With 90 minutes to go, the two airmen stood quietly beneath the purple and cloudless sky. The fliers were in no hurry to end the peculiar brotherhood of their hectic training. They stood side by side and they looked upward to the white starship, their bird, their Glass Lady. From her tail, plumes of white liquid hydrogen vapors, 250 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, swirled in the sunshine at the black nozzles of Endeavor’s three Rocketdyne main engines.
Colonel Parker looked hard at his main engines. Before Challenger’s first flight on Shuttle Six in April 1983, the ship had been grounded for four months when all three of her main engines were found to have cracked fuel lines. Five years before that setback, a report by the National Research Council Assembly of Engineers had warned NASA about shuttle engine weaknesses. But their warning had gotten lost in the shuffle of federal paper. And in June 1984, the STS-12 countdown for Shuttle Discovery’s maiden flight had ticked down flawlessly to minus six seconds from lift-off when her main engines ignited for 2½ seconds and then burped stone-cold dead — four seconds before the solid rocket boosters were to fire. Shuttle Discovery went nowhere. Had Discovery’s main engines failed on Shuttle’s twelfth mission only five seconds later — after the solids had ignited — Discovery and her ship’s complement of five men and one beautiful dark-eyed woman very likely would have become one great grease spot.
Standing at Endeavor’s tail, Parker and Enright took the communion of their ship, whose black tiled nose pointed skyward. Standing quietly, with their pilots’ eyes and hearts they kicked the tires.
A ship of the line poised to rip open the sky is a living thing, a breathing thing, a pregnant thing. Like a roundly pregnant mare searching for her private meadow in which to foal, a fueled starship fumes potently, anxious to leave behind in her white-hot wake the probing fingers of her keepers.
There is an urgent noise about a spacebound vessel at the ready. Pipes whine and clank like a pot-bellied stove as super-cold propellants settle and flow in tankage and plumbing. Vents and purge ducts belch frothy steam and icy vapors as the coldest cold sends plumes percolating into the humid air.
To describe Shuttle as weights and measures is to describe birth as only ganglia, neurons, and synapses. The shuttle, like the human organism which birthed her, is greater than the sum of her parts.
Two solid rocket boosters, the SRB’s, strapped to Shuttle’s external tank, stand silently. Each of these 149-foot-long silos holds 1 million pounds of explosive. Once lighted, each SRB spits 2,700,000 pounds of thrust for 122 seconds from the largest solid rocket motor ever built, the largest moveable rocket nozzle ever fired, at nozzle temperatures in flight of 5,600 degrees Fahrenheit. Words pale. The energy of the two SRB’s is known only by their vibration, which starts in the heels of an observer standing five miles away and travels up his body until the teeth ache.
The great external tank sweats frost from its 66,809 pounds of metal pores, where 140,000 gallons of supercold liquid oxygen sit atop 380,000 gallons of super-cold liquid hydrogen. Inside, some 1,561,816 pounds of propellant churn with the same energy with which God fashioned heaven’s first molecule of water.
The scent of Go excreted from Shuttle’s glands, like deer musk in November, rides the still, humid air. Go is in the wind, it clamors in the ears, it penetrates the steel launch tower, and it reverberates into the earth and into the hearts of Shuttle’s stewards. The Go engulfs a body until it sweats out moistly on the palms.
With their eyes and their legs, Parker and Enright felt the presence of their ship enter their bodies, surge through their plasma, and tingle their nerve endings.
“Let’s do it, Number One,” Colonel Parker, Astronaut, said firmly through his open faceplate as he led Enright into the gantry elevator.
“Right behind you, Skipper.”
Atop the launch tower in the White Room, 147 feet above the sand, Parker and Enright were met at the catwalk leading to Endeavor by the former prime crew of the mission.
The two suited fliers stood awkwardly before the dispossessed crew who had emerged from Endeavor’s flightdeck.
“We’re ahead of the timeline on the flightdeck, switch position protocol,” the bumped command pilot smiled lamely.
“Thanks, buddy,” Colonel Parker nodded.
“This is from us ’cause you and Jack need it.” The displaced mission commander reached behind toward his own crewmate. The pilot handed Parker and Enright a new, yard-long, toilet plunger with a bright bow festooning its wooden handle.
Colonel Parker held the offering as he and Jack Enright studied it with mock gravity and dignity.
“I know just the place for this,” Parker said with sober resolve through his open faceplate.
“Knew you would, Will,” the pilot in coveralls replied, unable to restrain his broad grin.
The momentary tension evaporated with a four-way laugh among brothers in the humid morning air.
Enright on his hands and knees crouched through Endeavor’s open side hatch. Parker followed him along the narrow Crew Access Arm which reached from the White Room to Endeavor’s glass side. The former crew followed and stopped outside the open hatch.
As Parker bent low to squeeze on all fours through the hatch, his colleague, whose seat had been pirated, reached to Parker to retrieve his non-flight-rated gift, the beribboned Plumbers’ Friend.
Colonel Parker did not hand it back through the hatch. Instead, he pushed the plunger inside to Enright.
“This is mine,” Will Parker smiled warmly.
The serious pilot outside on the catwalk nodded as he peered into the hatch where Endeavor’s mid-deck basement cabin was crowded with her two pilots and two closeout technicians anxious to see the crew take their seats upstairs on the flightdeck.
With the two astronauts and their technicians standing in the mid-deck with Endeavor sitting vertical on Pad 39, the four men actually stood on the mid-deck’s back walclass="underline" the “floor” of the upright shuttle. Secured to the wall of the mid-deck, which will be the ceiling when Endeavor is right-side up, was a 280-pound canister pointed toward the open hatchway. The canister contained the shuttle escape pole dreamed up after the Challenger explosion. Should any shuttle experience serious trouble and if the pilots could wrestle the ship into a normal glide toward the ground, the pole would allow the desperate crew to bail out. At least that is what the advertisement says.
As the crippled shuttle coasted toward the ground, the crew would use the pole on the mid-deck ceiling to abandon ship. First, the pilot would have to get his glider down to 40,000 feet. There, the crew would depressurize the cabin which is now allowed since everyone since Challenger wears the heavy pressurized suits. At 31,000 feet, 70 explosive bolts in the mid-deck hatch would be blown and the hatch jettisoned. The spring-loaded escape pole would then be released to extend nine feet outside the hatch-way. When Shuttle reached 20,000 feet, the commander would put her on automatic pilot with instructions to the black boxes to keep Shuttle level at 200 knots flying speed. Each crew member would then hook on to the pole like a telephone man’s safety belt along a telephone pole. They would then jump at 15-second intervals. By scooting down the pole, the pole would steer the evacuating fliers away from the massive wing, missing the wing by 18 feet. The astronauts would then parachute to Earth, arriving about one mile apart.
Parker and Enright grinned at the dubious escape pole installed more for the press after Challenger than for the Shuttle. Some say the astronaut corps calls the nine-foot escape pole “Big Johnson.”
“Bring her back alive, Will,” the displaced pilot called into the open hatch.