He’s almost forgotten to reposition it, rotating the bottom upward and leaning it back in accordance with the checklist and tightening his seat and shoulder harness against the five-g peak deceleration to come.
The thought of Bill Campbell’s lightly restrained body behind him suddenly flashes in his consciousness. Only small Velcro straps are holding the plastic bag to the back bulkhead, and up to now all the deceleration has been backward. But when the real atmospheric braking starts, the body will tumble forward, and he wonders how to secure it.
He could strap it into his passenger seat close behind, but it’s too late to get out of the harnesses. The thought of the body crashing forward and into his hand on the control stick worries him, but he’ll deal with it when, and if.
He can see a line of snow-covered mountains far below, and as he looks north, one of them resembles Pikes Peak and he wonders if he’s coming down in the middle of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo range.
But when he looks more closely, he realizes Colorado is apparently much farther north.
He could twist the sidestick controller around and yaw left or right to see better, but he’s afraid of disobeying the V on the ADI in front of him and he stifles the need. He’ll wait until
A hint of slipstream noise is becoming more pronounced, a clear rising protest of assaulted atoms of nitrogen and oxygen shoved aside by a bow wave, a supersonic bow wave, as he descends below three hundred thousand feet, no longer in space but clearly still in the far upper reaches of the atmosphere. The speed is fairly steady now, just under Mach 3, and the indicated airspeed has begun to move upward in single digits.
A red symbol has begun blinking urgently on the forward display and Kip leans forward to read it.
He understands. The twin tail booms are in the up position for reentry, yet the left one is not locked, and the increasing pressure of the airflow is trying to force it down. If that happens, he’ll start spinning and speeding up until either the gyroscopic forces or the overheating kills him.
Kip pulls the other checklist to his lap from its storage slot and pages through, amazed that he isn’t frantic. He flips to the section covering major emergencies and locates the one labeled “Strut Up-latch Unsafe Warning during Reentry.” The first step is to verify the hydraulic pump is still on, and he looks at the appropriate part of the panel.
The switch is on. But the pressure is zero, indicating the pump has failed.
Ever so slowly, as he looks at the horizon,
Chapter 43
There is a manual procedure, Kip sees, listed in the text, and at first it confuses him. Apparently a cable of some sort can be pulled to secure the up-latch, but the g-forces have already begun to build, and, as the gyration to the left begins to become noticeable, the reentry deceleration force is progressively raising the weight of the arm he has to use to open a panel he’s never seen beneath his left leg.
The fact that in less than a minute he’ll be pinned to the command seat by upward of five g’s registers, and Kip snaps off his seat belt and shoulder harness and dives forward, his hand scrambling around the lower left kick panel, finding several different recessed latches. He struggles to peer over the edge of the seat and read the verbiage on each of them, holding on to the checklist with his right hand. Constant control of the sidestick is unnecessary during this phase, he was told, and he hopes he’s remembered that correctly. The aerodynamic forces are now gripping
And clearly, the left boom is starting to retract under the air load.
The first panel yields nothing but switches and circuit breakers, but the second is the right one, and Kip finds the left boom T-handle and grabs it just as Bill Campbell’s body tears loose from the Velcro and tumbles forward, slamming into the panel and jamming the little access door partially closed with Kip’s hand still inside.
He feels a flash of pain, along with a burst of unpleasant odor, as the mass of plastic covering Bill’s remains pins his arm, the loads now exceeding two g’s. Kip releases the checklist from his right hand and struggles to shove the body back away from his trapped left hand. There is only one pull possible, and if the boom isn’t in the completely extended position the moment he pulls, he’ll close the locking jaws on nothing.
His fingers close on the checklist.
“Ensure aerodynamic control automatic engagement has occurred.”
There is a light somewhere on the screen. No, not a light, a lighted message. His eyes are blurry, his body straining forward against two and a half g’s now, but he finally sees the words.
“Pull nose up momentarily to twenty degrees nose high, then pull T-handle.”
He understands what has to happen.
There is no time to think about it and Kip stays hunched over in the seat and unrestrained as he grabs the stick and pulls it back, feeling an amazing increase in g-forces as the belly of the space plane becomes perpendicular to the relative airflow, slowing him. The spin to the left becomes a blur, and he’s having to pull almost to the stops to get twenty degrees nose high.
His entire body is protesting at the elephant of force that’s just jumped on his back, crunching him down as he hears the boom clang into position. He yanks hard on the T-handle, pulling it out to the stop before the sickening feeling of a broken cable registers in his head.
Something on the forward panel has changed, though, and as he strains to look, the warning light is gone. Somewhere on the left is supposed to be a locked indication, but he feels himself about to pass out, his vision reducing to a tunnel ahead of him as he leans forward against what feels like five g’s, and finally spots it.
Kip forces his torso back into the reclined command chair and fumbles for the seat and shoulder harnesses, the very act of getting back in clearing his vision.
The indicated airspeed is climbing through a hundred and ten knots now, the downward true through-the- airspace velocity slowing toward the speed of sound. His entire body is hurting from the fight with the g-forces and he has to remind himself to look back at the checklist. The procedure is only half complete. If the hydraulic system can’t lock a wayward tail boom, it can’t unlock it and move it downward, either, and with the tail in the flipped-up position,
The g-forces are slowly diminishing with his speed as he once again concentrates on the checklist items, wondering what other T-handles he’ll have to find.
He’s missed a section, Kip realizes. He never checked to find the circuit breaker for the hydraulic pump, and apparently there’s a backup pump as well.
Once more he leans forward, remembering the slightly higher kick panel compartment with the circuit breakers before recalling the panel of breakers overhead. His head hurts but he forces himself to focus on the
