Back to the Moon-ARC

Chapter 32

“Mercy I, this is mission control, copy?

“Mercy I, this is mission control, do you copy?

“Come on, guys, this is Houston, come in?”

Bill would have sworn he was having a bad dream. No, a nightmare would have been more like it. He’d been stranded outside a spaceship for hours, only to make it inside the thing just in time to go careening through the Earth’s atmosphere at over fifteen kilometers per second. The ship had shaken him to his bones. His teeth and jawbone ached from having clenched so tightly. Somewhere in there he had passed out. That had probably been for the best. He imagined that the ride may have even been worse after he’d passed out.

“Uh, roger…ahem…roger, Houston,” he said weakly. Bill shook his head and squinted his eyes as best he could in his suit. He reached up and tapped the control screen and brought up the ship diagnostics. Cabin pressure was good, so he popped his faceplate. Just doing that nearly exhausted him. He let his arms fall back down beside him, and they actually fell. He had a bit of a dizzy sensation also. “Uh-oh. That can’t be good.

“Houston, this is Mercy I, over.” Bill reached up and switched on the internal microphone. “Hey, anybody with me in here?”

“Zhi and myself are awake, Bill,” Hui answered. “Xu and Ming are alive but still out.”

“Tony?”

“Huh, what, hey?” Tony startled as he awoke.

“Easy, Tony.”

“Bill, I feel like I’m gonna throw up,” Tony said.

“Yeah, me, too. I think we’re spinning or tumbling. I’m trying to figure it out.” Bill carefully moved one hand and tapped the commands to bring up the flight-command suite. The digital direction gyroscopes, Global Positioning System, and attitude determination and control systems seemed to be all functional and online. The gyro was rolling counterclockwise. And that meant that the Orion was spinning like a top.

“Good to hear your voice, Bill,” mission control replied. “We need to assess the ship and telemetry data. We show an induced roll?”

“Roger that, Houston. We’re rolling pretty darn quickly. My guess is we’re pulling about three gees.” Bill worked his hands out of the gloves and did his best to stow the gloves out of the way without getting sick on himself. Then he eased his left hand around the stick.

“Copy that, Mercy I. We show your rate of spin to be conducive to a three point two one gravity load.”

“Why hasn’t the automated attitude control and stabilization system kicked in?” Tony asked.

“Good question, Tony.” Bill tapped the screen. “Holy crap. Uh, Houston, I’m looking at the boards for the attitude control and stabilization system, and it is all orange and red across the board. I’ve got alarms on the ACS PROP, Main Guidance Processing, and a P&P Alert on RP. Any advice there?”

“Copy that, Mercy I. Hold one for that.”

Bill considered just taking the manual controls and trying to straighten out the ship. The problem with that would be that if they had suffered some damage during the aerocapture maneuver, or Tony’s target practice, then putting power to the thrusters could start a fire, cause an explosion, or do nothing. They could withstand the merry-go-round for another minute or two. But not much longer than that.

“Hey, didn’t something like this happen to Neil Armstrong?” Tony asked.

“Gemini 8. Neil and David Scott docked with the Agena target vehicle, and apparently the attitude-control systems for the Gemini capsule and the Agena kept firing, and they couldn’t seem to get them to stop. They ended up aborting the mission and using the Gemini capsule’s reentry thrusters to straighten them out, if I recall. But I think they were spinning head over heels, not round and round like we are.” Bill squinted his eyes. The roll rate was getting worse. Maybe it just felt worse.

“Okay Mercy I, we believe that the P & P alert is the key. The pressurants and pressurization algorithm is telling us that we’ve got either an ACS roll thruster stuck open or there is a leak in the propellant line that is rapidly venting. But since the thrust appears to be very stable and directional, our best guess is the thruster.”

“Uh, okay, Houston. What is our work-around?” Bill inched his hand closer to the manual-control switch.

“Bill, you need to see if you can reboot the ACS. The PROP team thinks that there might be a valve stuck open, and the reboot will close it.”

“Okay. Roger that. Start with the reboot sequence.”

“Roger that, Mercy I. Here we go. ACS SEQ 999GGH3…”

It took Stetson more than seven or eight very long minutes to type in the commands. During that time Tony Chow began retching and heaving into a barf bag as best he could manage. The Chinese crew members seemed to be handling the situation a little better.

“Alright, Houston, hitting reboot now.” Bill tapped in the final command code. When he did, everything went black. “Jesus!”

“What the…?” Tony forgot his barf bag when the lights flickered out.

“Houston, we’ve had a complete power failure here. All my boards are out.” Bill started tapping at reset switches and breakers, but nothing seemed to happen. For some reason, the communications system was still up.

“Mercy I, we’ve lost all feeds but the Ku-band links. No telemetry whatsoever is making it to us. We are looking into it.”

“Roger that, but we are still spinning up here.” Bill was beginning to think that the ship was about to come apart at the seams. They had comm-system power. That meant something. They needed the ACS back online if he was going to stop the spin.

“Bill, my screen is coming on!” Tony shouted.

“What does it say?” Bill tried his best to move his head in that direction, but the spin kept him from doing so.

“It’s a hard reset! I think the entire system shut down and is now starting to boot back up.” Tony reached up and tapped the enter key on the console, and his screen lit completely up and started loading the operating system. Then the lights flickered back on, and Bill could hear the carbon dioxide scrubber fans start up again.

“Houston, be advised that we’ve got systems coming back online.” Bill’s screen blinked back on and began loading the mix of drivers loaded onto it to command the spacecraft. “Any idea what just happened?”

“Uh, we’re working on that, Mercy I. Right now we believe we had a main power-bus failure and back-up power has kicked in,” Houston replied.

“Roger that. Now we need to stop this rolling.” Bill waited as the system came completely back up. “Houston, I have an initial idea that will help.”

“Go ahead, Bill.”

“I want to redeploy the solar arrays.” Bill understood that they were spinning about the roll axis just like a figure skater on ice doing an axel. When figure skaters let out their arms, it slowed their rate of spin due to the law of conservation of angular momentum. Extending the solar arrays should have the same effect. It probably wouldn’t stop the spin, but it would slow it to something a little more tolerable.

“We agree with that, Bill. Go ahead and cycle the solar arrays, over.”

“Roger that, Houston. I’m making my way through the procedure now.” Bill tapped several commands, and then the graphic of the exterior view of the ship showed the solar panels extending. Bill could feel some vibrations from the gimbal motors. The lights turned green for both arrays, showing that they had been fully extended. He held up his arms. They didn’t feel as weird as they had before.

“Did it work, Bill?” Tony asked.

“Don’t know. I feel different, but we’ll have to wait until the gyro is fully back online. Another minute will tell.” So they waited.

And waited.

When the Orion completely rebooted itself and all systems were back online, the directional gyro showed that the ship was still spinning, but at about half the speed it had been before. That was a little more tolerable.

“Okay, Houston, we show that our roll rate has dropped to a constant speed. Also note that the roll thruster appears to have turned itself off during the reboot.” Bill hit the auto ACS icon and activated the automated-control system.

Bang! Bang! Bang, bang, bang!

Several attitude-correction thrusts were initiated by the computer, and then the roll rate showed zero on the directional gyroscope. The ship had stopped spinning. And not a moment too soon, as Tony Chow was reaching for his barf bag once again.

“Houston! That worked. We’ve stopped spinning, and now I believe we are back in business. I’m setting up a full diagnostic run now to see what shape we are in. That should only take a few minutes.” Bill tapped in several key sequences and then leaned back to look out the docking windows. Earth filled the view, and it was awesome. From the look of things, Bill was guessing that they were somewhere over China at the present moment.

“Hey, everyone. Take a look out the window.” Chow, Hui, and Stetson each took a turn unbuckling and floating up to the windows and peering out at Earth—at home.

Bill watched as his home planet rotated beneath them. From the looks of the size of things, it seemed about right. He’d been in low Earth orbit many many times now and knew what it looked like. One thing didn’t seem to add up, though. If he had his bearings straight, then it appeared to him that they were flying much closer to an equatorial orbit than the orbit of the International Space Station.

“Uh, Houston, is there something else you need to tell us?”