Cape Canaveral
The Astrovan ride from the O and C building to launchpad 39B took fifteen minutes. It was a strangely silent ride, none of the saying much. Just a half hour before, while suiting up, they had been joking and laughing in that sharp and electric tone that comes when one's nerves are raw with excitement. The tension had been building since the moment they had been awakened at two-thirty for the traditional steak and eggs breakfast. Through the weather briefing, the suiting up, the prelaunch ritual of dealing out cards for the best poker hand, they had all been a little too and cheerful, all engines roaring with confidence.
Now they'd fallen silent.
The van came to a stop. Chenoweth, the rookie, seated beside Emma, muttered, 'I never thought diaper rash would be one of the job hazards.' She had to laugh. They were all wearing Depend adult diapers under their bulky flight suits, it would be a long three hours liftoff.
They accepted help from the launchpad technicians, Emma stepped out of the van.
For a moment she paused on the pad, gazing up in wonder at the thirty-story shuttle, ablaze with spotlights. The last she'd visited the pad, five days ago, the only sounds she'd heard were sea wind and the birds. Now the spacecraft itself had come to life, rumbling and smoking like a waking dragon, as volatile propellants boiled inside the fuel tank.
They rode the elevator up to Level 195 and stepped onto the grated catwalk. It was still night, but the sky was washed out by pad lights, and she could barely get a glimpse of the stars overhead.
The blackness of space was waiting.
In the sterile white room, technicians in lint-free 'bunny' suits helped the crew, one by one, through the hatch and into the orbiter.
The commander and pilot were seated first. Emma, assigned to middeck, was the last to be assisted. She settled back into her seat, buckles secured, helmet in place, and gave a thumbs-up.
The hatch swung shut, closing the crew off from the outside.
Emma could hear her own heartbeat. Even through the air-to-ground voice checks chattering over her comm unit, through the gurgles and groans of the awakening shuttle, the thud of her own heart came through in a steady drumbeat. As a middeck passenger, she had little to do in the next two hours but sit and think, the preflight checks would be conducted by the flight-deck crew. She no view of the outside, nothing to stare at except the stowage and food pantry.
Outside, dawn would soon light the sky, and pelicans would skim the surf at Playalinda Beach.
She took a deep breath and settled back to wait. Jack sat on the beach and watched the sun come up.
He was not alone in Letty Park. The sightseers had been gathering since before midnight, the arriving cars forming an endless of headlights creeping along the Bee Line Expressway, some peeling north toward Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge, the others continuing across the Banana River to the city of Cape Canaveral. The viewing would be good from either location. The crowd around him was in a holiday mood, with beach towels and picnic baskets.
He heard laughter and loud radios and the bawling of sleepy children.
Surrounded by that swirl of celebrants, he was a silent presence, a man alone with his thoughts and fears.
As the sun cleared the horizon, he stared north, toward the launchpad.
She would be aboard Atlantis now, strapped in and waiting. Excited and happy and a little afraid.
He heard a child say, 'That's a bad man, Mommy,' and he turned to look at the girl. They gazed at each other for a moment, a tiny blond princess locking eyes with an unshaven and very disheveled man. The mother snatched the girl into her arms and quickly moved to a safer spot on the beach.
Jack gave a wry shake of his head and once again turned his gaze northward. Toward Emma.
The Flight Control Room had turned deceptively quiet. It was twenty minutes till launch -- time to confirm it was still a go. All back-room controllers had completed their systems checks, and now the front room was ready to be polled.
In a calm voice, Carpenter went down the list, requesting verbal confirmation from each front-room controller.
'Fido?' asked Carpenter.
'Fido is go,' said the flight dynamics officer.
'Guido?'
'Guidance is go.'
'Surgeon?'
'Surgeon is go.'
'DPS?'
'Data Processing is go.' When Carpenter had polled them all and received affirmatives from all, he gave a brisk nod to the room.
'Houston, are you go?' asked the launch director in Cape Canaveral.
'Mission Control is go,' affirmed Carpenter.
The launch director's traditional message to the shuttle crew was heard by everyone at Houston's Mission Control.
'Atlantis, you are a go. From all of us at the Cape, good luck and Godspeed.'
'Launch Control, this is Atlantis,' they heard Commander Vance respond.
'Thanks for gettin' this bird ready to fly.' Cape Canaveral Emma closed and locked her visor and turned on her oxygen supply.
Two minutes till liftoff. Cocooned and isolated in her suit, had nothing to do but count the seconds. She felt the shudder of the main engines gimballing into launch position.
T minus thirty seconds. The electrical link to ground control was now severed, and the onboard computers took control.
Her heart accelerated, the adrenaline roaring through her veins. As she listened to the countdown, she knew, second by second, what to expect, could see in her mind's eye the sequence of events that were now playing out.
At T minus eight seconds, thousands of gallons of water were dumped beneath the launchpad to suppress the roar of the engines.
At T minus five, the onboard computers opened the valves to allow liquid oxygen and hydrogen to travel into the main engines.
She felt the shuttle jerk sideways as the three main engines ignited, the spacecraft straining against the bolts that still harnessed it to the launchpad.
Four. Three. Two ... The point of no return.
She held her breath, hands gripped tight, as the solid rocket boosters ignited. The turbulence was bone- shaking, the roar so painfully loud she could not hear communications through her headset. She had to clamp her jaw shut to stop her teeth from slamming together. Now she felt the shuttle roll into its planned the Atlantic, and her body was shoved back against the seat by the acceleration to three g's. Her limbs were so heavy she could move them, the vibrations so violent it seemed the orbiter would surely fly apart into pieces. They were at Max Sentence, the peak of turbulence, and Commander Vance announced he was throttling back the main engines. In less than a minute, he would throttle up to full thrust.
As the seconds ticked by, as the helmet rattled around her head, and the force of liftoff pressed like an unyielding hand against her chest, she felt a fresh lick of apprehension. This was the point during launch when Challenger had exploded.
Emma closed her eyes and remembered the simulation with Hazel two weeks ago. They were now approaching the point where everything in the sim had started to go wrong, where they'd been forced into an RTLS abort, and then Kittredge had lost control of the orbiter. This was a critical moment in the launch, and there
