Abandon flotation tanks and prolonged astronaut training. Stick the inexperienced mission specialists into existing Hamilton Standard space suits, show them the oxygen switch and the waste management facility, and tell them to touch nothing else.
Use experienced Shuttle pilots and arrange it so that the mission specialists, safely inside the orbiter, tell them how to prime the nukes during EVA. Don’t get that bit wrong.
Abandon all thought of spacecraft environmental testing, simulated mission environments and the like.
Use big hunks of old interplanetary mission and operational support planning. Tear out the pages that don’t apply. Do likewise with the computer programmes on board and on the ground.
Improvise.
Pray.
KSC press release no. 257-02
The Venus probe passed an important milestone today when it was hoisted atop the Air Force inertial upper stage, prior to being loaded into the Frontiersman Space Shuttle. The operation was begun at midnight precisely and it was on the upper stage by 1 a.m. Until now, IUS and the probe it carries have been undergoing integration and testing at the Payload Hazardous Services Facility (PHSF) at Kennedy Space Center. Verification tests will begin immediately and are expected to be complete within twenty-four hours. Probe close-up activities will begin on the following day, February 13, leading to its encapsulation inside the Shuttle cargo bay. The long crawl to Launch Complex 39-B on Cape Canaveral Air Station will then begin.
“In this weather? Idiots.”
“Sir?” The young Air Force pilot, startled, looked across at the white-haired meteorologist.
“Just talking to myself, son. It happens when you get to my age.”
“Yes sir. I talk to my teddy bear.”
Merryweather put the press release back in his briefcase. He glanced down at the chalets and villas of the NASA executives over which they were flying. The familiar outline of the Johnson Space Center, a sixteen-hundred-acre sprawl, appeared ahead. Merryweather tapped the pilot’s shoulder and indicated a spot near the warehouses at the edge of the site: he wanted to walk. The helicopter sank over warehouses and test facilities, flew low over the astronaut isolation HQ, and settled gently down on to a field at the edge of the site.
Merryweather collected his badge and shook hands with a young, plump man. “Hi George. It’s gusty out there, prevailing west-nor’west, humidity eighty per cent. Cloud ceiling moderate.”
“Am I glad to see you, sir. I’m going nuts. Come along to the Weather Room.”
A bank of familiar terminals faced Merryweather. He went straight to one of them, and looked at a set of black lines covering a map of North America. Over Canada, the USA and Mexico the lines seemed to meander aimlessly. Further out they wandered over Cuba and the islands of the West Indies. But just outside Mexico, they formed into tight, concentric circles.
“Ho hum. Anything from GOES or the DMSPs?”
“Over here.”
For the next forty minutes Merryweather immersed himself in a complex mass of data from geostationary satellites, polar orbiters, radars from Cocoa Beach to Melbourne, sixty-foot towers scattered around the launch pad, buoys in the heaving seas up to 160 miles from Cape Canaveral, balloons at 100,000 feet in the stratosphere and lightning detection systems at over thirty sites around the Cape. Telephone exchanges with the USAF 45th Space Wing Commander and the Weather Team at Canaveral confirmed what Merryweather clearly saw: the weather pattern was unstable and deteriorating.
Two sets of weather criteria have to be satisfied before a Shuttle launch is permitted. The weather has to be right for launch, and it has to be right for landing. The launch criteria need only the observed weather at the moment of launch; but the end-of-mission criteria require a forecast. Merryweather concurred with his worried colleague: neither set of conditions was satisfied.
Merryweather entered the third-floor Flight Control Room, the one used for Department of Defense payloads. The Flight Director was sitting on the bench with his back to a console, in conversation with the CAPCOM, Gus Malloy, a former astronaut.
“Jim, heard you’d turned up. Good to see you.” The FD’s expression did not match his words of welcome.
Without preliminaries, Merryweather leapt into the attack. “Joe, what’s going on here? They tell me you’re overriding your Weather Team. The landing criteria will not be satisfied. You need a cloud ceiling more than eight thousand feet and you’ll have six. You need visibility five miles and you’ll have four. You know crosswinds have to be less than twenty-five knots and you’ll have forty. There’s an even chance of strong turbulence at the point of landing, and I couldn’t rule out a thunderstorm in forty-eight hours. You want to fly your Shuttle back through anvil cirrus? Maybe in a thunderstorm?”
“Jim, at the worst, we can put down in Morocco instead of Edwards. You guys are all the same. You know the standard weather parameters are conservative. We’re just giving a little flexibility.”
“A little? There’s a storm heading in from the Gulf. I practically guarantee precipitation at Kennedy within the next four hours. You’ll be gusting well over the thirty-four-knot peak. The damn thing could hit the gantry on the way up.”
“Jim, you’re retired, remember?”
“You’ll never get this through the poll.”
If only I could explain, the FD thought. But he simply shrugged and said, “We’ve taken an executive decision. And the final decision to launch or scrub is mine.”
“I have no official status here but I want it noted that I concur with your SMG. The Flight Rules are not satisfied, neither LCC nor RTLS criteria. And the downrange weather advisory gives seas in excess of five: there are twenty-foot waves out there, Joe. Launch Frontiersman in this and I’ll personally crucify you at the congressional inquiry.”
“So noted. We’re tanking up now and we GO in four hours and twenty minutes.”
“If I recall the routine, the astronauts are due a weather briefing in fifteen minutes. They’ll refuse to fly.”
“You’ll see.”
The prime firing room at the Kennedy Space Center has its own code of discipline. Conversation is limited to the business in hand: there is no place for idle chatter between the serious professionals who man it. No personal telephone calls are made except in an emergency. No reading material unrelated to the business in hand will be seen therein. The professionals do not wander about; each man (and they are nearly all men) remains at his assigned station, concentrating on the task in hand.
The vocabulary of the firing room is terse, technical and laden with acronyms. This clipped conversation is not used to exclude the uninitiated; rather, by stripping away non-essential verbiage, the language yields precision of speech and concept; and the vital outcome is that, in a complex, changing and highly technical environment, individuals understand each other perfectly. As a sub-set of the English language it serves its purpose even though, to the outsider, there is something faintly absurd about describing a lavatory as a waste management facility, or a stranded astronaut’s fate as an ongoing death situation.
Three hours before launch, entrance to the firing room is restricted; movement within the room is minimized. Twenty minutes before launch, while the “ice team” are making a last check on the ice which builds around the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks, and the white room close-out crew help the astronauts into their little vehicle, the door of the firing room is locked. And fifteen minutes before launch, readiness polls are conducted amongst the Shuttle Launch team. These polls ensure collective responsibility, and protect the system against eccentric or arbitrary decisions by highly placed officials.