“Best tell Mother, Jack.”
Without words, the copilot in the right seat which his floating body barely touched tapped at the keyboard’s black keys. The computers reached out into the black vacuum with electronic fingers which wrapped around LACE’S black body.
“See anything, Jack?” Both men peered into the darkness.
“Can’t even see the stars with these floodlights in here.”
Seventy-six minutes out, Endeavor glided 720 miles east of Samoa toward the Equator 900 miles to the north. At the Earth’s far eastern comer, the curvature of the horizon was visible as a hair-thin band of pink with blackness above and below. Because Shuttle flew bottoms-up, the curving pink lines of their South Pacific sunrise looked from the flightdeck like an airy smile with the Earth’s reddening limb curving up at its edges.
“Mornin’, Skipper.”
“And to you, Number One, ’Bout time to go out to fetch the newspaper from the front porch.”
“Watch that first step, Will.”
Both pilots chuckled 14 minutes from their next ground station contact. They watched the upside-down horizon turn quickly from pink to red to orange as the sun’s white disk erupted over the edge of the world with an explosion of blinding daylight like a magnesium flare.
From the top of their helmets, the pilots pulled a tinted visor down over their closed faceplates advertised as laser-proof.
Far below, the sea was still black and colorless as the ship raced in daylight toward the sun. On the South Pacific islands beneath Endeavor’s white backside, the horizon was only three miles away and the new sun had a long way to go before it climbed over the edge to awaken the gold-skinned islanders. For Shuttle, the horizon where the sun sat was a thousand miles distant. Endeavor flew in daylight which the palm trees below would not feel for another hour.
Two minutes after the dazzling sunrise 720 miles northwest of Tahiti, the black glass bricks on the underside of Endeavor’s wings and body were baked by full daylight. The flash evaporators sweated profusely as the freon in Shuttle’s veins warmed to the blinding sunlight.
Flying upside down and racing over the gray sea 80 minutes from home, Enright’s window faced north and the left seat pointed toward the south. The copilot squinted outside to search for Christmas Island 750 miles to the northwest. He could see only endless green sea in morning twilight. Wisps of clouds dotted tiny islands where turtles and crabs were the only life stretching in the morning sunshine. The clouds covered the islands but not the ocean. Two minutes and 600 miles from crossing the Equator, the upside-down command pilot squinted east toward the dozens of cloud-covered islands of French Polynesia.
The pilots watched their green television screens, which depicted their target ahead of them and moving eastward with Endeavor. The shuttle was lower than LACE, which gave the pilots a faster orbital speed than their target. As their range closed, the glass starship would catch LACE from below and would move steadily upward toward the laser satellite. During the final moments of the chase, during Terminal Phase Initiate, Shuttle would pass underneath LACE and would end the game of space tag by coming up east of LACE and ahead of it. The final rendezvous would then be shot from a position in front of LACE in a matched tandem orbit.
“Rev Two, Skipper,” Enright called as Endeavor crossed the Equator northbound 82 minutes into the mission.
Unlike prior American manned spacecraft whose orbits were numbered from the west longitude meridian of Cape Canaveral, Shuttle orbits, or revolutions, are counted from the point where Shuttle crosses the Equator while flying from south to north. As Endeavor sped over the Equator, she began her second Earth revolution, although her position along the orbital track was still 4,000 nautical miles west of Cape Canaveral. Her second revolution thus began after only five-sixths of a complete orbit around the earth.
“Eight minutes to acquisition of California voice, Jack.” Endeavor would travel 2,400 miles during that eight minutes over open water before hearing from the ground. They pursued LACE alone with Mother’s warm black boxes at the helm. Their first United States landfall would be Texas in thirteen more minutes after a pass over northern Mexico.
The white sun was low in the eastern sky. On the blue-green sea 128 nautical miles beneath the inverted shuttle, it was 7:30 in the morning. With Endeavor’s nose and black belly between the cockpit and the morning sun, the flightdeck went dark gray, just dark enough to make reading impossible. The center annunciator panel’s forty lights illuminated white, yellow, and red for an instant. Then the warning lights and all of the cabin floodlights went out.
There was only the gray gloom and a silence absolute as the lights and the three televisions and the cabin fans went dead.
The two pilots sat quietly in the silent semi-darkness. To keep their weightless arms from floating against the instrument panels, the pilots tucked their hands into their chest straps. There were no simulations for Mother suffering a stroke.
“So I was jest wond’rin’, Jacob,” the AC drawled calmly, like any old farmer talking over the back fence with his cousin from ’cross the creek.
“Yeah, Skipper,” the copilot asked with his very best, downhome “so how’s your old mare?” voice.
“Meant to mention it: Did you pay the ’lectric bill ’fore we left this mornin’?”
“Didn’t have time, Skipper. Do it when we get home.”
“Reckon that explains it,” said the Colonel in the half darkness.
“Think we could mail it in?”
“Think you can find the mailbox, Number One?”
Both airmen chuckled in the air which was quickly becoming stuffy without cabin and suit fans.
“Think Mother’s state vectors are off the line, too?”
“Don’t even think it, Will.”
The two pilots abandoned their gallows humor. Parker reached over his head to Panel Overhead-13.
“Let’s see, Jack. Circuit breakers, Essential Bus 1BC are all closed, rows A and B. Essential Bus 2CA, breakers closed. And Essential Bus 3AB, also all closed. She’s alive here. Try your side, Jack.”
Enright felt for the long instrument panel, Right-1, by his right elbow. He tried to get his face closer to the barely visible array of 96 switches, pushbuttons, and circuit breakers on the single 12-by-32-inch electrical systems panel braced to the cockpit wall.
“Okay, Skipper. AC controller, all nine breakers, still closed. Let’s put AC bus sensors One, Two, and Three, from auto-trip to off. Inverter AC-1 to on, AC-2 to on, and AC-3 to on. Let’s try control bus power, DC Main A to reset, DC Main Bravo to reset, and Main Charlie to reset.”
“Damn” was all Parker said when the cabin lights blinked on, along with the three green televisions. The hum of the cabin fans filled the stale flightdeck.
“How can air from a bottle taste so sweet, Skip?”
“Amen, Brother Jacob.”
“What about Mother?”
The command pilot watched his attitude indicator ball swing upside down as the ship’s three inertial measurement units caught their electronic breath. The digital numbers on the Mission Elapsed Time clock located just above the forward windows blinked on showing 00:01:29:30 and counting up. The pilot in the right seat checked his wristwatch sewn into the sleeve of his pressure suit. His watch read 10:29 Houston time, in agreement with the MET clock. Mother had not missed a beat.
Enright pulled a clipboard from beneath his seat. On it were a complex series of graphs and square grids full of numbers. The pilots called it a Buzz Board in honor of retired, Apollo astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, the man who followed Neil Armstrong down the ladder of the lunar lander Eagle at Tranquility Base, the Moon. On Aldrin’s first spaceflight on board the two-man spacecraft Gemini-12 back in 1966, Astronaut Aldrin had concocted his own, long-hand tables for executing a space rendezvous with an Agena target satellite by eyeball-only. The other astronauts laughed and dubbed the quiet, intense airman, “Doctor Rendezvous.” But on Gemini-12, the ship’s rendezvous radar failed before astronauts James Lovell and Buzz Aldrin could catch their Agena target in the heavens. Aldrin pulled out his home-grown charts, and with them, Twelve shot a perfect rendezvous and docking without radar help. No one laughed after that performance.