Its six squat landing legs were folded out and extended. But MEM 009 was destined to land nowhere.
Gershon stood harnessed in place beside Bleeker in the cramped little cabin of the MEM’s ascent stage. He felt bulky, awkward in his orange pressure suit. In front of Gershon was a square instrument panel, packed with dials and switches and instruments. There were two sets of hand controllers, one for each man. More circuit breakers coated the walls, and there were uncovered bundles of wiring and plumbing along the floor.
The cabin had two small triangular windows, one to either side of the main panel, calibrated with the spidery markings that would help guide a landing on Mars. Blue Earthlight shone through the windows, dappling the cabin’s panels.
Behind Gershon there were three acceleration couches, two of them folded up. On a landing flight there would be a third crewman in here, the mission specialist, a passenger during the MEM’s single brief flight.
The cabin’s surfaces were utilitarian, functional, mostly unpainted. The metal panels were just bolted together, the bundles of wires lashed in place by hand. You could see that the MEM was an experimental ship: the product of handcrafting, of thousands of man-hours of patient labor, and based on conservative designs, stuff that had worked before.
The apparent coarseness of the construction, with everything riveted together as if in a home workshop, was the feature of space hardware that most surprised people used to sleek mass-produced technology. It was nothing like Star Trek.
But to Gershon the MEM was real, almost earthy.
To descend to Mars, in a ship assembled by the hands and muscles of humans: to Gershon, still elated to be in space at all, there was something wonderful about the thought.
As long as the mother worked, of course.
“Coming up on two minutes,” Curval called up. “Mark, T minus two minutes.”
“Roger,” Bleeker said. He turned off the tape.
Glancing at his panel, Gershon could see that the ascent stage was powered up, no longer drawing any juice from the lower stage’s batteries. It was preparing to become an independent spacecraft for the first time.
In this test, simulating a launch from the Martian surface, the whole unlikely MEM assemblage was supposed to come apart, releasing the sticklike ascent stage with its ungainly, strap-on propellant tanks.
Gershon knew this was the moment on the mission that was most feared by the engineers at Columbia and Marshall. There were too many ways for the fucking thing to go wrong. Like, the ascent-stage ignition would take place with the engine bell still buried within the guts of the MEM’s descent stage. What if there was a blowback, an overpressure of some kind, before the ascent stage got clear?…
Well, they were soon going to find out.
Bleeker said, “Guidance steering in the PGNS. Deadband minimum, ATT control, mode control auto.”
“Auto,” Gershon responded.
“One minute,” the capcom said.
“Got the steering in the abort guidance.”
Gershon armed the ignition. “Okay, master arm on.”
“Rog.”
“You’re go, Iowa,” said Curval.
“Rager. Clear the runway.”
Bleeker turned to him. “You ready?”
“Sure.”
“That mother may give us a kick.” Bleeker reminded him of the drill. “Okay, Ralph. At five seconds I’m going to hit ABORT STAGE and ENGINE ARM. And you’ll hit PROCEED.”
“Rager.”
“Here we go. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five.”
Beyond the small window in front of Gershon’s face, the shining blue horizon of Earth drifted by, a complex, clearly three-dimensional sculpture of cloud over sea.
The computer display in front of Gershon flashed a “99,” a request to proceed. He glanced across at Bleeker.
Bleeker closed the master firing arm. “Engine arm ascent.”
Gershon pressed the PROCEED button.
There was a loud bang, a rattle around the floor of the cabin. Pyrotechnic guillotines were blowing away the nuts, bolts, wires, and water hoses connecting the upper and lower stages of the MEM.
A weight descended smoothly on Gershon’s shoulders.
“First-stage engine on ascent,” Bleeker said. “Here we go.” He smiled. “Beautiful.”
After his unexpected assignment to the prime Mars crew, Gershon had been happy to be bumped onto this D-prime test mission. His first flight into space might not have been the most glamorous in the MEM test program — that would probably be the one remaining E mission, the attempt to bring a reinforced MEM in through the Earth’s atmosphere and land it on the salt flats around Edwards Air Force Base. That had been given to an experienced crew led by John Young. But the D-prime, an eleven-day Earth-orbit shakedown flight, was arguably the more important test. In an untried spacecraft, the crew would rehearse every phase of the Mars landing mission save only the atmospheric entry and final powered descent; and, as well, they would rehearse many contingency procedures which might save future missions.
Already, in the MEM, Gershon and Bleeker had ventured as much as a hundred miles from Apollo. In a craft which nobody had tried to rendezvous with before. Which didn’t have a heat shield strong enough to get them back to the ground. And on top of that, the whole flight was in low Earth orbit, where communications and navigation challenges were even tougher than on, say, a flight to the Moon.
If they got through this flight the MEM would be man-rated, with only the Mars heat shield remaining to be test-flown. It was a connoisseur’s spaceflight, a flight for true test pilots.
And besides, Gershon had been happy to bury himself in the mission, to get away from the attention his assignment to the Mars crew had brought him. The first black man in space: the first brother on Mars. He was learning to deal with it, but it was relentless, distracting. And nothing to do with him.
As far as he was concerned he was Ralph Gershon, complete and entire, and not a symbol of anyone else’s agenda.
However, the mission had been snake-bit: nothing but problems from the beginning.
It started even before the launch, in fact. Gershon had seen JK Lee’s people at Columbia tearing their hair out as they tried to coax Spacecraft 009 through its final prelaunch checkout in the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Cape. There had been times when Gershon had become convinced that it wouldn’t come together at all.
Then, once they had reached orbit and opened up the docking tunnel between Apollo and MEM, Gershon found himself floating in a snowstorm of white fiberglass. It had blown out of an insulation blanket in the tunnel wall. Gershon and Bleeker had spent their first couple of hours in the MEM just vacuuming all that crap out of the air, and they had finished up with white stuff clinging to their hair, their eyelashes, their mouths, until they’d looked like nothing so much as a pair of plucked chickens.
After that Bleeker and Gershon had crawled all over the MEM, putting the subsystems through comprehensive tests. And every damn one of those tests had given them problems which had needed diagnosis and repeated testing.
There had been that odd, sour smell coming from the environment control system in the surface shelter, for instance, which they had finally traced to a piece of scuffed insulation slowly scorching behind a panel. The electrical power system had shown some severe faults, with whole panels of instruments just cutting out. Meanwhile the inertial guidance system was a pig, wallowing inside its big metal sphere, constantly losing its lock. And the MEM’s big antennae complex had gotten stuck, and for a while it couldn’t talk to the Apollo or the ground…