Perigee

1

Cape Canaveral, Florida
September

Waiting was the hardest part of the job.

A necessary inconvenience, it sustained a time-worn pilot’s adage: flying was hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror. The frenzy would come soon enough. For now, there was just not much for Dan Wyatt to do except look out the window and try to ignore the burning sensation around his neck.

His heavy beard made that especially irritating, as his suit tugged at the freshly shaved follicles beneath his chin. Unable to loosen the collar, he stretched instead, circling his arms and running a thick gloved finger inside the neck ring beneath that maddening pressure seal.

The sacrifices we make for government work
, he thought. If this went on long enough, he’d get to enjoy struggling to not wet his suit.
At least I finally learned to lay off the coffee before launch
.

He was reclined in the commander’s seat of
Orion 1,
poised on pad 39-A, the site from where giant Saturn V rockets had departed for the moon decades earlier. Not that many years ago, it had launched the last space shuttle. And today, for the first time in decades, it would launch the first flight of a new class of space vehicle. Riding a booster crafted from old shuttle components,
Orion’s
shakedown flight would take his crew around the moon on a looping elliptical orbit. Someday, the purse-holders in Washington might be persuaded to let them go even farther. DC’s perpetual funding tug-of-war guaranteed nothing but uncertainty.

Orion’s
first mission would be Wyatt’s last, and in this moment he tried to absorb the sensations instead of allowing the checklists to consume him. It was often far too easy to miss out on what they were actually doing. He pulled up against a handrail by his window for a quick peek at the Florida coast far below. As seagulls drifted past along the breeze, he smiled and settled back into the chair.
Not a good idea for you guys to hang around here much longer
.

The sky beyond was a deep, clear blue. The stubborn milky haze of another boiling Florida summer had been swept away by a cold front the night before. It would return soon enough—autumn’s relief was sure to arrive late here as always.

Twisting about, he surveyed the crowded cabin: a clutter of gleaming instrument displays set among gray panels and white bulkheads, liberally strewn with equipment packages strapped to the sidewalls and flooring. This monochrome milieu was sharply contrasted by two figures cocooned in similar blaze-orange pressure suits. On his right, the command module pilot was absorbed with the countdown checklist as they waited through the final hold. Behind them, the flight engineer quietly thumbed through a system diagram on her overhead display. The drone of technician’s cross-talk buzzed in their headsets; otherwise it was quiet as a tomb.

Wyatt broke their silence. “How’re you guys doing? My tailbone went numb a half-hour ago.”

The pilot spoke up first. “Lost all the feeling in my butt, too. So that makes it about like the simulator,” he said while scrolling through the pre-launch checklist. “Just don’t want to stumble over anything once they restart the clock. Waited long enough, haven’t we?”

“Right. Capsule systems look good,” chimed in their flight engineer from the European Space Agency. “Booster interface is nominal. And my
arse
is just fine, thank you,” she added curtly.

“I’ll trust your judgment there,” Wyatt laughed. “Get ready to start the T-minus Nine card while I holler at Launch Control.”

…

Three hundred feet below and five miles away, in a firing room attached to the towering black-and-white hulk of the Vehicle Assembly Building, launch controllers were making a final sweep of their own data. Beyond the room’s expansive windows, they could see the big rocket venting gas; exhaling as some mythic creature about to be unleashed.

As Wyatt was about to call, the Launch Test Conductor radioed in a distinctive Florida cracker twang.

“
Orion
, LTC. Ya’ll bored enough up there yet?”

Wyatt gave his pilot a sideways glance and thumbed the microphone: “Just catching up on my reading. You slackers about ready to get this show on the road?” he taunted.

“Thought you’d forgotten,” he replied casually. “Launch Director’s lifting the hold on schedule. We’ll get back to business soon enough.”

Wyatt’s speech became noticeably more clipped and direct as he switched gears back to the businesslike commander. “LTC,
Orion
copies,” he said crisply. “Standing by to resume count at T-minus-niner minutes, on your mark.”

Having just received the “go” signal, the test coordinator did likewise. “Roger
Orion
, count has resumed at T-minus nine,” he answered with a remarkably subdued twang. For the intense final minutes, his game face would be on too.

…

With thirty seconds to go, the ship cast away its ground connections and finally came to life under its own power. Fifteen seconds later, water began spilling down the launch umbilical tower to deaden the cascade of noise that would soon follow. Soon after that, the giant main engines lit with a thundering rush. As they swung about their gimbaled mounts, the rocket pitched forward slightly.

In the crew cabin high atop the stack, the motion felt far more pronounced. It was unnerving—the great beast actually
swayed
while still bolted down, bellowing and shuddering as steam billowed up from the flame trench below.

Two seconds to go.

Only after the ship’s computers were satisfied its engines were at full pressure would it command the side-mounted solid boosters to ignite. Once lit, there was no way to turn them off and therefore no going back. They fired with a crackling roar, belching white smoke and bright yellow flame. The same computers immediately severed a dozen restraining bolts around the skirt of each rocket, as if knowing it was hopeless to restrain the thundering brutes.

As the countdown clock reached zero,
Orion 1
leapt from the pad and into the bright autumn sky, trailing a thick column of white smoke. Wyatt strained against the sudden acceleration to focus on the task ahead. He had always been startled by the out-of-control feeling on the shuttle, comparing it to being strapped naked to the front end of a freight train. It looked like this ride wouldn’t be much different.

“Houston,
Orion
has cleared the tower,” his voice rattled into the helmet microphone, above the din.

…

Johnson Space Center
Houston, Texas

“They’re all ours, gang,” the flight director announced. “We’re back in the saddle.” Of course, Mission Control didn’t really need reminding that the flight was finally under their watchful eyes. Being the first mission they had run in years, his team had anxiously waited for this moment through the countdown’s final hours.

“Roll program complete,” they heard Wyatt call as
Orion
turned onto its back for the climb to orbit, which agreed with their own displays. An unemotional “nominal” from the guidance officer was the most enthusiasm anyone voiced.

Inside the control room, hundreds of spacecraft systems would be continually monitored until the craft parachuted into the Pacific a week hence. Each was scrutinized by its own dedicated control engineer and supported by back-room teams of more technicians. Their collective goal was to anticipate problems before any became “events”; failing that, to quickly solve the ones that eluded them.

One controller searched her displays more earnestly than most. Audrey Wilkes had worked at the Marshall center in Alabama since college, and had finally made it here to the “big room”. Running the Booster console, she was responsible for the main engines and fuel systems during launch. She would be headed back to Huntsville after
Orion
was safely in orbit, and was acutely aware her duties in Houston were temporary. If Audrey performed well enough today, she hoped to be invited to come back permanently.

Keen attention to detail and the ability to stay cool under pressure were non-negotiable qualities of a good Flight Controller. The slightest hiccup in her data stream could signal a disaster waiting to happen—or nothing at all. Her job was to let the flight director seated behind them know which was which, and fast.

She followed her training, purposefully scanning the streams of numbers and undulating graphs in sequence, the way a pilot monitored cockpit gauges. As she did, a brief anomaly caught her attention: what looked like a sharp pressure jump inside of an engine turbopump shot across her screen.

Did Number One just spike?

And just like that, it disappeared.

Calm down girl
, she thought, soothing herself.

Of all the systems under her fingers, she was most fascinated by the immensely powerful turbopumps. Capable of draining an Olympic-size swimming pool in seconds, each operated on a ragged edge between absolute efficiency and ruinous failure as they fed propellant to the ravenous engines.

It had only been a split-second, but a voice from the backroom yelped into her headset at the same moment: “Audrey, you see that?”

She hesitated another split-second, and worried it was too long.

“Affirmative,” she answered tensely, and called up the director. “Flight, Booster; we had a temp and pressure spike on pump one but it’s within limits,” she reported in the coolest voice she could muster.

“Copy that, Booster,” she heard the measured voice reply, just as the numbers on her screen jumped again.

What? What the hell was that?

There it was. Chamber pressure jumped erratically, appearing then vanishing almost instantaneously. One blink and she’d have missed it, but it was definitely out of limits. There was precious little time to decide if some innocuous, unrelated system might be causing this. On an adjacent monitor, she quickly studied the turbine’s schematics. Maybe it was isolated, not really a pump about to fail? The answer was buried somewhere in that stream of numbers.