Titan (26 page)

The various teams became exhausted as the test dragged on. Eventually the managers ordered a two-day break.

But still the test limped on, eroding through its checklist. The team got through to the twenty-six-minute mark, the completion of the test of power transfer. Then they began the process of prechilling the thrust chambers in the second and third stages.

Then, amazingly, they reached the start of the automatic count sequence, at minus three minutes and seven seconds. Fahy watched as the final automatic procedures cycled through, controlled by 1960s software re-engineered to run on computer hardware vintage 2007…

The clock stopped, as planned, at minus fourteen seconds.

Now, forty years late, AS-514 was at last a fueled, checked-out, fully operational vehicle, and the team had done everything it would do on the launch day except light the igniters.

There was a burst of ragged applause.

Good God almighty, she thought. We’re really going to do this.

On the last day, Fahy walked among the crowds at the KSC visitors’ center. She heard grandparents pointing out the needle-slim Saturn on its pad. They tried to tell their grandchildren about how they’d watched the launch of
Apollo 11
—or
12,
or
13,
or
14
—when they were little kids themselves.

The kids looked on, bemused, asking questions—
they’re really going to throw all of that away? how much junk did they leave on the Moon? is the Moon really as messed up as they say?

Fahy rode up the gantry elevator to the payload check-out room at the top of the stack. The elevator was an open metal cage, and it rose with bumpy rattles and clangs; she climbed past steel beams, cables, work platforms.

When the elevator stopped, she stepped through the gate onto a railed catwalk. It spanned the gap between the elevator and the curving flank of the booster, with its open access panels. She looked down the complex, curved flank of the Saturn to the huge steel platforms far below, the flaring skirts over the big F-1 engines, diminished by perspective.

An ocean breeze picked up, and there was a ponderous creak of metal. The catwalk seemed to tilt, and she had to grab a handrail for support. This huge mountain of steel was
swaying.

When she looked away from the booster, she had a panoramic view of the Atlantic coast. It was early evening, and the coastal towns strung out along the edge of the land sparkled like jewels. But the land itself looked flat, muddy, primeval, barely poking above the water, and the water of the ocean and marshes and canals shone like beaten metal. It was like, she imagined, the place where the first amphibian had crawled painfully, the air like fire in its new lungs, its belly and tail working at the sand, striving to get back to the water…

In a few years, she reflected—when the pads and gantries were torn down and hauled away at last—maybe the sea, the ancient swamp, would swallow up this place once more.

Marcus White got to the Launch Control Center of KSC in the predawn, a couple of hours before the launch.

The Firing Room was a big hall, a third the size of a football field, with eight rows of consoles. White took his place in a glassed-in viewing area set off at an angle at the back of the Firing Room, and looked out through the big picture windows over the pads.

AS-514 was bathed in a cone of light, set up by big searchlight beams that met at the tip of the stack, and the lights of its gantry gleamed like a ship’s lamps.

The daylight started to come up. From the Firing Room, White was looking east, into the gathering dawn; soon Launch Complex 39-A was silhouetted against the sky. The breeze was blowing debris around the pad, and the wind meter at the top of the tower was spinning around. But the forecast said the windspeed would be within weather rules at launch time.

The paintwork of the refurbished Saturn gleamed, and the booster, slim beside the blocky orange tower, looked oddly feminine, delicate. White felt a lump, unwelcome and painful, gathering in his throat. To hell with Titan. It was all worth it, he thought, just to see that old lady fixed up and with the lichen and moss and streaked paint scraped off, raised up to where she belonged.

He followed the slow evolution of the count, under the control of the KSC Firing Room staff. Events were accelerating, as the tanks in the various stages went through their cycles of precool, till and replenish. It seemed inconceivable that AS-514 was going to lift on time. But there were no holds today. He sensed the buildup of the indefinable momentum that gathered about a mission, as it prepared for a crucial new phase.

At ten minutes before the launch, the thrust chambers in the second and third stages, both powered by lox and liquid hydrogen, went into chilldown. Pyro devices were armed. Some of the gantry access arms were withdrawn.

Still there were no holds.

At T minus three minutes and seven seconds the firing command was given, and the tanks in all three stages breathed in the helium they needed to force their propellants into the pumps. At minus fifty seconds, the Saturn’s internal power took over; the bird was detaching itself from its dependence on the ground. With half a minute to go, the big turbine that drove the five engines of the first stage powered up.

At minus nine seconds, an electrical signal was sent to the igniters, and four small flames lit within the combustion chamber of each of Don Baylor’s F-1s.

In the Firing Room, the spectators in Management Row swiveled around and lifted binoculars to their eyes, and peered through the row of windows at the back of the Launch Control Center. White knew they could close protective louvers over the windows if the booster blew up. If it did, the explosion would be equivalent to a three- or four-megaton nuclear bomb. But he figured that if that happened, the guys in here would just keep watching anyhow.

The familiar F-1 ignition process cut in. That rich flood of thick orange smoke burst out of the nozzle and bounced off the flame deflector under the launcher.

Then the main fuel valves opened.

The flame directly under the engines turned to an incandescent white, and the orange smoke billowed outward and upward, enveloping the base of the booster.

The thrust of the engines reached ninety percent of maximum. Still AS-514 hadn’t moved.

To White, the spectacle was unfolding in an eerie silence; the noise of the burn had yet to cross the miles to the Firing Room.

The booster shuddered. An ice shower fell steadily, sheets and flakes of ice pouring away from the walls of the stages’ cryogenic tanks, vaporizing as they hit the smoke and flames billowing below.

The booster lifted off the pad, its huge weight barely sustained by the thrust. It seemed impossible for anything so huge to move anywhere; it was like a building taking leave of the ground.

Now five umbilical swing arms had to get out of the way. First the outermost section of each arm retracted, and the arms themselves began to swing, to get away from the flanks of the booster. It was a complex and unlikely mechanical ballet.

The sound reached out across the marsh, and rammed into the windows of the viewing area: a series of staccato crackles, profound, physical, powerful. The glass shuddered in its frame, violently. Plaster dust from the roof showered down over him.

It was a sound White hadn’t heard in thirty-five years, a noise he’d half-forgotten.

The booster climbed, but the trail of flames just continued to lengthen, all the way down to the pad. It wasn’t until the booster was several hundreds of feet above the ground that the huge plume of flame lifted from the launch platform.

He felt as if his rationality was softening, guttering; the understanding he thought he’d developed of the forces shaping his age fell away from him.

How could we build a monument like this, and then turn our backs on it, let it rust on the lawn? Damn, damn. It made no sense. Maybe it never did.

The booster hauled after it a spear of fire eight hundred feet long. Shock waves danced along the flanks of the rocket, blurring its outline in White’s binocular view. A mist of ionized gas expanded above the engines, a broad plume of flame in the thinning atmosphere.

When the S-IC died, it was as if the sky dimmed.

White could sec the burst of light from the first stage’s retro-rockets, and then the flare as the second stage ignited. The Saturn seemed to recede quickly now, heading east, diminishing to a star.

It was visible, he knew, for five hundred miles around.

White turned to follow the trajectory of the discarded first stage on the Firing Room’s big display screens.

Tumbling, battering against the air, the S-IC quickly lost most of its forward momentum, and fell back to crash into the Atlantic, still carrying all of Don Baylor’s beautifully restored engines, its story finally concluded after four decades.

White grinned. It was just, he thought, fucking unbelievable. Now, all we got to do is survive five more launches, and we can all retire for good…

R
osenberg’s training for the mission
began in earnest a year before the launch.

He had to move to Houston. He had to become an astronaut, in fact, an employee of NASA, and hence of the government.

Benacerraf put him up for a while in her house at Clear Lake, but they didn’t get on too well, and Rosenberg started to look for an apartment.

But he gave that up, and moved into a room at the Nassau Bay Hilton. It was going to cost, and after a couple of months he began to run up a debt, but what the hell. He figured his money wasn’t going to be much use any more anyhow. He squared it with the hotel management that they would be paid out of the government salary he would collect, in the years of his flight.

At the start of his training, Bill Angel took him to a regular Monday morning meeting in the Astronaut Office at JSC. This was a plain-looking room populated by hard blue chairs, and with Shuttle mission plaques, more than a hundred of them, crowding the walls.

There were more than a hundred astronauts in the corps, he learned, But only a couple or dozen showed up today. Nobody would speak to him. Or Angel, come to that.

The thing of it was, nobody was going to get to fly again except for a couple of dull missions delivering components of the Titan mission to orbit—save for the Titan five themselves. And of those, one was a Brit—British-born, anyhow—and another was Rosenberg, a pony-tailed double-dome, who wasn’t even in the fucking corps.

The resentment in that room was tangible, a living thing.

The training was split between Houston and the Cape. The crew, working together, progressed through hierarchies of trainers, all the way to the full-scale simulators. At first Rosenberg enjoyed the sims—the crew zipped into their orange pressure suits and their white helmets inside the simulators themselves, the controllers in the FCR, and the competing team of simulation supervisors, throwing at them every combination of defect, training them all to cope. It was fun. Like a computer game.

But the novelty soon palled, as they went over the same routine, over and again, toiling through jargon-laden checklists, jammed inside their stuffy suits.

They flew to the Cape in T-38s, the neat little needle-nose two-man trainers the astronauts used. Pilots, like Libet and Angel, were expected to put in at least four hours a week of flight experience. Piloted by Angel or Libet, Rosenberg was whisked back and forth between JSC and Cape—over eight hundred miles, an hour and a half each way—three or four times a week, encased in a flight suit and with a parachute on his back, as if he was a jock hero astronaut himself, for God’s sake.

He got his first view of the Cape from the air, in fact, from the cockpit of a NASA T-38. It was a place of shining water, spits and isthmuses of low, dredged-up marshy land, concrete splashes of pads and crawlerways, the whole remarkably primitive, like the slow recovery from an immense bombing raid.

He was taken to see Shuttle orbiters in the Orbiter Processing Facility—
PEOPLE MAKING DREAMS A REALITY
, read the motto on the door—and in the Vehicle Assembly Building, and on the pad. He was stunned by the VAB, sitting in its car park like some immense department store, fifty storeys high. It was big enough to have assembled four Moon rockets at once, and it had doors tall enough to accommodate the Statue of Liberty. Inside was an industrial complex of riggings and girders and cranes, whole floors suspended like drawers in some immense piece of furniture, capable of being rolled forward and back as needed. And, suspended in the smoky, dim-lit air amid all this clunky scaffolding, he could see the shape of a Shuttle orbiter, unexpectedly graceful in this volume of right angles and pipes and tubes, upended and pinned like some huge white moth.

He was stunned by the scale of it all, his first gut understanding, perhaps, of the huge energies and efforts that would be assembled under him to hurl his own fragile body into space.

The staff who worked here, preparing spacecraft for launch, were a type of human being he hadn’t encountered before, either in the circles of scientists with whom he’d spent his working life, or among the closeted NASA engineers at the other centers, or even among the astronauts. These were people used to heavy work: dealing with millions of gallons of highexplosive fuel, with the slow controlled explosions of Shuttle launches, and doing it every few weeks, year in and year out. They must have a lot in common with oil-workers, he thought, or deep miners: hard-working, confident, muscled people.