Gravity

Instead he paid his bar tab and walked out of the Hilton.

At midnight, standing on the beach at Jetty Park, he gazed across the water toward pad 39B. I’m here, he thought. Even if you don’t know it, I’m with you.

He sat down on the sand and waited for dawn.

July 24

Houston

‘There’s a high-pressure system over the Gulf, which is expected to keep skies clear over Cape Canaveral, so RTLS landing is a go. Edwards Air Force Base is seeing intermittent clouds, but that’s expected to clear by launch. TAL site in Zaragoza, Spain, is still current and forecast go. TAL site in Morón, Spain, is also current and go. Ben Guerir, Morocco, is experiencing high winds and sandstorms, and at this time is not a viable TAL site.’

The first weather briefing of the day, broadcast simultaneously to Cape Canaveral, brought satisfactory news, and Flight Director Carpenter was happy. The launch was still a go. The poor landing conditions at Ben Guerir airport was only a minor concern, since the two alternate transatlantic-abort landing sites in Spain were clear. It was all backups within backups, anyway; the sites would be needed only in case of a major malfunction.

He glanced around at the rest of the ascent team to see if there were any new concerns. The nervous tension in the Flight Control Room was palpable and mounting, as it always was prior to a launch, and that was good. The day they weren’t tense was the day they made mistakes. Carpenter wanted his people on edge, with all synapses snapping a level of alertness that, at midnight, required an extra dose of adrenaline.

Carpenter’s nerves were as taut as everyone else’s, despite the fact that the countdown was right on schedule. The inspection team at Kennedy had finished their checks. The flight dynamics team had reconfirmed the launch time to the second. In the meantime, a far-flung cast of thousands was watching the same countdown clock.

At Cape Canaveral, where the shuttle was poised for launch, the same tension would be building in the firing room of the Launch Control Center, where a parallel team sat at their consoles, preparing for liftoff. As soon as the solid rocket boosters ignited, Houston’s Mission Control would take over. Though thousands of miles apart, the two control rooms in Houston and Canaveral were so closely interconnected by communications they might as well have been located in the same building.

In Huntsville, Alabama, at Marshall Space Flight Center, research teams were waiting for their experiments to be launched.

One hundred sixty miles north-northeast of Cape Canaveral, Navy ships waited at sea to recover the solid rocket boosters, which would separate from the shuttle after burnout.

At contingency landing sites and tracking stations around the world, from NORAD in Colorado to the international airfield at Banjul, Gambia, men and women watched the clock.

And at this moment, seven people are preparing to place their lives in our hands.

Carpenter could see the astronauts now on closed-circuit TV as they were helped into their orange launch-and-entry suits. The images were live from Florida, but without audio. Carpenter found himself pausing for a moment to study their faces. Though none of them revealed a trace of fear, he knew it had to be there, beneath their beaming expressions. The racing pulse, the zing of nervousness. They knew the risks, and they had to be scared. Seeing them on the screen was a sobering reminder to ground personnel that seven human beings were counting on them to do their jobs right.

Carpenter tore his gaze from the video monitor and focused his attention back on his team of flight controllers, seated at the sixteen consoles. Though he knew each member of the team by name, he addressed them by their missioncommand positions, their titles reduced to the shorthand call signs that was NASA-speak. The guidance officer was nicknamed GDO. The spacecraft communicator was Capcom. The propulsion systems engineer was Prop. The trajectory officer was Traj. Flight surgeon was shortened to Surgeon. And Carpenter went by the call sign of Flight.

The countdown came out of the scheduled T-minus-three-hours hold. The mission was still a go.

Carpenter stuck his hand in his pocket and gave his shamrock key ring a jingle. It was his private good-luck ritual. Even engineers have their superstitions.

Let nothing go wrong, he thought. Not on my watch.

Cape Canaveral

The Astrovan ride from the O and C building to launchpad 39B took fifteen minutes. It was a strangely silent ride, none of the crew saying much. Just a half hour before, while suiting up, they had been joking and laughing in that sharp and electric tone that comes when one’s nerves are raw with excitement. The tension had been building since the moment they had been awakened at two-thirty for the traditional steak and eggs breakfast. Through the weather briefing, the suiting up, the prelaunch ritual of dealing out playing cards for the best poker hand, they had all been a little too noisy and cheerful, all engines roaring with confidence.

Now they’d fallen silent.

The van came to a stop. Chenoweth, the rookie, seated beside Emma, muttered, ‘I never thought diaper rash would be one of the job hazards.’

She had to laugh. They were all wearing Depend adult diapers under their bulky flight suits; it would be a long three hours until liftoff.

With help from the launchpad technicians, Emma stepped out of the van. For a moment she paused on the pad, gazing up in wonder at the thirty-story shuttle, ablaze with spotlights. The last time she’d visited the pad, five days ago, the only sounds she’d heard were the sea wind and the birds. Now the spacecraft itself had come to life, rumbling and smoking like a waking dragon, as volatile propellants boiled inside the fuel tank.

They rode the elevator up to Level 195 and stepped onto the grated catwalk. It was still night, but the sky was washed out by the pad lights, and she could barely get a glimpse of the stars overhead. The blackness of space was waiting.

In the sterile white room, technicians in lint-free ‘bunny’ suits helped the crew, one by one, through the hatch and into the orbiter. The commander and pilot were seated first. Emma, assigned to mid-deck, was the last to be assisted. She settled back into her padded seat, buckles secured, helmet in place, and gave a thumbs-up.

The hatch swung shut, closing the crew off from the outside.

Emma could hear her own heartbeat. Even through the air-to-ground voice checks chattering over her comm unit, through the gurgles and groans of the awakening shuttle, the thud of her own heart came through in a steady drumbeat. As a middeck passenger, she had little to do in the next two hours but sit and think; the preflight checks would be conducted by the flight-deck crew. She had no view of the outside, nothing to stare at except the stowage area and food pantry.

Outside, dawn would soon light the sky, and pelicans would skim the surf at Playalinda Beach.

She took a deep breath and settled back to wait.

Jack sat on the beach and watched the sun come up.

He was not alone in Jetty Park. The sightseers had been gathering since before midnight, the arriving cars forming an endless line of headlights creeping along the Bee Line Expressway, some peeling north toward Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge, the others continuing across the Banana River to the city of Cape Canaveral. The viewing would be good from either location. The crowd around him was in a holiday mood, with beach towels and picnic baskets. He heard laughter and loud radios and the bawling of sleepy children. Surrounded by that swirl of celebrants, he was a silent presence, a man alone with his thoughts and fears.

As the sun cleared the horizon, he stared north, toward the launchpad. She would be aboard Atlantis now, strapped in and waiting. Excited and happy and a little afraid.

He heard a child say, ‘That’s a bad man, Mommy,’ and he turned to look at the girl. They gazed at each other for a moment, a tiny blond princess locking eyes with an unshaven and very disheveled man. The mother snatched the girl into her arms and quickly moved to a safer spot on the beach.

Jack gave a wry shake of his head and once again turned his gaze northward. Toward Emma.

Houston

The Flight Control Room had turned deceptively quiet. It was twenty minutes till launch—time to confirm it was still a go. All the back-room controllers had completed their systems checks, and now the front room was ready to be polled.

In a calm voice, Carpenter went down the list, requesting verbal confirmation from each frontroom controller.

‘Fido?’ asked Carpenter.

‘Fido is go,’ said the flight dynamics officer.

‘Guido?’

‘Guidance is go.’

‘Surgeon?’

‘Surgeon is go.’

‘DPS?’

‘Data Processing is go.’

When Carpenter had polled them all and received affirmatives from all, he gave a brisk nod to the room.

‘Houston, are you go?’ asked the launch director in Cape Canaveral.

‘Mission Control is go,’ affirmed Carpenter.