to the pumps to fill ‘em up.” The closeout chief smiled warmly at his crew. One hundred feet below, technicians prepared to fill each of the maneuvering rocket engine pods on either side of Endeavor’s tail with 9,000 pounds of fuel and 14,866 pounds of oxidizer for each of the two Orbital Maneuvering System engines. These OMS motors, one in each tail cone, each generating three tons of rocket thrust, would push Shuttle into orbit after the three Space Shuttle Main Engines, SSME’s, have burned up their fuel in the external tank after 8½ minutes of powered flight. Each rear pod also must be topped with another 2,418 pounds of fuel and oxidizer to drive each OMS pod’s 14 reaction control system jets used to maintain Shuttle’s attitude in space.
“Sure, Chief. Fill ’er up.”
“Will do, Colonel. My boys have been hanging by their feet for 48 hours inside there, refitting the payload bay for you. She’ll be achin’ to fly come mornin’. The PAM is already on board.”
“For sure, Chief,” Enright smiled. “Right and tight.”
“In the bank, Jack,” the chief waved as he crawled into the ship’s open, round hatch.
“So what do you think, Skipper?” Enright inquired as the pad elevator creaked toward the ground. The refurbished Pad 39-A had been used for the manned Apollo moon flights.
“Shell rise to it. We’re goin’ to do it, Jack,” the Colonel drawled with cheery resolve.
“Right and tight, Skipper.”
In the Kennedy Space Center van which carried the new prime crew to the Cape’s three-mile runway built for shuttle landings, the two fliers were joined by the Launch Vehicle Test Conductor.
“I half thought we couldn’t pull this one off, you know.”
“And now, Rob?”
“We’re going to do it,” Robert Meckler said with resolution. “Four days of rewriting the text book, and we’re really going to do it. Even I’m amazed. What do you boys call her, the Glass Lady? Your bird is some lady. We gutted her innards in two days and ran a full plugs-out, dry countdown yesterday. All she did was purr along without a whimper.”
“All you got to do is talk sweetly to her iron heart, buddy,” the Colonel said warmly. Sitting by the window, his tired face was revived with red life by the brilliant and warm Florida sunshine.
“What about you two? You both look tired. You’ve got a real workload up there tomorrow — and with the Russians right beside you breathing down your necks.”
“Oh, we’re up for it,” Enright bubbled. “It’s just the night before the big game. Team is bound to look antsy. We’re ready. Ready and then some. Aye, Skipper?”
“You betcha, Number One.” The tall man soaking in the afternoon sunshine meant it. The clear sky, the clean salty air, the pad crew doing double-duty, the firing room tension before going Up There again, all were cathartic for Will Parker. In the humid air full of Go, the command pilot felt reborn, ready to be about doing a pilot’s business. The gray-eyed colonel with the sun in his weathered face was the young airman framed on his livingroom wall. He could feel the hairs on the back of his furrowed neck. “Right and tight, Jack.”
“LACE won’t be any picnic, Will. Hear about last night?”
“What about, Rob?” the Colonel asked the white sun.
“Picked off one of our earth resources, imaging satellites about two o’clock this morning,” the engineer recited grimly.
The two pilots beside him said nothing. The purple sky was too full of Can-Do for talk.
“Everything out and dirty,” Colonel Parker called from the left seat of the Cape’s Gulfstream jet. The sleek corporate aircraft is the shuttle approach and landing trainer. Heavily modified for generating shuttlelike landings, the Gulfstream had a shuttle instrument panel in front of the command pilot’s left seat. Wing flaps and slats provided so much drag that the jet comes in for landing with her nose 20 degrees below the horizon, the aerobatic approach angle of the returning shuttle. The approach glide path is seven times steeper than for an unmodified jet.
With wheels down and locked, with everything but the crew’s laundry hanging down from the wings, and with her two jets generating 91 percent reverse thrust, the Gulfstream’s descent was unnervingly steep and rapid.
“Looks good, Aircraft Commander.”
“Roger, Flight,” the Colonel drawled as he manipulated the Shuttle control stick between his knees. “CSS real crisp.”
“Copy positive control stick steering.”
“MLS centered, Flight.”
“Copy you tracking inbound, front course, on the microwave landing system. Cross wind off your left, Will. Altimeter 30 point 01; wind 240 at 07.”