The Ocean Liner

Kennedy Space Centre, Florida

It had been a particularly nerve-racking three days. The first launch had been aborted at the last second – literally. With seven seconds to go before ignition, Columbia’s hazardous gas detection system had suddenly reported high levels of hydrogen in the orbiter’s aft engine compartment. With vivid memories of the 1986 Challenger fireball, in which all seven crew members had died, Thomas König and the other system engineers in Kennedy Space Centre’s Firing Room No. 1 had had to take a decision. The launch had been aborted less than half a second before the three main engines were due to ignite.

Columbia’s five crew members had emerged from the spacecraft in their orange flight suits, disappointed but philosophical. The STS-93 mission was historic in being the first in space shuttle history to be commanded by a woman, Eileen Collins, with a second woman among the five-person crew, Cady Coleman.

On inspection, the hydrogen concentration indication had turned out to be a false reading.

‘We took the right decision,’ Thomas said to his dejected team, his German accent still noticeable after a lifetime in the United States. ‘Better safe than sorry. We’ll reinitiate countdown shortly.’

After recalibrating the gas detectors, they’d scheduled a second launch for two days later.

This time, the weather had closed in, with storms and high winds. The second launch had also been scrubbed. They’d initiated a twenty-four-hour turnaround, hoping the weather would improve, as the meteorologists were predicting.

While the shuttle crew tried to relax, Thomas and the rest of the team worked round the clock on preparations for the third countdown. Third time lucky, everybody said. The mission would be a short one, five days in orbit; but every minute of every day would be filled with work for the astronauts. There were several secondary payloads to be deployed, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, an orbiting X-ray telescope fifty times more powerful than anything yet used, capable of reading the letters on a stop sign from twelve miles away.

On the space station, the astronauts would monitor several ongoing biological experiments, and would all take turns on the treadmill to collect valuable data on how exercise in space affected the microgravity of the space station. Routine stuff; but even after all these years, there was nothing routine about space exploration. Every day brought new wonders and new challenges.

‘You’re going to miss all this, Tom,’ a colleague said to Thomas.

He nodded. ‘Yes, I am.’

It was his last launch. Now into his seventies, he was ten years older than NASA’s official retirement age. His lifetime with the Agency, and his deep involvement with the Space Shuttle Program, had kept him working, sharing his experience and wisdom. But by the time Mission STS-93 returned to Florida, he would be in retirement. A tall, spare figure in white shirt-sleeves and dark tie, he would in his turn be missed by all those he had worked with. His reputation for brilliance and reserve, tempered with kindness, was legendary.

The day of the launch dawned clear. The meteorologists had prophesied correctly. The Firing Room system engineers were all at their desks by midday. The huge screens on the wall in front of them showed the space shuttle, aimed at the heavens, waiting to be unleashed from earth’s sullen bonds. Steam rose tranquilly around it into the pellucid afternoon sky.

Reflected in the lagoon that extended beside the launch pad, Columbia appeared pristine, though the shuttle was now ten years old. Unlike other spacecraft, which took on the appearance of turkeys left too long in the oven, Columbia returned from space relatively unscathed each time. Her tiled surfaces were carefully designed to withstand the heat generated by ploughing into the earth’s atmosphere at orbital speed during re-entry. Only a close look revealed the scuffs and burns left by twenty-five previous missions.

STS-93 was to be a night launch, taking off shortly after midnight. The astronauts began to take their seats in the shuttle again during the late afternoon.

The humid Florida night fell. In the darkness, loud with the voices of frogs and night birds, Columbia glowed like a beacon. She had become as iconic a sight to a generation of Americans as the Statue of Liberty herself. The intense light from the floods glanced off her sleek fuselage, streaming up into the sky, as though – or so Thomas thought – she were illuminating a path for herself to the stars.

Commander Collins’s voice came through the communications link a few minutes after midnight: ‘Great working with you guys, see you in five days.’ And then the launch sequence was underway.

A night launch was a spectacle which Thomas always enjoyed. Ignition of the three main engines was reminiscent of a volcanic eruption. Huge glowing clouds billowed around the launch vehicle. Then it began to lift cleanly, jets of fire spitting from the three gaping nozzles.

The thunder of her engines made the earth vibrate under the feet of the watchers. Outside, it was deafening. Like a midnight sun, the rocket lit up the night as it climbed the sky. For a while, it was too bright to watch. Then the dazzling fireball dwindled swiftly. Within a few minutes, it was no more than a spark in the blackness. With burnout and separation complete, Columbia had consumed two million pounds of fuel, half of her launch weight, within ten minutes of her departure.

An appearance of cool professionalism was the norm in the launch centre these days. The days of ecstatic cheers and high-fives had passed. Everybody tried to look as though this was just part of a normal day, a result that had been planned for and expected. But as Columbia ascended on her fiery tail, the mood was elated.

Thomas left the centre sometime around two a.m., his eyes aching, his back weary. He knew that farewell parties and award ceremonies awaited him during what remained of the week, but this was effectively his last working day.

He had never been a sentimental man – he had cut extraneous emotions out of his life as far as he possibly could – but the aftermath of a launch always left him somehow saddened.

The departure of that gleaming white thing left a sense of loss, of something wonderful and magical that would never come again; of moments of glory and wonder that had illuminated the darkness for a while and then had left him bereft and alone.

He had lived with that sense of loss all his life.

He had never heard from his mother and his father again, nor from anyone else in his immediate family. After the war, the Red Cross had informed him that they had all perished in the camps. Though he had made two pilgrimages back to the places where they had died, there had been no graves, no markers, no place to lay flowers. All he was left with were the memorials in various public sites, where their names figured along with the countless millions of others whose lives had been consumed.

There had been other losses, too. He had never married, never had children of his own. There simply hadn’t been time. His life had been study and work, work and study. He had given his best years to the space program. There had been nobody else to give them to.

He entered his house, finding it air-conditioned to his specifications, softly lit just the way he liked it. He’d programmed computers to regulate most of the functions of the house. They switched things on and off, paid the bills, kept the pool pristine. They even controlled the large tank in which brilliant tropical fish drifted, the only living things with which he shared his life.

Lined on the wall were photographs of the people he’d worked with over the years: John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong, Sally Ride, others who had been places he would never go, while he watched from his desk. Smiling in their sky-blue space suits were the seven Challenger astronauts who had died in 1986, two women, a black man, an Asian, two white men, a cross-section of America.

He ate a breakfast of cereal standing in the kitchen. He was thinking of that remark, almost a cliché: You’re going to miss all this, Tom.

It opened the question which, strange to say, he hadn’t considered until this moment – what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He was healthy, fit, active. The question was going to become pressing. But it was time to sleep now. He would start thinking about that when he was rested.

He cleared away the tiny disruption he had caused in the kitchen and went to his computer to check his messages before going to bed. He’d been using email for over ten years. Now, in the era of AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe and Hotmail, it was becoming the norm for millions of Americans.

Most of his mail was work-related. Already, messages of appreciation for his lifetime’s service to the space program were starting to flood in. But one message stood out because it contained a name he hadn’t heard for decades.

He opened the email, and read it. Then he clicked on the attachment, and found himself looking at a face that for over half a century he had only seen in dreams.