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

Ken Brown

Chair, Intercenter Photo Working Group

Pollard read the e-mail twice before swallowing what felt like a size-12 tube sock in her throat. She selected print using a well-practiced keyboard shortcut, then quickly hit the return key.

Shit! You’ve gotta be frickin’ kidding me! Now what?

Her eyes darted over to her laser printer, where the status light was already flashing. Pollard tapped her fingers on the printer as her brain began to break down the e-mail message.

“Come on, come on.”

What would the crew expect? What’s my next step?

The promise of an easy mission had ended just that fast.

Finally, a small motor inside the printer awoke and along with it a series of gears and rollers. In her mind, too, whirring away like a well-tuned machine, she imagined the vital structures of Columbia’s wing: the reinforced leading edge, the protective tiles on the underside of the wing and the left main landing-gear door that protected a pair of virgin Michelins pressurized with gaseous nitrogen to a rock-hard 350 psi.

She grabbed the printed e-mail on her way out of her office just as her mind reached the end of the correct path. Like a fireman waking to the sound of a call, Pollard knew exactly what she needed to do.

Data, data, data. The debris strike must be objectified.

She needed to form a tiger team.

The debris strike e-mail propagated throughout NASA and the space community like the cargo of frenetic scout-ants.

For as many who heard the news it seemed there were an equal number of opinions, some based more on fact and experience than others, about what could happen to Columbia if no further action were taken.

Every engineering division at NASA, whether electrical, structural or some other discipline, viewed the debris strike from its own studied perspective. Some thought it was simply a turnaround issue, NASA’s term for something that needed to be addressed and fixed before an orbiter’s next mission, but not something that posed an immediate risk to either crew or spacecraft. They argued that in the past 112 shuttle flights, debris shed from the external fuel tank had never been shown to be a safety-of-flight issue.

Experts from NASA’s structural-engineering division, on the other hand, wrote lengthy e-mails describing just how awful it could be if the debris had in fact penetrated Columbia’s thermal protection system. They predicted that if the reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) panels of Columbia’s wing were breached, the superheated plasma gases of reentry would penetrate the wing, melting the wing superstructure, which in turn would lead to catastrophic loss of crew and craft.

At this point, though, no one knew for sure.

Chapter 5

Cocoa Beach, Florida

Friday, Jan. 17, 2003

1:16 PM EST

JOHN STANGLEY DONNED the white hotel-supplied terry cloth bathrobe, grabbed the remote to turn off the TV, and then sat down in a chair near the window. He moaned all the while as if he’d had to summon all his physical resources to complete the simple task. Except for the low-level rushing of white noise in his ears, an apparent side effect of the antidepressant he was taking, there was a wonderful silence. It was almost restful, magical. His eyes were swollen like a prizefighter’s from hours of crying, his vision blurry still at the edges from tears, but, by the grace of God, he thought, this last bout of crying had finally passed.

He took the newspaper from the small table beside his chair, found the article he’d written, and began reading:

16-Day International Shuttle Mission Begins

By John Stangley

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida.

   Shortly before 11 A.M. EST yesterday, Space Shuttle Columbia roared off launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on her 28th flight, in what NASA has described as an uneventful launch. For this mission, designated STS-107 (STS, short for NASA’s Shuttle Transportation System), Columbia is carrying an international crew of seven, which includes two women and a first-ever Israeli astronaut. The crew will conduct experiments around the clock in two shifts for the duration of the scheduled 16-day mission.

   “STS-107 was delayed 13 times over more than two years—she’s finally off the ground!” Gerald Conner, a spokesperson for NASA, told reporters in a post-launch press conference Thursday. “Some of the delays were caused by the shifting of the mission schedule to allow higher-priority missions to launch first. Other delays were due to extended maintenance work on Columbia, which took six months longer than we expected and, finally, we found flowline cracks on several main engines and had to perform some last-minute flowliner (the main-engine fuel lines) repairs on Columbia’s main engines.”

   The mission’s sole purpose is to serve as a floating laboratory, where the crew can conduct research in a microgravity environment. There are no space walks planned for this mission—none of the familiar activities such as satellite launch/repair or construction work on the space station.

   Following STS-109 in March 2002, Columbia’s last mission, the space plane spent several months in California for refurbishment and modifications, and was then flown back to the Kennedy Space Center piggyback-style on the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft—NASA’s specially modified Boeing 747 airplane.

   While in California, the robotic arm was removed from Columbia’s payload bay to make room for SPACEHAB Inc.’s Research Double Module (RDM). The RDM is a pressurized work environment mounted inside Columbia’s payload bay that is accessible during orbit by the crew via a tunnel extending from Columbia’s mid-deck into the payload bay.

   The module measures 20 feet long, 14 feet wide, and 11 feet high. The RDM, while significantly increasing Columbia’s living space, provides a space-station-class microgravity laboratory, allowing continued research in space during International Space Station construction.

   Nearly 82 percent of the RDM’s 9,000-pound capacity will be used by NASA, while the remaining 18 percent has been marketed by SPACEHAB Inc. to international organizations such as the European Space Agency (ESA), the Canadian Space Agency and some commercial users.

   Astronauts of STS-107 will conduct some 80 experiments designed