Whatever was coming down, it couldn’t be as bad as that, at least.
She tried to steady her breathing. She was supposed to be here to help, after all.
At the center of the cockpit consoles there was a forty-light caution/warning display. A small panel marked “right OMS” glowed red. The engine, then.
Angel said. “I think—”
There was a jarring bang, sharp and abrupt.
The orbiter shuddered; Benacerraf felt the rattle through her canvas seat, and she heard the creak of stressed metal. Long-wavelength vibrations washed along the structure of the orbiter, powerful, energy-dense.
She could feel it. The thrust of both OMS engines had died, halfway through the burn.
The master alarm sounded again. Now both left and right OMS lights on the caution/warning light array glowed red.
Lamb killed the noise with a stab at a red button. “Goddamn squawks.”
Angel seemed to have frozen; he turned to Lamb, his mouth open. That bang was like a howitzer in the back yard. What was it, some kind of hard light?”
Lamb was pressing at an overhead panel. “Losing OMS pressure,” he barked. “Losing OMS propellant.”
Angel seemed to come to himself. “Okay. Uh, Houston, we seem to—”
“Houston, Columbia,” Lamb broke in. “We have a situation up here. We lost OMS.”
The master alarm sounded again; Lamb killed it again.
It was like the worst simulation in the world, Benacerraf thought.
Tell me this isn’t happening, Fahy thought. She stared at the numbers on her screen, at the flickering alarm indicators, unable, for the moment, to act — unable, in fact, to believe her eyes.
The capcom said, “Can you confirm that, Columbia?
“We lost both OMS, halfway through the burn.”
“Copy that.”
The capcom — a balding trainee astronaut called Joe Shaw — turned and looked to her for guidance, for instructions on what to say next.
Fahy tried to think.
“EECOM, tell me what you got.”
“I see a sealed can, Flight.”
EECOM was telling her that the spacecraft was intact; the crew still had a life-sustaining environment. That was always the first priority, in any situation like this. It gave her time to react.
“DPS, how about you?”
“We think there’s maybe a telemetry problem with a wraparound heater.”
“Where?”
“On one of the right OMS engine pod propellant lines.”
“EECOM, you got a comment on that? It’s your heater.”
“It’s possible, Flight. That heater might be down. We don’t have the data.”
In which case that fuel line could be frozen. Or melting, depending on the situation.
“All right. Prop, talk to me.”
“Prop” was the propulsion engineer. “I’ve lost nitrogen tet and hydrazine pressure in the OMS tanks,” Prop said miserably. Nitrogen tetroxide was the oxidizer, monomethyl hydrazine the fuel for the OMS engines. “If my telemetry’s right.”
“Which tanks?”
“Both.”
“What? Both pods? But they’re on opposite sides of the bird.” And besides, the OMS engines — because of their importance — were among the simplest systems in the orbiter. They were hypergolic; fuel and oxidizer ignited on contact, without the need for any kind of ignition system, unlike the big main engines. There was hardly anything that could go wrong. “How the hell is that possible?”
“We’re working on that, Flight.”
“How much of a loss are you seeing?”
“I’m down to zero. It’s as if the tanks don’t exist any more. There has to be some telemetry screw-up here.”
But we have that report from Lamb, she thought. We know the OMS have shut down. This is something real, physical, not just telemetry.
Another call came in. “Flight, EGEL I got me an unhappy power unit. Number two is in trouble.”
“What’s the cause?”
“We can’t tell you that yet, Flight.”
“Can you keep it on line?”
“For now. Can’t tell how long. Anyhow performance should still be nominal with two out of three APUs.”
“Could that be linked to this OMS issue?”
“Can’t say yet, Flight.”
Christ, she thought.
“Flight, Capcom.” Joe Shaw, at the workstation to her right, was still looking across at her. “What do I tell the crew?”
For a moment she listened to her controllers, on the open loops.
Every one of them seemed to be reporting problems, and batting them back and forth to their backrooms. Fido and Guidance were worried how the orbiter was diverging from its trajectory. EECOM was concerned about excessive temperatures in the main engine compartment at the rear of the orbiter. He was shouting at DPS, worrying about the quality of the rest of his telemetry following the heater defect. And Egil, in addition to his worries about the power units, thought the warning systems, pumping out their multiple alarms, were giving false readings.
Thus, most of the controllers seemed to think some kind of instrumentation problem or flaky telemetry was screwing their data. They couldn’t recognize the system signature they were getting. In such situations controllers had a bad habit of retreating into their specialisms, thinking in tight little boxes, blaming the data.
Except there had also been a crew report. Something real had happened to her ship up there.
Behind her, the FCR’s viewing gallery was starting to fill up. Bad news travelled fast, around JSC.
STS-143 was falling apart, and on her watch.
Another calclass="underline" “Flight, Prop. I’m reading RCS crossfeed. It’s Tom Lamb, Flight. I think he’s going to burn his reaction thrusters.”
He’s trying to complete the burn, Fahy thought.
Lamb thumbed through a checklist quickly. “All right, Bill, I’m going to feed the RCS with my left pod OMS tank. I’m assuming I’ve still got some pressure in there, despite what these readouts say… Here we go. Aft left tank isolation switches one, two, three, four, five A, three, four, five B to close, left and right…”
Lamb was, Benacerraf realized, intending to burn the reaction control engines, without waiting either for the okay from Houston or even for burn targets. He was just, in his can-do 1960s kind of way, going ahead and doing it.
Angel was watching Lamb. He was working switches on an overhead panel. His gestures were hurried, careless, Benacerraf thought. His blue eyes were shining; he grinned, and his face was flushed. He was enjoying this, she realized, enjoying being stuck in the middle of a deorbit burn with two failed engines. Relishing a chance to show off his competence.
She felt a deep and growing unease.
Lamb grasped his flight control handle. “Initiating burn.” He pushed the handle forward, keeping his eye on his displays. “Houston, Columbia. RCS burn started.”
“Copy that.”
“Please upload burn targets for me.”
“We’re working, Tom. Hang in there.”
Benacerraf said, “Are we committed to the deorbit yet? Maybe we could just abort the burn and stay up a little longer.”
Tom Lamb glanced back at her, still holding down the flight stick. “The rear RCS bells are back in the OMS engine pods, remember. If something big has taken out the OMS, we don’t know how long we’ll have the RCS.”
My God, she thought. He’s right. We have to use the reaction control system while we have it, use those smaller thrusters to try to complete the burn. Because it’s all we have, to get us home.
Her perspective changed. It was, she realized, perfectly possible that she wasn’t going to make it through; that suddenly — so quickly — it had become her day to die.