Back to the Moon-ARC

of knowing if the vehicle had exploded, gone off course, or was performing as it was supposed to.

Stetson’s mind raced, running through what he would do if he were in the flight director’s chair at this moment. But he wasn’t, and there was no way he was going to do anything other than speak if spoken to. Green Team was good, and they were doing everything they could to regain contact with the Altair. His mind was racing nonetheless.

From Houston to Lexington to Beijing, all ears were listening to the voice of NASA’s mission control as the obviously flustered commentator tried to fill the otherwise dead air with calming words and speculation about what was actually happening to the Altair—two hundred and fifty thousand miles away. No one in mission control had the time or inclination to provide the commentator with up-to-the-minute information, so he had to wing it. All things considered, he was doing an adequate job. After all, the Green Team in mission control didn’t know what was going on, either.

“Bill.” Looking at the harried Green Team doing its job with extreme professionalism, Helen Menendez leaned forward and spoke to Stetson quietly at first. Then a little louder. “Bill, the Altair is on autopilot, and if it is working correctly, we should see it on the Orion’s exterior cameras any minute now.” She spoke loud enough to be heard by Bill Stetson, Charles Leonard, and Anthony Chow, but not loud enough to be heard by anyone else. She was as sensitive as Stetson regarding their role as observers and observers only.

“Roger that.” Stetson nodded in affirmation. “That’s what I’m counting on.” As he spoke, his gaze shifted to the second screen from the right on the front wall. On the screen, which held his gaze, was the view through the Orion’s window of the lunar surface passing peacefully beneath the vehicle. If one could focus on the nose of the capsule and not be distracted by the sight of the lunar surface scrolling by below or the majesty of the myriad stars visible directly through the upper part of the frame, the docking ring that would attach the Orion to the Altair would be clearly visible. It was to there that the Altair was programmed to return—if it was still in one piece.

“There!” Seemingly on cue, a voice called out from somewhere in the room. “I see her! We’ve got a visual of the Altair from Orion!” Now all eyes in the room focused on the image from the orbiting Orion. There, in the distance, was a tiny glint. A spot of light only a few pixels in size on the monitor. But it was there, and it was growing larger. A few seconds more and the spot grew into more of a small disc as the Green Team watched breathlessly. After a few minutes it became apparent to all that the spot of light was, in fact, the incommunicado Altair, performing its automated rendezvous maneuver as it was designed and programmed to do.

“Hot damn!” Bill couldn’t contain himself any longer.

“I’ll second that” was all the Green Team’s flight controller could manage as he and the rest of the team began to prepare for the lunar-orbit rendezvous of the Altair and the Orion. Pictures and telemetry were coming from the Orion just as they should. The Altair remained totally silent.

Weeks later, after hundreds of engineers had a chance to review data from the voyage, it would be discovered that telemetry was likely lost due to a poorly potted connector in the primary communication system, stopping communication with the Earth but not stopping the flow of engineering, position, and velocity data between it and the Orion. The important data, that which was required to complete the rendezvous, was never disrupted. The backup communications system didn’t activate, because the primary system’s fault-detection software never detected the problem—after all, the Altair and the Orion never lost communication. Only the dirt-bound humans in mission control were cut off. The software routines never deviated; they assumed all was well with the data transmission and that nothing more needed to be done. Shortly thereafter, a bright console engineer would realize that he could have simply relayed the data from the Altair through the Orion feeds and then to mission control. Instead of getting egg on his face and making a big thing of it, he wrote an e-mail about it to the fault-response team that was duly noted and stored away.

Despite the success of the mission, that type of fault was one of the worst kind—two separate and distinct failures in the same system had caused a failure of the primary and backup communications systems. Fortunately, the double failure happened in a rather benign system and didn’t imperil the mission. Had the failure resulted in a loss of communications between the Altair and the Orion, then a successful rendezvous would have most likely been impossible. That is, since there were no humans aboard either spacecraft. Bill’s craw got all tied up in knots every single time he thought about it. Every system, step, procedure, and control had been automated to the point that pilots could do very little during the test program to show that the mission could still succeed even if one or more of the automated systems failed. He kept to himself the thought that decades of flying in low Earth orbit and only sending out robotic probes had sucked the adventure out of his colleagues.

“Damn it all to hell,” he muttered to himself. “This could have halted us by a couple of years.”

Chapter 10

Barely six weeks later, glimmering in the unrelenting Nevada sun, sat the Dreamscape, engines running with a loud rocket noise right out of a science fiction movie. It was just barely audible to those in the observation stands. The reusable spaceship was poised to make history, just waiting for the pilot to begin its maiden journey to Earth orbit. The unmistakable power of the vehicle was obvious to all onlookers as crisscrossing lines of exhaust poured from the thruster nozzles. But the restrained explosive beast was kept in check by its human masters.

To the pilot, Captain Paul Gesling, the moment was anything but serene. Despite the air conditioner in his pressure suit running at maximum, Paul was sweating profusely—he barely noticed the cold air or the sweat. Instead, he cursed happily.

“Hot damn!” he shouted over the spacecraft’s interior noise. He was elated to be in the pilot’s seat, even if it was just a test. He eyed the various status touch screens displayed on the iPhone-like LCD display that had replaced the old-fashioned gauges and dials of spacecraft and aircraft from previous generations. Then one of the icons turned from green to yellow and then to red. He uttered another stream of epithets. “Damn! Damn! Damn! Hell!”

“Warning, ACS fuel pressure approaching critically low level,” the onboard computer voice, aka “Bitchin’ Betty,” announced over the ship’s internal communications system.

“Control, what’s up with the helium repress?” Gesling said not quite calmly into his microphone. Hoping for a positive answer from the lead engineer in the control room barely one mile away, he reset that status display and pressed the attitude control system status icon one more time, hoping that the low pressure reading would go away, clearing Dreamscape for its first orbital flight. The gauge showed that the pressure in the fuel tank that fed the ship’s attitude control system was low. That was a critical function. It contained the subsystem that would allow the Dreamscape to remain in a stable orientation while in space—in other words, keeping it from spinning in random directions. There would be no flight unless the problem was resolved. The spin could induce too much of a g-load on the structure and tear the ship apart. Of course, that would be after the crew had either vomited themselves into oblivion or passed out.

“Hold on, Paul, we’re looking into it,” was the reply from the engineer in the Space Excursions control room.