He floated up into the air and folded back his couch, the center of the three. In microgravity, the cramped cabin seemed roomy. Dana pushed a fingertip against an instrument panel; it was enough to launch him slowly down past the others into the equipment bay under the couches.
He drifted among coolant pipes and storage compartments. There was room to stretch out, for the first time since the launch, with his feet by the hatch and his head pointing at the floor. As he stretched he felt twinges at his stomach, chest, and knees: the aftermath of the pogoing. It was actually less painful than he’d expected; his pressure suit had evidently protected him.
Dana floated down to the Inertial Measuring Unit. The guidance device was a metal sphere the size of a beach ball. Inside the casing a platform was maintained in position by three nested spheres. The whole thing was like a table on a boat, gimbaled to remain level regardless of the boat’s heeling. The system was the spacecraft’s way of being able to sense where it was relative to a reference trajectory.
Checking the alignment was a routine chore; it was a checklist item on every flight. But there was a big fear that the pogoing and wild gyrations Apollo-N had suffered during the launch might have thrown the platform out of line.
To align the platform Dana had to take sightings on various stars through a small optical telescope and sextant. The idea was to pick a couple of stars from a standard list, then tell the spacecraft to find them. If the star wasn’t exactly centered in the crosshairs of the telescope, Dana would make an adjustment to correct it, and the computer would enter the adjustment into the platform, which would then reset itself.
He selected the constellation of Orion, with its distinctive three-star belt across the middle. He shielded his eyes more carefully from the glare of the Earth and the cabin lights, and he pointed the ’scope where he knew Orion ought to be. At last he made out the three faint dots, and bright Sirius nearby, right where they were supposed to be…
He grinned. The alignment was fine. Maybe the worst was over, and the rest of the flight was going to work out.
After all, the first objective of the flight test had already been achieved: to prove that the S-NB could loft itself, and a crewed spacecraft, into orbit. From here on out the mission was to show that NERVA could safely be restarted several times. During the week-long flight Apollo-N would be sent on thin, elliptical orbits, looping a hundred thousand miles into space — halfway to the Moon.
There would be plenty of science to do, with an extreme ultraviolet telescope, helium observations, high-altitude atmospheric studies, and Earth observation and photography; there was equipment inside the Command Module, and various external experiments and sensors stored in an instrument bay in the Service Module. But the science was nominal, Dana knew. The real purpose of this mission was simple: make sure the damn NERVA works, and can be controlled from the spacecraft, without smearing nuclear waste all over everything.
When he’d taken his star readings, he used the sextant to measure the angle between two fixed stars. It was a check of the platform’s memory; Dana had to get his calculations to agree to within a ten-thousandth of a percentage point: the goal, in fact, was to get five balls, a perfect reading of .00000 on the star angle comparison.
Dana scored .00003: four balls and change.
Meanwhile he was getting used to microgravity. When he put his hands out he found he could make himself spin in the air, like a sycamore seed.
The feeling was wonderful. He felt like laughing.
Rolf Donnelly was at the center of a web of information, argument, and extrapolation, a web that swept across the country: from the Marshall people in Alabama, to Rockwell at Downey, with its intimate understanding of Apollo-N, to Boeing, which was doing some hard analysis of the telemetry data from its balky S-IC first stage, to a dozen or more groups in the MOCR, and the back rooms, and in Building 45. He imagined phone lines singing as the ground controllers and the crew worked through comprehensive checklists covering the propulsion systems, gimbal systems, gyros, computers, life support, spreading their findings out across the country.
Slowly the answers were coming in, filtered and assembled by Indigo Team.
The S-IC pogo was, it seemed, due to an unexpected resonance mode of the Saturn VN, the new Saturn/NERVA stack. It should have been anticipated by somebody, long before the stack was assembled for launch.
What the hell happened to quality control on this program? Donnelly understood how everyone involved was under great time pressure. But stilclass="underline" It won’t fail because of me. It sounded like some assholes at Boeing or Marshall had kind of forgotten that motto; and there couldn’t have been a worse mission to forget it on.
Anyhow, what to do?
The logical thing to do was just to abort, to bring the crew home. After all, the spacecraft hadn’t been designed for the treatment it had received during launch.
But Donnelly had started out as a physicist, and he remained, at heart, a scientist. Never mind the mission rules, or the politics: what does the data tell you?
The failure had been Saturn’s, not NERVA’s. And Saturn had been discarded, and the Booster people were assuring him that everything was fine, that the pogoing hadn’t hurt the S-NB nearly as badly as it might have. Besides, the S-NB had already worked — and well, given the situation it had found itself in when it had tried to find its flight path. Meanwhile, the other subsystem teams were continuing to click off the items in their checklists as sweet as honey.
Behind him, in Management Row and the Viewing Room, there were more little clusters of senior management, worrying themselves to death. There was Bert Seger, with the directors of Flight Operations and Crew Operations; and behind Seger, beyond the Viewing Room glass, Donnelly recognized Tim Josephson.
The strategic importance of the flight was obvious to everyone: NERVA’s nuclear technology had to succeed — it had to be demonstrably safe — because if public hostility wasn’t assuaged, and if the nuclear program was cut back or even terminated altogether, well, hell, you could kiss good-bye to Mars.
Donnelly had to make the right call. By tradition only Flight, or Surgeon, the mission doctor, could call an abort. NASA senior management had never before overridden a flight director’s decision during a mission.
It was a first Donnelly didn’t want to happen on his watch.
Natalie York, as capcom, was sitting in the workstation row in front of Rolf Donnelly. She watched the faces of the controllers around her. She’d gotten to know them all during the intensive training for this mission, the long, complex integrated sims, the frenetic drinking sessions later. They were all men, all very young. They shared a brand of intense, fragile intelligence which made them socially awkward, maybe temperamental, ultimately unstable.
They’d all had a tough time during the flight to orbit, and they still faced equally tough decisions.
Mike sat in the Trench, the row in front of her, a little to her left. He was hunched over his console, his posture redolent of tension, his hair loose and greasy at his neck. He was bent in some huddled discussion with a colleague from Marshall.
She remembered all her old doubts about Mike’s temperament — whether he was suited to high-pressure situations like this, involving erratic boosters and manned spacecraft and rapidly unraveling missions…
She had an impulse to reach out and touch him, to try to reassure or calm him. But she knew that her intrusion wouldn’t be welcomed. Mike was off on some trajectory of his own, as out of her control as had been the Saturn/NERVA stack, guiding itself into space.
Anyhow, she ought to be concentrating on herself. This assignment was a big moment for her. York was an ascan no more. She was officially on the flight roster, and this capcom posting was her first operational duty: quite a vote of confidence.