Perigee (13 page)

Penny stood before a conference table in one corner of the room. Assembled around it were people from across over the company with different areas of expertise, an ad-hoc crisis management team although the current dilemma didn’t fit into any category of emergency they had ever prepared for. It was still an evolving, dynamic situation, not a disaster to be somehow stage-managed.

Not yet, if she could help it.

The group was dominated by crestfallen, morose faces. Their collective mood seemed resigned to defeat, fearing their friends and colleagues were almost certainly doomed. If there were to be any hope of bringing those people home, she had to pull this group back from the brink quickly.

She stood quietly with crossed arms, sizing them up for several more minutes until they seemed more receptive. “You guys ever hear of a Tiger Team?”

Her question was met with blank stares. Only an older engineer they’d picked up from Lockheed signaled any recognition.

“It’s an old NASA term,” she finally explained. “Whenever something had really gone down the crapper, we’d pull together the system experts and lock them in a room until they solved the problem.” She turned to the big screen to show a map of Earth wrapped in the familiar overlapping sine waves of an orbit. A white triangle traced along one of them. It was
Austral Clipper
, just now passing over California.

She turned back to face the team. “That’s what we’ve got here, people. One of our birds is stuck up there and we have no idea how to get her down yet. I don’t have to tell you this is nothing like any in-flight emergency anyone here’s ever handled.”

Surveying the group she found their eyes fixed on her, calm and focused.
Good. They’re not scope-locked
. Just as dangerous here as in orbit, it would be far too easy for desperation to set in and ignite a disastrous cycle. As soon as that happened, they would stop thinking and start giving up.

“So, for you liberal-arts majors who blew off physics in college,” she said tartly, “just because they’re in orbit doesn’t mean they’re
stuck
.” Pointing out the critical values on screen, she went on. “Apogee is about 500 nautical miles, perigee is 100, give or take a few.” Moving to a dry-erase board, Penny drew a circle with an egg-shaped ellipse around it to represent their orbit. “Maybe we can work that in their favor.”

“How’s that?” one of the technicians asked.

Charlie answered now. “Mostly because it was one long burn. In something like a satellite launch, they’d do a second burn to circularize at the desired apogee and stabilize the orbit.”

“You said ‘mostly’,” another prompted. “What else is there?”

He thought for a minute. “By pulsing the RCS jets, Tom flattened out the trajectory just enough to keep them up there a while,” he answered, and immediately wished he’d qualified that remark better. The room erupted in contentious cross-talk.

“Whoa!” the technician exclaimed. “Are you saying they
wouldn’t
be in orbit if he’d just left it alone?”

“What did he think he was doing?” piped up a maintenance controller. “So he tried to fly it back down and screwed the pooch good, huh?”

Just then, Penny noticed they had unconsciously segregated themselves by specialties. This wasn’t some disaster movie full of young engineers brimming over with bright ideas. This place was, at its heart, still an airline—a few had spaceflight backgrounds, but most didn’t. All of the operations and maintenance people—the trench workers—were seated on one side of the table and responsible for most of the buzz. The eggheads from engineering and aerodynamics were all sitting quietly on the other side, lab scientists patiently awaiting more data.

She waved them down. “All right, settle down everyone. We’ve all seen crisis situations before. We aren’t going to help anybody up there by second-guessing the crew. Right now we collect information, analyze it, and figure out their options. Turn over every rock, question every assumption.”

“But what about that orbit?” pressed the maintenance tech. “From what Charlie just said, the pilots could’ve let it go and they’d be on the ground by now.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Penny said, “but fair enough...I need to educate some of you guys on the basics. But make no mistake—we don’t have time for rock throwing. Got it?”

The man tipped his head, accepting her rebuke.

She began drawing more circles. “You guys all know the difference between suborbital and orbital. It’s mostly about speed, right?”

She drew a large parabola now, curving away from the circle representing Earth and then steeply back down to it. “
Almost
—and that’s relative to the surface, okay? They can reach orbital velocity going straight up, so to speak, but they’ll just come right back down at the same angle…” she said, emphatically drawing a large X on the circle. “Splat.”

“That’s exactly what they avoided by using the reaction-control jets. If they’d continued at the same climb angle, they’d have burnt to a crisp on the downhill side. The plane wouldn’t survive a ballistic re-entry at that angle. Tom knew exactly what he was doing.”

“So it wasn’t as simple as just trying to fly it back down into the atmosphere?” another asked. It was the assumption they’d made at the time.

“Remember, this is the guy who ran the flight tests on these machines. He’s no dummy. He knows the RCS jets wouldn’t have enough impulse to work sideways against the main engines at full power. Their only chance was to get into some kind of screwball orbit and hope it decayed into a controlled re-entry. He was buying time.”

One of the engineers finally voiced concern. “But it still wasn’t meant to re-enter at orbital speeds, Penny.”

“True. But for now, here’s what I want you guys thinking about,” she said, turning back to the board. “Our first problem is consumables. Figure out how much air, water, food and power they have on board, and how far they can stretch it. Then figure out what’s waiting to sneak up and bite them in the ass. Out-gassing, cold-soak effects…that kind of stuff. The longer they can stretch life support, the more time we have to find solutions. And time is
everything
right now,” she declared with a heavy swipe across the board.

Another engineer spoke up. “The environmental systems group has already been working on that,” he said. “Right now they estimate at least four days of life support, and it can probably be stretched to five depending on other variables. The low passenger count helps, of course.”

Penny had figured as much. She noticed Charlie staring at the floor, chewing a thumbnail and lost in thought. Her own expression gave away nothing, though her heart sank as she thought about the predictions they’d worked up just prior to coming in here.

“That’s a good start,” she said through a forced smile.
But they’re going to be up there for at least a month
.

24

Castle Rock, Colorado
One day earlier

Tom was working downstairs when his personal cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number at first and suspiciously lifted it to his ear. “Hello?”

“Tom? Ryan Hunter. Where the heck are you?”

“In my basement, tying lures and forgetting about airplanes. You know…the important stuff. What’s going on?”

“Frank Kirby’s on the warpath. They need us to ferry a bird to Frankfurt and bring the live trip back tonight. Said scheduling couldn’t find you.”

He screwed his eyes shut in chagrin. He’d been enjoying a rare rest period at home, perhaps a bit too much for his own good. He’d left his company phone in his coat upstairs and forgot that Elise usually kept the ringer on their house line turned down low. And he’d made it a point to not let the company have his personal number…a man had to have
some
measure of privacy in this business, but it was never good to find yourself on the Chief Pilot’s bad side.

“Great. Well, let’s hope it’s not too late. What’s our show time?”
Might as well get back to business
.

They agreed to meet in crew ops at seven o’clock. Checking his watch, Tom figured that would give him just enough time to grab a bite with Elise and head off. Maybe she’d be up for a quick trip to their favorite cheap Chinese joint.

He reluctantly called Kirby, who promptly let fly a torrent of profanity in an over-the-top tirade. Expecting him to vent and hang up without even waiting for a “yes sir,” Tom sat the phone down and straightened up his workbench as his boss continued to rant…something about going back to flying puddle-jumpers and screwing up one-car parades.

25

Austral Clipper

Ryan swam into the cockpit and closed the door behind him. Tom was still in the left seat, running system checks for what was likely the fifth or sixth time. Wade floated by the window on the opposite side, then clumsily pulled away to clear the copilot’s seat. Still getting used to freefall, he pushed off too hard and banged into the overhead panel. Swearing, he rubbed his forehead and continued pushing away, more cautiously now.

“Watch yourself,” Ryan warned. “Soon as you think you’ve got zero-g figured out, it’ll surprise you. Makes a cramped space like this feel bigger than it really is. It’ll help if you go out in the cabin where there’s room to play around, get your space legs.”

Wade was still rubbing the fresh knot on his forehead. It was hard to tell if Ryan was serious through all of the gyrating confusion in the cockpit. He managed to pull himself down into the jumpseat and snapped the lap belt into place. “You’re just trying to get rid of me,” he finally said. “Thanks, but I usually tend to learn things the hard way. Could I trouble you for my camera?”

Ryan reached up on the glare shield and found a compact digital camera, floating with its strap looped around a handhold. He gently pushed it off in Wade’s direction. “Nice rig. Sightseeing?”

“It’s a good hobby when you travel as much as I do. And there’s not much else to do for now.”

“We’re sure not going anywhere soon,” Ryan agreed as he pulled himself down into the seat. “And I’m serious—get out and swim around a little.” He handed Tom a clipboard with a handwritten inventory list.

Tom caught it in midair and looked over the tally, comparing it against his own notes. “Food and water?” he asked.

“We had a full catering load for the next leg so food’s no problem. Lots of soda and juice, but water needs to be rationed. And Marcy locked down the booze.”

“Good idea. How’s everyone doing?” he asked. “Does she have a handle on them, or are we going to have to start taking watches back there?”

“I can help with that,” Wade said, hoping it would also calm his own nerves. “You’ll need help managing the boss. He’s bound to get testy, especially if the scotch is locked up.”

“Roger that,” Ryan agreed sourly. “For now Marcy’s keeping them busy organizing the consumables, and she’s still checking out the flyaway kit,” he said, referring to a supply container strapped into the cargo bay. “There may be some useful stuff in there.”

“Hard to imagine what that could be, but it’s still worth doing,” Tom agreed. “So what’s her take on life support?” he asked, looking up at the environmental controls on the overhead. “Dispatch figured about five days worth.”

“That good?” Ryan asked. “Marcy figured three days, but she wasn’t sure what was left in the oxidizer tanks.” If the bypass valves were still working, their pressurization system could draw breathable air from the same liquid oxygen tanks used to feed the engines.

“Assuming we don’t have pressure escaping somewhere…who knows? I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a consideration during cold-soak.” It was part of the flight test regimen—no one could really know how systems would behave after long hours at extreme altitude until they actually went out and did it.

Ryan mulled that over and began paging through a systems manual on his tablet. “Hadn’t thought of that one. I was more worried about boil-off.” Even with the best insulation, the harsh heating from direct sunlight in space would begin to evaporate the super-cold liquid oxygen.

“We’ll use those tanks first,” Tom decided. “Plumbing down there’s good for a few hours in vacuum, but who knows if it’ll hold for a week?”
Much less five
, he left unsaid. Penny had just sent him her rough calculations of their orbital period. He didn’t have the resources to check himself, but it had sounded about right.

“Guess we’ll find out,” Ryan said. “If Penny and Charlie have a team together, they ought to come up with some workarounds.”

“Who’s that?” Wade asked.

“Flight control staff,” Tom explained. “Charlie’s our lead dispatcher, he’s been with the airline long before us rocket-jockeys showed up. Sharp guy. Soon as we started this program, he went back to school on his own dime just to get smart on spaceflight physics. Penny is one of our pilots, used to fly the Shuttle. We keep a pilot in the control center just in case, and it was her turn this week.”

“So she drew the lucky straw?” Wade said. “Good to know they haven’t forgotten about us.”