Carver was unsure how fast Reynolds was drifting away, and clueless as to the MMU’s speed or range. Assuming Reynolds was even alive, there was a distinct possibility of a successful capture without enough propellant to return back to Discovery. But he couldn’t just abandon Reynolds, left to drift forever in space.
He had to try to get him back.
Powering up the MMU, he familiarized himself with the thruster controls. The unit required both hands for maneuvering; the right controller providing roll, pitch, and yaw, the left producing acceleration for moving forward-back, up-down, and left-right. Carver nervously undocked the MMU from the payload bay wall.
“Mayday, mayday. Mission Control, please come in.” He waited a few seconds, but the radio was silent. “This is Frank Carver, declaring mayday for Discovery. I am not receiving your signal. We have collided with E.S.S.E. I have lost radio contact with Ikiro and Ramirez; they may be incapacitated. Commander Reynolds lost his tether and was thrown into space. I am attempting to recover him using the M.M.U. Please re-establish contact and advise.” He was uncertain if the communication problem was in his own headset, or perhaps the shuttle comm system itself. With no time to diagnose the cause, he set off to recover Reynolds.
Avoiding pieces of Essie still bouncing around the payload bay, he activated the MMU’s left joystick to produce upward thrust. About to collide with Discovery’s damaged robot arm, he yanked back on the joystick to reverse thrust. Unable to see behind, he failed to stop in time and slammed into the portside bay wall.
Frustrated, he took note to execute shorter, more controlled bursts. He tried again and finally cleared the bay. Earth loomed large above his head, dark and ominous as Discovery orbited the night side approaching the terminator.
Operating the right hand joystick, he rolled over to position Earth below him, which greatly eased his growing sense of vertigo.
Carver scanned the area. Essie was a pile of rubble adrift 50 yards beyond Discovery’s nose, slowly moving away from the shuttle.
He began searching for Reynolds, attempting to triangulate his position based on the direction he was thrown. Minutes passed as he searched for what seemed an eternity, and there was still no sign of his colleague. His hopes began to fade. Space seemed so big; searching for Reynolds gave new meaning to looking for a needle in a haystack. Perhaps he had already drifted too far away.
There. A small object transiting some stars. After floating toward and tracking the object for a few seconds, his eyes adjusted to the retreating glare from the payload bay. The object was Reynolds, slowly tumbling away from Discovery. There was no body movement.
Carver quickly accelerated forward. “Commander Reynolds, come in. Do you read me?” No response. After a thruster burst of about 30 seconds, he released the control and coasted. Reynolds’ suit brightened with reflected light as he passed into the illumination of Earth’s penumbra.
Gaining confidence in operating the MMU, he nudged the directional controls to stay on course. A minute later he was surprised by how much distance still remained between them, expecting to have caught up to Reynolds more quickly. Maintaining forward velocity, he engaged the right control and rotated 180 degrees. He now faced backwards along his direction of travel. He was startled at how small Discovery appeared. The distance he had already traveled was much greater than expected—at least a thousand yards. They were fortunate to be orbiting Earth’s dark side, as the glow from the open payload bay provided a brilliant beacon. The shuttle would have been virtually impossible to find against a backdrop of blue sea and white cloud on Earth’s day side. With a renewed sense of urgency, he rotated back around to face his target.
A minute later he closed the distance to within a few meters and reversed thrust. Timing his decel perfectly, he slowly closed the last few feet until he could grab Reynolds arm.
“Gotcha.”
Turning Reynolds so they were face to face, he gasped. There were several cracks in the helmet’s gold sun visor. He rotated the visor up; there were cracks in the clear bubble as well. Reynolds eyes were closed.
He leaned forward to put his own helmet in contact with Reynolds’. “Mark! Can you hear me?!” He was non-responsive. His suit’s life support display provided the explanation: the internal pressure was almost nil.
Hooking his feet around Reynolds’ legs, Carver once again tapped the rotation thruster, gently spinning them both 180 degrees so he could navigate back to the shuttle. He immediately got a visual on Discovery, lined up and applied forward thrust, pushing Reynolds in front of him.
He was relieved to be heading back to the relative safety of the orbiter. The thought of becoming marooned in space, forever adrift, was terrifying.
His relief would be short-lived. Carver would soon discover that recovering Commander Reynolds was child’s play compared to the problems awaiting him inside the space shuttle.
Chapter 11
Mission Status: Unknown
Everyone in Mission Control watched in horror as images of the satellite suddenly lurching forward and crashing into the payload bay filled display screens. Seconds after the impact, the shuttle’s video feed flickered and turned to static.
After a stunned moment of silence, the control room erupted into a state of controlled panic. There were a thousand questions, foremost of which was whether or not the shuttle and its crew were dead or alive.
The Flight Director ordered everyone to stop shouting and begin status checks on all systems.
Deputy Administrator Benson Davis was standing behind the Director’s station nervously observing the frantic activity. He immediately ordered Mission Control sealed off; no one was allowed to enter or exit the room until he gave the all-clear. He was relieved the media had not been allowed into the observation area during this part of Discovery’s mission.
Davis tried to stay out of the way as NASA personnel worked to re-gain contact with the shuttle. Every engineer and technician in the room was considered the best in their field, but that gave him little comfort as he feared the worst.
The last thing NASA needed was another mission gone wrong.
* * *
Despite a slower inbound velocity, Carver perceived the passage of time on his return trip to Discovery much more quickly. Pushing Commander Reynolds in front of him, he closed to within twenty meters above the payload bay, deftly used the MMU to spin them both around again and, now traveling backwards, applied forward thrust to act as a brake. He eased off the control with just enough remaining momentum to drift slowly backwards into the bay. He smiled. Frank Carver: Ace MMU pilot. Where’s an audience when you need one?
The weightlessness of space notwithstanding, he had his hands full extracting himself from the maneuvering unit while keeping Reynolds from floating away. Rather than lose time re-securing the MMU, he scuttled the unit with a big push up and out of the bay, watching as it cleared the giant doors and sailed off into the heavens to become yet another piece of space junk orbiting the earth. NASA can bill me, he thought as he moved toward the airlock.
Within five minutes, he managed to open the airlock hatch, pull himself and Reynolds inside, re-pressurize the airlock and open the inner door to the Mid-deck.
The shuttle interior was dimly lit by a few emergency back-up lights, indicator bulbs on various status boards and earthshine from the open payload bay. He experienced a new sense of dread, unsure how much damage the collision with Essie had done to Discovery’s systems.
After verifying air levels and pressure inside the shuttle were nominal, he spent the next several minutes extracting himself from his space suit, haphazardly shoving the gear into the empty airlock to save precious minutes.
He quickly turned his attention to Reynolds. Blood oozed from the commander’s nose as he removed his helmet, tiny little red spheres hovering in the air.
Reynolds remained unconscious. Carver checked for vitals with an ungloved hand, detecting a pulse in the carotid artery, and slow respira
tion, both faint but definite. He opened Reynolds’ eyelid, but the emergency lights did not provide enough illumination to see if the pupil was dilated.
Although there were no other signs of physical trauma, Reynolds was non-responsive even when Carver subjected him to smelling salts from the medical supply. Moving to the crew sleeping area, he secured Reynolds in a sleeping bag and strapped a mask over his face delivering pure oxygen, praying he suffered no brain damage.
Pulling himself through the Mid-deck access, he found the Flight-deck quiet, but not silent. Myriad colors of lighted indicators, gauges, monitors and other read-outs were dutifully operating, the faint whirring of electronics in the background. He was relieved to see that some of the control systems were still under power.
Michelle Ikiro was drifting aft near the payload ops station, her arms floating gently as if she were conducting an underwater Adagio.
Diego Ramirez was slowly cart-wheeling near the Commanders seat, softly bouncing into side and overhead instrument panels, his legs bent grotesquely above the knee.
They were both unconscious.
Carver’s spirits lifted momentarily when Ikiro reacted to the smelling salts, but with a nasty contusion on her forehead, it was obvious she had suffered a serious concussion. She was unable to stay awake; not a good sign. He moved her down to the Mid-deck and strapped her into a passenger seat.
Quickly returning to the Flight-deck, Carver examined Ramirez more closely. He was in bad shape, with obvious multiple fractures to both legs and likely other internal injuries as well, his pale skin indicating shock. Carver injected him with 10mg of morphine sulfate obtained from the med kit, and strapped him into the mission specialist seat.
With no assistance from the ground, Carver had been thrust into the roles of Damage Control Officer and Chief Medic. He found himself multi-tasking at levels he would not have thought possible.
The crew was in need of advanced medical attention, immediately. Desperate to re-establish contact with Mission Control and receive instruction, he scanned dozens of panels in search of radio controls, finding several with promising labels such as “Left Audio”, “S-Band”, “Ku-Band” and so forth; he was aware these were part of the shuttle communications system, but was untrained in how they operated.
Settling into the left-side shuttle command seat, he found the buttons, switches, knobs and displays in front, to the side of and above his head overwhelming. Everything was laid out in a patchwork of individual panels, each designed to control different systems. He had no doubt the cockpit layout was completely logical and made perfect sense to a trained eye, but to him it was an unorganized hodge-podge of controls. Sure are a helluva lot of buttons for a glorified glider.
He put on a communications headset wired to a push-to-talk control device, and pressed the transmit button.
“Mission Control, this is Discovery. Do you read me?!”
There was no answer. He repeated the call several times, issuing another mayday to no avail, frustrated that he did not understand the shuttle systems well enough to diagnose the communications problem.
With no ground contact, and three people on board that might not survive the day without emergency medical care, he had a choice to make: wait for NASA to organize a rescue, or attempt to land the shuttle himself.
A space rescue was unlikely to be soon. Shuttles Atlantis and Endeavor were retired and no longer operational, and NASA had no other manned spacecraft in service. Soyuz was the only available option, and Carver surmised it would take days if not weeks to arrange a rescue mission with the Russians.
Ultimately, he was left with only one choice, an utterly preposterous one, but one that provided at least a chance of saving the crew: land the shuttle himself.
He found a crew operations manual velcroed next to the pilot’s chair, turned to the index, and began the most important cram session of his life.
Chapter 12
Mission Status: Aborted
Earlier, while Mission Control was still in lock-down, everyone in the control room skipped a collective heartbeat as a voice from the flight crew sounded briefly over the intercom. After numerous response attempts, it was clear Discovery was transmitting but not receiving radio signals.
After working frantically for more than two hours, flight controllers managed to re-establish telemetry and data links with the shuttle, but were still unable to regain two-way voice communication.
Davis and other NASA administrators were debating rescue scenarios when the voice came over the radio again.
“Mission Control, this is Frank Carver. I don’t know if you can hear me. I am not receiving transmission. Here is the sit-rep: E.S.S.E. collided with Discovery and is destroyed. Damage to the shuttle is unknown. Commander Reynolds, Ramirez and Ikiro are injured and in need of immediate medical attention. I am going to initiate re-entry procedures and land the shuttle at Edwards Air Force Base. I hope these damn computers know what they’re doing. Please have medical personnel standing by at Edwards.” There was a pause before Carver signed off. “That’s all. Discovery out.”
Stunned, the control room was dead silent.
Ben Davis was the first to speak. “Oh my God. Carver, you crazy bastard.”
The silence was broken as everyone began talking at once, shouting questions and barking orders again.
Davis could no longer keep a lid on the situation. Reluctantly, he directed his media relations team to issue a press release: Due to a technical anomaly, Discovery’s mission would end early. Better to get the word out first before someone leaked the whole story and created a firestorm; though he realized sooner or later the press would sniff out the fact that the shuttle was in trouble as emergency procedures would hardly go unnoticed. Before rescinding the control room lock-down, he reminded everyone inside Mission Control that the existence of E.S.S.E. and Discovery’s mission were classified.
Tensions were high as everyone tried to focus on their assigned tasks while fighting back unwelcome memories of 2003’s Columbia disaster. No one said aloud the question everyone was thinking:
Was Discovery about to suffer the same fate?
* * *
Carver ended his transmission to Houston and removed the headset microphone, unsure if anyone had heard his desperate message.
The next two hours were consumed by a frantic series of tasks as Carver prepared the shuttle and crew for landing. After a twenty-minute cram session reviewing shuttle landing procedures, he began de-orbit readiness preparations normally allocated to the entire crew. He retracted what was left of the mangled remote manipulator arm, closed the payload bay doors, suited up each injured crewmate in their orange launch-entry pressure suits, strapped them into passenger seats, connected O2 lines and locked on their helmets.
He was spent.
Reynolds and Ikiro occupied seats Mid-deck, both still unconscious.
On the Flight-deck, Ramirez woke briefly, screaming in pain as Carver bandaged soft-splints to each leg before pulling on the pumpkin suit. He passed out again as Carver buckled him into the seat.
Carver needed help with the re-entry procedures, and Ramirez was his only option.
“Sorry about this old chap, but I need your help,” he said as he snapped open smelling salts and waved them under the pilot’s nose. Ramirez jerked his head as the ammonia took effect.
Wincing in pain, his eyes fluttered open. He was weak from his injuries and groggy from the morphine. “Wha...what’s happening? Where...”
“Diego, take it easy. It’s me, Carver. You’re still on board Discovery, but there’s been an accident. Reynolds and Ikiro are down below, but they’re in bad shape. So are you. We’ve lost contact with the ground. I’ve got to land the shuttle. Do you understand?” He gave him another whiff of smelling salts.
“Jesus...I’ve got...to...contact...”
“Never mind that. The radio is out. Ramirez, I need your help. How do I initiate the re-entry program on the computer? Wh
at’s the code?!”
The pilot regained some measure of lucidity, but it didn’t last long. “Carver. You don’t know...what you’re doing. Wait... for...rescue.” He was grimacing in pain with every word.
“We can’t wait. You’ll die if you don’t get to a hospital soon. So will Reynolds and Ikiro. I’ve got to chance a landing. You need to help me initiate the computer. Please!”
“Center console...panel C 2...initiate de-orbit sequence...see ops manual...enter landing site code. You will need to...you will...need...” His voice trailed off as he slipped back into unconsciousness.
“Great,” Carver muttered aloud. Need to what? He hoped he could cross that bridge when he got to it. Conceding he would get nothing more out of him, he gave Ramirez another shot of morphine.
Settling into Discovery’s pilot seat, he searched for and found panel “C2”, and did as Ramirez had instructed. The required code was an identification number representing the intended landing site, usually Kennedy Space Center in Florida or Edwards Air Force Base in California’s Mojave Desert. Carver was able to find a list of codes in the operations manual. A dozen other sites were available, military air fields in the United States, Europe and other emergency landing locations throughout the world. He knew Edwards provided not only the longest runway but, located in the middle of a huge dry lake bed, was also the roomiest location.
While speed-reading the manual on landing procedures, he was impressed to learn that the shuttle basically flew itself, the pilot’s job boiling down to programming the computer and making sure the craft didn’t stray off course during its descent. Essentially, the pilot flew the computer, and the computer flew the shuttle. So all Carver needed to do was program Discovery to land at Edwards Air Force Base, sit back and enjoy the ride. If only it were that simple.
Carver reviewed the huge unknowns that stood between him and the ground, foremost of which was how much damage had been inflicted during Essie’s collision in the payload bay. With the radio out, only God knew what else was wrong with the craft. He estimated the chances of a re-entry burn-up were well north of 50-50.