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

your MAG, Mullen. He was wondering if you peed yourself,” Garrett said with a laugh.

“How about you, Garrett, your suit good?”

“Yeah,” Garrett said, still laughing. “I’m good.”

Even the most seasoned astronauts found the prospect of EVA simulations in the pool a test of their susceptibility to claustrophobia. Some even had nightmares of drowning in the space suit, which seemed unlikely given the fact that each astronaut in the pool always had four scuba divers tending to his or her needs. But astronauts who dared to speak of their nightmares told similar stories of near-drowning. They would wake from their dreams with pulses racing, having imagined themselves ensnared in heavy, power-tool-laden space suits filling with water. In these dreams, shouts turned to screams that would go unheard due to water-shorted electrical circuits. Rescue divers seemed impossibly distant and were always looking away at the critical moment. The medical team was present, ready and capable, but unaware of any problem. Can’t anyone see I’m in trouble? With eyes bulging in terror, the astronauts knew that even if they could manage to reach the surface, they wouldn’t be able to remove their helmets without help.

“Remember, guys,” the voice from the NBL control center instructed the two now fully submerged astronauts, “in this first sim Garrett will be the rescued and Mullen will be the assist.”

“Garrett here, copy that.”

“Roger that, we’re on our way to position,” Mullen responded, as two members of his scuba team guided him down to the floor of the mock-up Atlantis payload bay.

When Garrett arrived on his mark, he rotated himself length-wise, lowering his head, so he could more easily view Mullen over the lower aspect of his helmet. Mullen had maneuvered himself into position and was standing on the floor of the shuttle payload-bay floor mock-up, about 25 feet below. For a moment, Garrett was able to ignore all that would not be present in space—the blue water, the International Space Station truss mock-up to his left, and the eight untethered wet-suited bodies that were moving around him in the liquid space. Next, he imagined looking down from Columbia to the rescuing ship Atlantis, and how Earth would be rotating behind Atlantis, filling his peripheral vision. When he finished setting the scene in his mind, he suddenly remembered with concern that several of Columbia’s crew had no previous EVA experience. As a highly experienced EVA astronaut, Garrett felt the view Columbia’s crew would see as they looked down the boom to Atlantis would be quite daunting.

“Hey I just thought of something,” Garrett said, interrupting a conversation on the loop between a technician and Mullen.

“Ah, go ahead, Garrett,” The test director said, leaning toward his microphone as he watched Garrett on one of the NBL’s 25 control-room monitors. “What’s up?”

“Well, now that I’m in position looking down from Columbia at what will be Atlantis during the EVA, I gotta tell you, our virgin spacewalkers aboard Columbia might get a little overwhelmed by the visuals.”

“What choice do they have?” They have to go down the boom if they want to go home,” Mullen said.

“Well, of course,” Garrett said. “I just wonder if we should give them some sort of a heads up…”

The sim supervisor broke in, “Ah, you bring up a good point, Garrett. We are in the process of putting together an EVA briefing package for the crew of Columbia. I too think it would be helpful to uplink them video from the sims we do here in the pool so they can get a sense of the expected vantage point.”

“Roger that,” Garrett said.

Chapter 41

White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico

Sunday, Jan. 26, 2003

EVEN ON A GOOD DAY, when the sea is flat, the wind is calm, and the sky is clear, the business of landing an F/A-18C on the deck of an aircraft carrier can still scare the hell out of the best pilots. There is hardly a carrier pilot alive who does not have at least one recurring nightmare about what almost happened—or what did happen, and how he or she somehow managed to survive.

As Dana Avery climbed aboard the Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA), the memory of her worst night as a Navy aviator flashed in front of her now, just as it did whenever she took the left seat. Usually she relived only a scene or two, but sometimes the whole thing unfolded from beginning to end, and when it did, she let it come freely, waiting for whatever lesson would present itself this time.

That awful night, the word about their mission had come down suddenly during a prolonged lull in the wind. The mission objectives were conveyed to the carrier pilots assembled in the ship’s ready room, their questions answered directly and with military-grade brevity. The wind speed had fallen to within the established safe-flying parameters; it was one of those “now or never” moments.

So the frantic work began. The blue shirts sent planes up to the flight deck via the ship’s aircraft elevators, while the yellow-shirted handling and catapult officers scrutinized the moves of the various deck crews, assuring each plane’s ordinance and fuel-level was correct.

No time was wasted. As soon as planes began arriving at the flight deck, pilots climbed aboard for their pre-flight checks, while support equipment quickly positioned planes at the catapult. Steam vapors slithered up through the shuttle-track, danced like ghostly figures, then were blown by the headwinds across the deck and out over the ocean, where they vanished.

The steam-powered catapult piston recoiled and repressurized rhythmically, and with each new discharge it sent a pair of seething afterburners off into the arid night. One followed another until all 18 planes were off and away.

Barely an hour-and-a-half later, Avery and her squadron had turned and burned, having dropped 100,000 pounds of MK-83s on an Iraqi position in Kuwait. The squadron had met no resistance while executing its mission, and now it