She tried to reply; she felt her mouth working, but no sound emerged, as if the components of her body were becoming disengaged, the systems breaking down.
At last she forced out a word. “Go.”
“Confirm that temperature rise in the center engine. If we pass through nine hundred fifty we’re heading for an auto shutdown. We’re working on the hypothesis that there’s been a collision of some kind, probably with one of the discarded SRBs. We—”
“No. Booster, that’s wrong.”
“But—”
Somehow it made it easier for her that she wasn’t the only one, here, who couldn’t believe this. “We all saw it, damn it. Someone just drove into us. We’ve been hit a glancing blow by some kind of projectile. Prop, Egil, DPS, are you working with Booster on this?”
“Confirm, Flight.”
“Flight, capcom. What do I tell the crew?”
She took a breath. “Stand by, Marcus. Let’s just keep monitoring. We haven’t lost anything yet; we still have all three engines.”
But, she wondered, for how long?
To Benacerraf, it was like a rerun of the disintegration of Columbia’s final mission, the slow, almost laborious unravelling of catastrophe. Not again, she thought. Dear God, whatever happens, I can’t go through that again.
Angel turned to Libet, and Benacerraf could see him clench a fist, big knuckles white. “Houston, we heard a bang, just after SRB sep. A loud bang. We have a real issue here.” His voice had a sharp edge.
“We’re working on it, Bill,” Marcus White said. “Four minutes twenty. You have negative return. Do you copy?”
That routine call meant that, whatever the emergency, the abort option of returning to the launch site — in a drastic powered maneuver that would have pointed the Shuttle back towards Canaveral and used its main engines to slow it — was no longer available.
And it was a reminder that the events of the launch were continuing around them, bang or no bang; that Benacerraf was still trapped here, inside this slowly exploding bomb.
Angel said, “Houston, I’m watching this damn engine temperature reading here. It’s still climbing. Over nine twenty degrees—”
“We’re copying, Endeavour, Hold on that. Endeavour, Houston. Negative TAL now.”
“Copy, negative TAL.”
Another abort option had passed out of operation. Now it was impossible for the orbiter to attempt to cross the Atlantic and land at the emergency airstrip, at Zaragoza in Spain.
“Four minutes fifty seconds,” White said. “We’re still with you guys.”
Despite the situation, his tone was even, deep, immensely reassuring to Benacerraf. This is a man who has been to the Moon, she thought. Marcus won’t feed us bullshit. He will make sure we’re okay.
Angel was hunched forward, against the acceleration, studying his main engine temperature gauge.
If only, she thought, White was here in the cabin with them.
Angel said, “Okay, the center engine has gone through its red line. Do you copy? Nine hundred fifty centigrade. And—”
Benacerraf felt an immediate decrease of acceleration, a lessening of the Gs that pressed her against her seat. The flight deck was filled with a loud, oscillating tone. Four big red push-button alarm lights lit up on the instrument panels around the cabin.
Angel pushed a glowing button on a central panel, above a CRT, to kill the alarm. “Master alarm,” he snapped.
I know, Benacerraf thought bleakly.
Just to the right of the lowest of the cockpit’s three CRT screens was a small cluster of three lights. They were main engine status lights. Benacerraf saw that the centermost light had turned red.
“We lost the center engine,” Angel called. “It got too hot and shut itself down.”
“We copy, Endeavour,” Marcus White said. “Endeavour, Houston…” The capcom fell silent.
“We’re waiting,” Angel said heavily.
Deeke tried to keep from looking out of the cockpit.
What would he see? — a cloud of dispersing liquid oxygen from a ruptured External Tank, the bright orange glow of RCS hypergolics, fragments of the orbiter wheeling out of the plume, like another Challenger?
Had it worked?
…He approached his peak altitude. Deeke began to push his nose down, with RCS blips, so that he climbed to the top with a ten-degree nose-down attitude.
In the moment of stasis at the top of his trajectory, he saw the Earth, spread out before him, through his mailbox window.
The world was very bright, like an inverted sky. Under the nose of the aircraft it curved away, in all directions, as if he were poised above some huge blue dome. Out ahead, he could see the ocean, a deeper, bluish grey color. The atmosphere was clearly visible, as a layer of blue haze over the Earth. Above him there was only blackness.
It was extraordinarily beautiful.
My God, he thought. What have I done?
He probed his soul for remorse.
His main regret, actually, was that he would surely, in any conceivable future, never again fly like this, never see the Earth from this extraordinary altitude, spread out like a bright blue quilt.
As he went over the top, the change was rapid; the flight path changed from a climb of plus thirty degrees to minus thirty in minutes.
The deep ocean receded from him as he fell. The lighter blue of the coastal waters expanded below him, coated with lumpy cloud. The air seemed to reach up and clutch at him.
The black nose of the X-15 began to glow as the plane dipped back into the thickening atmosphere. The sensation of speed returned, and negative Gs piled on, soon climbing to four or five.
Deeke pulled X-15 up through twenty degrees. He could feel the aircraft fighting him. The leading edges of the wings glowed a bright cherry-red; now, at the climax of the reentry, the heat of air friction was dispersing around the airframe, raising its average temperature above a thousand degrees. But here, in his little aluminum shell, Deeke could feel nothing but the brutal eyeballs-out deceleration. He felt blood pool in his arms, painfully.
Canaveral said, “Ease it on over. Watch your nose position, Linebacker. We have you low on altitude. Bring it back up. Pull your nose on up, Linebacker.”
“Okay, it’s coming up.”
“Turn left three degrees. Left three degrees.”
“Rog.”
“Speed brakes in. And maintain your altitude, you’re still a little low, Linebacker.”
“Rog.”
“Okay, you’re about ten miles from your checkpoint. You’re looking very good here, Linebacker.”
The calm, competent dialogue went on, routine and almost meaningless.
Nobody had said a word since he’d deployed the ASAT. He still didn’t know whether he’d succeeded or not.
Just get onto the ground, Linebacker. Time enough for all that later.
The flight dynamics engineer, Fido, was talking steadily in Fahy’s ear, outlining available abort modes to her.
The RTLS and TAL modes were already unavailable to her. But they could lengthen the burn of the remaining engines and the OMS, and so reach some kind of orbit. That was an Abort to Orbit, ATO. It had actually been flown before. Later, an abort once-around would be available, with Endeavour completing a single circuit of Earth, and reentering immediately.
The ATO gave some chance of salvaging some of the mission’s objectives. And getting Endeavour up, intact, into some kind of orbit would provide time to figure out what in hell was going on here, and what resources she had to work with.
But an ATO would be a gamble. She would have to hope that the remaining main engines kept working nominally for the rest of the ascent. And as Booster kept pointing out, there was no guarantee of that.
Someone shot at us, damn it. I can’t believe it.
The launch sequence was unfolding rapidly, a ticking clock. In the next few seconds, she had to make the decision: to abort or not, and which mode.