First. First is her goal. At the age of thirty-nine, having already piloted one shuttle mission and about to command her second, Rhonda is perfectly positioned to be first.
First on Mars.
With the shuttle fleet set to be mothballed within two years, NASA planned to send a manned mission to Mars within fifteen. Of course no launch date had been set and there wasn’t funding in place, but she was working towards the goal as if it were set in stone.
She doesn’t want to be first for glory or kudos. She thinks, as Neil Armstrong did forty years ago, that dealing with fame is a waste of time and energy. No, she wants to be first because she believes that reaching Mars is the single most important challenge facing humankind. She’s convinced humanity needs an event bigger than itself to focus on, to force it to consider the greater universe rather than petty regional issues. She hopes the sheer effort necessary to reach another planet will be that event. And, after careful consideration, she thinks she’s the best person to lead the mission.
Rhonda knows she has the skill set, the leadership qualities and the disposition to do it right. She just has to make sure the powers that be know it too. So that means no mistakes. She can’t let anything divert her attention from the job at hand. Like Judd.
She turns and her eyes find Martie Burnett on the opposite side of the room. The payload specialist for this mission, Martie is a tall southerner with flowing auburn hair and a strong, chiselled face. She looks thirty-five but is actually forty-four. Martie widens her eyes to say ‘hey there’. She’s Rhonda’s best friend in the program and, as Rhonda doesn’t have a life outside the program, that makes her Rhonda’s best friend, full stop. Rhonda hasn’t told Martie about the break up with Judd because she finds the whole thing not-wearing-underpants-when-your-skirt-blows-up embarrassing. The fact that the two women had first bonded by sharing NASA personnel gossip didn’t help matters. She’ll tell Martie once the mission is completed, including the truth about why she left. As annoyed as she was about Judd coming to Thompkins’ home, that wasn’t why she moved out. There was another reason, something that had been playing on her mind for a while —
Stop it. She’s doing it again, thinking about the wrong stuff. She pulls in a deep breath, blinks hard and forces herself to focus on the job she must do tonight.
7
Henri grabs the handle and yanks the door open. He leans into the roaring wind and looks down at the slate-grey clouds, illuminated by a three-quarter moon. Through a break he can make out the Atlantic ocean, twinkling 34000 feet below.
The icy wind doesn’t affect him. A matte-black helmet, a head-to-toe triple-layer Nomex suit and thermal gloves keep out the cold. He takes a deep breath from the oxygen mask strapped over his mouth and nose, connected to a canister on his hip. He checks the backlit screen of the small, circular GPS unit attached to his chest. They’re almost in position.
He takes in his team. Dirk and Nico and Cobbin, then further along the fuselage Tam and Gerald, all dressed as he is. He speaks into a microphone located within the oxygen mask. ‘Big Bird, it’s time.’
Big Bird sits at the controls of the Canadian-built Twin Otter aircraft. His response crackles in their helmet headsets: ‘Ready when you are.’
Henri’s eyes flick to the GPS unit. He studies the information that blinks and changes on the screen, then looks at his GMT-Master and waits for the sweep hand to pass twelve, for ten p.m. exactly.
‘Go.’ Henri steps out of the aircraft and the others follow in quick succession. The two-metre-wide, delta-shaped wings strapped to their backs seize the air, wrench them to a horizontal position and catapult them across the sky at 180 kilometres an hour.
They slice across the upper atmosphere, as high as a commercial jetliner on a transatlantic flight, like a cloud of giant bats on their way to a night feeding. The wings’ matte-black colour make them invisible against the night sky while their size and carbon-fibre construction make them invisible to radar detection.
What was the sales pitch? Red Bull gives you wings. Years before, on CNN News, Henri watched the Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner, festooned with Red Bull sponsor logos, jump out of an aircraft then fly across the British Channel with one of these delta wings strapped to his back. It was a revelation. The Frenchman stole Felix’s wing idea then spent $300 000 improving it. He needed to go further than the 35 kilometres Felix flew that day, so he redesigned the wing and tested it over the following two years to increase its lift-to-drag ratio. All for tonight.
Henri’s wing hits an air pocket and shudders. The Frenchman looks down at his chest. The GPS unit shows five streams of information, constantly updated. Right now the most important is the large arrow that points in the direction he must travel. When he’s on course it glows green, when he’s off course, it glows red. It’s now red.
His arms are by his side. Each hand holds a handle that operates a hydraulic ram. The ram activates a flap on the corresponding wing’s trailing edge. Twist the handle left to lower the flap, twist it right to raise it. He works the handles and the wing banks right. He glances at the GPS reader and the arrow blinks green.
Two bat-men arc away to the left. Henri watches Tam and Gerald shrink into the distance, knows their duties lie along a different path to his tonight.
Big Bird can’t be late. Folded uncomfortably into the tiny cockpit of the Twin Otter, the six foot seven Robby Muller pulls the aircraft into a steep descent.
Robby, or Big Bird to friends and neighbours because of his predilection for yellow T-shirts, guns the twin Pratt & Whitney turboprops. The German needs to get this aircraft on the ground and swap it for something more practical asap. He can’t be late.
8
The silver astrovan trundles towards launch pad 39B. It is essentially a pimped-out RV with plenty of room for the five crew members of Atlantis, and the two White Room guys who accompany them in case they need anything. The crew members are easy to recognise, dressed in bright-orange flight suits. Judd, as one of the White Room guys, sports, unsurprisingly, a white jumpsuit.
Martie Burnett sits opposite Rhonda. As payload specialist, Martie is responsible for the transfer of supplies and materials from the shuttle’s cargo bay to the International Space Station using the Canadarm 2, the spacecraft’s $150 million robotic grappling hook. Judd always thought she’d fit right in with the regulars at the salon in Steel Magnolias, swapping down-home truisms and hard-earned love advice with Dolly Parton. The truth is that Martie has a PhD in astrophysics and an IQ of 157, some four points higher than Judd’s.
Judd forces himself to stare at the van’s dark-grey carpet so he doesn’t look at Rhonda. He’d prefer to stare out the window but he can’t because there isn’t one. That’s to give the astronauts privacy and to make sure that if some loon took a pot shot at the van they’d hit bullet-proof Kevlar instead of glass. Given NASA is the perfect canvas for a terrorist organisation or lone gunman to scrawl a statement, it’s always a possibility.
On launch day, with the world’s media in attendance, the astrovan will be escorted to the pad by Kennedy’s own private army, the KSC SWAT team in their black, box-shaped van, while a brace of Jet Rangers swirl and chunter overhead, men toting M-16s hanging from the open doors like life guards searching for sharks. But that’s on launch day. Tonight there’s limited security because it’s an unpublicised test and the budget won’t stretch to anything more.