Riding Rockets

“Discovery,you’re press to MECO.” This was the sweetest call of all. It meant we could still make it to orbit even if one SSME failed. As an astronaut had once joked, “Surely God couldn’t be so mad at us that He would failtwo engines.”

At about eight minutes the G-forces hit three and the main engines throttled back to maintain that acceleration. This was necessary to preventDiscovery from rupturing herself. With a nearly empty gas tank the engines now had the muscle to overstress the machine. The reduction in power prevented that.

Hank’s velocity tape raced upward…20,000 feet per second…21,000…22,000. Every 15 secondsDiscovery was adding another 1,000 miles per hour to her speed. We were giddy with excitement, our laughs distorted by the G-loads.

“Houston, MECO. Right on the money.” At Hank’s call another cheer swept the cockpit.Discovery had given us a perfect ride.

Chapter 21

Orbit

MECO was silent. The Gs just stopped. I had no sense of being hurled forward as some space movies depict. There was nothud, thunk, bang, or any other noise to indicate the end of powered flight. MECO could only be noted as the termination of acceleration. In a blink we went from a silent 3-Gs to a silent 0-G.

At this pointDiscovery was headed for an impact into the Pacific Ocean. We still were not in orbit. The ascent was intentionally designed so as not to drag the 50,000-pound gas tank into orbit, where it would become a threat to populations below. Better to keep it on a sub-orbital trajectory, where its impact could be predicted. There was a heavythunk in the cockpit as the ET was exploded away to continue toward a Pacific grave. Hank moved his translational hand controller to the up position, and the thrusters in the nose and tail fired to clear us of the tumbling mass. The nose jets, merely a few yards forward of the windows, hammered the cockpit as if howitzers were firing next to us. Checklists strained at their Velcro anchors.

Now clear of the ET,Discovery ’s computers fired her Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) engines, twin 6,000-pound trust rockets mounted at the tail. Compared with the SSMEs, these were mere popguns, giving us only a ¼-G acceleration. The engines burned for two minutes to finish the orbit insertion. Then our silent free-fall began. We were in orbit 200 miles above the planet traveling at a speed of nearly 5 miles per second. The entire ascent had taken just ten minutes. In all likelihood Donna and the kids had not even had time to walk from the LCC roof.

I watched Mike activate the switches to close the ET doors. These covered two large openings onDiscovery ’s belly through which passed seventeen-inch-diameter fuel and oxidizer feed pipes from the gas tank. These pipes had been disconnected during the jettison of the ET. Now the doors had to close over the openings to complete the belly heat shield. If they failed to close, we were dead…but endowed with the power to choose the manner of our deaths: slow suffocation in orbit as our oxygen was depleted or incineration on deorbit. The open cavities would be pathways for frictional heat to melt the guts out ofDiscovery ’s belly on reentry. I didn’t lift my eyes from the ET door indicators until I saw them flip toCLOSED .

I was still strapped to my seat and didn’t yet feel weightless but the cockpit scene made it obvious we were. My checklist hovered in midair. A handful of small washers, screws, and nuts floated by our faces. An X-Acto blade tumbled by my right ear.Discovery had been ten years in the factory. During that time hundreds of workers had done some type of wrench-bending in her cockpit. While NASA employed strict procedures to keep debris from being lost in the vehicle, it was impossible to prevent some dropped items. Now weightlessness resurrected those from various nooks and crannies. A live mosquito also flew into view. It had entered through the side hatch during the many hours of prelaunch operations and had hitched a ride into space. I slapped it dead between my hands.

While I had trained for thousands of hours to immediately dive into the postinsertion checklist, I couldn’t overcome the temptation to look at our planet, now filling the forward windows. Blue, white, and black were the only colors. Swirls of lacey clouds patterned an otherwise limitless expanse of deep blue Atlantic Ocean. All of this was framed in a pre-Genesis black. There was no blackness on Earth to compare…not the blackest night, the blackest cave, or the abysmal depths of any sea. To say the view was overwhelmingly beautiful would be an insult to God. There are no human words to capture the magnificence of the Earth seen from orbit. And we astronauts, cursed with our dominant left brains, are woefully incapable of putting in words what the eyes see. But still we try.