'Verify SSME valve movement in the close direction. Check!' Major Donald replied.
Then at T-minus two minutes and fifty seconds there was something about terminating the GOX vent hood purge. And transfer the PRSD to internal reactants. Tabitha ordered all of us to close our visors and then rechecked the LH2 replenish. Then a lot of things on the checklist began zooming by, very fast.
RETRACT GOX VENT HOOD GLS CGLS (Auto)
T-MINUS 02 MINUTES AND 35 SECONDS PRSD TRANSFER TO INTERNAL REACTANTS GLS CGLS (Auto)
T-MINUS 02 MINUTES AND 00 SECONDS CLOSE VISORS
T-MINUS 01 MINUTES AND 57 SECONDS TERMINATE LH2 REPLENISH GLS CGLS (Auto)
CLOSE LH2 TOPPING VALVE GLS CGLS (Auto)
CLOSE LH2 VENT VALVE GLS CGLS (Auto)
T-MINUS 01 MINUTES AND 46 SECONDS INITIATE LH2 PREPRESS GLS CGLS (Auto)
T-MINUS 00 MINUTES AND 55 SECONDS PERFORM SRB FWD MDM LOCKOUT GLS CGLS (Auto)
T-MINUS 00 MINUTES AND 50 SECONDS GROUND POWER REMOVAL
T-MINUS 00 MINUTES AND 48 SECONDS CLOSE LOX & LH2 OUTBOARD FILL & DRAIN VALVES GLS CGLS (Auto)
DEACTIVATE SRB JOINT HEATERS
GLS CGLS (Auto)
T-MINUS 00 MINUTES AND 31 SECONDS GLS GO FOR AUTO SEQUENCE GLS CGLS (Auto)
ARM CUT OFF GLS CGLS (Manual)
INITIATE RSL5 GLS CGLS (Auto)
ORB VENT DOOR SE9 START GPC CGLS (Auto)
You get the idea.
Finally, at twenty seconds things started to happen that I could feel, physically through small vibrations or large jolts. Down below us the launch pad exhaust reflection pool was being flooded with water to suppress the sound waves from the lift-off. Just ten seconds later the SRB safety inhibits were removed. Three point four seconds after that main engine three was given the start command. My teeth started chattering as I was lunged forward then backward violently. The ship had jumped about a meter. I had been warned that the Shuttle would sway a meter or two at main engine firing. We affectionately refer to this as the 'twang' because the initial reaction of the spacecraft structure is to 'twang' like a tuning fork when it is struck. To an outside observer, the shuttle seems to sway a bit. But to an inside observer . . .
'Sway hell,' I mumbled to myself. It was more like being thrown in a car wreck.
Nine seconds later I couldn't hear a thing and I felt like I weighed five hundred and seventy pounds or more. What a ride! I tried to raise my arms once just to test how heavy they were. It wasn't easy. I was even more impressed by the space jockeys in the front two seats. I could barely blink. How the heck were they flying this thing? A few seconds later we went through throttle up and then to SRB separation and I couldn't remember a happier day in my life. This is what I had always wanted to do since I was a kid.
A moment of calm came over me. I was in a daze and things around me seemed like they weren't real but more of a dream. When the final jolt from the External Tank being dropped hit me, I was sure this was real. As the Orbiter made its way to a stable orbit in low earth orbit (LEO) I really had nothing to do, for the next few minutes anyway. So, I went back to sleep.
When Fines finally woke me up we were at stable LEO and were given the okay to get out of our flight gear. We helped each other with our suits as we played with the microgravity effects on things. Like my stomach for instance. I lost my steak and eggs almost immediately. Fines wasn't amused. So, I threw up on him again.
This time he was amused to the point where he lost his breakfast. We had a lot of fun repeating this procedure for the next hour or two. Finally, the nausea subsided to drunken spins. I wished that I had some of my grandmother's 'dizzy pills.' I hadn't spun like that since playing quarters with tequila that night in undergraduate school after we won the Iron Bowl.
After several hours of the spins followed by nausea followed by a severe pain in my ego, all of the symptoms disappeared and I felt wonderful. I even offered to help clean up but the flight surgeon had ordered both Fines and myself to take a shot of motion sickness medication and try to take a nap. I slept like a baby. In other words, I pissed and moaned the whole time.
A few hours later Tabitha wandered, or drifted rather, back to see me. I was absolutely fine at this point, showing no symptoms other than feeling like a kid on his birthday. In fact, I was near the aft viewport looking down at the Earth in awe. She actually startled me when she came up behind me.
'Feeling better?'
'Yeah, lots!' I assured her. She put her hand on my shoulder and steadied herself. I still hadn't been able to do that. What a pro this Colonel Ames was.
'Beautiful, isn't it? I'll never get tired of seeing that.' She looked at me with her puppy-dog eyes then kissed me on the cheek. She whispered in my ear, 'Feel better.' Tabitha kicked of the wall and did a backward flip into a Superman style flight in the other direction. She looked back over her shoulder at me. 'Since you seem to be feeling up to it, why don't you contact your ground support console and go through a postlaunch and preflight check of your experiment hardware as per the mission schedule? You're about four hours behind. And do me a favor.'
'Yeah, sure. What do you need?' I asked.
'Stop looking out the window until you're caught up and back on the mission timeline,' she scolded me with the Colonel voice. I was tempted to say, 'Yes, Colonel!' but thought better of it.
I found my way to my laptop and brought it online for check-lists. Velocroing in and donning my headset, I punched up the frequency for my ground support console operator. We were somewhere over the Indian Ocean at the time but either ground relay or TDRS would patch the signal back home. Jim was riding the console back at the Huntsville Operations Support Center or HOSC as it is affectionately referred to.
'Hi Jim! I guess I need to make up some lost time here and get the postlaunch and preflight started,' I told him.
'I hear you are bulimic these days, trying to fit in a new prom dress,' Jim kidded me.
'Just trying to watch my girlish figure. You know how it is. Actually, I think the colonel slipped some ipecac into my steak and eggs. How's everyone dirtside?'
'For the most part better than you. Let's get started.'
'Roger that, Jim. Okay, I've got no outside tolerance range parameters from my sensor suite here. Does your telemetry agree?'
The postlaunch and preflight took the next three or so hours to assure each of us that the components of the warp drive demonstrator, we had been calling Zephram, had indeed survived the launch and the exposure to the space environment at LEO. No powered tests other than the motherboard of the spacecraft bus and the sensor
