“Got the end effector secured to the grapple probe on the plasma package. About ready.”
“Super, Jack.”
Parker glanced over Enright’s right shoulder at the twin television monitors. The top screen was full of the grapple rod at the top of the package which was locked to the floor of the bay within its protective pallet.
“Ready to deploy the PDP, Will.”
“It’s your baby, Number One.”
Enright rechecked the RMS panel before his chest. The small lighted windows at the upper right corner confirmed the secure capture by the end effector of the grapple handle atop the plasma diagnostics package.
With his left hand, Enright turned the RMS mode knob to auto sequence Three and the AUTO-3 light illuminated white. The AC threw a switch to release the hold-down clamps at the base of the PDP housing. Enright flicked the spring-loaded, proceed toggle switch and Mother slowly flew the RMS arm upward.
The 353-pound, 26-inch-long, 42-inch-diameter cylinder, built by the University of Iowa, slowly lifted out of the OSS pallet which held it. The PDP stopped at the arm’s first, automatic pause point five feet above the bay floor.
“Looks real clean, Jack.”
“And Mother likes it… Let’s fly with it, Skip. Goin’ to manual-augmented.”
As Endeavor dashed in daylight across the Equator northeastward to begin Revolution Three at 02 hours, 51 minutes out, Enright powered up the translational hand controller for his left hand and the rotational hand controller for his right hand.
The Aircraft Commander busied himself with the aft console for the digital autopilot making certain that the RCS thrusters held Shuttle’s trim with the nose pointing northward, perpendicular to their ground track, and with Endeavor’s belly facing east toward the rising sun. The DAP held the ship’s left wing pointed straight down toward the brilliant sea.
Enright, with Mother’s help, steered the end effector with the PDP attached at the far end of the 50-foot-long RMS arm. The computer raised the PDP over the bay’s left side toward LACE which rolled slowly in the blinding sunlight 30 yards away. With the RMS mode selector in manual-augmented-orbiter-loaded, the RMS gently steered the PDP toward LACE.
“Zero point two feet per second,” Enright called as his hands worked with Mother’s silicon brain to fly the plasma-sensing package toward LACE where the PDP would sniff for LACE’s wake of radiation and electrical fields.
The arm hoisted the plasma sensor 40 feet above the open bay. The two pilots could only watch it through the two overhead windows above their rear work station. When the arm stopped at a pause point, Enright commanded the EEU to maneuver slowly outboard until the package had been waved in the direction of the end of Shuttle’s port wingtip. From there, the arm would ferry the package over the open bay doors toward the opposite wingtip. Outside their windows and on the television screen, the pilots watched the PDP canister.
“Endeavor, Endeavor: Colorado with you by Hawaii at 02 hours, 53 minutes. With you four minutes. Your temperatures are Go. And we’re looking at PDP data coming downlink.”
“Mornin’, Hawaii,” the tall flier called. “What do you see from the PDP?”
“Backroom says you’re plowing through a wall of electromagnetic garbage… Drop your visors immediately if they’re up.”
The two airmen looked at each other through their laser-proof visors.
“Garbage, Flight?” Enright inquired, pressing his mike button.
“Like boating down the Cuyahoga in Cleveland, buddy,” the radio crackled.
10
“What about a magnetic wake? Why is that serious, as problems go?”
“The best we had hoped for, Colonel, was a simple mechanical failure with LACE.” Admiral Hauch’s large frame was rumpled and exhausted. Behind him, the clock on the wall of the basement bunker read 53 minutes past noon Washington time. Beside it, a second clock face read 02:53. Beneath that clock hung the words “MISSION ELAPSED TIME, SHUTTLE.”
“A breakdown in LACE’s flux generator is leaking a wake of magnetic energy.” The Admiral slouched in his high-backed chair. He fumbled with his thick fingers and looked at his sweating hands instead of at the ten grim faces around the large table set upon the glass floor. “Any other problem with LACE would have meant that we only had to bring her down at a reasonable opportunity — hopefully before she takes a pot shot at Endeavor, or God forbid at Soyuz. But magnetic problems mean that now we are on a deadline, an absolute deadline. General Gordon, you should take it from here…”
The General from the Air Force and commander of the new U.S. Air Force Space Command from Colorado Springs nodded from across the table.
“Admiral, a magnetic disturbance inside LACE means that the bird is greatly susceptible to external magnetic influences. Any sudden magnetic disturbance in space could trigger another round of stray firings of the laser…”
“Can these magnetic disturbances be predicted — disturbances from space, I mean?”
“Not from space, no, Colonel… But from Earth, yes, and predicted to the second.”
“From Earth, General?”
“Yes. Michael, what do you have?”
“General.” A tall engineer in civilian clothes took over. Group Captain Michael Dzurovcin looked tired from his dawn flight to Washington from the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory at Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts. “We can predict a serious — very serious — magnetic perturbance when the vehicles cross the SAA…”
“The SAA?”
“Yes. The South Atlantic Anomaly — a huge area due east of South America which is the center of gigantic magnetic storms. At Endeavor’s present altitude, the SAA stretches from Uruguay in South America all the way across the Atlantic to Cape Town, South Africa. And it’s a thousand nautical miles wide, from latitude 30 degrees South down to 48 degrees South. It was the South Atlantic Anomaly which caused one of the early failures on the Hubble Space Telescope. By June 1990, after only five weeks in space, NASA figured out that the Anomaly’s intense radiation interference was actually destroying computer memory on board the telescope. Memory bits which were supposed to be off were switched on, and on-bits were switched off by the radiation fields…
“When LACE rides into that area, it will be like she hit a wall — a wall of magnetic interference. Our guess is that when LACE enters the region, no ship close to her will come out of it.”
“When does LACE cross this area of the South Atlantic?”
“Our vehicles, and Soyuz, squarely enter the SAA for the first time during Shuttle’s sixth revolution at mission elapsed time of 8 hours and 16 minutes. They’ll all be inside the Anomaly on that pass for nine minutes. They cross again on Shuttle’s seventh revolution at 9 hours and 43 minutes. On that transit, they are inside for a very long 14 minutes. These are actual entries into the zone. But they also make a very close brush alongside the SAA, within 75 miles, on Shuttle’s rev five at 6 hours and 47 minutes mission elapsed time. That proximity pass lasts only about one minute.”
“Tell us, Michael, is there any way LACE could pass over the Anomaly on rev seven for a quarter of an hour without being activated?”
“Admiral, in our judgment at Hanscom, she won’t survive the rev six transit without the laser very likely to fire. And just grazing the zone on rev five for 70 seconds has us worried. Very worried.”
The weary engineer studied the clock on the wall behind the Admiral, who had not lifted his face.
“Admiral, we have another five hours and eleven minutes till that rev six direct entry into the Anomaly for Shuttle to disable LACE. After that, in our best guess, LACE will probably vaporize anything within fifty miles of her… And that assumes we can survive the close pass on rev five in about four hours from now. Going to be real tight.”