“Unraveled is the word tonight, Walter. From the day’s dramatic turn of events, the sparse air-ground communications which NASA has relased to us, and then this sudden announcement less than thirty minutes ago that Shuttle is coming home at this very moment — all these events suggest that someone will have some explaining to do in the days to come.”
“Indeed, Dan. And Endeavor is coming down damaged, perhaps fatally… Eric?”
“Yes, Walter. Dan.” The white-haired retired journalist with the elegant Mount Rushmore face spoke with his wonderful voice. His upper lip never moved as his words flowed like warm honey.
“I think that the worst part of this strange day in space is the brevity of this mission not yet ten hours old. The suddenness of this flight and this now, life-threatening crisis announced with so little real information coming out of Houston has somehow cheated us, I think.
“The nation simply has not had time to get to know our brave men up there: Parker and Enright. Who even remembers that Colonel Parker flew the two-man Gemini spacecraft and then Apollo so long ago, back when we still called their tiny craft ‘capsules.’
“Before yesterday, no one really knew about this sudden rush to Intelsat at all. And I cannot help but wonder if anyone is even following this flight at home with us now?
“It’s funny, you know, how an old reporter’s memory works, Walter. Dan was too young, but you and I covered the state funeral for Franklin Roosevelt a lifetime ago. And all three of us covered the national pageant at John Kennedy’s death.
“I just cannot stop thinking about the demonstration which would follow the tragic loss of those three men up there in Endeavor: Parker, Enright, and Karpov. At least the Apollo One astronauts who burned on the launch pad in 1967, Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee and Ed White, America’s first spacewalker, all received a hero’s funeral. The country had the sense of really knowing those three men. But no one knows Parker and Enright.
“Remember when the seven bodies were plucked out of the sea after the Challenger explosion? They could have gotten the national funerals on television. All seven of them; and especially the schoolteacher from New Hampshire. But they really did not. Almost as if NASA wanted everything to go quietly away — quietly into the ground and into fading memory.
“And, strangely, it is not the sadness which this old warhorse remembers, not the feeling of loss, not the mournful tattoo of muffled drums. I remember, instead, the saddest and the most austere sound of alclass="underline" horses’ feet falling crisply upon the street. That cold, stark sound. Even now, when a Manhattan or Boston mounted policeman rides by, I hear again that terrible sound, that sadly grand, manful sound which brings the chill to the back of the neck. Like Shuttle herself thundering into the sky, the sound of six great grays plodding slowly before a gun carriage is a sound which has flesh and which becomes a part of the flesh and the bone of all who hear it.”
The great stoney face frowned.
“Yes, Eric. Let us hope: Not again. The crippled ship Endeavor is out of radio contact now. She will remain so for about six more minutes. Out there, in the darkness, Parker, Enright, and Karpov, the Russian, will be firing their only maneuvering system rocket in one minute. As we have noted, they cannot fire Shuttle’s three main engines, since the fuel for them left when the external fuel tank dropped off after the launch this morning. On our monitors here in New York, we can see Mission Control in Houston. We understand that the new United States Space Command in Colorado is also helping to bring Endeavor safely home to Okinawa, one of her secondary landing sites. As we look in on Mission Control, everyone looks rather quiet.”
Tristan Da Cunha, a tiny group of three South Atlantic islands, were dots on the large video plot board. Above their image, a little bug crept along its curved track line. At the base of the screen, digital numerics read TIG -30 SECONDS.
The big man in dress blues sat alone in his glass house. Sitting in his high-backed chair with his back to the erect Marine sentries, the Admiral slumped with his head bowed. As the clocks reached twenty seconds to single-engine ignition, the old sailor looked down at his thick hands folded in his lap.
“Fifteen seconds, firing command is in.” Parker pressed the EXEC key on the computer keyboard on the center console.
The AC’s voice was calm. After all, he had returned to Earth from Out There three times before this moment.
“Proceed light!”
Enright’s voice was brimming with excitement. As the launch 9 hours and 55 minutes earlier was his first ride of the sacred fire, so this was his first homecoming from the great silence.
Mother’s green faces showed the first re-entry trajectory plot as her warm black boxes hummed confidently with computer program Major Mode 302.
“PAP at 360! Ten, nine…” Enright called.
The television in front of Enright’s swollen face confirmed that the Pneumatic Activation Pressure in the gaseous nitrogen, firing mechanism in the OMS engine’s propellant valves was at ignition pressure.
As Endeavor flew headsdown, tailfirst, and 10,520 statute miles southwest of her Okinawa target, the two fliers read aloud and together the seconds winking on the event timer.
“Four… Three… Two… One… Ignition!”
“Fire in the hole! Looks good.” The copilot’s voice was ecstatic.
As the 6,000 pounds of thrust from the single right OMS rocket fired against the momentum of the 200,000-pound starship, the deceleration was only a gentle nudge of the flight seats against the backs of the three airmen.
“Go, babe!” Enright shouted. “One minute down, four to go. NTO flow rate right on.” The nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer utilization was nominal on Mother’s television.
“Much gentler than I expected, Skip.”
“Should have felt an SPS burn in Apollo. A real eyeballs-in maneuver.” Will Parker once rode Apollo’s Service Propulsion System engine out of lunar orbit. In all the world, only 24 men could say that. Three more moon men in their crippled Apollo 13 mothership had no SPS engine after a near fatal explosion. They rode their Lunar Module engine home, instead, in 1971.
“Sorry, Will. I wasn’t old enough then.”
The AC chuckled.
“Got a little out-of-plane building. Anything, Jack?”
The single engine on the far right corner of Shuttle’s up-side-down tail labored to compensate for the off-center forces of its three tons of thrust. The flight director needles on Parker’s instruments displayed a slight side-to-side error in trajectory.
“Negative, Skipper. Still fat inside the cross-range envelope. Hang tight. PC at 125. Oh, sweet, sweet bird!”
The OMS engine combustion chamber pressure was normal. Shuttle’s cross-range landing capability allows her to land at a site nearly 1,000 miles on either side of her ground track. Any reasonable, cross-range error will be adjusted as she steers through the upper atmosphere at a velocity of twenty times the speed of sound.
“Three minutes; one to go, Will. OMS mixture ratio 1 point 65. Right on!”
The single OMS rocket continued its 298-second firing. The engine burned 14 pounds of nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer and 9 pounds of monomethylhyrazine for each one-foot-per-second change in Endeavor’s speed. Gaseous, high-pressure helium forced the caustic propellants into the engine. Inside the engine’s combustion chamber, the propellants burned at 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Seventy seconds to go, Will… 68, 67, 66. Positive nose RCS, now!”
Enright noted that with 66 seconds left in the OMS deorbit burn, an early OMS shutdown would not be fatal. After this moment, the additional rocket power needed to leave orbit could be provided by turning Shuttle around and firing the three, forward-firing, nose thrusters for 150 seconds. This is the maximum allowable continuous thrusting time for the reaction control system jets in the ship’s nose. A 2½-minute burn of the three RCS engines firing together has the same impulse as one OMS engine firing for 66 seconds.