Kessler glanced backward through the rearview panes, checking for any abnormalities in the payload bay. No light shone in the payload bay area. That only meant one thing. There hadn’t been a burn-through yet. The Russian bandage was still holding.
Six minutes. Kessler felt he was asphyxiating. The air inside Lightning seemed thick, heavy. He didn’t understand why. Tereshkova had provided them with enough oxygen to reach Earth safely. Is there an oxygen leak somewhere? Maybe caused by all the explosions?
Vibrations remained at an all-time high. Kessler kept a solid grip on the stick and his eyes on the attitude indicator. Thirty-five degrees. Speed 9.5 mach.
Kessler checked the oxygen level. It had dropped below normal. Why? What’s happening? It didn’t matter at that point. He couldn’t do anything about it anyway. He couldn’t leave the control stick. Sweat ran into his eyes and he blinked rapidly, forcing them to remain focused on the attitude indicator. The angle had to be maintained at all cost. He had reached maximum re-entry temperature. Any disturbance in his flight path would most likely result in Lightning’s immediate disintegration.
Just as slowly as they had begun, the vibrations faded away, and so did the orange glow alongside the bottom of the front panes. Kessler’s lips pursed suspiciously. He still had three minutes left. Why had he already broken through? It was too early. Something had gone wrong. He double-checked the angle of entry. It had been a steady thirty-five degrees for most… Oh, Jesus. For twenty or so seconds he had lowered the nose as much as fifteen degrees to avoid collision with the satellite. That was it! Damn.
His heartbeat increased in anticipation of what he would see. He hoped to see land, but as the noise went away and he shot below 150,000 feet at 4.5 Mach, all he could see was the ocean.
“Houston, Lightning here.”
“Lightning, we’re tracking you four hundred miles off course. What in the hell happened up there?”
“Had a close encounter with a suicidal satellite.”
“Say again, Lightning?”
“I’ll tell you guys later.”
“Stand by, Lightning. We’re plotting a new approach solution.”
“Roger, but make it fast, Houston. Oxygen level is getting too low.” Kessler eyed the altimeter. It showed 140,000 feet at 4.3 Mach. He inhaled deeply several times. The low oxygen level began to take its toll. He felt light-headed. Kessler shook his head vigorously and fought to remain in control. He now wished he had that portable oxygen unit in the aft crew station, but lacking a co-pilot, he couldn’t afford to let go of the stick for even a second.
“No problem, Lightning.Avoid the S-turns. New heading zero-eight-zero. Maintain current angle of descent. At that speed you should see the coast any second now.” The S-turns were used to bleed speed after reentering the atmosphere.
“Houston, oxygen level… in critical. Need to switch to autopilot… as soon as possible.”
“Stand by, Lightning.”
Kessler was now breathing heavily through his mouth. His limbs began to tingle. He knew he could lose consciousness in less than a minute unless he reached for that oxygen unit.
“Lightning, there may not be enough juice left for the autopilot servo-motors.”
Kessler didn’t have a choice. It was either switching or asphyxiating. He enabled autopilot and let go of the stick. Lightning remained on course.
With his vision blurring, Kessler unstrapped himself and bolted to the rear. Suddenly, his vision also narrowed. He had gotten up too fast. He was weaker than he’d imagined, and dropped to his knees. His body had not gotten a chance to adjust to Earth’s gravity. The single G that Kessler was experiencing felt like four or five.
“Lightning, Houston. What’s your situation?”
Kessler wasn’t listening any longer. He looked up and saw the metallic door to the right of the aft crew station. He had to reach it and pull out the small emergency oxygen unit.
Kessler kicked his legs and pushed himself toward the back. His body felt very heavy. His hands trembled from the effort. An overwhelming desire to rest engulfed him, but he persisted. He had come too far to give up now. He had to fight. He was mission commander. He was in control of Lightning. One final push. There! He pulled open the cabinet and extracted the oxygen mask attached to a small canister through a thin plastic tube. He placed the mask over his mouth and nose and turned the knob on the canister.
Kessler took one breath of pure oxygen, exhaled, and quickly followed with three more. He coughed for a few moments and breathed deeply once more before sitting up.
“Lightning, Houston. Come in. Come in, Michael. Michael?”
Kessler stared at the empty flight seat, and slowly crawled on his hands and knees back to the front and strapped himself in place. He eyed the altimeter as it shot below 110,000 feet.
“I’m still here, Chief.”
“Welcome home, Lightning.We have you on TV at one hundred thousand feet, three-point-five Mach. Everyone is breathing a little easier now.” Kessler smiled. Lightning was safely gliding toward the dry lake beds of Edwards Air Force Base.
“Roger that, Houston. Ninety thousand feet, range seventy-four miles, two-point-nine Mach,” Kessler read out loud. “Everything looks good on board.”
“Roger, we’re looking at it. You can take air data now.”
“Roger, Houston. Eighty-two thousand at two-point-five Mach.” Kessler switched controls to automatic and then back to manual, performing a series of tests before flying around the approach circle manually and then going back to automatic control for the first part of the approach-and-landing phase. The data from the tests were automatically fed back to Houston control, where powerful computers quickly analyzed them. Lightning was designed to use RCS thrusters in space, and elevons and rudders inside Earth’s atmosphere. As Lightning descended below the stratosphere, the General Purpose Computers were in the critical process of slowly transitioning from the RCS system to the elevon/rudder system for control of flight. Nearly two million operations per second computed the precise blend of RCS and aerodynamic controls to keep the orbiter on its glide path. No pilot could ever even dream of coming close to maintaining that tricky balancing act.
“Everything is looking right on the money. We have a wind update for you and a weather update. You’ve got a very thin cloud layer at forty thousand, the winds airborne are as briefed, and on the ground two-one-five at eighteen knots gusting to twenty. Altimeter two-niner-oh-five. Visibility fifty unlimited.”
“It sounds like a good ol’ day at Eddie!”
“You got it, Lightning.”
As the orbiter descended below 45,000 feet, Kessler noticed the computers shutting off the RCS system. The air was thick enough to rely only on aerodynamic control surfaces.
“Hello, Lightning. Welcome to California.”
Kessler looked to his right and noticed the first of the chase planes, an Air Force T-38 Talon.
“Lightning making a wide sweeping turn to get aligned with the runway. Twenty thousand feet.” Runway 23 at Edwards was ready and waiting.