“I wish you luck… next year on the water, Nikolai.”
The big man blinked moist eyes at the back of the bilious bureaucrat who stumbled toward his dark car.
“With you, Endeavor, at 03 plus 27. Your downlink is clean and crisp.”
“Thanks, Flight,” the AC answered from his command seat in the front of the flightdeck. As Shuttle had approached the western edge of the listening range of the Dakar station in Senegal, the command pilot had strapped himself into his front left seat. There, he was powering up the ship’s celestial sextant, the Crew Optical Alignment Sight. The COAS would back up the two star trackers in Shuttle’s nose for aligning the inertial measurement units’ platforms by a star sight.
“COAS warmin’ up, Flight,” the AC reported from his seat over blue sea 800 miles west of Africa. With Enright standing at the aft station where he handflew the remote arm, the AC forward had to make the slowest possible attitude maneuvers to track his stars after sundown five minutes away. Only instantaneous firings from Endeavor’s smallest RCS thrusters would protect the outstretched manipulator arm from dangerous strain during maneuvers.
At the aft crew station, Enright steered the deployed RMS arm back toward Shuttle’s tall tail fin. Stretching the arm outright such that none of the joints were flexed would lessen the swaying moments induced in the 50-foot-long arm as Endeavor changed positions to search for navigation stars for the COAS sight. The tubular COAS periscope mounted before Parker’s face was fixed in Shuttle and could not move to search the sky. The two star-trackers gimbaled about in their shoe-box-size containers to search on their own for bright stars.
“Endeavor: Colorado via Dakar. Backroom says the field spikes recorded by the PDP may be from a communications laser on board Soyuz. Probably a blue-green laser similar to our submarine laser communications.”
“Oh,” the AC mumbled as he worked Mother’s black keyboard. His mind befuddled by horse tranquilizer, he failed to press his mike button.
“You copy that, Endeavor?”
“Gotcha, Flight,” Enright called from the rear station.
“Roger, Jack,” the voice called remoted through the African coastal station near the already-darkening eastern horizon. Evening twilight came to the starship sixteen times faster than as seen from Earth.
Three and one-half hours into the mission on Shuttle’s third revolution, Endeavor crossed the west coast of Africa. In four minutes, the ship would lead LACE and Soyuz back out over open sea as they left Africa’s western bulge for the Atlantic west of Africa-proper. For the blink of an eye, Endeavor was directly over the tracking station at Dakar 150 statute miles below. Then she was gone.
“Endeavor, we have another word for you from the backroom boys: One of our recon survey satellites in synchronous orbit 23,000 miles above you is getting some kind of ultra-light, molecular out-gassing near Luanda, Angola. Could very well be a missile venting hydrogen vapors. No word from our guys in trenchcoats on this. We want you to execute a roll maneuver using DAP in vernier-B to take a quick look when you overfly the area at 03 plus 39 plus 40. You should be wrapping up your P-52 alignment by then. Copy the time?”
“Got it, Flight,” the AC drawled from his left seat in the forward cockpit. “Copy that way-point and we’ll roll after the IMU sights. Shadows really getting longer down there.”
The command pilot’s visored head was close to the two side windows over his left shoulder. With Endeavor flying on her port side with her nose pointing north, the pilot looked over his left shoulder straight down to the dusky African countryside. Shuttle cruised into the veil of evening twilight and sunset over Guinea. The small nation Ivory Coast drifted silently into view in the waning daylight at a speed of 300 miles per minute.
Not more than four feet behind Parker, Enright stood at his station at the portside rear bulkhead, where he stabilized the remote arm for the Colonel’s navigation maneuvers. The copilot floated erect with his knees bent and his boots locked to the floor. He strained his neck muscles against his helmet’s neckring to raise his face to the square window above his body.
Peering into the darkness beyond the overhead window, Enright watched the sun flatten upon the far western horizon. Between the twilight horizon’s band of orange-and-blue ribbons at sunset, he could see clearly the black and slowly rolling hulk of LACE. On the death ship’s far side, the silent Soyuz glowed orange as the dying sun lapped at the long wings of solar electrical cells along the flanks of Soyuz.
As Shuttle flew into the darkness of the planet’s nighttime shadow, the AC ordered Mother and the digital autopilot to roll Endeavor rightside-up.
Just beyond Parker’s triple-pane, forward windows, the two star-trackers scanned the moist blackness of heaven for navigation stars memorized by Mother. “Where are we by the eternal stars?” beeped Mother at the speed of light over her wire ganglia. And the mass memory unit replied: “Ten degrees north latitude by eleven degrees west longitude at 03 hours and 32 minutes since leaving home.” Armed with her dead-reckoning bearings guessed by memory, Mother commanded the minus-Z tracker to look straight up for the faint star Markab in the sprawling constellation Pegasus. The star-tracker found the pinpoint of light overhead. The minus-Y tracker just ahead of Parker’s left shoulder looked sideways toward the black western sky as Endeavor flew heads-up with her nose pointed to the north. Mother ordered this tracker to look for the star Altair halfway to the horizon in the constellation Aquila.
Mother chose her stars based upon her electronic dialogue with her three inertial measurement units, which felt where Shuttle ought to be. Mother found her stars in the corners of the black sky where her magnetic memory told her to look. This meant that the uncorrected IMU alignment was within half a degree of true.
Working his computer keyboard, Parker gave Mother permission to convert her star sights into torque angles which command the IMU gyroscopes’ gimbals to swing just enough to sense true local vertical and local horizontal. Each IMU was aligned with a slightly different bearing to allow cross-checks among them until the next IMU alignment.
“P-52 complete, Jack,” the AC called by intercom to Enright behind him. “Right on, Number One. No need to recompute the reference stable member matrix.”
“Roger, Skip,” Enright said. “So where are we?”
“Right here,” the AC chuckled.
“That’s a comfort, Will,” Enright laughed.
“Ah, Flight? The IMU is aligned all balls.”
“Copy, Endeavor. Real fine. LOS Dakar momentarily. We remind you to roll heads down before Angola in six minutes to check on their activities down there. You’re Go to stow the RMS and to begin EVA prep to get Jack outside by the States. At 03 plus 34, you look fine all vitals…”
The ground’s voice broke up in a wave of static as Shuttle sped over the horizon.
Shuttle coasted out over open water after passing Abdijan, the capital of Ivory Coast, West Africa. Leaving Africa’s western bulge behind, the ship would cross open sea for six minutes and 1,800 miles before returning to the land mass of central Africa. Radio silence would last ten minutes before acquisition of signal, AOS, through the NASA station in Botswana near the city of Gaborone, 190 miles northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa.
With Endeavor flying rightside-up, Parker peered into the COAS periscope recticle before his face. He had raised his helmet faceplate to get his eye closer to the small mirror at the base of the Crew Optical Alignment Sight. As an old sailor, the AC could not resist consulting his space sextant. Gently nudging Shuttle’s nose among the stars, he found the star overhead which Mother had shot. Since the COAS can only look overhead, he could only use it to check the minus-Z startracker which also looks only upward. Working his computer keyboard, he fed his eyeball sighting from the COAS to the computer’s navigation and control programs. The left of the three green televisions on the center forward instrument panel blinked and confirmed that Mother’s sight was reliable. “Man in the loop,” the real pilots in the astronaut corps called it. Parker inserted an airman’s eyeball into the loop at every opportunity.