The Glass Lady (3 page)

“Endeavor: Chase One sees your speed brakes open wide.”

“Thanks, Chase,” the pilot in command called. “Flight: we're full manual CSS out here. Into the preflare at 1750 feet. Nose up bubble one point five degrees on inner glide slope . . . Two miles out. Landing gear armed. We're sittin' fat.”

“Copy, Endeavor. You're twenty-eight seconds out. Right down the pike.”

“Thanks, Flight . . . Let me hear it, Number One!”

“Steady as you go, Skipper,” Enright called. “Landing gear hydraulics valves One, Two, and Three, set GPC. Out of 250 feet at 270 knots. Three in motion . . . Three down and locked!”

The centerline of Runway 23 rose swiftly to stop Endeavor's descent. From their cozy office, the pilots could see the runway center line coming closer. But they could not see their ship's wings nor her down-and-locked wheels far behind them. They flew their flightseats toward the dry lakebed of Edwards Air Force Base.

“Chase Two confirming three gears down and six wheels in position. One hundred feet, eleven seconds out,” the small chase plane called from beside the powerless glider.

“Okay, Skipper: 100 feet at 190 knots . . . 50 feet at 185 . . . 30, 20 . . . 10 at 170 . . . 5. Mains contact!”

“We're on the center line, Flight! Nose Wheel Steering ready. Nose wheel at 10 feet . . . 5 feet . . . 3 . . . and Flop! Speed brakes 100 percent. Looked like 160 knots at touchdown . . . And we're rollin' in the sunshine! Light braking here at 80 . . . 50 . . . 20 . . . And, all stop!”

“Roger, Endeavor. You're home and beautiful job all the way!”

‘Yeh, Flight,” the sweating and exhausted Aircraft Commander sighed.

“Endeavor, we're ready for closeout and safing procedures when you're ready.”

“No thanks, Flight. We've been in this sweatbox for six hours. We blew up once on the pad, missed two OMS insertion targets, and bent our metal on two landings. And it smells like my old socks in here just now. You boys pull the plugs. Me and Number One are goin' for the beer. And right now.”

When the Command Pilot yanked his microphone plug and laid his sweaty headset atop the forward glareshield, the second in command did likewise.

The Commander pushed his seat away from the instrument panel so he could lift his stiff, long legs over the low, center console between the two seats in the cockpit.

“Thought the Captain leaves last, Skip.”

“Not when the Captain has to make tracks for the head, Jack,” sighed William McKinley Parker.

The metal ladder swayed as Jacob Enright followed the commander out of the 60-million-dollar Shuttle Mission Simulator and into the cold fluorescent glare. In their sweat-soaked flightsuits, the two stooped airmen brushed past banks of computers and bleary-eyed technicians who conceive every possible failure, crisis, and catastrophic malfunction with which to torment the crew inside the lifelike simulator. Through the simulator's computer-controlled windows, even the view of Earth and space is perfectly accurate.

“Nice crash in the drink there, Colonel Parker,” grinned a fat technician. The stoney glare from the flier's face froze the trainer in midthought.

“That, my friend, is why those two guys are called The Icemen around here,” laughed another engineer after Parker and Enright grimly strode past them into the austere halls of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The two exhausted pilots stood side by side facing the wall in the JSC men's room, tending to business.

“Nine hours in that sweatbox, Jack!” the taller flier sighed.

“Yeah, Skipper. Least they can't generate a wing falling off,” mumbled Jacob Enright.

“I'd call an FCS Saturation alarm and running clean out of elevon travel ten feet above the ground the next best thing, Jack.”

The two fliers zipped in unison, reflecting months of training together as a back-up crew who had yet to get a flight of their own. At least they were finally on the manifest for a military mission next year.

“And always bridesmaids, but never brides,” said the slow, down-home drawl of the taller, older man as he led his young copilot into the glare of the hallway.

“We'll get ours, Will. It won't be wasted. Not to worry.” Jack Enright consoled his captain as they shuffled down the glassy corridors to the astronauts' office. They squinted against the cold glare of the hallway after spending half the night in the softly muted lights of the simulator's flightdeck.

Side by side, backs stooped, hands deep in sweaty flightsuit pockets, the tall man and the short man made their way onward. Flaccid faces of technicians watched the crew pass. Over coffee, night-shift technocrats commented often that Jacob Enright walked and talked more like Colonel Parker every day.

Inside a large, chilly conference room, Parker and Enright sipped hot coffee at a large table topped with tacky plastic wood. Across the table sat the Launch Vehicle Test Conductor, at his side sat FIDO, the Flight Dynamics Officer, and beside him sat the only woman in the room, the Lead Shuttle Simulation Instructor. In front of the room-long blackboard secured to the wall, the Flight Director paced anxiously.

“I know it's late,” the Flight Director began as he glanced out the window into the dark, cool December night. “But I want to nail down the simulation on the Return To Launch Site Abort protocol.” The director leaned over a pile of computer printouts and graphic time-lines spread upon the table.

“We had the Abort Region Determinator initiate the RTLS abort at 248 seconds into the launch. You carried trajectory lofting through 400,000 feet on two live main engines and one prematurely shutdown. No sweat there.” The tall flight director squinted through his pipe smoke. “But then, men, you boys were out to lunch. Anne?”

Parker and Enright studied their steaming coffee mugs.

The young woman set her round glasses upon a pretty face. She sifted through her own stack of mission profiles before she addressed the tension.

“It fell apart right from the powered turn-around,” she began dryly. “While burning the two remaining main engines after the center engine blew, you were late dumping 16,000 pounds of OMS pod fuel and 1,100 pounds of RCS propellant. You initiated powered pitch-around at 400,000 feet at five degrees per second, taking 32 seconds to reverse your track. That's 16 seconds too long. By the time you turned around to initiate guidance back to the Cape, you were 275 miles up-range—50 miles too far from landing. Descending under power after the powered turn-around, you pulled 3 point 2 G's—that's one-tenth below crush level.”

The two pilots grimaced together as the speaker continued her litany of flaming disaster.

“You initiated powered pitch-down late completing the PPD in 17 seconds instead of 15. Then at Main Engine Cut Off: MECO was late with zero instead of two percent fuel remaining in the external tank. You separated from the ET okay at the nominal 200,000 feet; but you were 375 miles up-range instead of the 325-mile target. ET separation was at Mach 7. That's okay. But your dynamic pressure on the vehicle was 12 pounds per square foot. That's 3 pounds too high. Then, during Alpha recovery . . .”

“Mea culpa,” Enright whispered into his coffee as the mission commander smiled weakly.

“Then,
gentlemen
,” the woman droned on, “you were too fast recovering your angle of attack during load relief. You pulled up in 8 seconds instead of 10 and you pulled 2.8 G's instead of 2. And . . . you pulled up from 90,000 feet to 100K in six seconds instead of eight, at Mach 7 instead of Mach 6.7. You then overshot the target Alpha angle before your angle of attack stabilized at the 8-degree target. Finally,” she sighed, removing her glasses, “you arrived inbound at the glide slope 175 miles up-range instead of 150. Somehow you were at feet at Mach 4 instead of at Mach 5 out of 90K. And pulling 3.3 G's.” She paused to catch her breath.

“And we broke her back and sixed in the drink four miles from the Cape runway,” Parker interrupted. “We were there. Remember?” Parker looked up from his coffee for the first time during the midnight briefing. “We got our feet wet one lousy time. And that is why you have four shuttles in your hangar instead of one!”

“Listen . . .” an angry Enright added. “We've logged six hundred hours of dry flying in that mother. And we've only come home bent twice. Pretty fair average, I'd say.” Jacob Enright was fuming, a sight which made Colonel Parker the only onlooker to smile.

“You threw everything but a biffy backing up in mid-deck at us today,” Enright raved softly. “And we hit the numbers every time today but once . . . Now I want to get some sleep. Fm whipped—and the skipper stinks.” The second in command grinned feebly as he labored to recover his iceman composure.

“What say we gather over the cold, stiff bones in the mornin',” Colonel Parker offered sleepily. I'il tuck in this here young buck ifn ya'll don't mind,” the Colonel drawled in his finest, put-the-wagons-in-a-circle voice.

Sometimes, when hot, tired, and wrecked by ten hours of hangar-flying the simulator, Jacob Enright resented the Colonel's paternal intervention. Not tonight.

“Obliged,” imitated the copilot.

“Not to mention it, Number One,” the weary senior pilot smiled.

“Okay,” the Flight Director sighed. “Tomorrow morning, say at 10 o'clock. You free, FIDO?”

“Ten's fine, Hutch.”

“Then ten o'clock,” said the bearded, youthful Flight Director who pounded his cold pipe on his palm.

Enright and Parker shuffled wearily toward deserted acres of parking lot. They stopped in a wintry drizzle at two wet vehicles parked side by side: Enright's gleaming sports car fit for any fighter jock, and Parker's delapidated pickup truck. They stood alone beneath harshly bright lights which grew on poles from the asphalt.

“About that RTLS abort, Jack?” Colonel Parker began.

Jack Enright looked at his wristwatch wet with rain. It read one o'clock in the morning.

“How about 7:30 at the simulator in about six hours, Will?”

“You got it, Number One. See you at O-dark-thirty.” The tall colonel waved as he fought with his truck's crumpled door.

It might be day, it might be night. It might be summer, it might be winter. There are no clues five stories below the living world in the Crystal Room locked in the concrete bowels of the Pentagon.

The Crystal Room is a huge glass box with clear acrylic plastic floor, clear plastic ceiling, four plastic walls—all transparent and the size of a corporate conference room. Nestled within a steel-and-concrete bunker, the Crystal Room sits upon a score of clear plastic blocks five feet above a bare concrete floor. In the bunker's ceiling of armor plate, rows of fluorescent lights rain their harsh, cold light down and through the Crystal Room's clear ceiling.

Even the thick ventilation and air-conditioning ducts which curl beneath the floor are clear plastic. Through the plumbing, air whines like a soft breeze of scentless, bottled atmosphere.

“Sorry to bring you here in the middle of the night. But we have something of a situation on our hands.”

Admiral Michael T. Hauch spoke quietly to avoid the Crystal Room's unnerving echos. At his side, a ramrod-erect Marine sat beating the keys of the stenomachine between his knees. The young Marine was cut from the same lean and hard cloth as the two guards who stood rigidly outside the closed glass door of the Crystal Room. Around the long mahogany table, a dozen men and one small woman slouched sleepily. Half of the men wore the uniforms of each branch of the armed services. All of the military men were of flag rank, and the starchy light twinkled upon too many stars and gold sleeve echelons for the six civilians to count.

Admiral Hauch, in his blues and with his thick blond hair, glowed resplendently at the head of the table.

Four of the civilians sat gripping the edge of the massive table or the arms of their leather high-backed chairs.

“I know this place is a bit much for the senses until you've been in here a while,” the Admiral smiled. “Especially the part about seeing your feet so far above the real floor. But you won't fall through.”

The intense Marine stenographer did not open his eyes as he transcribed the Admiral's words. The silver wings upon the chest of an Air Force General bore the small triangle within a circle which marked Command Astronaut wings. His collar insignia carried the unfamiliar ensign of the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

“We learned long ago,” continued the Admiral, “that debugging a security area is just about impossible. The other side is too clever. So we built this place, a glass greenhouse where burying a listening device would be impossible—unless they have invented a wired homing flea. Since we haven't, we assume they haven't.”

A stifled chuckle simmered among the civilians in business suits. They sat gripping their chairs like passengers on their first airplane ride.

“I called you here. I am Admiral Michael Hauch, special counsel to the National Security Council and liaison to our Space Technology Center at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, which began operations in October 1982. For everyone's reference and for the record: around the table are our stenographer, three NSC members, and General John Gordon of the United States Space Command, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. John is with the Space Defense Operations Center created in September 1982. To his left is General Bruce Cochran, Air Force, Defense Department liaison to NASA's Office of Space Sciences, Houston. From the green branch, Army General Tommy Burns is with DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the boys with the billion-dollar erector sets.

“Beside Tom is General Ed Breyfogle of the Marines, liaison to DSRC—Defense Systems Review Council—and on temporary duty with the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. On this side of the table are Commander Jack Wiegand, Navy, Project Sea Lite.