Loudspeakers boomed with the voices of the astronauts on the air-to-ground loop, and with updates from Mission Control at Houston and the Firing Room there at the Cape. The Public Affairs Officer intoned countdown highlights. A way down from Muldoon, a woman reporter was fanning herself with a crumpled-up press release.
Muldoon, stiff and hot in his dark business suit, felt aged, restless, thirsty.
The mist was burning off the horizon. Then, at 39A, he could see the slim white needle of the Saturn, emerging from the blue haze.
LAUNCH CONTROL CENTER, CAPE CANAVERAL
When he’d first come to work here at the Cape, Rolf Donnelly had found the LCC very different from the MOCR back at Houston.
The Firing Room was full of the same computer consoles and wall-sized tracking screens; but there were also sixty TV screens showing the Saturn stack from different angles. And in the viewing room behind the Trench, there was a huge picture window with a panoramic view of Merritt Island, with its launch gantries poking up out of the sand, three miles away. Unlike the MOCR, the Firing Room wasn’t closed to the outside world.
And at the moment of launch, the Firing Room flooded with real, honest-to-God rocket light.
The atmosphere was different here, too. The controllers here were independent of the Mission Control guys, by job description and inclination. They were more like blue-collar technicians. The LCC controllers were in charge for the first few seconds of the flight; they were the guys who had to get the mission off the ground by doing the dirty work of the launch.
It was an atmosphere Donnelly liked. He’d come to Florida, bringing his family, soon after the Apollo-N fiasco, hoping to rebuild his career.
As he’d feared, some of the shit flying around then had stuck to him. Well, he wasn’t a flight director anymore; Indigo Team was just embarrassing history, and Donnelly’s brilliant career probably wouldn’t look so brilliant ever again. But he was still here, still involved, still with NASA.
They reached T minus five minutes, and the controllers moved into the final pre-automatic check.
“Guido?”
“Go.”
“EECOM?”
“Go.”
“Booster?”
“Go.”
“Retro?”
That was Donnelly.
He glanced at his console. His vision was misty. “Go,” he said.
Go, by God. Go!
JACQUELINE B. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER
Helicopters flapped over the pads: that was Bob Crippen and Fred Haise, Muldoon knew, checking out the launch weather conditions.
At T minus ten minutes, the countdown went through the last of its planned holds. After that, there were no more holds; and for Muldoon, events unfolded with the inevitability of falling off a cliff.
At thirty seconds, Muldoon stood with the rest, and faced the Saturn. Save for occasional flags of vapor from the cryogenic tanks, the pad was still static, like a piece of a factory.
There was a moment of stillness.
Plumes of steam — from the sound-suppression water system — squirted out to either side of the slim booster. Muldoon could see the last umbilical arms swinging aside. Main engine start.
Then a bright white light erupted from the base of the Saturn.
The Saturn lifted from the ground, startlingly quickly, trailing a column of white smoke which glowed orange within, as if it were burning. The booster was a splinter of bone white riding on a lozenge of liquid, yellow-white light — the fire of the Solid Rocket Boosters — light that was stunningly bright. This, the brilliance of rocket light, was what the pictures never captured, he thought; at this moment the TV images would be stopped down so much they would tame the rocket light, turn the sky dark blue, make the smoke a dull gray.
The stack arched over, following a steep curve away from the tower: the pitchover maneuver, violent, visible. Already the gantry was dwarfed by the smoke column; it looked denuded.
The Saturn punched through an isolated thin cloud, threading it like thread through a needle. The surface of the barge canal rippled, glaring with the reflected rocket light.
Then, after maybe ten seconds of the flight, the sound reached him. There was a deep reverberation that he sensed in his gut and chest, and then a clattering thunder which rained down from the sky above him, in sharp multiple slaps: that was shock waves from the booster engines, huge nonlinear waveforms collapsing and battering at each other. Through this bass pounding he could hear the people around him whooping and clapping.
Before him, silhouetted in rocket light, JFK raised up a wizened fist.
Muldoon could feel that he was in the presence of a huge release of energy: it was like being close to a huge waterfall, maybe. But this energy was made and controlled by humans. He felt a surge of triumph, a deep exhilaration… a huge outpouring of relief.
It was done. And after this last effort, he thought morbidly, he could get to work on pickling his liver seriously. It was a kind of release. No more goals.
The Saturn arced upward, its vapor trail leading right into the sun; Muldoon, dazzled, couldn’t see the first staging.
His vision was blurred. He was crying, damn it. “Go, baby!” he shouted.
MERRITT ISLAND
Seger had been leading his group in hymns, and handing out leaflets about how Ares was carrying plutonium casks, for its SNAP generators, into space. ST. JOSEPH OF CUPERTINO IS THE PATRON SAINT OF ASTRONAUTS. JOIN WITH US IN PRAYER…
But they were mainly ignored by the crowds around them on the road, with their cameras and binoculars, their eyes shaded by hands against the sun.
When the Saturn light burst over the road, the hymn dissolved, as the members of the group turned to look.
The white needle, clearly visible, had lifted off the ground on a stick of fire. There was no sound yet.
Seger fell to his knees, dazzled. It was the first launch he’d viewed since Apollo-N. He let his leaflets fall to the dust, and tears stung his eyes. He could see some of his congregation staring at him, amazed; but it was as if he was back in the MOCR again.
He knew now he’d never left it, really; in fact, he never would.
“This is holy ground,” he said. “Holy, holy ground.”
Gulls wheeled overhead, crying, oblivious to the lethal noise cascading toward them.
JACQUELINE B. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER
Muldoon stayed in the stand until the news came that Ares had reached orbit successfully. When he got to the limousine that had taken him here — in the VAB parking lot, maybe thirty minutes after liftoff — the vapor stack still loomed in the sky above, a man-made column of cloud, miles wide and slowly dispersing.
Book Six
MANGALA
Through the airlock’s small window, Natalie York could see stars, embedded in a black sky.
There was Jupiter, high in the sky, a good third brighter than as seen from Earth, bright enough to cast a shadow. And in the east there was a morning star: steady, brilliant, its delicate blue-white quite distinct against the violet wash of the embryonic Martian dawn. That was Earth, of course. The twin planet was close to conjunction — lying in the same direction as the sun — and was about as close as it ever got to Mars; just now it was actually a crescent in the Martian sky, with its shadowed hemisphere turned to Mars.