I
Columbia sat on the launch pad, nose to the blue-white Florida sky, vapor from her tank vents drifting and dissipating on the light, intermittent breeze. Her crew was aboard, and the gantry elevator had just been secured in preparation for launch. Inside her instrument panels and bulkheads, signals raced through electronic pathways of printed wiring as circuit diagnostic programs searched for faults.
From a bird’s vantage point, technicians in white coveralls appeared like ants as they moved around the base of the gantry and the huge spacecraft. The temperature was rising on another humid June day, and the low-lying mist was burning off the backwaters of the inland, marshy estuary known as Mosquito Lagoon.
To the west, occasional palmettos, moss-laden oaks and windrows of salt-cedar trees interrupted the flat, hazy horizon of low scrub that was Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge. There, alligators, snakes, armadillos and marsh hawks were wrapping up a night of foraging, and settling into their cooler nests and burrows in anticipation of the sluggish heat.
On the eastern side of the launch complex, along the Atlantic shore, the surf frothed and gurgled among the gently lapping waves and low rollers that marked the transition between tides. It was a peaceful summer morning at Kennedy Space Center. The scent of the sea rode the easterly breeze, and the shuttle launch preparation in progress was unremarkable.
For Mission Control, this flight, like a hundred previous ones, would be a routine, even humdrum mission, entailing three onboard science experiments, deployment of an ultraviolet astrophysics research satellite, and two term experiments that would be inserted into a decaying orbit—an orbit calculated to assure destruction upon reentry. “Term packages” were neat, clean—no additional space junk. They did their thing and disappeared, and they did not require the extensive application process required to secure a permanent orbit assignment.
“Fifty-seven minutes to ignition sequence,” echoed the gantry loudspeakers. The gantry technicians continued their tasks with no apparent notice.
Inside Launch Control, launch team personnel were just as cool and professional, running through the diagnostic routines in methodical, workmanlike fashion. Launch Director Gene Obermiller walked between rows of technicians and engineers seated at computer monitors. He looked over their shoulders at their CRT displays, stopping occasionally to listen to the two-way conversation between a member of the shuttle crew on board Columbia and one of the technicians as they ran through the prelaunch systems checklist.
An hour from now, most of the people in Launch Control would leave, and Mission Control in Houston would take over flight operations. In nine days, assuming no technical difficulties or inclement weather, they would do it all over again for Atlantis.
“Launch telemetry ready.”
“Goldstone, do you copy?”
“Are you gonna catch the game tonight?”
“Three is vented, you can disconnect,” went the drone of quiet conversation across the room.
“Minus forty-three and counting at oh nine oh five,” the annunciator echoed.
The sky and sea seemed quietly expectant today. In a few minutes, the fuming vehicle on the pad would ride a coruscated column of water vapor and white-hot flame into those boundless vaults of air, pirouetting gracefully as she performed her dance with destiny, and Merritt Island and the Cape Canaveral peninsula would vibrate to the crackling thunder of her engines.
Obermiller looked at the ceiling monitor that displayed the down-range horizon, ran his fingers through the dark hair that was beginning to gray above his temples, and massaged the knotted muscles in the back of his neck.
Taciturn by nature, Obermiller was unusually quiet and introspective this morning. His colleagues liked his poker face and unfailing dependability. They respected him as only one veteran can respect another. In engineering vernacular, Gene was positive-displacement. You knew what you were getting and you always got it.
Long ago, someone had laminated a newspaper cartoon and pinned it to the corkboard inside the glass-covered bulletin board in the lobby of the Launch Control complex. The person who had clipped it and penned in “Gene” with an arrow pointing to one of the characters was long forgotten, but the sentiment lived on in the minds of NASA old-timers. The labeled golfer in the cartoon leaned casually on a golf club, watching an atomic mushroom rise above a nearby city skyline, and said to the other golfer, “Go ahead and putt, Ralph, it’ll take a few seconds for the shockwave to reach us.”
That was Obermiller. The consensus was, if Gene ever got nervous, you might as well bend over and kiss your nether region good-bye, because you were about to witness the Second Coming. It wasn’t that evident on the surface, but today Gene was nervous.
Forty-seven minutes later, “SRB separation at oh nine fifty-two,” came the voice of the controller. “She’s seventy-five miles downrange and five-by-five. Seven minutes of burn remaining.”
A seated technician looked at Obermiller, who stood watching the overhead monitor. “Bermuda has comm and telemetry, Gene, and Sydney is standing by for the handoff.”
“Fine. It looks like a good one,” Obermiller replied.
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Two days later, Columbia orbited the Earth belly down, her bay doors open to eject her payload toward a higher orbit. Two mission specialists worked in the cargo bay, intent on their task, oblivious to the black, yawning void above them and the majestic, blue-white, marbled planet turning below. The rest of the crew was busy inside Columbia’s cabin.
When the research satellite was away, controllers on the ground would fire thrusters on the “bird” to maneuver it into geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above Earth. Once her payload had been deployed, Columbia would roll over on her back, open bay toward the Earth, for her remaining days in orbit.
The important payload, the ultraviolet research satellite, was gently guided onto the spring-driven expulsion platform by the two mission specialists, and when the moment was right, ejected in a slowly spinning trajectory, like a rifle slug, toward the deep. The two remaining orbital experiments followed, lifted from the shuttle bay and released in Columbia’s wake by the robot arm, with just enough rearward momentum to assure they cleared the shuttle’s vicinity, where engine and thruster maneuvers might affect them. As the astronauts watched past the tail of the ship, the instruments shrank to specks of light, and finally winked out in the distance.
“Payload insertion complete,” radioed the mission specialist to the shuttle commander.
“Good! Secure for maneuvering,” came the reply.
At two days into the mission, everything was going fine. Columbia would spend three more days in low earth orbit (LEO) as the crew completed the onboard experiments and other studies that comprised this missions program, then, due to impending weather at Kennedy, she would land at Edwards Air Force Base in California. There, she would be mounted on the back of a 747 jetliner for transport back to Kennedy.