Authors: Douglas Savage
“Amen, Brother Jacob.”
“What about Mother?”
The command pilot watched his attitude indicator ball swing upside down as the ship's three inertial measurement units caught their electronic breath. The digital numbers on the Mission Elapsed Time clock located just above the forward windows blinked on showing 00:01:29:30 and counting up. The pilot in the right seat checked his wristwatch sewn into the sleeve of his pressure suit. His watch read 10:29 Houston time, in agreement with the MET clock. Mother had not missed a beat.
Enright pulled a clipboard from beneath his seat. On it were a complex series of graphs and square grids full of numbers. The pilots called it a Buzz Board in honor of retired, Apollo astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, the man who followed Neil Armstrong down the ladder of the lunar lander Eagle at Tranquility Base, the Moon. On Aldrin's first spaceflight on board the two-man spacecraft Gemini-12 back in 1966, Astronaut Aldrin had concocted his own, long-hand tables for executing a space rendezvous with an Agena target satellite by eyeball-only. The other astronauts laughed and dubbed the quiet, intense airman, “Doctor Rendezvous.” But on Gemini-12, the ship's rendezvous radar failed before astronauts James Lovell and Buzz Aldrin could catch their Agena target in the heavens. Aldrin pulled out his home-grown charts, and with them, Twelve shot a perfect rendezvous and docking without radar help. No one laughed after that performance.
“What's the Buzz Board say, Jack?” the Colonel asked impatiently as they coasted northeast, headsdown, over blue water halfway between Hawaii and Mexico City.
“It says: Range to target 1 point 2 miles, R-dot 30 feet per second and closing. Does Mother agree, Will?” It was Enright's turn to sound anxious.
The AC tapped his computer keyboard beside his right leg. On the center television, Mother's green face printed “1.2 R . . . 28.3 R.”
“Seems we're still in business, Number One!”
“Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night, Skipper.”
“Endeavor, Endeavor: GDS listening at 90 minutes.”
“Greetings, California,” the AC drawled from a thousand miles due west of Guadalajara, Mexico.
“Bet you boys are just sitting up there, hands folded, looking out the window while everyone down here has to work for a living.”
The two upside-down pilots looked at each other across the twenty-inch-wide center console separating their seats.
“You got that right, Goldstone,” Enright replied without smiling.
“Thought so, Endeavor. Your temps look fine. When we get a good hard lockup on your uplink, we'll update your state vectors via GDX.”
The two great dish antennae at the Goldstone tracking station in southern California carry the designators GDS and GDX.
“ 'Kay,” a Kentucky voice called from the black sky full of sun.
“You're 2½ from Baja. We show you 1 point 2 behind your target and closing at R-dot of 26 feet per second. Soyuz is station-keeping two hundred meters from the target and they remain radio-silent. Backroom wants you to roll plus Z throughout TPI. You should have no problem using the COAS for the final approach alignment.”
“Roger, California. Understand attitude-hold in headsup. We're still anxious about our temperatures with the doors closed in the bay.”
“We're watching it for you, Shuttle. Your next sunset will be at two hours, two minutes. No problem with your heat load till then.”
“Flight, you got a time hack on opening the bay doors? Don't want to rely on the flash evaps one minute longer than necessary.”
“We hear you, AC. We're hoping to have you on station with the target on this revolution by the time you lose Bermuda. We should be able to cycle the bay doors and engage the radiators during your BDA contact.”
“Okay, Houston. We'll plan on getting the doors open before we lose Bermuda. How's that timewise?”
“Ah, standby one, Jack . . . You're AOS Bermuda at 01 hours, 49 minutes. Then your LOS seven minutes.”
“Roger, Flight. It's already warmin' up in here . . . And we're now rollin' to plus-Z.”
“We see you rolling over. The evaporators should be able to handle the heat load another ten minutes, no problem. We show you now crossing Baja California, at 01 hours, 02 minutes, MET. See it?”
“Sure do from the right seat, Flight. It's very clear, very reddish.”
“Believe that, Jack. And we show your range to target one mile even. We'd like to try a COAS shot here. AC: Your target should be about sixty-seven degrees above the horizon. Sun now about forty-five degrees high in the east, well below the Celestial Equator. Target should be in motion ahead and above you and rising against the stars Vega, low, and Alphecca, high, both northeast.”
The command pilot riding headsup squinted against the sun burning through his center, side window. His face was close to the small mirror of his COAS alignment sight.
“Lookin' . . . Lookin'. Have stars Altair very low in the east, and Antares about forty degrees high southeast.”
The command pilot gently nudged Endeavor's nose from side to side with pre-programmed, one-tenth-second bursts of Shuttle's two small vernier thrusters one on each side of Endeavor's nose. Each tiny thruster popped with only 24 pounds of thrust for very fine attitude adjustments. The pilot fine-tuned his ship's position with his control stick as he searched near the faint star Rasalhague in the equatorial constellation Ophiuchus nearly invisible against the sun in the east.
“Good star field, Flight. Wait one . . . One of'em is moving . . . moving upward. Jack is checking on it.”
The copilot tapped his computer keys asking Mother to resolve the Crew Optical Alignment Sight observation with the vector to LACE by the rendezvous-radar. Mother's green face blinked at her pilots.
“Visual contact confirmed, Flight. Range one mile, and R-dot of sixteen feet per second. Angle 71 point three degrees high and increasing as we pass under the target. Have a very bright Soyuz in the starfield ahead.”
“We hear you, Jack. You're Go for braking maneuver your discretion. KSC will remind you via MLX to confirm Hughes, anti-laser visors down and locked.”
“No need, Flight. They're in place and secured.”
“Copy that, Endeavor. And welcome home! You are over Texas now at 95 minutes out. Configure LOS Goldstone. With you by Merritt Island.”
“Mornin', Florida. See you later, California, thanks. Our range-to-go now zero point niner miles, and Jack and I both have a real visual dead ahead. Brightest thing I've seen out here. Brighter than approaching an Apollo CSM for sure. Sun angles must be just right.”
“Copy, Will. You're four and one-half minutes from Bermuda acquisition which will occur over Georgia. And put Jack on the day watch; backroom says his eyeballs are sharper than yours, Will.”
“Thanks, Flight. Just don't call me Gramps yet . . . You heard the man, Number One. Into the crow's nest with you!” the AC grinned with his very best Wallace Beery voice which always convulsed Jack Enright.
“Aye, Captain Bligh,” the copilot laughed, flying headsup, 130 nautical miles above southern Texas 180 miles west of Houston.
“Step lively, Mister Christian,” drawled Wallace Beery with a touch of Blue Grass country in his raspy voice.
“You guys all right up there or what?” the headphones crackled as Shuttle over Texas spoke with Cape Canaveral's antennae.
“Too much sun, I reckon,” the AC grinned.
“Sounds like it, Will. Make Jacob wear his hat.”
“Roger, Flight.”
“And, Endeavor, we see you really close now. Advise when braking.”
Endeavor approached LACE from below. In her lower orbit, Shuttle sped over the ground slightly faster than her target.
“Range half a mile; R-dot down to 12 feet per second. Target is right in the COAS field, dead center and 83 degrees high. Great visual out the windows. And there's Brother Ivan five degrees below the target. I can just make out the new window in the work-station module. Must be a Soyuz-TM alright.”
“Real fine, Will. Your freon loop temps still look good from here.”
“A real traffic jam up here, Houston.”
“Roger that, Jack. Don't run over anyone.”
“Try not to. Skipper is now on the THC for final approach.”
“Copy, Jack. Understand Will is braking manually.”
The Aircraft Commander had powered up the translational hand controller, a square handle with four spokes forming a fist-size cross at the lower left side of the forward instrument panel. With the THC in his left hand, Parker called upon the RCS thrusters which fire fore-aft, up-down, and left-right, to nudge Endeavor into minutely different orbits en route to LACE. With the rotational hand controller, RHC, in his right hand between his knees, the Command Pilot adjusted the attitude of Shuttle's rightside-up body. Both pilots had an RHC control stick between his thighs, but only the pilot in command had the translational controller for moving the ship through space under rocket power. Pushing the THC into the instrument panel fired two RCS jets in each of the tail's OMS pods. These pushed Shuttle forward. Pulling back on the THC handle fired three 870-pound-thrust jets in the nose for slowing Endeavor's forward velocity.
Squinting into the tubular COAS sextant and out the window, the AC had his hands full of starship. He had to slow their closing speed with exacting precision to stop right at LACE in an orbit perfectly matching LACE's orbit. Any alignment or velocity error would send Shuttle silently above or below their target, an error grossly costly in propellant. Such an overshoot, called a “wifferdil,” would require enormous amounts of precious RCS fuel to fix.
In close pursuit of LACE over the heartland of the Old Confederacy, the command pilot flew his terminal approach while his copilot read out the numbers of the chase.
“At 99 minutes, Endeavor, you are due north of Atlanta.”
“Thanks, Flight,” the Skipper called. “ âOld times there are not forgotten' . . .”
“ âLook away, look away,' ” Jacob Enright sang inside his helmet over the hiss of the air rushing into his face from the suit's sealed neckring.
“Think your frog got loose, Will,” the voice from Earth chuckled.
“Hard to argue with that, Flight.”
“Fifty seconds to AOS by Bermuda.”
“Thanks, Houston.”
Endeavor flew 130 nautical miles above the Appalachian Mountains of east Tennessee and western North Carolina. Below, where it was 11:40 in the morning Eastern Time, the mid-day sun of winter was well below the Equator. The white sun cast soft shadows from the northern flanks of the Great Smokey Mountains browned by winter chill. As the mountains slid beneath Shuttle at five miles per second, the ship was almost vertical. The command pilot paused in his final approach to study the bright landscape of his youth. In the high sun angle, terrain features were fuzzy and were washed out by the sun's glare. Behind his eyes, William McKinley Parker filled in the details of mountain hollows along the Cumberland Plateau dotted with little clapboard houses from whose chimneys smoke would be rising, and of paintless old churches beside ancient graveyards. Behind the battered fences, letters etched into coarsely hewn stones had been erased by wind and weather over the generations. Riding with his head pointed toward the black but starless sky, the Colonel intently searched the holes in the clouds for Kentucky's white rail fences and old smokehouses.
“Endeavor: At 100 minutes, we have you by Bermuda. You're two minutes from the coast and three minutes from LOS by Merritt Island. You lose Bermuda in 8 minutes. Target now 300 meters, R-dot at 08 feet per second. Downlink looks fine; Freon temps look fine.”
“Thanks, Flight,” the pilot in command responded. “Looks like a real solid lockup with the target.”
“Copy, AC. We'll be quiet while you shoot the approach. Still not a word from Soyuz now 400 meters from the target. If Ivan is talking with his own stations, Network is not hearing it. We do have their C-band beacon though.”
“ 'Kay, Flight. You watch the store for us, especially the water loop temps . . . What you see, Jack?”
“Climbing right up the slot, Skipper.” Enright repeatedly queried the green television about LACE's position. Ordinarily, Shuttle crews pilot a space rendezvous from the flight station in the rear of the flightdeck. But Shuttle's first-revolution rendezvous with a crew of two instead of the normal operational complement of four astronauts made a front-seat rendezvous necessary. Enright flew the computer keyboard and the televisions while the AC handflew the starship.
“Easy, Will. R-dot down to 6 FPS. We're 280 meters out and 300 meters below. Steady as she goes . . .”
Endeavor rose toward LACE, twinkling like a black jewel in the blinding sunshine.
“Now 200 behind, 250 below . . . Left just a tad, Skip.”
The AC jerked the translational hand controller in his left hand toward the cabin wall. A pulse toward the right stopped the portside drift as Shuttle crossed directly beneath LACE 150 meters away.
“Easy does it, Will . . . Braking . . . Braking.”
Forward pulses from Endeavor's nose jets slowed Shuttle as she climbed out ahead of LACE.
“Null your plus-Z residuals . . . Now! Real fine, Skip.”
Lifting the THC handle fired the thrusters in the top of the two tail pods and the upward-firing jets in Shuttle's nose. The ship matched LACE's altitude perfectly.
“Combination braking, Skip.”
With the computers choosing the best RCS thrusters to accomplish the commander's orders from his two control sticks, the pilot halted Endeavor's drift out ahead of and eastward of LACE. But slowing Endeavor to allow LACE to close their separation distance would actually drop Shuttle back into a lower orbit which would defeat the delicate physics of a space rendezvous. So with each retrograde thrust to slow Shuttle, Mother chose a combination of upward-firing jets to hold Endeavor in line with her target.