Orbit

Chapter 7

So Sharon was right after all.

Kip thinks of little else. The hope that he might somehow remember how to blast himself back out of orbit and find a way to land seems beyond overwhelming. He looks at the pile of checklists in his lap, having read over several trying to get a mental image of the long litany of technical duties that he’ll have to perform at the right moment in the right way to direct the rocket motor in precisely the right direction to lose all that speed they gained.

He sighs, shaking his head at the image of himself getting tangled up in what switch to hit next. Even if, somehow, he gets it all right and everything works, he’ll then pop out in the lower troposphere and have an on-the-job learning experience trying to dead-stick an engineless spacecraft down to a runway somewhere without colliding with something hard and unforgiving.

No, Sharon is going to be right, he decides. But there is still the slightest glimmer in his mind that he could escape. A shred of hope, like believing your football team can somehow use the last five seconds of the game to Hail Mary their way through ninety yards of determined defenders to the winning touchdown.

Possible, yes. Probable, no.

Okay, most likely I’m going to die.

And the hell of it is, he can’t even call Sharon to apologize.

He looks at his watch, then at the Earthscape passing below. He’s in darkness now somewhere over the Pacific, wondering why he has to wait for three more orbits before trying to leave. Maybe he should plan to try the retrofire sequence at the end of the second orbit, instead of waiting for the third? Or would that bring him down in the wrong place? To fire it right now, for instance, would probably mean a very wet and fatal landing a thousand miles east of Hawaii.

Wait a minute, dammit! he thinks, responding to a small wave of anger that punches at him, causing him to clench his jaw in self disgust. What am I doing? Giving up without a fight?

This defeatist attitude, he’s grappled with it before. The “Eeyore Syndrome,” he’s labeled it, a determination to find the worst in every situation. Hasn’t he warned the girls against it? Jerrod, too, until Jerrod literally rolled his eyes at him one day.

And here I sit programming myself to fail and die. Bullshit!

He takes a deep, if ragged, breath and forces himself to sit up, to comply with this newfound determination, but not really believing it. His mouth is cotton dry and he reaches for the water bottle by his seat, drinks deeply, then recaps it and slips it back in one of Bill Campbell’s seat pockets.

Okay, so what do we do first?

He pulls the checklists back to his lap, ignoring his shaking hands, and starts through the lists of steps again, determined this time to figure out and practice exactly what needs to be done.

I’ve got five hours before planned reentry. That’s an eternity. So what if it’s hard? I have to try.

The reward is survival. Possible survival.

After all, he reasons, they wouldn’t have taught this stuff in ground school back in Mojave if they didn’t think a passenger could handle it. So all the keys have to be right here!

The first sequence will be to turn the ship around, pointing the engine nozzles in the direction he’s traveling. There may be an automatic system to do just that, he figures, since it’s referenced in the verbiage of the checklist. But then how to initiate the maneuver on the panel? He imagines he may also have to use the control stick, the fighter-pilot-style, video-game type hand-control mounted on the right edge of the armrest.

Once more there’s a low whooshing noise in his ear, and he realizes he’s been hearing it periodically. Whenever it happens, he feels Intrepid move slightly.

The reaction jets!

That’s what it has to be. And there has to be an automatic system making them fire, keeping the ship pointed straight ahead. It’s floating in a three-axis, three-dimensional environment, with yaw, pitch, and roll. Without air outside to operate against flight controls, the only way to move the ship around those three axes is firing tiny jets of whatever propellant Intrepid uses. He remembers the briefing clearly.

But there’s only so much propellant aboard, and he’ll need to make sure he doesn’t use too much. Without those little jets, there will be no way to position the ship for reentry or even slow down.

He stares harder at the forward panel, determined to find the appropriate switches and learn how to use them, and slowly, very slowly, some of the nomenclature begins to make sense. Just not enough.

ASA MISSION CONTROL, MOJAVE, CALIFORNIA, 9:25 A.M. PACIFIC

Richard DiFazio has never walked into Mission Control in a real crisis, simply because there’s never been a real crisis. A few scary moments, yes, but nothing like this.

Careful not to usurp the flight director’s authority or give any of his gravely worried crew even more worry, DiFazio stays by Arleigh Kerr’s side and merely nods an affirmation when any of the other technicians look his way.

The briefing has been chilling, and the time in transit from his home in Lancaster has provided no relief, no indication that it’s all a false alarm. Bill Campbell’s fate, Kip Dawson’s, and the fate of the entire operation is anything but assured, and he can just imagine NASA’s Geoff Shear monitoring this same information—and even doling it out to ASA.

He knows Shear all too well and loathes him. A Machiavellian, master bureaucrat.

“Are they helping?” he asks Arleigh regarding NASA’s role.

“So far, whatever we’ve asked for, they’ve provided.”

“What are our options, Arleigh?”

The question seems to stun the flight director into silence. DiFazio watches his face turn pasty, sees him swallow hard and struggle to find the appropriate answer.

“Well, sir…”

“Too soon to ask?”

This question is a welcome rescue and Arleigh nods energetically. “Yes. Too soon. We need to exhaust all other explanations first.”

“Is Venture unusable? Could we get her ready to go up?” DiFazio asks, referring to the only other spacecraft ASA has, the ship now sitting with a damaged landing gear in one of the hangars.

“I don’t know yet.”

“If I have to send it up in less than perfect shape to get them back, I’ll do it. It’s guaranteed that no one else is going to help us.”

More engineers are gathering in front of Arleigh now, and DiFazio pats him on the shoulder, announces that he’ll be in his office, and steps away, rather than stand like a rock in the river, disrupting the flow of their urgent consultations.

The news coming into the control room is no better, the info from NASA and NORAD confirming that something was seen streaking in and apparently striking the spacecraft just as communications were lost.

“In twenty minutes,” Arleigh decides, “I want us all in the conference room with any and all ideas about what we should do and how we should proceed. Any ideas. Okay?”

He turns them back to their consoles and resumes his position, the iron-jawed leader standing at the helm in hurricane force winds, undaunted by the ferocity of the storm.

But inside he’s dying.

Plaques, models, and framed memorials to a full if frustrating career surround John Kent. He sits at his desk and rubs his closed eyes, wondering what else he can say to the wife of his longtime buddy Bill Campbell.

“Katie, it is entirely possible that Bill’s okay and working hard to get them down, and just hasn’t been able to cure the communications blackout.”

“I know,” is the barely controlled response from the Campbell home somewhere near Lancaster, California. “I’ve always known the risks.”

“Look… I’ve got all our people monitoring everything, and I’m… do not repeat this, okay?… but I’m working on a rescue plan if, for some reason, we need to go up there and bring them back.”

The silence is long and telling. Katie Campbell knows well her husband’s heartburn over NASA’s official position regarding private spaceflight. And she knows John Kent doesn’t run NASA.

“Thanks, John.”

“I’ll call you with any news. Immediately. But you hang in there and have faith.”

The call ends and he sits back, his mind spinning with possibilities, his personality geared to analysis, action, and cure. The course seems clear: Prepare for the worst case, regardless of Shear’s rancid attitude.

He lunges from his chair, swinging open his office door and sticking his head into the outer office where a half dozen other astronauts and engineers are waiting.

“Everybody come on in here. None of this leaves this room, but we’ve got to plan a rescue, just in case.”