He had gone off campus, to the New Outpost, a bar across NASA Parkway from the Johnson Space Center. The original Outpost, a shack in the middle of a parking lot that had more craters than a similar plot of land on the Moon, had been a fixture in the community for decades but had been torn down.
Now there was this slick new hangout, with autographed astronaut photos on the walls, glassed-in memorabilia.
As far as Harley knew, no astronaut ever went into the place. Which was why he’d suggested it this day. There was little chance he would see anyone he worked with.
By now JSC was crawling with reporters—and dozens of staffers whose curiosity and self-importance had overwhelmed their adherence to the privacy code. If a security guard or assistant cook spotted Weldon, Drake, Bynum, and the others huddled in conference, word was going to be on the Web within seconds.
“Besides,” Weldon had said, “I need to get outside that gate.”
So here they were, Harley setting the tone with his order of an alcoholic drink at lunch, and that was stretching the lunch hour to late morning. Very 1960s, Apollo-era. Weldon unbent enough to order a beer, and so did Sasha Blaine. (Harley was liking this girl more with each new revelation.) Williams, with his years on the wagon, stuck to club soda, and Kennedy ignored the offer.
“So,” Harley said, once the waitress had returned to the bar, “are we clear on the proposal?”
Kennedy actually sneered. “You mean, crash-land Destiny on the surface of Keanu?”
“It’s not really a crash landing,” Williams said, his voice at least twice as loud as necessary—or prudent. Harley’s expression warned the elderly writer, and he continued more quietly. “That’s why Harley said to forget what you know about ops—the closing velocities will be so low that you could think of this as a rendezvous between Destiny—”
“—and a spacecraft a million times larger and more massive,” Shane Weldon said, sipping from his beer. He turned to Blaine. “Of course, that’s just a wild-ass guess. You’ll run the figures.”
Blaine had her Slate with her. “I’m sure they’re good enough for this discussion, but I’ll run them, just in case.”
“Can we get serious here?” Kennedy was no longer hiding his impatience. He had already glanced at his watch.
“You got somewhere else to be, Josh?” Harley said. “Is there a kids’ soccer game on the schedule?” He had judged Kennedy to be one of those precise, ascetic youngish men who worked hard and played, whenever possible, without alcohol, late hours, and unsavory companions. They had been the dominant personality type in mission ops for a generation. It was probably inherent in the job; you couldn’t be a boozer or a womanizer and still possess the appropriate seriousness to manage a flight into space.
Or so the mythology had it. Harley agreed that guys who followed rules made better flight directors—as long as that job was defined as . . . following the flight rules.
But in a situation like this, where the rule book was having its pages bent, if not entirely ripped out, NASA needed a riverboat gambler. A buccaneer. A Shane Weldon.
Not an earnest young father. “Since when is my personal life any of your business?”
“It’s not,” Harley said, “unless it keeps you from doing your job.”
Kennedy was bright enough to take the temperature of the room, and right now it was cool toward him. “Sorry. Let’s work this through.”
Harley said, “The idea is to command Destiny to make a burn, to descend in the flattest trajectory possible . . .”
“And just skid across the surface?” Kennedy’s voice was now neutral, but it was clear he was still horrified.
“It’s largely snow,” Weldon said. Kennedy shot him a look that said: Traitor. “The impact velocity could be as low as three meters a second.”
“Or . . .” Harley said, not wishing to attempt conversions or even division with a vodka tonic aboard.
“Sixty to eighty kilometers an hour,” Blaine said, blushing. Was it doing the math so quickly under pressure? Or the beer? Or something else?
The figure sounded good to Harley until Kennedy said, “That speed would still beat the hell out of my Hyundai.”
Williams was spoiling for a fight. “Your Hyundai wasn’t designed to be blasted into space, then survive thousand-degree heat on a lunar return.”
“Don’t we both know that those are different kinds of durability? The vibration damping and thermal protection aren’t the same as impact resistance, right? I mean, the tiles on the space shuttle could withstand temps of three thousand degrees, but if you dropped a penny on them they would split in two.”
Weldon said, “Josh, no one is suggesting that we might not lose an antenna—”
Kennedy had placed his palms on the small table. He would not look directly at anyone. “It’s the solar panels I’d be worried about, though, okay, you ought to be able to operate for a few days with only one. But consider trying to maneuver to the right attitude, make burns, and reenter without data from Houston.”
“This is where mission ops will shine,” Harley said. “You guys will have the departure burns and times precalculated and preloaded to Destiny’s onboard computers before we make the landing.”
Kennedy was nodding, though not so much in acceptance as impatience. “Yeah, yeah, got that. So we pancake down on the surface and manage not to rip a hole in the side of the vehicle, or scrape off both panels and every antenna.” Now he looked up. “You’ve got four, five people in suits. How the hell do they get on board?”
Harley hadn’t given this problem much thought. Because it was not designed for EVA operations, Destiny did not possess an airlock the way the Venture lander did. Which meant it didn’t have easy-open hatches. There was access through the nose—where the Low-Impact Docking System allowed Destiny to dock with Venture. And there was the side hatch, which was how the crew of four entered the vehicle on the pad and departed from it after landing.
The capsule could be depressurized in an emergency. Its electronics were hardened against exposure to vacuum. But which hatch to open, and how—those procedures weren’t in the front part of the training manual, and the surviving Destiny astronauts would be exhausted and totally dependent on guidance from the ground.
“That is what you guys need to work on,” Harley said, feeling the warmth of the vodka through his entire body. “Which way in is better, through the LIDS or through the side access?”
Kennedy had his own Slate out now and was tapping notes to himself and his team. Nothing made an engineer happier than a tricky engineering problem.
“There are other challenges, too,” Weldon said, for Kennedy’s benefit, and to keep Harley and his team on track. “We might have five or six people rather than four; how do we protect them against g-forces on reentry? Water and oxygen and food shouldn’t be immediate problems, but I’m just guessing on the oxygen front.
“There’s the whole business of sample returns, assuming they’re still carrying anything, and how to secure those when we pluck them out of the ocean.”
“And how easy is it going to be to get five exhausted astronauts out of Destiny when it’s bobbing in the Pacific?” Harley disliked many things about the Destiny design, had fought wars against all of them a decade past. But his greatest hatred was for the water landing, a relic of the Apollo days. Destiny could have been designed to thump down safely on a military range like Edwards, but weight considerations and trade-offs had killed that idea. Now the capsule splashed down off the coast of California, near the Channel Islands, where it would be picked up by a NASA-chartered freighter.
“If I may,” Williams said, knowing well that no one would say no, “I just want to say that this kind of rapid response makes me proud and thrilled. It’s like watching the rescue of Apollo 13. It’s NASA at its best.” He tipped his club soda to Weldon and Kennedy. “Cheers.”