Orbit

Chapter 3

Kip knows it isn’t so, but the interior of the spaceship named Intrepid appears to have shrunk, and it scares him.

He sat in this very seat just last week in the hangar, with Anna Altavilla on his left and Tommy Altavilla and Tariq in the back row—the seating order a result of drawing straws. It was bigger then, the interior. He’d swear to it. But on the day of his actual flight he was too excited to even think that it was going to feel like being crammed into an oil drum with windows.

Can this thing really fly?

His thought is accompanied by a nervous laugh, but he’s having serious doubts. It seems as flimsy as a toy, moving in all directions at once whenever either of them moves an arm.

He tries scooting his rear around in the seat he’s been carefully strapped to, but real sideways movement is all but impossible, and with Bill Campbell—his pilot/astronaut companion—already belted into the command seat in front of him, Kip can barely even lean forward.

A one-two-two configuration, they call it, with the pilot/astronaut in the forward center seat, his head in the low curvature bubble canopy, and the occupants of the second and third rows given small windows on each side perfectly aligned with their eyes by seat height adjustment.

The other three seats are gone now, removed to reduce weight, which should make it look more roomy but doesn’t. He can smell plastic and cleaning chemicals and something else he finally realizes is the evaporating remnants of his own cologne.

He looks to the right, checking his window alignment, aware that his eyes are squarely in the middle of the small, thick sandwich of glass and plastic that will have to protect him from the vacuum of space and the incredible speeds which will be mere inches away at the peak of their flight.

An amusement park-style retention bar would complete this feeling, he thinks with a laugh, recalling the first time he agreed to take Jerrod on a modern roller coaster—a steel monster engineered for upside-down excursions and three-g turns. The thought that he wasn’t going to survive the experience had coursed through him when the retaining bars were clicked into place, but he sat there anyway, as if chickening out in front of his boy was a worse fate than being tossed out upside down and dying.

This feels pretty much the same, he thinks, this feeling of needing to see it through, despite the gut level scream from his body and mind that no way could any human survive an attempt at spaceflight in such a tiny, flimsy, puny craft.

But Bill Campbell has logged thirty-nine successful missions, he reminds himself. That means no unsuccessful ones.

Yet.

“So how’re you doing, Kip?” Bill is asking, grinning as he glances over his right shoulder at his only passenger.

“Just fine.”

“Yeah, right. You look green around the gills. Relax.”

“No, no! I’m… fine. Really.”

“It feels like a science fair project when you first strap in, doesn’t it?” Bill prompts, familiar with how a tiny spacecraft designed to be lightweight can feel, well, lightweight. He’s also aware that without any other passengers to talk to and identify with, this passenger is feeling really isolated.

“It just seemed far bigger and more substantial the other day in the hangar.”

“It was. Something happened on orbit and it came back like this.” Campbell is waiting for him to laugh but for a few embarrassing seconds Kip is actually processing the statement. He catches on and winces. “Oh, jeez, okay.”

“You’ll be fine. This is an amazingly good piece of engineering. Best I’ve ever flown. But here’s the thing. This is a ship you strap on, not one you get into.”

“I believe it.”

“Say, Kip. Did you tell me you were a licensed pilot back in class?”

Kip laughs at the aeronautical gulf between them. “No, unfortunately. I’ve taken glider lessons and soloed, so I know basic stick and rudder, but I never quite got time to finish my license.”

“Just wondered how much to explain and that tells me. Relax for a few, or you might even want to take a brief nap. I just heard Mission Control say we’re delayed fifteen minutes.”

“A problem?”

“Yeah, one of the mothership pilots forgot his lunch.”

“Another joke?”

“Yes, Kip,” Campbell chuckles. “Boy, you need to get loose, buddy. It’s all okay. They just need a bit more fueling time.”

“Bill, have time for a question?”

“You bet.”

“Everyone keeps saying ‘on’ orbit instead of ‘in’ orbit. Is that a space thing?”

“Yep. Mainly started at NASA, but there’s good scientific reason to call it that. In brief, we have to get on speed and altitude to be there, so we’re on orbit, like being on a perch.”

Campbell returns to his preflight duties as Kip lets himself think back through two weeks of ground school, wondering what he’s already forgotten.

It was amazing how efficient the ASA ground school had been in prepping people like Kip. Within an hour of reporting for class, he’d had his new name tag clipped to his shirt and been greeted, briefed, equipped, supplied, introduced, and seated in ASA’s version of Astronaut 101, taught by the various astronauts themselves. American Space Adventures had accomplished the impossible in less than five years, they were told, and they had no intention of being shy about telling their story.

The company’s chief astronaut, George Andrews, opened the first day. A former NASA astronaut with one shuttle mission, he moved around the classroom with the ease of an experienced professor, inspiring confidence by his just standing there, his youthful appearance the result of keeping a fifty-year-old body in top condition, though his hair was clearly graying.

America’s Space Prize, Andrews explained, was created after the first private suborbital flight won the Ansari X prize in 2004. Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites had teamed with Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen to pull it off, using a Rutan-built air-launched craft called SpaceShipOne carried aloft by a mothership from the same Mojave airport. Once the realization had sunk in that private spaceflight was a new, fledgling reality, another prize, ten times larger, was announced. The Bigelow Aerospace Corporation—a start-up organization with big dreams to orbit and operate space hotels—would need a way to get customers to and from their inflatable space stations. The fifty-million-dollar prize they posted came with a stringent list of rules. To win, a privately funded company had no more than five and a half years to figure out how to build, with no government money, a private spacecraft that could fly at least five people into a two-hundred-fifty-mile-high altitude for a minimum of two orbits, and do it a second time within thirty days.

ASA had tackled the challenge like NASA had tackled the moon in the sixties. They won the prize handily nearly a year ahead of schedule with a winged, double-tailed craft that looked like an overfed version of SpaceShipOne, and within six months were in full commercial operation.

“Our machine is a bit of a miracle,” Andrews told them. “We couldn’t just fire it up to sixty-five miles and let it glide back to Earth like Burt Rutan did with SpaceShipOne. We had to figure out a way to carry enough fuel to get it to at least two hundred and fifty miles up, then accelerate it to seventeen thousand miles per hour orbital velocity, then find a way to lose all that monstrous buildup of energy without constructing a battleship of heat tiles like NASA’s shuttle or running the risk of incinerating ourselves like Columbia if something went wrong. And we had to build in enough life support and backup systems for staying in space long enough to dock with one of Bigelow’s future orbiting hotels.”

The key, they discovered, was to air-drop the ship from a Lockheed 1011 jumbo jet, then use a very large load of rocket propellant to blast up to speed and altitude, and the same propellant to blast back to zero velocity before descending.

“That meant we needed a far more efficient fuel system and a lot of fuel, and thanks to thinking way, way out of any known box, we did it.”

“How about the dangers of all that fuel?” one of the class had asked.

Andrews had laughed. “Nowhere near as scary as sitting on top of a virtual bomb, which is what the space shuttle does on every launch. I mean, is it risky? Of course. This isn’t an airline flight. That’s why we’ve got a half day of release forms and informed consent instruments our lawyers require you to sign. But don’t forget, I… or one of our other astronauts… will be up there, too, and just like you, we all have families to come back to.”

Some of us do, Kip remembers thinking sadly.

“Okay, Kip. We’re starting the checklists now,” Bill Campbell says, pulling Kip back to the present.

There is a point, Bill has already explained to him, when a professional pilot submerges a large part of his conscious will into his procedures and checklists, and Kip watches that moment arrive. Campbell now becomes the smooth professional running through the complicated predeparture checks without a flicker of emotion.

Kip, however, is the wide-eyed amateur, and for him, no amount of ground school or simulation can make what’s about to happen feel routine. In fact, every motion, every noise, every radioed response between Mission Control and Campbell is just below the threshold of startling.

One of the pilots in the mothership has triggered his radio. “Intrepid, Deliverance. Comm check all channels and lock.”

Deliverance is the name of the highly modified Lockheed 1011 that engulfs them, the carrier aircraft from which they will hang as an appendage until the four mechanical releases are triggered open at sixty thousand feet.

“Roger, Deliverance, checks in progress, showing nominal and green all channels. Telemetry initiation confirmed… and all checks cycled and complete with green.”

“Roger.”

Kip has his own headset, and his microphone is set up in such a way that when he speaks, Bill can automatically hear him—as can the support technicians on the ground. But remaining quiet is something he dearly wants to do, not wishing to interfere in any way with Bill’s sequence for doing things or run any risks of helping something go wrong.

The checks are suddenly over, the radio channel quiet, and he hears in place of the chatter the sound of Deliverance’s huge high bypass jet engines starting up, the entire exercise sounding no different than any routine airline departure.

Which is, Kip thinks, rather like what this is. What’s amazing is how fast this kind of private spaceflight has become so reliable and so routine. Crank the engines, fly to altitude, drop Intrepid, which does its thing at three hundred ten nautical miles above the Earth, then comes home after making two million dollars. Clockwork.

He feels the 1011 start taxiing rather than sees it. Intrepid is suddenly bobbling back and forth on its four attach points, like they’ve scrimped on the attachment hardware and tied Intrepid to Deliverance with baling wire.

Kip looks out the side window and back behind them, seeing enormous tires rolling slowly. Craning his neck to see through Bill’s bubble canopy nets little more. Basically he has a great view of the 1011’s belly.

Bill flicks a switch toward the end of the runway porting the regular air traffic controller-to-pilot channels into Kip’s headset.

“Deliverance, Mojave Tower, you are cleared for takeoff Runway Three-Zero, fifteen thousand nine hundred feet available. Winds are two nine zero at six, gusting twelve.”

So now it really begins! Kip thinks, still not believing where he is.

“Roger. Deliverance is cleared for takeoff, and we’re rolling.”

Physical noises and motions like he’s never experienced course through his body and head, shaking and galvanizing him as the oversized engines wind up to their seventy-thousand-pound thrust level. Slowly at first, or so it seems, the aircraft-spacecraft combination rolls down the runway as if it were reluctant to go, gaining speed slowly, every bump and uneven section of the concrete surface magnified by the time it’s transmitted through the attach points to Intrepid. Kip feels his eyeballs wobbling with each jolt, the startling vertical accelerations feeding the feeling that they’re also fishtailing down the runway.

The frequency of the gyrations and bumps increases as they pass a hundred knots, steadily working their way up to the one-hundred-sixty-knot speed, which is the point at which Deliverance’s captain eases back on the yoke and causes the huge Lockheed wings to cant up into the wind, producing, at last, more lift than there is weight to be lifted.

And suddenly they are airborne, the washboard bouncing and yawing gone, the craft swaying gently on its attach points as the ground drops away below.

A new series of thunks and lurches course through the spacecraft. Kip dares a glance over his right shoulder in time to see the immense right main landing gear retracting toward Intrepid’s hindquarters. Logic dictates that the main landing gear will clear Intrepid as it retracts, but for a second he mentally braces for impact, surprised as the gear thuds into place somewhere behind them, and the gear doors close.

The pilots are reducing the engine power now as he’s been taught they will, setting up for a forty-minute climb to altitude, and Bill Campbell turns around to check on his passenger again.

“Still with me?”

“You bet.”

“Okay, not much to do for the next half hour now as we gain altitude. But once we’re dropped, things are going to happen fast and heavy.”

Kip nods and gives him a thumbs-up, but Bill continues.

“Let me go over the sequence again for when we get there, okay?”

“Sure,” Kip responds, wanting instead to watch the desert drop away from his window.

“Deliverance will stabilize our flight level four-three-zero—forty-three thousand feet—and turn onto the launch heading. We’ll do our final checks, get final clearance from Mission Control, and Deliverance will light her booster rockets and pull up to a twenty-two-degree climb angle, trading airspeed and power for altitude. She’ll push over at flight level six-one-zero as the rockets burn out, and she’ll hold there for just long enough to drop us. You saw those guys get aboard in pressure suits, right?”

“Yes, I did.”

“That’s because we can’t pressurize a huge 1011 safely enough to guarantee they won’t have their bodies exposed to blood-boiling pressure altitudes, so we solve it by making them very uncomfortable. As we taught you in class, we don’t need to wear space suits here inside Intrepid since this capsule is triple-redundant and self-sealing.”

“But you’ve got yours aboard, right?”

“Well, sure. It’s all compressed flat and stored, just in case some impossible event might present the need for me to float around outside and repair something. But don’t worry, it’s aboard. Checking it is part of my preflight routine.”

“Good.”

An unexpected shuddering rattles the spacecraft—and presumably the airplane carrying it—and they’re shoved sideways for a few seconds. Routine, Kip tells himself, but Bill hesitates, his eyes darting to his panel as he gets quiet for a few seconds.

“What was that?” Kip asks.

“Don’t know. Upper air turbulence, or CAT 1, I suspect. Clear air turbulence. Whatever it was, no worries.”

“Okay.”

“Where was I? Oh yeah. We’ll confirm our clearance as we’re dropping away, light our motor, confirm forward vertical clearance from Deliverance, and we’re off.”

“Hey, Bill,” Kip ventures, feeling serious.

“Yeah?”

“Is it really routine for you? This sequence?”

He can see the astronaut/pilot start to repeat the company line but stop himself, the curtain of professionalism parting for just a second as a large smile covers the man’s face and his eyes flick away to the windows.

“It’s Christmas morning every time, Kip. My dream comes true every launch.”

Kip is nodding even after Bill turns his attention back to the forward panel.

“I’m glad to hear that. I don’t think I’d want to fly with someone who wasn’t as excited as I am.”

The half hour evaporates and Kip hears Bill once again running through a checklist, Intrepid’s altimeter steady on forty-three thousand feet. The same basic countdown he listened to from Cape Canaveral on so many launches winds down in his ear.

“Kip, the mothership’s rocket motors never quite fire at the same moment, so there will be a sideways lurch for just a second, and then she’ll steady out.”

Kip nods, too overwhelmed with the sensations and the impending drop to find his voice.

“Two, one, ignition.”

The outboard rocket-assist motor mounted under the left wing of the 1011 lights first and they yaw amazingly to the right as the opposite one kicks in, as advertised.

The pilot’s voice from the 1011’s flight deck is utterly unemotional.

“Thrust nominal, commencing pitch-up and countdown.”

More numbers counting backward. More lighted numerals and readouts changing on the complicated liquid crystal displays in front of Bill Campbell. Kip struggles to keep his eyes on what he knows is the altimeter, one of the few he can read. It shows them now climbing through fifty thousand feet. He thinks the attitude indicator is showing a pitch-up of twenty-two degrees, but it feels like forty or more. Intrepid is shaking back and forth sideways and being pulled ahead and he wonders if there’s any way the real launch will feel as startling.

“Release minus two minutes, mark.”

There are a host of voices in his ears making sure everyone and everything is coordinated and ready, and their calm is almost unnerving. He thinks if the whole thing blew apart like space shuttle Challenger and the radios remained, Bill and his compatriots would probably keep the same tone of voice as they narrated down to the desert floor.

“Ah, Roger, Mojave we have unscheduled dual wing separation and unauthorized main aircraft body disintegration, with estimated time to extinction on impact T minus one minute, ten seconds, on my mark.”

“Roger, Intrepid, we copy the end of life as you know it.”

He shakes himself free of the maudlin thought, although for some reason it does seem amusing. There are thirty seconds left and the big aircraft holding them close is pushing its nose down to level now as it slows, the altitude topping out at sixty-one thousand feet where the 1011 was never designed to be.

Kip knows about the tiny window of time to launch. If something hiccups, they have no more than twelve seconds to figure it out and fix it before scrubbing the launch and letting the 1011 pilots fly the mothership back to the low forty-thousand-foot range.

He almost misses it, the call is so routine. The drop clearance—his clearance to fly to space—is issued from Mission Control below, the count now less than ten seconds. Kip finds himself mouthing the descending numbers.

“Hang on, old buddy,” Bill says. “It’s about to get interesting.”

“Three, two, one, release.”

Kip thinks he’s feeling time dilate. Nothing seems to be happening.

Wait, nothing is happening! Time is slowing for real now, and he waits, expecting to feel any microsecond the sensation of being dropped toward the desert below. But they’re still attached!

He looks at Bill for confirmation that he hasn’t missed it all, but the astronaut is busy triggering his transmitter.

“We have negative release, Deliverance. Select prime backup and confirm.”

“Shit!” Is the singular response from above, as another voice intones “Eight seconds in the window.”

“Primary backup selected, counting two, one, release.”

Something shoves them around, or so Kip thinks, but they’re still merely a mechanical appendage of the 1011.

“Selecting secondary,” one of the pilots above says, the slightest trace of stress in his voice.

“Three seconds to abort,” another intones.

“Pressurizing.”

“Two, one, release, dammit!”

This time the whole world changes. Whooshing sounds of a pneumatic backup system force the jaws of the four primary hooks open in slightly staggered fashion. Intrepid’s nose drops first as the forward hooks release, followed by an uneven release of the rear two. In an instant Kip’s stomach has declared itself in freefall. His fingers dig a deathgrip into the armrests of his seat as he watches Campbell’s right hand holding the primary ignition control.

“Intrepid away,” Campbell says.

“Deliverance in pitch mode,” is the response, the 1011 sharply turning and slowing to get out of the way.

Aren’t we going to ignite our engine? Kip’s mind is screaming.

“Cleared for ignition,” says someone somewhere on the ground, and suddenly ignite is exactly what the rocket does—the engine kicking the living hell out of his back as Kip hangs on and wonders how Bill Campbell can even react, let alone casually look up and back as he checks his controls.

“Ignition confirmed.”

“Cleared to climb, Intrepid. Godspeed.”

“Roger.”

They’re being propelled forward with incredible force and speed and suddenly they’re also pitching-up, on their own, like a teenager driving away in his new car for the first time, leaving stunned parents waving from the sidewalk.

The previous pitch-up while they were attached to the mothership, Kip thinks, was sandlot ball compared to a round with the Yankees.

This is amazing!

They’re almost vertical now. He can see the little black dot in the attitude indicator coming into the center of Bill’s target, and while he knows it’s only three-and-a-half g’s he’s feeling, it seems infinite.

And the shaking! Nothing in the ride up on the 1011 even remotely prepared him for the crackling and shuddering and bouncing of the little craft as it streaks straight up. He’s too frightened to be scared.

“Passing Mach 2, one hundred thousand feet.”

“Copy,” says the same voice on the ground.

Mach 2, Kip thinks. That’s… that’s about twelve hundred miles per hour!

He can feel his heart racing, almost pounding out of his chest, his head locked forward by the ground-school caution that if he turns his head to look out the window, he’ll never be able to turn it back.

But in his peripheral vision, he can already see the Earth’s curvature.

“My… God!” is all he can manage as he moves his eyes as far right as possible to take in the sight.

“So far,” Bill continues, “I’ve been flying the controls like an airplane, but now they get strange, and things almost reverse. When we get up higher, we’ll have only the reaction control jets to keep us pointed in the right direction. Okay, passing one hundred fifty thousand feet, and Mach 3.”

Kip knows that’s about as fast as they’re going to go before pitchover, before they’re so far above the denser air molecules of the atmosphere that increasing speed won’t cause frictional heating problems.

“Two hundred thousand feet, Mach 3.2,” Bill intones, adding a postscript. “That’s thirty-two nautical miles, Kip. We’re technically not in space yet.”

It sure looks like space to me, Kip thinks, keeping his eyes on the horizon as the g-forces decrease.

“Are we slowing?” he asks. They’ve already taught him the answer, but he can’t help it. The last thing he’s going to pretend to be up here is a seasoned professional blase about the details.

“Not yet,” Bill is saying. “We’ll start our throttle-back at sixty miles and reduce speed as we climb to two hundred miles, then do the pitchover and accelerate.”

“Got it.” He wants to yell, “Whee-oooh!” as loudly as possible, but it would be undignified and might startle the pilot. Not a good idea, he decides, to startle the pilot while flying an eggshell into space.

The Earth’s surface curves away like a huge ball now, even though they’re just passing the so-called threshold of space, around sixty-five miles. The steady force in his back begins to lessen as Bill pulls the throttle to half thrust, using the ship’s immense momentum in the absence of most air resistance to partially coast, partially thrust, up to the three-hundred-mile point.

Five minutes go by slowly, but on the other end of it Kip feels Bill pushing the craft over, using the control jets now, throttling up as soon as he hits the right attitude, the g-forces reasserting themselves as the nose continues to drop slowly in relation to the horizon.

“Now the speeds get really industrial strength,” Bill is saying. They pass through four thousand miles per hour, then six, then eight and ten, the actual digits familiar from training but incredibly difficult to accept. Faster than a speeding bullet. In fact, far faster.

Take us into orbit, Mr. Sulu!

The gravity he feels now isn’t gravity at all, but the acceleration of the engine as it thrusts Intrepid through the airless void toward seventeen thousand four hundred miles per hour. His mind replays every Star Trek clip he can recall of the Starship Enterprise streaking toward the speed of light. This feels like that looked.

“Stand by for a bit of a shock,” Bill calls.

“What? Is there a problem?” Kip’s reply is too sharp, too instantly concerned, and it triggers a laugh from Campbell.

“No, no. It’s just time to throw it into neutral.” He pulls the throttle back and cuts the rocket motor, the sudden disappearance of thrust and acceleration leaving Kip feeling like he’s falling again, but forward, this time. Bill Campbell hears the anticipated gasp.

“We’re weightless,” Bill announces. “And congratulations, man.” He’s reaching back now to shake Kip’s hand. “You have officially arrived on orbit above our planet.”

“We’re here?” Kip turns to stare out his side window before Bill can answer.

“We sure are. We’re almost welded up here in an orbit so stable it might not decay for forty or maybe as many as sixty years, give or take a few sunspots.”

Kip falls into awed silence, his hands still death-gripping the armrests, his stomach still confused about which way is up. At long last he lets himself breathe, a runner exhaling at the end of a long jog. Sixty years, he thinks, missing the reference to the sunspots.

“Magnificent.”

“Sorry?”

It takes a few seconds to find his voice, and Bill waits in a familiar indulgence.

“For this moment at least,” Kip says, “I feel like the luckiest guy in the world.”