Squinting into the tubular COAS sextant and out the window, the AC had his hands full of starship. He had to slow their closing speed with exacting precision to stop right at LACE in an orbit perfectly matching LACE’s orbit. Any alignment or velocity error would send Shuttle silently above or below their target, an error grossly costly in propellant. Such an overshoot, called a “wifferdil,” would require enormous amounts of precious RCS fuel to fix.
In close pursuit of LACE over the heartland of the Old Confederacy, the command pilot flew his terminal approach while his copilot read out the numbers of the chase.
“At 99 minutes, Endeavor, you are due north of Atlanta.”
“Thanks, Flight,” the Skipper called. “ ‘Old times there are not forgotten’…”
“ ‘Look away, look away,’ ” Jacob Enright sang inside his helmet over the hiss of the air rushing into his face from the suit’s sealed neckring.
“Think your frog got loose, Will,” the voice from Earth chuckled.
“Hard to argue with that, Flight.”
“Fifty seconds to AOS by Bermuda.”
“Thanks, Houston.”
Endeavor flew 130 nautical miles above the Appalachian Mountains of east Tennessee and western North Carolina. Below, where it was 11:40 in the morning Eastern Time, the mid-day sun of winter was well below the Equator. The white sun cast soft shadows from the northern flanks of the Great Smokey Mountains browned by winter chill. As the mountains slid beneath Shuttle at five miles per second, the ship was almost vertical. The command pilot paused in his final approach to study the bright landscape of his youth. In the high sun angle, terrain features were fuzzy and were washed out by the sun’s glare. Behind his eyes, William McKinley Parker filled in the details of mountain hollows along the Cumberland Plateau dotted with little clapboard houses from whose chimneys smoke would be rising, and of paintless old churches beside ancient graveyards. Behind the battered fences, letters etched into coarsely hewn stones had been erased by wind and weather over the generations. Riding with his head pointed toward the black but starless sky, the Colonel intently searched the holes in the clouds for Kentucky’s white rail fences and old smokehouses.
“Endeavor: At 100 minutes, we have you by Bermuda. You’re two minutes from the coast and three minutes from LOS by Merritt Island. You lose Bermuda in 8 minutes. Target now 300 meters, R-dot at 08 feet per second. Downlink looks fine; Freon temps look fine.”
“Thanks, Flight,” the pilot in command responded. “Looks like a real solid lockup with the target.”
“Copy, AC. We’ll be quiet while you shoot the approach. Still not a word from Soyuz now 400 meters from the target. If Ivan is talking with his own stations, Network is not hearing it. We do have their C-band beacon though.”
“ ’Kay, Flight. You watch the store for us, especially the water loop temps… What you see, Jack?”
“Climbing right up the slot, Skipper.” Enright repeatedly queried the green television about LACE’s position. Ordinarily, Shuttle crews pilot a space rendezvous from the flight station in the rear of the flightdeck. But Shuttle’s first-revolution rendezvous with a crew of two instead of the normal operational complement of four astronauts made a front-seat rendezvous necessary. Enright flew the computer keyboard and the televisions while the AC handflew the starship.
“Easy, Will. R-dot down to 6 FPS. We’re 280 meters out and 300 meters below. Steady as she goes…”
Endeavor rose toward LACE, twinkling like a black jewel in the blinding sunshine.
“Now 200 behind, 250 below… Left just a tad, Skip.”
The AC jerked the translational hand controller in his left hand toward the cabin wall. A pulse toward the right stopped the portside drift as Shuttle crossed directly beneath LACE 150 meters away.
“Easy does it, Will… Braking… Braking.”
Forward pulses from Endeavor’s nose jets slowed Shuttle as she climbed out ahead of LACE.
“Null your plus-Z residuals… Now! Real fine, Skip.”
Lifting the THC handle fired the thrusters in the top of the two tail pods and the upward-firing jets in Shuttle’s nose. The ship matched LACE’s altitude perfectly.
“Combination braking, Skip.”
With the computers choosing the best RCS thrusters to accomplish the commander’s orders from his two control sticks, the pilot halted Endeavor’s drift out ahead of and eastward of LACE. But slowing Endeavor to allow LACE to close their separation distance would actually drop Shuttle back into a lower orbit which would defeat the delicate physics of a space rendezvous. So with each retrograde thrust to slow Shuttle, Mother chose a combination of upward-firing jets to hold Endeavor in line with her target.
“Thirty meters, Skipper. Nail her down.”
With a rapid series of thruster pops, Endeavor stopped ahead of LACE and slightly to the side of Soyuz.
As all three ships flew in precisely matched orbits, 130 nautical miles into the brilliant sky, each vessel was perfectly motionless relative to the others. In coming up and under LACE, Endeavor had kept her glass nose pointing toward LACE. As a result, Shuttle had pitched fully over backward when she came up ahead of LACE at the eastern limit of the range of the tracking station on Bermuda Island.
“Flight: We’re all stop,” a weary Kentucky voice sighed. “Tell the boys in the backroom that M equals one.”
“Good news, Endeavor! We’re about to lose you here. Everyone is breathing easier down here. After you catch your breath, you’re Go to get the payload bay doors open. Well done, Endeavor. Configure…”
9
The white sun burned fiercely upon the black belly of Endeavor as the upside-down starship coasted across the Atlantic.
Eighteen hundred miles of blue sea, out of contact with ground stations, would be crossed in six minutes.
Thirty yards from Shuttle, the cylindrical black hulk of LACE rotated very slowly in the blinding daylight of what was mid-afternoon at sea. Twenty-five yards beyond that, Soyuz floated with her antennae bristling and her twin solar wings glistening in the sun. Energia, the world’s mightiest rocket, had hurled Soyuz aloft twelve hours earlier. Since then, not a single word had been monitored from the Russians by American ground stations.
“And best take a barf bag with you, Jack. Try not to turn your head too abruptly.”
“One blue bag, Skipper. Check.”
Enright prepared to leave his seat. He grinned broadly in anticipation of his first free-flight in weightlessness an hour and fifty minutes since leaving Pad 39-A. He still wore his bulky pressure suit and its white helmet with the anti-laser visor opened so he could breathe cabin air.
“Okay, Number One: Gloves stowed; lap belt and shoulder harness disconnect; comm power off; O2 hoses disconnect; biomedical cables and vent hose disconnect. And, don’t kick me, buddy.”
As the command pilot read off the seat egress checklist, the second in command’s ungloved hands moved swiftly to free himself from his web of hoses, cables, and seat belts.
Gingerly, Enright floated up from his seat in the harsh glare of the cabin floodlights. The copilot pushed his seat backward along its floor tracks as he tucked his legs up into his middle. He heaved his weightless body over the broad center console between his seat and the Colonel, who remained strapped to the left seat.