He slowly turned around and started to haul Jones back toward Lightning. The webbed line neutralized Jones’s rotational movement.
Kessler eyed Lightning. He estimated they were at least a thousand feet away, over three times the recommended distance for MMU EVA work, but Kessler knew that was just a precautionary specification. In actuality, as long as compressed nitrogen remained in his tanks, the MMU could take him as far away as he pleased.
He opted for a four-second thrust. The first second would put tension on the line and give him a hard tug, the other three seconds would be to compensate for Jones’s mass and to propel them both toward the orbiter.
With both hands on the controls, Kessler thrust himself forward. As expected, the tug came and jerked him back, but he kept his hands on the hand controls, commanding the MMU to give him more forward motion. Slowly, it happened. Kessler began to drag Jones back to the orbiter.
A few minutes later they got to within one hundred feet. Kessler knew slowing down would be trickier than accelerating. The moment he slowed down, Jones would close the ten-foot gap and either crash against him or fly by him and pull him along. Without slowing down, Kessler glanced at the aft section of Lightning’s empty payload bay. He estimated his velocity at no more than two or three feet per second.
Kessler directed thrusters to propel him and his “cargo” toward the payload bay. He waited. Fifty feet separated them from the bay. Forty feet. Kessler readied himself to perform a maneuver he’d never done before. Thirty feet… twenty-five… now!
He slowed down a little. The webbed line lost its tension as Jones continued moving at the same speed and in the same direction. Kessler jetted himself upward, barely missing Jones, who flew past him a few feet below. He waited for the tug. It came. Hard. Jones pulled him toward the payload bay. Ten feet. Kessler fired the thrusters and managed to slow Jones and himself down to less than a half foot per second. Jones softly impacted the inside wall of Lightning’s aft payload bay. Kessler managed to stop a few feet from him.
Almost home. Kessler unstrapped Jones’s MMU and secured it to the side of the cargo bay.
With Jones’s bulky MMU out of the way, Kessler placed Jones in between the arms of his own and gently jetted toward the front, toward the still-open hatch that led to the air lock. They reached it in less than twenty seconds.
Kessler quickly unstrapped himself, temporarily secured the MMU, and dragged Jones into the air lock.
He closed the hatch and repressurized the compartment. Kessler unlocked his gloves and removed his visor and helmet, letting them float inside the compartment as he unstrapped the backpack and display unit. He unlocked the joining ring, kicked off the lower torso pressure suit, and twisted his way out of the upper torso section. Now he wore only the liquid cooling and vent garment.
He removed Jones’s gloves and helmet, and powered down the backpack unit. Jones’s eyes were closed. Kessler put a finger to Jones’s nose. He was breathing. Kessler noticed a cut on Jones’s forehead. He must have hit the inside of his helmet on impact and knocked himself out.
He finished undressing Jones and spotted bruises on his ribs. Damn! Broken ribs. Kessler frowned, but was not surprised. Jones had crashed against the orbiter at great speed. He was lucky just to be alive. Kessler put on the comfortable blue, one-piece cotton flight suit and then carefully dressed Jones. He pushed the inside hatch open and gently dragged Jones to the mid-deck compartment, closing the hatch behind them.
“Houston, Lightning here. Do you copy?”
“What’s your situation, Michael? How’s Jones?”
“He’s got a head wound and I think some broken ribs. His breathing’s steady and his pulse is strong. I’m going to strap him in and keep him still.”
“Copy, Lightning. Careful with the broken ribs. Could puncture a lung.”
“Roger that. Also, I noticed several black tiles missing on the underside. They must have shaken loose during the explosion. That’s bad news.”
“Exactly how many tiles are we talking about?”
“Uh, I guess about a dozen.”
“We’ll have to check if your tile repair kit can handle that much exposed area.”
Kessler shrugged. Somehow that answer didn’t surprise him. NASA had been putting less and less emphasis on tile repair kits since the early days of the shuttle, when tiles were falling off left and right during tests due to poor adhesives. Since then, better compounds had been developed that greatly improved the reliability of the thermal shield to the point that not one single shuttle mission had had the need to repair or replace tiles in space. For that reason, Kessler doubted that the epoxy foam that came with Lightning’s tile repair kit would be enough to fill a dozen holes, most of which were six inches square by five inches deep.
“Say, Michael, when was the last time you slept more than a few hours?”
“The day before the launch.”
“Get some rest. We’ll wake you in a few hours.”
“Roger, Houston.”
Kessler reached for the orbiter medical system. The three-part medical kit, designed to handle simple illness or injuries, had some medications to stabilize severely injured crew members. He cleaned Jones’s head wound and bandaged it. That was the easy part. The ribs were different. He played cautiously and decided to leave them alone for now. As long as Jones didn’t move much, the broken ribs shouldn’t affect his lungs.
Kessler brought Jones to one of three horizontal rigid sleep stations and unzipped the sleeping bag attached to the padded board. The station was over six feet long and thirty inches wide. Kessler easily guided Jones into it and zipped it up. In weightlessness the sleeping bag would hold Jones against the padded board with enough pressure to create the illusion of sleeping on a comfortable bed. Kessler wanted to do more for his friend, but was afraid that in doing so he could cause more harm than good.
“Sweet dreams, CJ.”
Kessler crawled onto another horizontal station and tried to fall asleep but couldn’t. Too many questions preyed on his mind. Too many things had gone wrong. First the number-one SSME had blown up, then the OMS engines had malfunctioned, and now a faulty MMU. He exhaled. Inspection of the SSME and OMS engines would have to wait until they returned to Earth, but the MMU…
Kessler bolted out of bed, floated inside the air lock, and donned a space suit. He closed the internal hatch, depressurized the chamber, and opened the external hatch. He had left Jones’s MMU tied to the side wall on the other side of the payload bay. Kessler gently pushed himself in that direction without regard for a safety clip until he reached the MMU. He then clipped one end of a woven line hanging from his suit to the side wall.
The nitrogen jets of the MMU had somehow remained open, sending Jones tumbling out of control. Kessler was only partially familiar with the MMU design, but he had an engineering degree and felt somewhat confident enough to open the rear panel door where the nitrogen tanks for the jet thrusters were located. He pulled back a square panel and exposed a section of the tanks along with an array of wires coming from the hand controls. The wires were connected to mini-valves that controlled the flow of nitrogen through a number of tubes coming out of the tanks.
That made sense, Kessler decided. Each tube went to a specific jet. The opening and closing of a valve was in reality what controlled the flow of compressed nitrogen to a jet. The wires went through a translation circuit that converted the hand-control commands into valve commands, which in turn regulated the flow of nitrogen to a particular jet. The conversion was needed because the joystick-type hand controls provided digital pulses which then needed to be amplified and converted into an electric current capable of driving the small valves. The design was simple but reliable. Then again, Kessler thought, the reliability of the system was not any better than the reliability of the individual components.