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BOOK ONE Landing

As the pilots prepared for the landing, Columbia’s flight deck took on the air of a little cave, Benacerraf thought, a cave glowing with the light of the crew’s fluorescent glareshields, and of Earth. Despite promises of upgrades, this wasn’t like a modern airliner, with its ‘glass’ cockpit of computer displays. The battleship-grey walls were encrusted with switches and instruments that shone white and yellow with internal light, though the surfaces in which they were embedded were battered and scuffed with age. There was even an eight-ball attitude indicator, right in front of Tom Lamb, like something out of World War Two; and he had controls the Wright brothers would have recognized: pedals at his feet, a joystick between his legs.

There was a constant, high-pitched whir, of environment control pumps and fans.

Lamb, sitting in Columbia’s left-hand commander’s seat, punched the deorbit coast mode program into the keyboard to his right. Benacerraf, sitting behind the pilots in the Flight Engineer’s jump seat, followed his keystrokes. OPS 301 PRO. Right. Now he began to check the burn target parameters.

Bill Angel, Columbia’s pilot, was sitting on the right hand side of the flight deck. ‘I hate snapping switches,’ he said. ‘Here we are in a new millennium and we still have to snap switches.’ He grinned, a little tightly. It was his first flight, and now he was coming up to his first landing. And, she thought, it showed.

Lamb smiled, without turning his head. ‘Give me a break,’ he said evenly. ‘I’m still trying to get used to fly by wire.’

‘Still missing that old prop wash, huh, Tom?’

‘You got it.’

Amid the bull, the two of them began to prepare the OMS orbital manoeuvring engines for their deorbit thrusting. Lamb and Angel worked through their checklist competently and calmly: Lamb with his dark, almost Italian looks, flecked now with grey, and Angel the classic WASP military type, with a round, blond head, shaven at the neck, eyes as blue as windows.

Benacerraf was kitted out for the landing, in her altitude protection suit with its oxygen equipment, parachutes, life-raft and survival equipment. She was strapped to her seat, a frame of metal and canvas. Her helmet visor was closed.

She had felt safe on orbit, cocooned by the Shuttle’s humming systems and whirring fans. Even the energies of launch had become a remote memory. But now it was time to come home. Now, rocket engines had to burn to knock Columbia out of orbit, and then the orbiter would become a simple glider, shedding its huge orbital energy in a fall through the atmosphere thousands of miles long, relying on its power units to work its aerosurfaces.

They would get one try only. Columbia had no fuel for a second attempt.

Benacerraf folded her hands in her lap and watched the pilots, following her own copy of the checklist, boredom competing with apprehension. It was, she thought, like going over the lip of the world’s biggest roller-coaster.

On the morning of Columbia’s landing at Edwards, Jake Hadamard flew into LAX.

An Agency limousine was waiting for him, and he was driven out through the rectangular-grid suburbs of LA, across the San Gabriel Mountains, and into the Mojave. His driver – a college kid from UCLA earning her way through an aeronautics degree – seemed excited to have NASA’s Administrator in the back of her car, and she wanted to talk, find out how he felt about the landing today, the latest Station delays, the future of humans in space.

Hadamard was able to shut her down within a few minutes, and get on with the paperwork in his briefcase.

He was fifty-two. And he knew that with his brushed-back silver-blond hair, his high forehead and his cold blue eyes – augmented by the steel-rimmed spectacles he favoured – he could look chilling, a whiplash-thin power from the inner circles of government. Which was how he thought of himself.

The paperwork – contained in a softscreen which he unfolded over his knees – was all about next year’s budget submission for the Agency. What else? Hadamard had been Administrator for three years now, and every one of those years, almost all his energy had been devoted to preparing the budget submission: trying to coax some kind of reasonable data and projections out of the temperamental assholes who ran NASA’s centers, then forcing it through the White House, and through its submission to Congress, and all the complex negotiations that followed, before the final cuts were agreed.

And that was always the nature of it, of course: cuts.

Hadamard understood that.

Jake Hadamard, NASA Administrator, wasn’t any kind of engineer, or aerospace nut. He’d risen to the board of a multinational supplier of commodity staples – basic foodstuffs, bathroom paper, soap and shampoo. High volume, low differentiation; you made your profit by driving down costs, and keeping your prices the lowest in the marketplace. Hadamard had achieved just that by a process of ruthless vertical integration and horizontal acquisition. He hadn’t made himself popular with the unions and the welfare groups. But he sure was popular with the shareholders.

After that he’d taken on Microsoft, after that company had fallen on hard times, and Bill Gates was finally deposed and sent off to dream his Disneyland dreams. By cost-cutting, rationalization and excising a lot of Gates’s dumber, more expensive fantasies – and by ruthlessly using Microsoft’s widespread presence to exclude the competition, so smartly and subtly that the anti-trust suits never had a chance to keep up – Hadamard had taken Microsoft back to massive profit within a couple of years.

With a profile like that, Hadamard was a natural for NASA Administrator, in these opening years of the third millennium.

And even in his first month he’d won a lot of praise from the White House for the way he’d beat up on the United Space Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed consortium that ran Shuttle launches, and then on Loral, the company which had bought out IBM’s space software support division.

Hadamard planned to do this job for a couple more years, then move up to something more senior, probably within the White House. The long-term plan for NASA, of course, was to subsume it within the Department of Agriculture, but Hadamard didn’t intend to be around that long. Let somebody else take whatever political fall-out there was from that final dismantling, when all the wrinkly old Moonwalker guys like Tom Lamb and Marcus White got on the TV again, with their premature osteoporosis and their heart problems, and started bleating about the heroic days.

Hadamard was under no illusion about his own position. He wasn’t here to deliver some kind of terrific new Apollo program. He was here to administer a declining budget, as gracefully as he could, not to bring home Moonrocks.

There had been no big new spacecraft project since the Cassini thing to Saturn that was launched in 1997, and even half of that was paid for by the Europeans. There sure as hell wasn’t going to be any new generation of Space Shuttle – not in his time, not as long as a couple of decades’ more mileage could be wrung out of the four beat-up old birds they had flying up there. The aerospace companies – Boeing North American, Lockheed Martin – did a lot of crying about the lack of seedcorn money from NASA, the stretching-out of the X-33 Shuttle replacement program. But if the companies were so dumb, so politically naive, as not to be able to see that NASA wasn’t actually supposed to make access to space easy and routine, then the hell with them.

The car turned onto Rosamond Boulevard, passed a checkpoint, and then arrived at the main gate of Edwards Air Force Base. The driver showed her pass, and the limo was waved through.

He folded up his softscreen and put it in his breast pocket.

They arrived at the center of the base, the Dryden Flight Research Center. The parking lot was maybe half full, and there was a mass of network trucks and relay equipment outside the cafeteria.

He shivered when he got out of the car; the November sun still hadn’t driven off the chill of the desert night. The dry lake beds stretched off into the distance, and he could see sage brush and Joshua trees peppered over the dirt, diminishing to the eroded mountains at the horizon. Hadamard looked for his reception.

Barbara Fahy settled into her position in the FCR – pronounced ‘Ficker’, for Flight Control Room. She was the lead Flight Director with overall responsibility for STS-143, and the Flight Director of the team of controllers for the upcoming entry phase.

Right now, Columbia was still half a planet away from the Edwards Air Force Base landing site at California; the primary landing site, at Kennedy, had waved off because of a storm there. Now Fahy checked weather conditions at Edwards. The data came in from a meteorology group here at JSC. Cloud cover under ten thou was less than five per cent. Visibility was eight miles. Crosswinds were under ten knots. There were no thunderstorms or rain showers for forty miles. It was all well within the mission rules for landing.

Everything, right now, looked nominal.

She glanced around the FCR. There was an air of quiet expectancy as her crew took over their stations and settled in, preparing for this mission’s final, crucial – and dangerous – phase.

This FCR was the newest of the three control rooms here in JSC’s Building 30; the oldest, on the third floor, dated back to the days of Gemini and Apollo, and had been flash-frozen as a monument to those brave old days. Fahy still preferred the older rooms, with their blocky rows of benches, the workstations with bolted-in terminals and crude CRTs and keyboards, all hard-wired, so limited the controllers would bring in fold-up softscreens to do the heavy number-crunching. Damn it, she’d liked the old Gemini mission patches on the walls, and the framed retirement plaques, and the big old US flag at front right, beside the plot screens; she even liked the ceiling tiles and the dingy yellow gloom, and the comforting litter of yellow stickies and styrofoam coffee cups and the ring binders full of mission rules …

But this room was more modern. The controllers’ DEC Alpha workstations were huge, black and sleek, with UNIX-controlled touch screens. The display/control system, the big projection screens at the front of the FCR, showed a mix of plots, timing data and images of an empty runway at Edwards. The decor was already dated – very nineties, done out in blue and grey, with a row of absurd pot-plants at the back of the room, which everyone ritually tried to poison with coffee dregs and soda. It was soulless. Nothing heroic had happened here. Of course, Fahy hoped nothing would, today.

Fahy began to monitor the flow of operations, through her console and the quiet voices of her controllers on their loops: Helium isolation switches closed, all four. Tank isolation switches open, all eight. Crossfeed switches closed. Checking aft RCS. Helium press switches open …

Fahy went around the horn, checking readiness for the deorbit burn.

‘Got the comms locked in there, Inco?’

‘Nice strong signal, Flight.’

‘How about you, Fido?’

‘Coming down the center of the runway, Flight, no problem.’

‘Guidance, you happy?’

‘Go, Flight.’

‘DPS?’

‘All four general purpose computers and the backup are up, Flight; all four GPCs loaded with OPS 3 and linked as redundant set. OMS data checked out.’

‘Surgeon?’

‘Everyone’s healthy, Flight.’

‘Prop?’

‘OMS and RCS consumables nominal, Flight.’

‘GNC?’

‘Guidance and control systems all nominal.’

‘MMACS?’

‘Thrust vector control gimbals are go. Vent door closed.’

‘EGIL?’

‘EGIL’ was responsible for electrical systems, including the fuel cells. ‘Rog, Flight. Single APU start …’

And so it went. Mission Control was jargon-ridden, seemingly complex and full of acronyms, but the processes at its heart were simple enough. The three key functions were TT&C: telemetry, tracking and command. Telemetry flowed down from the spacecraft into Fahy’s control center, for analysis, decision-making and control, and commands and ranging information were uploaded back to the craft.

It was simple. Fahy knew her job thoroughly, and was in control. She felt a thrill of adrenaline pumping through her veins, and she laid her hands on the cool surface of her workstation.

She’d come a long way to get to this position.

She’d started as a USAF officer, working as a launch crew commander on a Minuteman ICBM, and as a launch director for operational test launches out on the Air Force’s western test range. She’d come here to JSC to work on a couple of DoD Shuttle missions. After that she had resigned from the USAF to continue with NASA as a Flight Director.

As a kid, she’d longed to be an astronaut: more than that, a pilot, of a Shuttle. But as soon as she spent some time in Mission Control she realized that Shuttle was a ground show. Shuttle could fly itself to orbit and back to a smooth landing without any humans aboard at all. But it wouldn’t get off the ground without its Mission Controllers. This was the true bridge of what was still the world’s most advanced spacecraft.

She’d been involved with this mission, STS-143, for more than a year now, all the way back to the cargo integration review. In the endless integrated sims she’d pulled the crew and her team – called Black Gold Flight, after the Dallas oil-fields close to her home – into a tight unit.

And she’d been down to KSC several times before the launch, just so she could sit in OV-102 – Columbia – and crawl around every inch of space she could get to. As far as she was concerned the orbiter was her machine, five million pounds of living, breathing aluminum, kapton and wires. She liked to know the orbiter as well as she knew the mission commander, and every one of the four orbiters had its own personality, like custom cars.

Columbia, especially, was like a dear old friend, the first spacegoing orbiter to be built, a spacecraft which had travelled as far as from Earth to the sun.

And now Barbara Fahy was going to bring Columbia home.

‘Capcom, tell the crew we have a go for deorbit burn.’

Lamb acknowledged the capcom. ‘Rog. Go for deorbit.’

The capcom said, ‘We want to report Columbia is in super shape. Almost no write-ups. We want her back in the hangar.’

‘Okay, Joe. We know it. This old lady’s flying like a champ.’

‘We’re watching,’ the capcom, Joe Shaw, said. ‘Tom, you can start to manoeuvre to burn attitude whenever convenient.’

‘You got it.’

Lamb and Angel started throwing switches in a tight choreography, working their way down their spiral-bound checklists. Benacerraf shadowed them. She watched the backs of their heads as they worked. The two military-shaved necks moved in synchronization, like components of some greater machine.

Lamb grasped his flight controller, a big chunky joystick, in his right hand. ‘Hold onto your lunch, Paula.’

‘Don’t worry about me.’

Lamb blipped the reaction control jets.

Columbia’s nose began to pitch up. Benacerraf watched through the flight deck’s airliner-cockpit windows as Earth wheeled. The huge, wrinkled-blue belly of the Indian Ocean dominated the planet, with the spiral of a big swirling anticyclone painted across it.

Now Columbia flew tail-first and upside down.

‘Houston, Columbia. Manoeuvre to burn attitude complete.’

‘Copy that, Tom. Columbia, everything looks good to us. You are still go for the deorbit burn.’

Lamb replied, ‘That’s the best news we’ve had in sixteen days.’

Angel said, ‘The Earth is real beautiful up here, pal. I wish you could see how beautiful it was …’

‘Okay, let’s go for APU start,’ Lamb said. ‘Number one APU fuel tank valve to open.’

‘Number one APU control switch to start. Hydraulic pump switches to off.’

‘Confirm I got a green light on the hydraulic pressure indicator. Houston, Columbia. We have single APU start, over.’

‘Copy that …’

The APUs were big hydrazine-burning auxiliary power units. They powered the orbiter’s hydraulics system. During the launch, they had swivelled the big main engines, and now they would be used to adjust Columbia’s aerosurfaces during the descent. During its glide down the orbiter would be reliant on the APUs; without them, and without engines to provide power, it would have no control over its fall to Earth. The power units were clustered in the orbiter’s tail, beneath the pods of the OMS – rhyming with ‘domes’, the smaller orbital manoeuvring system engines which would slow Columbia out of its orbit.

‘Okay, let’s arm those babies,’ Lamb said. ‘Digital pilot to auto mode.’

‘Left and right OMS pressure isolation switches to GPC. Engine switches to arm/press.’

‘Gotcha. Houston, OMS engines are armed, over.’

‘Roger, you are go for burn countdown.’

Lamb scratched the silvery stubble on his cheek. He looked sideways at Angel. ‘What do you say? Shall we fire these old engines, or take another couple of swings around the bay?’

‘Aw, I’m done sightseeing.’

Lamb pressed the EXEC button on his computer keyboard. ‘Five. Four. Three. Two.’

There was a jolt, and a remote rumble, and then a steady push at Benacerraf’s back.

The CRT displays cycled between a complex display of the orbiter’s horizontal position, and a burn status screen.

‘… Hey.’ Angel shifted; something about his body language changed. He was looking at a panel in front of him. ‘I got a warning on prop tank pressure, in the right OMS engine pod.’

‘High or low?’

‘High. Two eighty-five psi.’

Lamb grunted. ‘Well, the relief valve should blow at two eighty-six. Anyhow, we only need another few minutes.’

The burn continued.

Fahy’s controllers saw the excess pressure immediately.

‘Flight, Prop.’

‘Go.’

‘I’ve got some anomalies in the right-hand OMS engine pod. The relief valve has just blown and resealed, the way Tom said. That brought us down to the operating range. But now I’m seeing a pressure rise again.’

‘Will we get through the burn?’

‘Uncertain, Flight. The trend is unsteady.’

‘All right. Anyone else got anything in that OMS engine pod? EECOM, how about you?’

‘Flight, EECOM. The temperature in there looks okay. I guess the heaters have been functioning.’

‘You guess?’

‘Flight, the data looks a little flat to me …’

That meant the environment control people thought they might be seeing some kind of instrumentation fault with the wraparound heaters which kept the fuel lines from freezing up.

Fahy wasn’t too worried by the anomaly, obscure as it was. At the back of the orbiter, in the OMS engine pods, was a complex, interconnected system of engines and fuel and oxidizer tanks. For safety the tanks were situated in the two separate OMS engine pods, on either side of the orbiter. But they could feed, through isolation valves and crossfeed lines, both the big orbital manoeuvring engines and the smaller reaction control engines in either pod.

Even if there were a real tank defect of some kind in the right pod, it was highly unlikely that it could affect the left pod. The left pod’s tanks could then keep feeding both left and right OMS engines through the pod crossfeed lines. If the defect were severe enough to kill the right OMS engine itself, the left engine could keep firing to complete the burn. And even if both OMS engines were lost, the smaller reaction control engines manoeuvring jets could fire and maintain the burn, using up the excess OMS propellant.

There was a lot of redundancy in Shuttle.

It was a nagging worry, though.

She knew that those OMS engine pods, and their contents, were rated for a hundred flights; the pods flying today had completed eight and nine flights respectively. But the refurbishment schedule had been cut down in the last couple of years, by the United Space Alliance, the private consortium to which Shuttle ground operations had been outsourced.

She made a mental note to recommend the strip-down of that right OMS engine pod, maybe the left as well.

There were only a couple of minutes left in the burn anyhow. She watched the big mission clock on the display/control screen at the front of the FCR, counting down to the end of the burn.

That was when the master alarm sounded.

The flight deck was filled with a loud, oscillating tone. Four big red push-button alarm lights lit up on the instrument panels around the cabin.

Lamb pushed a glowing button on a central panel, above a CRT; the lights and the tone died. ‘Now what the hell?’

Benacerraf heard her breath scratch in the confines of her helmet.

A master alarm. Shit.

… But, she realized, the tone hadn’t been a siren, which would have been set off by the smoke detection system, or a klaxon, which would have meant loss of cabin pressure.

Whatever was coming down, it couldn’t be as bad as that, at least.

She tried to steady her breathing. She was supposed to be here to help, after all.

At the center of the cockpit consoles there was a forty-light caution /warning display. A small panel marked ‘right OMS’ glowed red. The engine, then.

Angel said. ‘I think –’

There was a jarring bang, sharp and abrupt.

The orbiter shuddered; Benacerraf felt the rattle through her canvas seat, and she heard the creak of stressed metal. Long-wavelength vibrations washed along the structure of the orbiter, powerful, energy-dense.

She could feel it. The thrust of both OMS engines had died, halfway through the burn.

The master alarm sounded again. Now both left and right OMS lights on the caution/warning light array glowed red.

Lamb killed the noise with a stab at a red button. ‘Goddamn squawks.’

Angel seemed to have frozen; he turned to Lamb, his mouth open. ‘That bang was like a howitzer in the back yard. What was it, some kind of hard light?’

Lamb was pressing at an overhead panel. ‘Losing OMS pressure,’ he barked. ‘Losing OMS propellant.’

Angel seemed to come to himself. ‘Okay. Uh, Houston, we seem to –’

‘Houston, Columbia,’ Lamb broke in. ‘We have a situation up here. We lost OMS.’

The master alarm sounded again; Lamb killed it again.

It was like the worst simulation in the world, Benacerraf thought.

Tell me this isn’t happening, Fahy thought. She stared at the numbers on her screen, at the flickering alarm indicators, unable, for the moment, to act – unable, in fact, to believe her eyes.

The capcom said, ‘Can you confirm that, Columbia?’

‘We lost both OMS, halfway through the burn.’

‘Copy that.’

The capcom – a balding trainee astronaut called Joe Shaw – turned and looked to her for guidance, for instructions on what to say next.

Fahy tried to think.

‘EECOM, tell me what you got.’

‘I see a sealed can, Flight.’

EECOM was telling her that the spacecraft was intact; the crew still had a life-sustaining environment. That was always the first priority, in any situation like this. It gave her time to react.

‘DPS, how about you?’

‘We think there’s maybe a telemetry problem with a wraparound heater.’

‘Where?’

‘On one of the right OMS engine pod propellant lines.’

‘EECOM, you got a comment on that? It’s your heater.’

‘It’s possible, Flight. That heater might be down. We don’t have the data.’

In which case that fuel line could be frozen. Or melting, depending on the situation.

‘All right. Prop, talk to me.’

‘Prop’ was the propulsion engineer. ‘I’ve lost nitrogen tet and hydrazine pressure in the OMS tanks,’ Prop said miserably. Nitrogen tetroxide was the oxidizer, monomethyl hydrazine the fuel for the OMS engines. ‘If my telemetry’s right.’

‘Which tanks?’

‘Both.’

‘What? Both pods? But they’re on opposite sides of the bird.’ And besides, the OMS engines – because of their importance – were among the simplest systems in the orbiter. They were hypergolic; fuel and oxidizer ignited on contact, without the need for any kind of ignition system, unlike the big main engines. There was hardly anything that could go wrong. ‘How the hell is that possible?’

‘We’re working on that, Flight.’

‘How much of a loss are you seeing?’

‘I’m down to zero. It’s as if the tanks don’t exist any more. There has to be some telemetry screw-up here.’

But we have that report from Lamb, she thought. We know the OMS have shut down. This is something real, physical, not just telemetry.

Another call came in. ‘Flight, EGIL. I got me an unhappy power unit. Number two is in trouble.’

‘What’s the cause?’

‘We can’t tell you that yet, Flight.’

‘Can you keep it on line?’

‘For now. Can’t tell how long. Anyhow performance should still be nominal with two out of three APUs.’

‘Could that be linked to this OMS issue?’

‘Can’t say yet, Flight.’

Christ, she thought.

‘Flight, Capcom.’ Joe Shaw, at the workstation to her right, was still looking across at her. ‘What do I tell the crew?’

For a moment she listened to her controllers, on the open loops. Every one of them seemed to be reporting problems, and batting them back and forth to their backrooms. Fido and Guidance were worried how the orbiter was diverging from its trajectory. EECOM was concerned about excessive temperatures in the main engine compartment at the rear of the orbiter. He was shouting at DPS, worrying about the quality of the rest of his telemetry following the heater defect. And Egil, in addition to his worries about the power units, thought the warning systems, pumping out their multiple alarms, were giving false readings.

Thus, most of the controllers seemed to think some kind of instrumentation problem or flaky telemetry was screwing their data. They couldn’t recognize the system signature they were getting. In such situations controllers had a bad habit of retreating into their specialisms, thinking in tight little boxes, blaming the data.

Except there had also been a crew report. Something real had happened to her ship up there.

Behind her, the FCR’s viewing gallery was starting to fill up. Bad news travelled fast, around JSC.

STS-143 was falling apart, and on her watch.

Another call: ‘Flight, Prop. I’m reading RCS crossfeed. It’s Tom Lamb, Flight. I think he’s going to burn his reaction thrusters.’

He’s trying to complete the burn, Fahy thought.

Lamb thumbed through a checklist quickly. ‘All right, Bill, I’m going to feed the RCS with my left pod OMS tank. I’m assuming I’ve still got some pressure in there, despite what these readouts say … Here we go. Aft left tank isolation switches one, two, three, four, five A, three, four, five B to close, left and right …’

Lamb was, Benacerraf realized, intending to burn the reaction control engines, without waiting either for the okay from Houston or even for burn targets. He was just, in his can-do 1960s kind of way, going ahead and doing it.

Angel was watching Lamb. He was working switches on an overhead panel. His gestures were hurried, careless, Benacerraf thought. His blue eyes were shining; he grinned, and his face was flushed. He was enjoying this, she realized, enjoying being stuck in the middle of a deorbit burn with two failed engines. Relishing a chance to show off his competence.

She felt a deep and growing unease.

Lamb grasped his flight control handle. ‘Initiating burn.’ He pushed the handle forward, keeping his eye on his displays. ‘Houston, Columbia. RCS burn started.’

‘Copy that.’

‘Please upload burn targets for me.’

‘We’re working, Tom. Hang in there.’

Benacerraf said, ‘Are we committed to the deorbit yet? Maybe we could just abort the burn and stay up a little longer.’

Tom Lamb glanced back at her, still holding down the flight stick. ‘The rear RCS bells are back in the OMS engine pods, remember. If something big has taken out the OMS, we don’t know how long we’ll have the RCS.’

My God, she thought. He’s right. We have to use the reaction control system while we have it, use those smaller thrusters to try to complete the burn. Because it’s all we have, to get us home.

Her perspective changed. It was, she realized, perfectly possible that she wasn’t going to make it through; that suddenly – so quickly – it had become her day to die.

For the first time since the events of this incident had started to blizzard past her, she felt real fear.

And, she thought, Lamb figured all of that out, in the first couple of seconds, in the middle of this roller-coaster ride. And made the right choice, took the appropriate action.

‘Okay, Columbia, Houston.’

‘Reading you, Joe,’ Lamb said.

‘We want to confirm you’re doing the right thing. We’re figuring those burn parameters now. Uh, I have the targets. They’re being uplinked now. And I’ll voice up the parameters to you, Tom.’

Lamb nodded at Angel, who fumbled for a scratch pad, and copied down the timings the capcom read up.

The residual burn lasted a full seven minutes.

‘Okay, Columbia, Houston. Counting you down out of the burn.’

‘Good. My arm’s getting kind of stiff, Joe,’ Lamb said.

‘Ten. Five. Three, two, one.’

Lamb released the flight control stick. He checked the orbiter’s attitude, altitude and velocity using his analogue instruments, and compared them to the CRT. ‘Hey, we got a good burn. How about that.’

‘Copy that, Columbia. Residuals are three-tenths. You’re a little off US One, a little delayed, but we figure you can recover on the way in.’

Benacerraf found she was gripping her checklist so hard her fingers hurt.

Is that it? Is it over?

The master alarm sounded, jarring.

More lights appeared on the caution/warning array, and on another display to Angel’s right hand. Lamb killed the alarm.