Riding Rockets

The atmosphere had thickened enough to become an obstacle to our hypersonic sled. Compression againstAtlantis ’s belly heated the air to a white-hot glow now visible from the front windows. I wondered what was happening underneath us. I had visions of molten aluminum being smeared backward like rain on a windshield. None of our instruments or computer displays showedAtlantis ’s skin temperature. Only Houston had that data. I wondered if they would call us if they saw it rising. I hoped not. Such a call would definitely have us all tensed up as we died. Even Hoot wouldn’t be able to laugh away that MCC call. I looked at our displays and meters, not sure which would be the first to reveal a heat-shield problem. They were all in the green. Hoot would later tell me his eyes were never long from the elevon position indicators, certain a left-right split in those instruments would be the first hint the right wing was melting.

With the nominal displays I was happy to consider that our worries might have been misplaced. Maybe we had been alarmists. Maybe the damage was minor, as MCC had indicated. I still couldn’t believe that, but I prayed it was the case. I would have no problem offering the flight director, the CAPCOM, and everybody else an apology for having questioned their judgment.

“Three hundred ten thousand feet…still holding Mach 25…some Gs starting to build.”

Hoot didn’t have to tell me about the Gs. Dressed in my LES I had added more than sixty pounds to my body. My zero-G-acclimated muscles were finding it difficult to bear that weight against even a small G-load.

I looked upward through the top windows. As I had seen on STS-41D a snake of plasma flickered over us and slithered into the black. Periodically it would pulsate in incandescent-bright flashes that filled the cockpit like camera flashes. I wished I had paid more attention to the reentry light show during myDiscovery mission. Wasn’t this plasma ribbon brighter? Weren’t those flashes more frequent? Was itAtlantis ’s vaporized skin enhancing the show? There were no calls of distress from Hoot or Guy and the radios were mute. If the heat was dissolvingAtlantis ’s belly, the damage had yet to reach a system sensor.

At 240,000 feet and Mach 24.9 the guidance system commandedAtlantis into a 75-degree right bank. She was high on energy and the autopilot was pulling her off course to increase the distance to landing. In that extra distance we would have more time to descend. We trusted the autopilot to turn us back toward the Edwards AFB runway at the appropriate time. It was impossible for a shuttle pilot to look out the window at a featureless ocean from 45 miles high while still 3,000 miles from the runway and manually modulate the orbiter’s energy state. We had to trust the wizardry of accelerometers inAtlantis ’s inertial measuring units to do that.

The plasma vortex intensified in brightness. I wondered how many earthlings were watching the celestial spectacle. The trail of superheated air would glow for many minutes after our passage. We were painting a white-hot arc from horizon to horizon to take away the breath of anybody watching, be they jungle island shaman or the crew of a supertanker.

The horizon came into view from Guy’s window. The Earth’s limb was tinted with the indigo of an impending sunrise.

“Mach 22 at 220,000 feet, a half-G.”

I wasn’t going to be able to stand much longer. My leg muscles were quivering. I had to get down the ladder to my seat. Before I left the flight deck, though, I craned my neck to see the Earth. The Sun had risen and painted a broken layer of clouds in flamingo pink. Just when I thought I had seen every “wow” scene in space, I was treated with a new feast for the eye. We were still traveling at a couple miles per second but had dropped to within forty miles of the cloud tops. The illusion was that we were accelerating, not slowing down. The clouds appeared to skim by at science-fiction speeds. The sight was a narcotic and I watched it until my zero-G-weakened legs couldn’t take my weight any longer and I collapsed to the floor. It was beyond time to get to my seat. I crawled to the mid-deck ladder like a wounded infantryman and felt with my feet for the ladder rungs. In slow, deliberate movements I worked my way downward and into my seat. By the time I was strapped in, I felt as if I had just descended the Hillary Step with a Sherpa on my back. I was exhausted from working in a G-force that was one half of the Earth’s pull.