Instead of that rickety ladder, Sam drove a cherry picker, across the hangar floor and lifted us in our space suits, two by two like Noah’s passengers, up to the hatch of the orbiter. The male attendant went up first and was there at the hatch to help us step inside the passenger cabin and clomp down the aisle to our assigned seats.
Sam and I were the last couple hoisted up. With the visor of my suit helmet open, I could smell the faint odor of bananas in the cherry-picker’s cab. It made me wonder where Sam had gotten the machine, and how soon he had to return it.
After we were all strapped in, Sam came striding down the cabin, crackling with energy and enthusiasm. He stood up at the hatch to the flight deck and grinned ear to ear at us.
“You folks are about to make history. I’m proud of you,” he said. Then he opened the hatch and stepped into the cockpit.
Three things struck me, as I sat strapped into my seat, encased in my space suit. One: Sam didn’t have to duck his head to get through that low hatch. Two: he wasn’t wearing a space suit. Three: he was probably going to pilot the orbiter himself.
Was there a copilot already in the cockpit with him? Surely Sam didn’t intend to fly the orbiter into space entirely by himself. And why wasn’t he wearing a space suit, when he insisted that all the rest of us did?
No time for puzzling over it all. The flight attendants came down the aisle, checking to see that we were all firmly strapped in. They were in space suits, just as we passengers were. I felt motion: the 747 beneath us was being towed out of the hangar. The windows were sealed shut, so we couldn’t see what was happening outside.
Then we heard the jet engines start up; actually we felt their vibrations more than heard their sound. Our cabin was very well insulated.
“Please pull down the visors on your helmets,” the blonde flight attendant singsonged. “We will be taking off momentarily.”
I confess I got a lump in my throat as I felt the engines whine up to full thrust, pressing me back in my seat. With our helmet visors down I couldn’t see the face of the elderly woman sitting beside me, but we automatically clasped our gloved hands together, like mother and daughter. My heart was racing.
I wished we could see out the windows! As it was, I had to depend on my sense of balance, sort of flying by the seat of my pants, while the 747 raced down the runway, rotated its nose wheel off the concrete, and then rose majestically into the air—with us on top of her. Ridiculously, I remembered a line from an old poem: With a sleighful of toys and St. Nicholas, too.
“We’re in the air,” came Sam’s cheerful voice over our helmet earphones. “In half an hour we’ll separate from our carrier plane and light up our main rocket engines.”
We sat in anticipatory silence. I .don’t know about the others—it was impossible to see their faces or tell what was going through their minds—but I twitched every time the ship jounced or swayed.
“Separation in two minutes,” Sam’s voice warned us.
I gripped my seat’s armrests. Couldn’t see my hands through the thick space suit gloves, but I could feel how white my knuckles were.
“You’re going to hear a banging noise,” Sam warned us. “Don’t be alarmed; it’s just the explosive bolts separating the struts that’re clamping us to the carrier plane.”
Explosive bolts. All of a sudden I didn’t like that word explosive.
The bang scared me even though I knew it was coming. It was a really loud, sharp noise. But the cabin didn’t seem to shake or shudder at all, thank goodness.
Almost immediately we felt more thrust pushing us back into our seats again.
“Main rocket engines have ignited on schedule,” Sam said evenly. “Next stop, LEO!”
I knew that he meant Low Earth Orbit, but I wondered how many of the tourists were wondering who this person Leo might be.
The male flight attendant’s voice cut in on my earphones. “As we enter Earth orbit you will experience a few moments of free fall before our anti-disequilibrium equipment balances out your inner sensory systems. Don’t let those few moments of a falling sensation worry you; they’ll be over almost before you realize it.”
I nodded to myself inside my helmet. Zero-gee. My mouth suddenly felt dry.
And then I was falling! Dropping into nothingness. My stomach floated up into my throat. I heard moans and gasps from my fellow tourists.
And just like that it was over. A normal feeling of weight returned and my stomach settled back to where it belonged. Sam’s equipment really worked!
“We are now in low Earth orbit,” Sam’s voice said, low, almost reverent. “I’m going to open the viewport shutters now.”
Since I had paid the lowest price for my ride, I had an aisle seat. I leaned forward in my seat harness and twisted my shoulders sideways as far as I could so that I could peer through my helmet visor and look through the window.
The Earth floated below us, huge and curving and so brightly blue it almost hurt my eyes. I could see swirls of beautiful white clouds and the sun gleaming off the ocean and swatches of green ground and little brown wrinkles that must have been mountains and out near the curving sweep of the horizon a broad open swath of reddish tan that stretched as far as I could see.
“That’s the coast of Africa coming up. You can see the Sahara a little to our north,” Sam said.
The cabin was filled with gasps and moans again, but this time they were joyous, awestruck. I didn’t care how much the ticket price was; I would have paid my own way to see this.
I could see the horn of Africa and the great rift valley where the first proto-humans made their camps. Sinbad’s Arabian Sea glittered like an ocean of jewels before my eyes.
Completely around the world we went, not in eighty days but a little over ninety minutes. The Arabian peninsula was easy to spot, not a wisp of a cloud anywhere near it. India was half blotted out by monsoon storms, but we swung over the Himalayas and across China. It was night on that side of the world, but the Japanese islands were outlined by the lights of their cities and highways.
“Mt. Everest’s down there under the clouds,” Sam told us. “Doesn’t look so tall from up here.”
Japan, Alaska, and then down over the heartland of America. It was an unusually clear day in the mid-west; we could see the Mississippi snaking through the nation’s middle like a coiling blood vessel.
Twice we coasted completely around the world. It was glorious, fascinating, an endless vision of delights. When Sam asked us how we were enjoying the flight the cabin echoed with cheers. I didn’t want the flight to end. I could have stayed hunched over in that cumbersome space suit and stared out that little window for the rest of my days. Gladly.
But at last Sam’s sad voice told us, “I’m sorry, folks, but that’s it. Time to head back to the barn.”
I could feel the disappointment that filled the cabin.
As the window shutters slowly slid shut Sam announced casually, “Now comes the tricky part. Reentry and rendezvous with the carrier plane.”
Rendezvous with the carrier plane? He hadn’t mentioned that before. I heard several attendant call buttons chiming. Some of the other tourists were alarmed by Sam’s news, too.
In a few minutes he came back on the intercom. In my earphones I heard Sam explain, “Our flight plan is to rendezvous with the carrier plane and reconnect with her so she can bring us back to the airport under the power of her jet engines. That’s much safer than trying to land this orbiter by herself.
“However,” he went on, “if we miss rendezvous we’ll land the orbiter just the way we did it for NASA, no sweat. I’ve put this ninety-nine ton glider down on runways at Kennedy and Edwards, no reason why I can’t land her back at Col6n just as light as a feather.”