The crews sat around the table, staring into the camera, smiles bolted in place.
Carter made a speech of stunning banality, a ramble that seemed to last forever. Solovyov and Viktorenko looked poleaxed. Carter was duller than Brezhnev.
Jesus, thought Stone. It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t know that Carter was on his way out And that he has always been dead set against the space program.
Carter went around the table, speaking to each astronaut and cosmonaut in turn. “So, Joe, I believe this is your first flight in eleven years.”
“Yes, sir, that’s so, my first since the Moon landing. And it’s wonderful to be back.”
“Do you have any advice for young people who hope to fly on future space missions?”
Muldoon’s face might have been carved from wood. Stone knew exactly what he was thinking. Yeah. Don’t fuck yourself over by mouthing off against the Agency. “Well, sir, I’d say that the best advice is to decide what you want to do and then never give up until you’ve done it…”
Well, as long as Carter doesn’t ask if he’s missing his wife, Stone thought, Muldoon will be home clear; everybody in Houston knew that Jill had walked out a couple of months before the launch, but somehow it had been kept out of the press.
Across the table from Stone, Viktorenko dug out five more “vodka” tubes; wordlessly he passed them around. Stone opened his and sniffed at it. Viktorenko nodded to him, holding his gaze. Yes, this really is vodka. But they will think it is borscht. A double joke!
Stone drained his tube in one pull and crushed the metal in his fist.
As the banal speeches and ceremonies went on, the mountains of the Moon, ignored, cast complex shadows over the tabletop.
Wednesday, December 3, 1980
Rolf Donnelly went around the horn, one last time.
“Got us locked up there, INCO?”
“That’s affirm, Flight.”
“How about you, Control?”
“We look good.”
“Guidance, you happy?”
“Go with systems.”
“FIDO, how about you?”
“We’re go. The trajectory’s a little low, Flight, but no problem.”
“Booster?”
“Everything’s nominal for the burn, Flight,” Mike Conlig said.
“Rog. Capcom, how’s the crew?”
Natalie York was on capcom duty again. “Apollo-N, Houston, are you go?”
“That’s affirmative, Houston,” Chuck Jones replied briskly on the air-to-ground loop.
“Rog,” Donnelly said. “Okay, all controllers, we are go. Thirty seconds to ignition.”
York said, “Apollo-N, you are go for the burn.”
Apollo-N was drifting over the darkened Pacific; Ben Priest could see a bowl of white light in the waters below — the reflection of the Moon — and, all but lost in that milky vastness, the lights of a ship.
The crew lay side by side in their couches, cocooned in their pressure suits once more. Priest felt his heart pumping harder. We’ve done everything we can to check this damn bird out; now we have to go full bore on it, and that’s all there is to it.
At ten seconds the DSKY threw up a flashing “99.” Chuck Jones reached out and pushed PROCEED.
Through the changing numbers on his console, Mike Conlig watched as NERVA’s nuclear core was brought back up to its working temperature. Liquid hydrogen was already gushing out of the big S-NB tank and pumping into the cladding of pressure shell and engine bell, and, Conlig knew, would be reaching the radioactive core about now, where it would be flashed to vapor as hot as the surface of a star.
The core temperature began to climb, following the curve laid out in the manuals -
No, it didn’t. The rise was too fast.
Conlig watched with dismay as his numbers drifted away from nominal.
As NERVA lit, the spacecraft shuddered.
Priest was pushed back into his seat with a long, gentle pressure. Perfect. Just like the sims.
Natalie York called up, “You’re looking good here. We’re hawkeyeing your trajectory. You’re right down the center line.”
Priest’s job was to watch the pressure and temperature readouts from the S-NB stage, the NERVA engine, and its big hydrogen tank. Jones was monitoring the attitude indicator with its artificial horizon, ready to take over the steering if the automated systems failed. Dana was calling out their increasing velocity from the DSKY readout. “Thirty thousand feet per second… thirty-three…”
Mike Conlig was aware of a deadly dryness in his mouth. On the loop from the back room, someone was screaming in his ear.
The numbers, white on a green screen, filled his world.
The computers worked constantly to update the numbers, and making sense of them wasn’t easy. He had to check the data-source slots at the top right-hand corner of the screen, to make sure that the sources of his numbers were all still updating him properly, and he had to be sure that he wasn’t diagnosing some problem incorrectly because of a mismatch in numbers of different vintages, fifteen or thirty seconds old.
But he discounted all that. He understood exactly what the silent parade of numbers was telling him. And it wasn’t good. The NERVA core was still overheating.
He tried to increase the flow of hydrogen through the core. That would take away some of the excess heat.
He got no response. In fact, one readout told him that the volume throughput of the hydrogen was actually falling.
Maybe there was a problem with a hydrogen feed line. Or maybe a pump had failed. Or maybe it was his old enemy, cavitation, somewhere in the propellant flow cylinders.
The core’s temperature continued to rise. More screaming in his ear.
Damn, damn. He’d have to abort the burn. And that was probably the end of the mission; he doubted they’d be allowed to go ahead with another engine restart after that.
He sent a command to the engine’s moderator control. He would slow the reaction in the NERVA core, reduce the temperature that way.
He got no response.
If the temperature had gotten high enough, the fuel elements could have distorted, even melted, and it would be impossible to insert the control elements into the core. Was that happening already?
If it was true, there wasn’t anything he could do to retrieve the situation. As he watched his numbers evolve, Conlig felt the first touches of panic.
Priest could clearly see the cones of the volcanoes of Hawaii, upthrusting, broken blisters. Earth receded visibly, as if he were rising in an elevator. The ride was exhilarating.
He felt a surge of elation. The damn nuke works.
It unraveled with astonishing speed.
Conlig watched power surge through the overheating core. After that, the resistance to hydrogen flow through the core sharply increased. Bubbles built up everywhere. The nuclear fuel assemblies were starting to break up. Pressure rose abruptly in the propellant channels, which were also beginning to disintegrate.
The whole structure of the core was collapsing.
The pressure in the reactor began to rise, at more than fifteen atmospheres a second. And, because of the massive temperatures, chemical and exothermic reactions were starting in the core.
And the increased pressure inside the reactor backed up to the pumps, and the pumps’ feedback valves burst. With the pumps disabled, the flow of hydrogen through the core stopped altogether.
The reactor’s main relief valves triggered, venting hydrogen to space. That offered some respite. But the discharge was brief; unable to cope with the enormous pressures and flow rate, the valves themselves were soon destroyed.