And suddenly — for the first time that day — York could see the Saturn: the central, gleaming white needle, slim and powerful, with its cluster of four squat Solid Rocket Boosters, the whole enclosed by the massive, blocky gantry, sitting atop the pad’s octagonal base. The assembly was picked out by powerful searchlights, augmenting the morning light. She could see ice coating the sides of the cryogenic fuel tanks, and there were puffs and plumes of vapors emerging from the central column, little clouds drifting across the launch complex.
The rising sun came out from behind a thin cloud, and splashed the sky with orange and gold. Light washed over the launchpad, and, beside its access tower, the Saturn shone like a pearl.
The van pulled up at the foot of the pad’s concrete base. The van doors swung open, and York was helped to the tarmac by suit techs.
Up close, the Saturn, looming before her, had a gritty reality that made it stand out in the washed-out dawn light. It had almost a home-workshop quality: the huge bolts holding it together, the white gloss paint on its flanks. Its complexity, its man-made-ness, was tangible.
There was a sign fixed to the concrete base of the launchpad: GO, ARES!
She looked back down the crawlerway to the Vehicle Assembly Building. The VAB was a black-and-white block, squat on the horizon; it was impossible to judge its size. The crawlerway was a path of big yellow river-gravel blocks running straight as an arrow to the VAB, at infinity; it ran alongside the canal built for the barges which hauled huge Saturn stages up to the VAB. She could see the tracks ground into the road surface where the crawler-transporter had hauled the Saturn to the launch complex; they looked like dinosaur footsteps.
Suddenly it struck her. The event they’d practiced and talked about for months was about to happen. She really would be sealed into the little cabin at the top of this stack and thrown into space. My God, she thought. They’re serious.
In the weeks before launch day, York had been out to the pad many times. She’d come to think of the pad as a noisy, busy place, like an industrial site: machines running, elevators going up and down the gantries, people clanging and banging and talking.
Launch day was different. Save for the crew and their attendants, there was no living soul within three miles.
After the press of people at the MSOB — the glimpses she’d had of the million-strong throng around the Cape — to be at the epicenter of this concrete desolation, with the overwhelming bulk of the Saturn VB before her, was crushing, terrifying. Like a glimpse of death.
Still carrying her air unit, accompanied only by the whisper of oxygen, York followed Stone toward the steel mesh elevator at the base of the launch tower scaffolding.
Perhaps these are my last moments on Earth. Right here and now, on this blasted concrete apron. Maybe this is indeed a kind of death, time-delayed by hardware.
JACQUELINE B. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER
The breeze off the Atlantic ruffled the flags behind the wooden bleachers at the viewing site, close to the VAB. The grandstand crowd was more than twenty thousand, Muldoon was told, including five thousand special guests and four thousand press. There were celebrities, politicians, families and friends of the crew.
There were one million people within seventy-five miles of this spot.
JFK was there, in his wheelchair, behind big sunglasses, looking a lot older than his sixty-eight years. The rest of Muldoon’s old Apollo crew showed up, and the NASA PAO people had the three of them line up — Armstrong, Muldoon, Collins — behind the frail old former President, with the Saturn gleaming on the horizon behind them.
The PR done, Muldoon sat down.
He was looking east, into the low morning sun. It was a clear, still morning, with a few scattered clouds; the PAO said the probability of meeting launch weather rules was good, more than 80 percent.
The VAB was a huge block to Muldoon’s left, the windows of the cars clustered around it glistening like the carapaces of beetles. There was a stretch of grass before him, with its clustered cameramen, the flagpole, and the big digital countdown clock, and on the other side of that the barge canal stretched across his vision. Beyond the canal was a line of trees. And beyond that — there on the horizon, made faint by morning mist — he could see the blocky, blue-gray forms of the two LC-39 gantries. The pad for Ares, 39A, was on the right.
If he turned to look farther to the right he could make out more launch complexes, gaunt, well-separated skeletons: ICBM Row, stretching off down the Atlantic coast.
KSC had changed a hell of a lot since he’d first flown, in Gemini. Even from where he was you could see how the space program had receded. Employment here was less than half what it had been then. The launch complex he’d flown Gemini from, LC-19, was still there — used for unmanned Titan launches — but only ten complexes out of twenty-six at KSC remained operational. The launchpads rotted, the gantries had rusted and were pulled down, and NASA executives let local scrap merchants bid to take away the junk.
But Complex 39A was still there. In 1969, he’d flown out of there on Apollo. And sixteen years later, the Ares stack was there, assembled and ready to fly.
Behind Muldoon’s seat, two old ladies chatted about the launch parties they’d held over the years in their Florida gardens, as brilliant manned spacecraft had drifted through the night sky, directly overhead.
NASA had set up a series of press porta-kabins, and reporters in short-sleeved shirts trooped in and out carrying photocopied mission time lines, and glossy goodies from the contractors. To Muldoon’s left, toward the VAB, the big network TV cabins were full of activity; their huge picture windows shimmered in the morning light.
Loudspeakers boomed with the voices of the astronauts on the air-to-ground loop, and with updates from Mission Control at Houston and the Firing Room there at the Cape. The Public Affairs Officer intoned countdown highlights. A way down from Muldoon, a woman reporter was fanning herself with a crumpled-up press release.
Muldoon, stiff and hot in his dark business suit, felt aged, restless, thirsty.
The mist was burning off the horizon. Then, at 39A, he could see the slim white needle of the Saturn, emerging from the blue haze.
LAUNCH CONTROL CENTER, CAPE CANAVERAL
When he’d first come to work here at the Cape, Rolf Donnelly had found the LCC very different from the MOCR back at Houston.
The Firing Room was full of the same computer consoles and wall-sized tracking screens; but there were also sixty TV screens showing the Saturn stack from different angles. And in the viewing room behind the Trench, there was a huge picture window with a panoramic view of Merritt Island, with its launch gantries poking up out of the sand, three miles away. Unlike the MOCR, the Firing Room wasn’t closed to the outside world.
And at the moment of launch, the Firing Room flooded with real, honest-to-God rocket light.
The atmosphere was different here, too. The controllers here were independent of the Mission Control guys, by job description and inclination. They were more like blue-collar technicians. The LCC controllers were in charge for the first few seconds of the flight; they were the guys who had to get the mission off the ground by doing the dirty work of the launch.
It was an atmosphere Donnelly liked. He’d come to Florida, bringing his family, soon after the Apollo-N fiasco, hoping to rebuild his career.
As he’d feared, some of the shit flying around then had stuck to him. Well, he wasn’t a flight director anymore; Indigo Team was just embarrassing history, and Donnelly’s brilliant career probably wouldn’t look so brilliant ever again. But he was still here, still involved, still with NASA.