"You'd be surprised how easy it is after pre-breathing oxygen for an hour," Seedeck asked. "Besides, I've done this once or twice before.
Check my backpack, please?"
"Sure," Bates said, and double-checked the connections and gauges on Seedeck's suit and gave him a thumbs-up. "It's goo d.
"Thanks. Clear the airlock. Admiral, this is Seedeck.
Preparing to depressurize airlock."
"Copy, Dick," the Atlantis' mission commander, Admiral Ben Woods, replied. "Clear any time. "Woods repeated the to Mission Control in Houston five hundred nautical message miles below them.ed the Seedeck turned to the airlock control panel and moved "AIRLOCK DEPRESS SWITCH" to 5, then to 0, and waited for air to be released outside. Three minutes later, Seedeck was exiting the airlock.
It was a sight he would never get used to-the mindboggling sight of the Earth spinning above him, the colors, the detail, the sheer size and spectacular beauty of Planet Earth five hundred miles away. Atlantis was "parked" right over the North Pole, and Seedeck could see the entire Northern Hemisphere-the continents of North America, Europe, and Asia, as well as the North Arctic region and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Clouds swirled around the globe like g Ising strokes of a painter's brush, occasionally knotting and pu the Shuttle's normal as a storm brewed below. Because of his upside-down orientation, Earth would actually be his "sky" during the entire E.V.A. Seedeck closed and locked the airlock hatch, clipped a safety line onto a bracket near the hatch and began working his way hand-over-hand along the steel handholds to where Atlantis' three MMUs, manned maneuvering units, were attached inside the forward bulkhead of the cargo bay. He He inspected one of the bulky, contoured devices, then uncapped it from its mounting harness.
Miming around so his backpack was against the MMU, Seedeck guided himself back against it. He felt his way back with his knees and sides until he heard four distant clicks as the MMU locked itself in place on his backpack.
"MMU in place, Atlantis."copy.
With his safety line still attached, Seedeck made a few test hruster shots then unclipped his safety line from the MMU's tether and moved himself out of the MMU's holder. Pushing gently, he propelled himself away from Atlantis' cargo bay and out into space.
"Clear cargo bay, Atlantis. Beginning MMU tests."
Seedeck knew that Admiral Woods, who would be watching him from one of the eight cameras installed in the cargo bay and remote manipulator arm, was choking down a protest, but Seedeck had an urge he couldn't ignore and this was his time.
A normal MMU maneuverability test consisted of short distances, short-duration movements, all with a safety tether connected. He was supposed to go up a few feet, stop, do a few side-to-side turns and try some mild pitch-ups, all within a few feet of the airlock hatch and manipulator arm in case of trouble.
Not Seedeck. With his safety line disconnected, Seedeck nudged his thruster controls and Performed several loops, barrel rolls, full twists, and lazy-eight maneuvers several meters above the open cargo bay doors.
"MMU maneuvering tests complete, he finally reported as he expertly righted himself above Atlantis'
cargo bay.
"Very Pretty, " Woods asked. "Too bad NASA isn't broadcasting Your Performance in Prime time."
Seedeck didn't care There was only one word to describe this feeling-ecstasy Without a tether line, he was another planetary body in the solar system, orbiting the Sun just like the planets, asteroids, comets, and other satellites around him.
He was subject to the same laws, the same divine guiding force as they were.
Seedeck floated, for a few moments before bringing his thoughts back to the business at hand. He spotted his objective immediately "Inventory in sight, Atlantis. Beginning translation."
They weren't allowed to call it anything but on an open radio channel.
The Atlantis had be "the inventory" six hundred meters away from the huge object, en Parked about e the closest the — it would be a short translation, w re allowed to approach it Y jargon for space-walk, over to it. Seedeck opened a bin in the center of the right side of the cargo bay and extracted the end of the steel cable from its reel mounted on the cargo bay walls, attached the cable to a ring on the left side of his MMU, then maneuvered back into open space and headed for the object floating in the distance.
It was the first time Seedeck had seen it, except of course for photographs and mock-ups. It was a huge steel square, resembling some sort of massive POP-art decoration suspended in space. Each side of the square was a hundred-foot-long, fifteen-foot-square tube. One large rectangular radar antenna, two thousand square feet in area, was mounted on each of two Opposite sides of the square, pointing earthward. Mounted on transmission dish antennas, one Pointing earthward, the Other one Of the other two sides of the square were two smaller data r pointing spaceward. On the remaining side was an eighteeninch diameter cylinder twelve feet long with a large glass eye at one end, also pointing to Earth. Enclosed within heavily armored containers on the four sides of the square were fuel cells, rocket fuel tanks, fuel lines, and other connectors and control units running throughout the steel frame.
Mounted in the center of the square was a huge cylinder, seventy feet in diameter and thirty feet long, armored and covered in shiny aluminum-Atlantis had to move its position now and then to keep the brilliant reflection of the sun from MP ruining its cameras. The spaceward end was closed, but the earthward side had a removable armor cover that revealed five shining, polished walls inside, all empty.
fifteen-foot-diameter tubes, earthlight reflecting around the This was Ice Fortress.
n all the articles, presentations, and drawings, it looked like a Rube Goldberg tinker-toy contraption, but out here in position it looked awesome and as mean as hell. The two large radar antennas, Seedeck knew, were target-tracking radars searching for sea- or land-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles. The smaller dish antennas were data-link antennas, one for transmitting steering signals from the platform, the other for receiving target tracking data from surveillance satellites at higher orbits around earth. The large cylinder with the glass eye was an infrared detector and tracker designed to search and follow the exhaust of an I.C.B.M in the boost phase.
The radars could track warhead carriers, "busses," in the midphase or even individual reentering warheads as they plunged through the atmosphere, and it could even differentiate between decoy warheads and the real thing.
The large center cylinder was the "projectile" container, which housed the launch tubes for Ice Fortress' weapons. The entire station was armored in heat-resistant carbon-carbon steel, and smooth surfaces and critical components like the missile cylinder covers and fuel tanks were also covered in reflective aluminum film. Seedeck had heard rumors about all these strange additions to Ice Fortress, but that wasn't his concern.
Seedeck's job today was to make Ice Fortress operational for the first time.
The station was almost a military unit unto itself, Seedeck thought as he completed his inspection of Ice Fortress. The station received missile-launch detection information from orbiting surveillance satellites that would tell Ice Fortress where to look for the missiles.
The station could use either its radars or its heat-sensing infrared detectors to locate and track the rockets as they rose through the atmosphere. Ice Fortress would then launch its "projectiles" against I.C.B.Ms heading toward North America.
Projectiles. Weird name for Ice Fortress weapons, Seedeck thought.
Ice Fortress carried five X-ray laser satellites. The satellites consisted of a main reaction chamber and fifteen lead pulse rods encasing a zinc lasing wire surrounding it, like knitting needles in a bag Of yarn — The reaction chamber was, in essence, a twenty kiloton uranium bomb-roughly equal to the destructive power of the first atom bomb that exploded over Hiroshima, Ice Fortress sensors would track any attacking intercontinental ballistic missiles and eject the X-ray laser satellites toward them. When the satellite approached the missiles, Ice Fortress would detonate the nuclear warhead within the satellite.