Pollard nodded agreement, and then stepped away, already in motion toward a solution. She scanned the room, found Senca, waved him over.
“I need you to find me the right five to work this airlock problem,” Pollard said to Senca abruptly. “Meet me in the conference room in two minutes.”
“Got it,” Senca said. Then he looked out across the consoles, already knowing who his five were.
Chapter 70
Johnson Space Center, Houston
Conference Room
WHEN SENCA AND HIS TIGER TEAM entered the conference room, they found Pollard standing at a portable white board, feverishly erasing something from a previous conference. Then, with black marker in hand, she quickly wrote “JAMMED EVA HATCH,” across the top of the board.
“Come in guys,” she said, hearing the conference room door opening behind her. As usual, Pollard already had an idea of how to solve the airlock problem. It was something NASA had never tried before—never had a need to before, on any mission. But she wasn’t yet convinced the idea was a good one.
The group moved in, stayed standing, formed a semicircle 8 feet back from the board.
With a red marker Pollard wrote “8:56,” then turned around to the group. She pointed back to the numbers. “Who can tell me what that is?”
The engineers looked puzzled. Pollard didn’t wait. “Eight hours, fifty-six minutes. It’s the record for the longest EVA to date.” She checked her watch and after the briefest of pauses wrote next to the first number, “6:48.”
“Guesses?” Pollard waited only a single beat.
Tim Levy raised a finger to answer, but Pollard didn’t see him in time.
“That’s how long Mullen and Garrett have been out there. The longer we take to figure out what to do, the less time these guys will have to get it done. Remember, the rescue gets finished today, not tomorrow. Right now, four guys in space suits are waiting for us to figure out what to do next.”
If she didn’t before, she had the group’s attention now. Senca stepped forward.
“Here’s what we know on this problem,” he said, knowing a recap of a problem was how Pollard liked to start. “Okay, so as Julie said we have limited time to both devise a workaround and execute it. Columbia’s EVA hatch worked fine all morning, no complaints of it catching, no reports of it being hard to operate. Last report was that it has seized altogether and the actuator arm won’t move at all. At this moment, Columbia’s commander and pilot are breathing suit air inside Columbia’s airlock. They’re still working the actuator arm in the hopes it will free itself.”
Senca motioned to Carl Gaines, his EVA expert, for his input. Senca liked to make sure Gaines was sitting next to the CapCom during complicated Space Station EVAs. Whenever a problem arose, whenever a tool didn’t fit, a part froze, or something unplanned happened, Gaines could spoon-feed the CapCom instructions for the astronauts.
“We’ve had problems with hatch mechanisms in the past,” Gaines said. “STS-80, November ’96 I think—Columbia, too, by the way. Anyway, they had a stuck hatch, had to abort both EVAs. Never did get it open in flight. Turns out a latching mechanism screw had come loose and jammed the ratchet. If that’s what we have here, that hatch isn’t going to open, period.”
“What about a thermal jam?” Senca asked.
“You mean is it jammed because the mechanism got too cold while in the shade?”
Senca nodded.
“Could be. One idea would be to rotate Columbia right side up relative to Earth, to get the sun on the airlock for a while, let it heat and see if that frees it up.”
Pollard was starting to get restless, but had begun dutifully writing a list of pros and cons for the group.
“But that’ll take forever,” said Eric Howell, an EVA logistics expert. “We’ll have to wait for them to repress Columbia’s airlock, doff their suits, then fly Columbia away from Atlantis. And that doesn’t even count the time they’d spend sunning the airlock. If it turns out not to work, then we’re out at least an hour and a half.”
“Well, we can’t just leave them up there. We’ve got to try to free the EVA hatch,” Gaines said.
“Easy guys, we’re nowhere near leaving Columbia’s commander and pilot in space,” Senca said.
Pollard checked her watch with an impatient movement of her wrist. She erased the “6:48” she had written, and updated it to “7:00.” Then she reached up, grabbed the white board along its side bezel, and held her hand there.
Senca felt something coming from Pollard; he’d seen it before, how her constructs could be rushed into production. It was the way her mind worked a problem from all directions, unbridled by the constraints others faced. She was unburdened by self-doubt or worry, and seldom if ever focused on the downside of an idea. She was so damn smart, so quick with figures and concepts. He’d guessed these guys were already frustrating her. Senca had worked with Pollard for so long, the give and take between them felt more like the relationship of an old married couple than that of colleagues; they often finished each other’s sentences, or sensed what the other was thinking. And this was one of those times. Pollard looked ready to detonate, ready to flip her trump card.
Pollard kept silent while the group toyed with a few other obviously weak ideas to solve the airlock problem. Eventually they too fell silent and looked to her for redirection. Her hand tightened on the white board, readied itself. She looked at Senca with a thin, almost nervous smile. Senca responded with a slight nod. Pollard then flipped over the board to reveal what she’d written before the team had entered the room. The group read what she’d written, then looked off in all directions, working the implications, juggling the angles.
Senca
