Launch on Need by Daniel Guiteras (small books to read txt) 📗

John Stangley sat twisted in his seat, tight against the window, looking out from the 757-200, with all the wonder of a small boy on his first flight.

“God I miss you Claire,” he said. His words to her collected on the window from dampened breath, then faded away. He longed for comfort, and found it somehow, in the sound of his own voice speaking to her. “God, I miss you… oh Claire.” His eyes welled, then released.

How many times had he taken this flight? Twenty? Thirty? Or was it more like forty or fifty? And so many of those times, she had been in the seat beside him, his companion, his lover, his wife, the missing puzzle piece that completed him. Her absence now, from this flight, from his life, from a developing story that was sure to be the highlight of his career and easily the story of the decade, stung him deeply. Without Claire here to love him, the engine to his soul had been lost, wrecked, rendered motionless.

Passengers closed their books, checked their watches, stowed their tray tables, and prepared for landing. Time moved on.

The plane heaved in the morning air, fighting to come down. The runway grew closer, moved faster, and rushed under the belly of the huge aircraft. And then came that quiet moment just before wheel contact, when a plane makes peace with Earth, the quarrel ends, and it settles in to land. Touchdown, 8:10 A.M. Houston time.

The plane taxied to the gate, its wings waving up and down as if it were bound by some ornithoptic reflex.

Stangley felt the pressure of the outside world nudging him to get moving again. Rushing, everyone rushing, needing to get somewhere. Time moved on. Life moved on. But he found himself paralyzed, refusing to be part of a world that was willing to go on without Claire. Finally, after several fellow passengers had politely motioned for him to move, Stangley reluctantly joined the exodus.

Stangley arrived at Johnson Space Center’s pressroom later than usual, hoping to avoid the unending questioning from his colleagues about how he was doing, their remarks about how great it was to see him again, and how great he looked.

He felt like hell.

The room seated well over a hundred, and was filling quickly with reporters from around the world, all eager to hear the next chapter of Columbia’s fate.

“Over twenty-five countries are represented,” he overheard Susan Gainey from the Chicago Tribune say. In a week, there’ll be three times that swarming this place, and the Kennedy Space Center as well, Stangley thought.

At the front of the room was a standard NASA conference table, covered neatly with a floor-length royal blue tablecloth emblazoned with a large NASA meatball logo. Despite his many years reporting on the space program, Stangley’s feelings about NASA had never changed. He was crazy about the space program, and he was the first to say so. Every launch and landing, every press conference, every meet-and-greet with the astronauts, anything to do with NASA, gave Stangley gooseflesh. Even the sight of NASA’s logo caused a stir in him.

For Stangley, NASA was the single-most patriotic entity in America. He had felt some of the same patriotism when visiting D.C. and the White House two years earlier, felt some of the same reverence; but the politics that went along with it—the bickering, back-stabbing, and posturing—always bothered him.

The Space Program, though, particularly the human spaceflight division, had brought together people of all ages, races, religions and political affiliations. Even now, Columbia was orbiting with an international crew, including a female Indian astronaut, and a first-ever Israeli astronaut.

NASA, of course, was not without its political challenges—and social challenges, too. There were those who argued America should be spending its vast resources on some earthbound cause, instead.

The space program had demonstrated its ability to transcend man’s differences, both in triumph and disaster. Apollo 1, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, and Challenger—all were proof that mankind was capable of uniting for a single purpose.

Stangley had seen it, witnessed it for himself; it was the same for every launch from the Kennedy Space Center. The first-timers, the foreigners and the seasoned reporters were all drawn in by the drama of the countdown clock, the American flag rolling in the breeze, and that unmistakable engine rumble. They stood transfixed, humbled at the sight, even from a distance of more than a mile, of millions of pounds of thrust pushing rockets skyward.

Someone unfamiliar to Stangley from NASA’s public affairs office took the podium as the four panel members took their seats at the conference table. “Thank you all for coming today,” he said. “I’ll start by introducing you to the four panel members for our STS-107 Flight Day Four press conference.”

Stangley was excited to be in Houston again. He was anxious, though, about this press conference and worried about the mess NASA was in. He expected grave wounds to be inflicted on his beloved space agency before day’s end. Although most reporters here thought themselves clever if they could make a NASA official stumble or waffle on a question, Stangley considered himself NASA’s greatest ally. When NASA had bad news, Stangley was interested in reporting it, but not from the angle that NASA had somehow screwed up, miscalculated or been caught taking a shortcut in design, testing or maintenance. Rather he sought to portray what the astronauts might be feeling, what dangers they faced, and what it must be like to be far from home and uncertain about the return to Earth.

“On my left is Julie Pollard, Chair of the Mission Management Team. Next to her is Joseph Senca, Chief Structural Engineer and Tiger Team leader. Then we have Allan Warner, Flight Dynamics Officer. And finally, Reid Hamilton, Space Shuttle Program Manager.”

“We’ve prepared some information for you today about the spacewalk,” the public relations representative continued, “and then we’ll take any questions you might have. Thank you again for coming today. Okay, now