Station Breaker

12 Crash Dummy

Why am I going along with this? Because a drowning man will cling to anything, even the tail of a great white shark if it happens to swim by.

Right now there's only one voice trying to steer me through this crisis. Although it very likely belongs to the person who instigated the entire situation.

If I hadn't spun the ship when the mysterious robot voice told me to, I would either be dead or strapped down in K1 as the prisoner of a bunch of angry Russians.

Now the voice on the sat phone is telling me I have to do a hybrid landing in the middle of a crowded tourist destination — but not actually land the thing. Oh, no, it gets better.

When Elon Musk first proposed landing all the parts of a rocket back on Earth using propulsion instead of parachutes, everyone said he was crazy. When SpaceX finally pulled it off, everyone said it was the most obvious idea in the world. All the public and private space programs rushed to develop their own propulsive landing systems.

The end result is that modern spacecraft like the Unicorn are designed to land back on Earth by doing two controlled burns. The first one in the upper atmosphere is intended to slow the ship down from 17,000 miles per hour to something just over the speed of sound, letting atmospheric drag then bring the Unicorn to terminal velocity around 200 mph. The second burn is the landing burn, gradually slowing the ship down so that it can nicely touch down with pin-point accuracy.

If you wanted, you could land the Unicorn on the helipad of a skyscraper — assuming the top was covered in asbestos.

That is a long way away from the days when you hit the upper atmosphere with enough uncertainty your splashdown zone was several thousand square miles of the Pacific.

If you were just dropping from a stationary point above the earth, you could narrow that area down considerably, but since you're hitting the atmosphere angled at an incredible velocity, the place where you're going to land is on the other side of the horizon. And between you and that spot, there are all kinds of thermal variations, wind currents and other factors; including the fact that a one degree variation in your approach angle can affect your drag enough to widen the landing area.

Computers helped a lot to narrow that zone. The Space Shuttle was also a big improvement. Because it was a controllable glider, you could fine tune its flight path and bring it down on a runway.

However, powered landings were the real game changer. They meant a crew could touch down and look out the window and see their car in the parking lot — a far cry from waiting for an aircraft carrier to retrieve you from shark-infested waters.

The key to a powered landing is letting the onboard system do all the work. The computer can do precisely timed engine bursts, sometimes lasting milliseconds, to finely adjust the landing path with minute precision.

Out of all the times you want to have a human handle the controls, this is not it. Nobody has reactions fast enough to make that work. Sure, a good pilot could land the thing without making a crater, but trying to hit the X on the pad — and not the cafeteria skylight — is a different matter.

And Mr. Mysterious just told me he wants me to take the stick at this most critical phase.

But it gets even better…

Even though this ship can launch and land entirely on rocket power, it has two backup parachute systems in the event there's an engine failure. The first one is opened in the upper atmosphere and serves as a drag chute to slow the ship down to a less ridiculous velocity. After that's jettisoned, a second one is opened to bring the ship to a more graceful landing over who knows where.

Around iCosmos, we call this landing "caveman" style.

But this isn't what the voice has planned for me…

He's telling me to open the ship's emergency parachute at a high altitude instead of doing a reentry burn to slow my descent. This means that I'll actually be dropping a lot faster initially — theoretically to avoid those MiGs he says are waiting to catch me.

However, when the Unicorn is at its most vulnerable, dangling from the second parachute, as easy a target as there is in the sky, he says don't use the chute. Instead, he wants me to have the ship free fall to Earth for a few miles, you know, no big whoop, then, THEN, at the point of no return, use all that fuel we didn't use on the reentry, to TAKE OFF AGAIN.

Now, it's not like there's an infinite amount of fuel on this thing. It'll only take the ship so high, about 10,000 feet or so. But for anyone watching where I'm about to land, won't that be a surprise…

They'll see the Unicorn drop down over the sunny bay — I think it'll be day there — then shoot up into the sky like a meteor in reverse — only not straight up.

Of course not. That would mean it would come right back down where it almost landed.

No sir. By tilting the ascent by 20 degrees, the Unicorn is going to shoot like a missile over Rio, the beaches, the Jesus statue and all the beautiful people in one giant arc, bringing the ship down in some monkey-infested jungle.

Here's the really, really good part. When the Unicorn lands, probably on some lost temple, I won't be there.

My mysterious friend wants me to do the unthinkable.

Shortly after the Unicorn starts its fake-out relaunch, and at some point when I'm conscious and able to actually move, I'm supposed to pop the hatch and jump out with a parachute of my own, conveniently packed in Peterson's duffle bag.

The burning question in my mind — other than will I live past the next few minutes — is why are there three chutes? Was this the plan all along?