Back to the Moon-ARC

Chapter 33

“Mercy I, something went wrong on aerocapture.” Mission control started in with the bad news. “You might have figured out by now that you aren’t at a fifty-two degree inclination in your orbit.”

“I was beginning to wonder about that, Houston.” Bill replied. “So, where are we?”

BANG! Bang, bang, bang! A big jolt resounded through the ship, followed by three ACS bursts. Then there were more ACS burns. Bang, bang, bang. Bang, bang.

“Holy crap!” Bill grabbed at his armrest with one hand to steady himself. With the other he tapped at the attitude-control diagnostics and the directional-gyro screen. “Houston, we’ve got something going on here. We’re rocking and rolling like crazy, and the ACS is trying to keep up with it.”

Bang. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Bang, bang. All the ACS thrusters seemed to be firing to correct for something, and the ship continued to rock with each bang.

“Mercy I, we show P & P PROP warning again, and the fuel level in ACS is dropping rapidly.”

“Roger that, Houston. The ACS is firing almost continuously now.” Bill considered taking control, but he had no idea what the ship was doing and why the computer felt it needed the ACS control thrusters to fire. Something was pushing them. “Tony, can you see anything out your window? I’ve got nothing on this side.”

“Bill! There’s something spewing sparkly stuff in a jet out the side over here.” Tony sounded upset.

“Alright. Take it easy, Tony.” Bill didn’t like the sound of that. It was never a good idea to be spewing anything out of the ship if you didn’t have to. “Houston, we’ve got something leaking out of the capsule near the starboard side up at the nose.” He didn’t have to remind anybody that that was the location where Tony had taken up target practice before the aerocapture. That big noise they heard during the capture process might have been something coming loose up there.

“Copy that, Mercy I.”

Bang, bang. Bang, bang, bang.

“Houston, be advised that the P & P PROP warning light is not resetting. Also, it looks like we’re gonna run out of fuel in the ACS thrusters if we don’t do something soon.” Bill was getting concerned. They were off their orbit and running out of fuel. They didn’t die on the Moon, or on the way back to Earth orbit, and he hoped they wouldn’t get stranded in Earth orbit just to die before they could get back to the space station. Home was just a few hundred miles beneath them. Somehow, they had to survive long enough to cover those last few hundred miles. Those last ones were just as deadly as the first half million.

“Sorry, Mercy I. We haven’t come up with a solution yet. Keep trying to reset the flow system and get that warning light back to green.”

“Roger that, Houston.” Bill didn’t like it. Houston always came up with something to at least try. “Tony. We’re on our own. We’ve got to fix this.”

“Bill, we don’t even know what is wrong.”

Bang, bang. Bang. The attitude-control system continued to fire correction burns.

“Everybody, faceplates on. I’m going outside to see what is going on,” Bill ordered the crew.

“Bill, shouldn’t we run that by Houston first?”

“They don’t have any idea what is going on, Tony.” He hadn’t come this far to fail now.

“We’re not even sure the hatch will cycle, Bill.”

“Well, I sure as heck don’t want to get stuck outside again. If it cycles, we’ll leave the hatch open until I come back in.”

“Makes sense,” Tony agreed.

“You still see that stream of stuff on your side?” Bill stretched to look out his window but didn’t see anything.

“It’s still going strong.”

“Figures.”

Bang. Bang.

Bang. Bang. Bang, bang.

The hatch had opened without a glitch this time. Resetting it before the aerocapture maneuver must have fixed the software problems, at least temporarily. With the ship rocking back and forth, Bill thought it would be wise to stay in intimate contact with it. Had he let himself float freely about it, one of the ACS burns might rock the ship into him and knock him out, damage his suit, or damage the ship even further.

“Whoa! Are you seeing this, Tony?” Bill moved his head back and forth so the camera in his helmet could see all the damage.

“It’s amazing we made it through aerocapture,” Tony replied.

Bill surveyed the damage as he held on to the bucking bronco. Each time there was an ACS burn, which was now about one every couple of seconds, he would nearly lose his handhold on the ship. A section of the multilayered insulation (MLI) blankets was charred black and peeled away from the hull, exposing an aluminum panel that had been superheated and flexed outward. The nose of the spacecraft on that side looked a little bit like a partially peeled banana. The bent panel was no longer than a piece of printer paper, but it was angled outward enough from the ship that it must have been causing all sorts of drag during the aerocapture. The bent panel had likely acted just like a flap on an airplane wing. Bill understood why their orbit was wrong. It dawned on him that he never did get the rest of the information from Houston as to how wrong it was.

“Look at that.” Bill whistled as he reached the forward-roll thrusters. The stream of sparkling stuff was fuel jetting out of the plumbing that fed one of the little rocket engines. One of Tony’s bullets had loosened the exterior panel enough so that it moved around during the aerocapture maneuver. Apparently it moved enough to bang into the little metal tube that carried the propellants to the thruster. The tube was spewing around randomly like a high-pressure water hose with no one holding on to it. It really wasn’t quite that bad, but the little metal tube, no bigger than a drinking straw in diameter, vibrated around several inches in any direction. That was the culprit imparting random thrust to the spacecraft and totally messing around with the ship’s attitude control.

“Can we clamp that off?” Tony asked.

“I’m gonna try, Tony.” Bill reached down into the panel and slid his fingers in behind the tube. “I’ll see if I can bend it over shut.”

Bang. Bang. Bang, bang. He paused to adjust his hand- and footholds a bit better. Instinctively, he double-checked his tether. He was strapped on to the ship just fine.

Confident he wasn’t going to get thrown from the ship, he set back to work. He did his best to work his gloves into the crevice between the tube and the ship’s structure. It was a tight fit, but he managed. First he tried to squeeze the tube between his thumb and forefinger, but that didn’t work at all. Then he tried bending the tube over with the strength of his fingers, but there just wasn’t enough dexterity with his spacesuit gloves on. He cursed the spacesuit technology for about the millionth time on the mission.

Not having much luck here, he said to himself just as he felt the tube give. Then the little tube bent at the tip of his thumb, and he managed to get both hands down to bend the tube the rest of the way over. When he did, the spewing gas slowed to a small trickle out the end of the tube. Bill continued to bend the tube back on itself until there was no more visible sign of the gas leaking. “I think I got it stopped.”

“Permanently?” Tony’s voice sounded in Bill’s helmet.

“I doubt it. Sooner or later the pipe is going to give out. But I don’t see any other fix at the moment. Maybe Houston can think of something before that happens.” Bill looked up and toward the Earth. It seemed farther away than it had earlier. He was sure that if that was the case, then something had gone way wrong on the aerocapture procedure. He really needed to get back on the horn with Houston.

“Well, Bill, we’re ready for you to come in whenever you are,” Tony told him. Bill could sense the anxiety in Tony’s voice.

“Tony, have you noticed anything different?’ Bill asked.

“Sure have. The ACS thrusters haven’t kicked in for the past couple of minutes.”

“Right. There’s nothing more I can do out here. Let’s cycle the hatch,” Bill ordered after he climbed in and untethered himself.

“Roger that, Bill,” Tony replied. “Cycling the hatch.”

Nothing.

“Uh, Tony. Cycle the hatch.” Bill put a glove on it and prepared to help out with a tug.

“Roger that, Bill. Cycling the hatch.” Tony tapped the icons on the screen for the hatch software to activate. Again, nothing happened. The door remained wide open.

“What else can go wrong?” Bill muttered to himself—hoping he hadn’t jinxed the mission as soon as he said that. He made his way over to his couch and in front of the command consoles.

“Is there a problem, Captain Stetson?” Hui asked.

“Looks like there might be. We’ll work it.” Bill tried to focus his mind. So much had happened in the last few hours that it would have been too much for most normal people. Fortunately, Bill was far above the average—even for an astronaut.

“Bill, there is no power getting to the door. The circuits must’ve gone dead when we cycled it open.” Tony continued to look at the diagnostics screen that was almost all orange and red.

“Houston, this is Mercy I. We’ve got our leak stopped, but now our main hatch door is frozen in the open position,” Bill communicated back to Earth.

“Copy that, Mercy I.”

“And, Houston, you might as well give me the rest of the bad news, because it looks to me like we are presently farther away from Earth than I expected us to be.” Bill almost held his breath waiting for the answer.

“Roger that, Mercy I. Bill, here is the problem. Something went wrong on aerocapture, and you came out in a forty-four degree inclination. Plus, your orbit is fairly elliptical. The orbital guys tell me you’re tracking with a perigee of about one hundred and ninety-four miles and an apogee of about three hundred and sixty-seven miles.” Bill listened and tried to work some of the math in his head. He couldn’t. But that was what Houston was for.

“Okay, Houston, what does that mean?”

“You don’t have enough fuel to crank your inclination enough to make it to the space station. You’d also need to circularize your orbit some. There just isn’t enough fuel for both maneuvers.” Mission control got quiet for a second.

“What do we do, Houston?” Bill asked.

“First thing we need to do is get that door closed. We think we have a workaround.”

“Roger that,” Bill replied. “What do we do?”