Titan

When she’d first joined the astronaut corps six years ago Benacerraf had been in complete awe of Tom Lamb.

He was the last Apollo veteran still working in the program, all of thirty-two years since the last Lunar Module had lifted off that remote surface. Tom Lamb still called himself an aviator, Navy style. She knew he had some kind of antique aeronautics degree from some technology institute in Georgia. But as far as he was concerned, Lamb was primarily a graduate of the Naval Pilot Test School at Patuxent River, in Maryland. She knew he had been known as a superb stick-and-rudder man, and his specialism had been night carrier landings, the hairiest flying in the Navy.

And as a young teenager Paula Benacerraf had watched Lamb and his commander Marcus White bounce like sun-drenched beach balls over the rubble-strewn floor of Copernicus.

How could you meet, how could you work with, a man like that?

But the awe had soon worn off, for Benacerraf.

Benacerraf was an engineering specialist – her discipline was orbital construction techniques – and she’d come into NASA with a hatful of qualifications, awards and degrees. She’d worked as a ground-based contractor on a number of Space Station construction missions. It was only when, because of Shuttle launch wave-offs and Russian construction delays, the Station assembly sequence had started to fall drastically behind its timeline that the need had been identified to draft the right experience directly into the program.

So – against the advice of her daughter Jackie, against the resistance of her employers – Benacerraf had given up her fancy consultant’s salary and her nice apartment in Seattle, and moved down to the humid stink of Houston, on Government pay.

At first she’d worked as a specialist in the backrooms behind the Mission Control rooms, in Building 30 of JSC, the Johnson Space Center. Then she’d been promoted to work as a Mission Controller, in the FCR – the Flight Control Room – itself.

But it still wasn’t enough. It was pretty obvious that this construction project – if it was ever going to get back on schedule – needed foremen in space.

Benacerraf had been a space nut since watching Lamb and his buddies on the Moon, all those years ago. But the thought of actually going up there herself, in a dinged-up old Space Shuttle, pretty much appalled her.

Tom Lamb himself had been deputed to talk her round. He’d used all the grizzled charm at his disposal.

… But I’ve got two grandchildren, Tom.

Hell, so have I. And if I can still cut it, a couple of years off my pension, why not you?

She was given promises of cooperation, special provisions, fast-tracks through the training. Even bonuses, to compensate her for her dropped salary. You’ll be treated with respect, drawled Tom Lamb. We need you, kid.

The training maybe hadn’t been quite as smooth as she’d been led to believe – too much resistance from the Spaceflight Training Division for that, who had insisted she had to work her way through their hierarchy of trainers and simulators, fast-track or no fast-track. But the pumped-up pay had come in as promised.

She just hadn’t bargained for the respect.

As an ascan, an astronaut candidate, she was royalty – at the rank of princess, at any rate, until she flew. People around the JSC campus were truthfully in awe of her, and the deference with which she was suddenly treated embarrassed her deeply.

But if she was a princess, Tom Lamb was a king among kings. And he loved it. She would watch him stroll through the Public Affairs Office or the clinic or the Crew Systems Lab, and people come running to serve him. And Lamb just lapped it up. It was as if Lamb had spent the whole of his adult life preparing for this role. Which, in a sense, he had.

Her opinion about Tom Lamb had evolved rapidly.

She pulled herself tentatively along the slide wire.

The orbiter was like a splayed-open aircraft. Before her she could see the big delta wings, spreading out to either side of the payload bay. Straight ahead, at the far end of the bay, was the bulky, rounded propulsion system housing, with its tanks and the engine bells for the main engines and the orbital manoeuvring system. Behind her was the flat rear bulkhead of the cabin section, like the wall of a big roomy shack, which contained the rest of the crew.

The curve of the wings was elegant. But for her, the design was spoiled by the softscreen mission sponsors’ logos displayed there: the US Alliance, Boeing, Lockheed, Disney-Coke. She knew that stuff brought in a lot of money to NASA, but for her it was a step too far.

At the back of the bay she could see the EDO wafer, the extended-duration pallet with its supplement of lox and liquid hydrogen for the orbiter’s fuel cells, which would allow Columbia to stretch out this mission to sixteen days. One objective of this flight had been to test the new EDO wafer in extremes of temperature, so the orbiter had been aligned to keep the payload bay in shadow for hours at a time, longer periods than on most flights.

Tom Lamb approached her, along the starboard fuselage longerons. ‘You ready for the MMU?’

‘Sure.’

‘Houston, EV2 preparing to deploy MMU.’

‘Copy that, Tom.’

Benacerraf made her way to the MMU station. The Manned Manoeuvring Unit was a big backpack shaped like the back and arms of an armchair. Since launch it had been stored in its station in the payload bay against the rear cabin bulkhead, on the starboard side.

Lamb had got there first, and he ran a quick check of the MMU’s systems.

‘You ready?’

‘Let’s do it.’

Lamb held her arms. He turned her around, and she backed into the MMU. She felt latches clasp her suit’s backpack.

‘Houston, EV2,’ she said. ‘EMU latches closed.’

‘Copy that.’

She pulled the MMU’s arms out around her. She closed her gloved hands around the controllers, which were simple hand-controllers on the end of the arms. A fibre optic data cable plugged into her suit from the MMU.

Lamb released the tethers which still clipped her to the payload bay slide wires, and reached around her. ‘Captive latches released.’

‘Copy.’

He shoved her gently in the back, and she floated away from the bulkhead. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s just like the sims.’

… Suddenly she didn’t have hold of anything, and she was falling.

‘Oh, shit.’

‘We didn’t copy that, EV2,’ the capcom said humourlessly.

Lamb ignored him. ‘Come on, Paula. Turn around.’

She had two big nitrogen-filled fuel tanks on her back now, and there were twenty-four small reaction control system nozzles. She grasped her right-hand controller, and pushed it left. There was a soft tone in her helmet as the thruster worked; she saw a faint sparkle of nitrogen crystals, to her right. In response to the thrust, she tipped a little to the left.

The controller was intuitive; moving it up or down made her pitch, her feet tipping up; left or right gave her a yaw, a sideways tilt. She twisted the handle, and made herself roll about an axis through her head to her feet.

The payload bay rotated around her.

‘It’s heavy,’ she said. ‘I can feel the unit’s inertia as I roll.’

‘You mass more than seven hundred pounds, suit and all, Paula.’

She blipped the RCS thrusters again, and slowed her roll. She finished up facing Lamb, where he clung to the aft cabin bulkhead. She pushed her left-hand controller, which drove her forward and back. There was a gentle shove, and her drifting slowed.

The MMU seemed to be working well, but its scuffs and scorch marks showed its age. And things most definitely did not feel the same, up here, as in the tethered sims on the ground. When she started moving, she just kept on going, until she stopped herself. She was in a frictionless, three-dimensional environment, like a huge ice-rink, where Newton’s laws held sway in their bare simplicity.

No wonder the Station assembly has proceeded so slowly, she thought. We just aren’t evolved for this environment.