Sitting in the canvas frame couch, Gershon sucked some more juice out of his tube and ran his hand over the surface of the grimy instrument panel before him. He grinned. Dining rooms, huh.
Gershon thought of Apollo technology the way, he supposed, other guys might think of classic cars. Like a Corvette, maybe. Apollo was a beautiful machine, and it worked, and it had achieved great things. And even after all those years it was still better than anything the Russians could put up…
And it seemed entirely appropriate to him that the first mission to Mars — for real — should be conducted not in some lost von Braun-type dream of the 1950s, but in a handful of strung-together Apollo-application cans.
Still, he knew that this voyage was a fulfillment of more dreams than just his own. As Ares followed its long, spiraling trajectory to Mars, he felt that it wasn’t alone: it was accompanied by a fleet of ghostly ships, huge silver forms, from the pages of Clarke and Heinlein and Asimov and Bradbury and Burroughs…
The Mozart floated around the cabin, and Gershon worked patiently through his checklist.
Book Three
APOLLO-N
Friday, November 28, 1980
Rolf Donnelly swung his car into his space outside Building 30, the Mission Control Center. He got out, whistling.
There was a new sign up, in a parking space close to the building: MCC M O EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH. Donnelly laughed. Welcome to government work! You’re in Mission Control, and your prize for a good job well-done is the loan of a parking space!
He took a breath of the muggy autumn air. It would be his last fresh air for a while; one of the few things he didn’t like about working in Building 30 was that it was completely enclosed. He walked slowly by the big air-conditioning grilles on the outside of the building; in the spring, birds nested in there, but he couldn’t see any activity.
Donnelly was still whistling as he turned into the building. He was a flight director, and he was going to be lead flight for the Apollo-N mission. And he loved his job.
The big display screens at the front of the room bore spectacular images from Kennedy, of climbing metal, billowing smoke, flames as bright as the sun.
The Saturn VN lifted smoothly off the pad.
A few seconds into the Apollo-N flight, the Mission Operations Control Room was an amphitheater of calm, of control, of patient work. From his position in the command and control row of the MOCR, third from the front, Donnelly could see everything: the rows of blocky benches, the workstations with their clumsy old CRTs and keyboards bolted into place, manned by the controllers that made up his flight team. Indigo Team. The workstations were littered with ring binders of mission rules, polystyrene coffee cups, yellow notepads.
On the brown-painted walls there were mission patches, dating all the way back to Gemini 4; and there were plaques, framed in the team colors of retired flight directors. There was a big Stars and Stripes at the front of the room. The light was low, the colors gloomy; but the CRTs glowed brightly.
The booster passed the launch tower. And, smoothly, Indigo Team took control of the mission from the Kennedy Firing Room.
Donnelly could feel adrenaline surge in his system.
“Roll and pitch program,” Chuck Jones called down on the air-to-ground loop. His voice was shaking, barely audible to Donnelly. “Everything’s looking good. The sky is getting lighter.”
The Saturn VN pitched itself over, arcing east over the Atlantic. The booster was flying itself, gimbaling its engines so that it neatly followed its preprogrammed trajectory; the members of the crew, Jones, Priest, and Dana, were passengers, their nuclear rocket just payload.
Natalie York, capcom for the shift, called up to the spacecraft. “Apollo, Houston… You’re right smack-dab on the trajectory.”
“Roger, Houston. This baby is really going.”
“Roger, that.”
Numbers scrolled across CRT screens, and Donnelly’s team talked quietly to each other on their comms loops.
It was York’s first assignment as capcom. She sounded calm, controlled; Donnelly was pleased.
The flight was going well. Rolf Donnelly could feel it. He didn’t have to do a thing.
There were a lot of unique features about this mission. It was the first time the U.S. had tried to maintain two ambitious flights at once, with no less than six astronauts above the atmosphere: Jones, Dana, and Priest climbing to orbit for their NERVA test flight on top of the Saturn VN, and Muldoon, Bleeker, and Stone already out in lunar orbit in Moonlab, waiting for their rendezvous with the Russians. It was also the first time NASA had operated both its MOCRs at once.
And this was, of course, the first manned flight of the S-NB, the new Saturn booster third stage with its NERVA 2 nuclear engine.
Management Row, behind Donnelly in the MOCR, was full today. For instance, there was Bert Seger, just over Donnelly’s shoulder, his trademark carnation a glare of white. And in the Viewing Room behind the glass wall at the back of the MOCR, Donnelly had spotted Fred Michaels himself, puffing on one of his cigars, watching the numbers unroll with baffled anxiety. This was a very important, and very public, flight.
But Donnelly wasn’t concerned; not now. He had a lot of faith in his people. The controllers in this room were actually leaders of the teams, three or five strong, who worked in the back rooms clustered around the MOCR; to get as far as this room, the controllers had had to work in the back rooms on a good number of missions. That was the way Donnelly had come up himself. The controllers would often get poached away by the higher salaries offered by the aerospace companies: a spell in Mission Control looked good on your resume. But that was all right; it kept down the average age in here.
Anyway, Donnelly had no such ambitions. The MOCR was much closer to the center of gravity of decision making, on any flight they’d launched to date, even than being in the cabin of the actual spacecraft. This was where things were run; in this room, Donnelly was in control. As far as he was concerned, it was better than flying.
One minute into the flight.
The vibrations of the launch smoothed out. We are outpacing sound itself, Jim Dana thought.
“You know,” Jones shouted, “there’s something…”
Ben Priest yelled back. “What?”
“This goddamn bird doesn’t ring right…”
Dana, staring at the panel before him, couldn’t see Jones’s face inside his helmet.
There wasn’t time to think about it. Gs were piling on Dana, as the five heavy engines of the S-IC stage continued to blast. Two, three, four Gs… he could feel his chest flattening.
But that was about as bad as it would get. In fact, the Gs were oddly reassuring. They were coming right on schedule. Maybe Jones was wrong. So far this was just like the sims. Almost.
Suddenly he was thrown forward against his seat restraints. What the…? The smooth buildup was gone. Could an engine have failed? But then he was hurled back, deeper into his couch; and then forward again, so hard he could feel his straps bruise his stomach and chest through the suit’s layers. Then back again -
“Pogoing!” Jones shouted. “Hang on to your hats, guys.”
The vibrations, forward and back, were coming at the rate of five or six a second, and their violence was astonishing. How many Gs? And oscillating all the time -
Dana could no longer see; the craft was a blur around him, and he felt as if he was being pummeled about the chest, head, and legs. We’ll have to abort. We can’t survive this. It’ll shake us to pieces. He tried to turn his head, to see if Jones was reaching for his abort handle.