Jones hated the WET-F. He could never forget the presence of the water around him: the resistance to every movement, the clammy light, the glopping of bubbles, the shadowy forms of the divers.
Conditions more different from the ice-cold stillness of space it was hard to dream up.
Looming ahead in the water he could see the sixty-foot-long hulk of a mocked-up S-IVB, a Saturn third stage, with the mouth of its single engine bell gaping at him. The Multiple Docking Adapter was a squat cylinder fixed to the front of the S-IVB, and a crude, open-ended mock-up of a docked Apollo Command Module was fixed to the front of that.
The idea was that the empty S-IVB would be used as a space station shell, a Skylab, once it had reached orbit. The S-IVB and the Apollo carrying its crew would be launched separately, by Saturn IB boosters, the smaller, cheaper cousins of Saturn Vs. The astronauts would dock with the booster by nuzzling the nose of their Apollo against the docking adapter, and then enter through specially fitted airlocks. The crew would clean out the shell and settle down to live inside the big liquid hydrogen tank.
The sim wasn’t painted, or finished in any way. It all looked ungainly, ugly, evidently lashed up in haste.
The simulation supervisor’s voice sounded in his headset. “Good morning, Chuck, Adam.”
Good morning to you, asshole.
Bleeker turned and waved at one of the ubiquitous TV cameras.
The SimSup said, “I just want to review the basic parameters of the sim with you, before you start. Now, you know this isn’t an integrated sim.” Meaning they weren’t hooked up to Mission Control. “This is just a preliminary trial of the checklist we’re going to have to use when we fit out the workshop in orbit. Okay, let’s proceed.”
The divers nodded to Jones, and they guided him closer to the Apollo mockup. It was just an open cone, fitted to the docking adapter. The simulation was supposed to start at the moment at which the crew was moving into the workshop to configure it for habitation.
Their first job was to dismantle the docking assembly in Apollo’s nose and open up the tunnel to the workshop. That part, at least, should go smoothly, because that sort of docking was standard operating procedure on the Moon missions.
Jones heard Bleeker’s breath scratching as he hauled at the heavy docking-probe assembly. “Take it easy, kid. We’re being paid by the hour.”
Bleeker laughed, and his posture relaxed a little.
When they had the probe assembly loose, Bleeker passed it to a diver.
Bleeker moved ahead of Jones into the Multiple Docking Adapter. The adapter was a tight tunnel, lined with lockers. All the equipment for living quarters, clothes, food, experiments, and the rest was stored in the lockers during the launch; after they’d fitted out the hydrogen tank for habitation, Jones and Bleeker would have to return here, unpack the lockers, and move the equipment into the tank.
Bleeker passed on, into the hydrogen tank itself.
The metal walls of the tank opened out around him. It was pitch-dark, and Jones had the feeling that he was following Bleeker into a huge, forbidding metal cave. “Hold up, Adam; let’s throw a little light on the situation here.” Jones unclipped a portable light from his belt and fixed it to the fireman’s pole that passed along the axis of the tank.
The lamp sent glimmering light through the water along the length of the tank, to a wall at the far end that bulged inward toward him. That was the bulkhead between the hydrogen tank and the booster’s lox tank beyond. Helium pressurization spheres clung to the walls like big silver warts. Handrails and poles looped across the metal cave, and folded-up partitions and other bits of kit were stowed neatly against the walls of the tank. Too neatly. I wonder what those poor schmuckos will find when they meet this bird in real life, in orbit.
The Skylabs were just lash-ups, really, improvisation. But they would give NASA experience it needed of orbital operations and long-duration flights, before the real space station cans started flying later.
“Okay, guys,” the SimSup said. “As you know, in orbit the first job would be to check that the propellant lines are properly blocked. Today, we want you to skip over that and proceed straight to the assembly of the floor.”
“We’ve read the checklist,” Jones growled. “Come on, pal.” He shinned along the fireman’s pole, deeper into the tank.
Bleeker and Jones manhandled packs of floor panels away from their stowage against the tank walls. Their job was to fit a floor of aluminum grid across the width of the tank, maybe two-thirds of the way along its length. Putting the panels together would be like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, working toward the tank’s axis.
The two men worked their way around the perimeter of the tank. It was simple work, but slow, clumsy, and tiring; Jones found it hard to grip tools with his suited hands, and the water resisted every motion.
Divers had followed them into the tank. One of them had brought in an underwater TV camera, and was filming them.
The SimSup tried to cheer them up. “We appreciate your help here, guys. We’re well aware that you two are slated for other missions, and probably won’t even be the ones to carry this out for real anyway…”
I sure as hell hope not, Jones thought.
Chuck Jones was supposed to be going to the Moon. He was backup commander on Apollo 15, which, according to the basic framework of crew rotation, would give him his own mission three shots later, on Apollo 18.
But Congress had cut NASA’s budget for fiscal 1971, making it the leanest budget for nine years. And Nixon still hadn’t responded to the Space Task Group’s proposals for the future shape of the space program, although the word was he was leaning toward a Mars program of some kind, under Kennedy’s relentless public pressure.
Anyhow, NASA was going to need Saturn Vs to launch its Skylabs and space station modules and NERVA test flights. So, NASA was going to have to conserve Saturn V launches. The remaining lunar expeditions, Apollos 14 to 20, were going to be stretched out to six-month intervals…
There were rumors in the Office that the later flights might be cut altogether.
Jones had flown in space. Once.
He’d finished three orbits of Earth on the second orbital Mercury flight, following John Glenn. It had been a picnic. He’d enjoyed the feeling of microgravity, being able to yaw the little capsule about so that the glowing Earth sailed every which way past his tiny window.
But he used up too much of his hydrogen peroxide maneuvering fuel, playing around in orbit.
By the time he got to the retrosequence, nobody was sure if he had enough fuel to set the capsule at the right angle to reenter. He might have burned up, having wasted all his fuel playing around in orbit. Well, he hadn’t; he’d overshot his splashdown point by 250 miles, but he was picked up within a couple of hours by choppers from the carrier.
Jones had been content with his adventure. But the NASA hierarchy were less than pleased with him. He might have augered in: killed himself by playing around.
Officially Jones stayed on the roster, for assignment to a later flight. But a certain distance had developed between Jones and the rest of the Astronaut Office. Deke Slayton, the chief astronaut, had dropped heavy hints that he might want to drop out of the program altogether.
But Jones, mad as hell, had flatly refused. He’d wanted to prove the astronauts really were aviators. He knew he’d done well; he knew he’d done better than Glenn, even, as far as he was concerned.
So he was going to stay on as an astronaut, and he was going to go to the goddamn Moon. In the meantime, to keep in the program, he accepted a job with Slayton and Alan Shepard — another of the original astronauts, also grounded, in his case for an ear condition — in the Astronaut Office.