Adrift on the Sea of Rains (Apollo Quartet) Read Online Free PDF Page B

spacecraft called Phoebus, though they would have preferred to throw spaceplanes into orbit. All that research at Edwards AFB they’d paid for, lifting bodies like the Martin Marrietta X-24 and Northrop M2-F3; and even the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar, though it never flew—so instead USAF happily bent the technology of North American and Grumman to its own uses, adding military hardware to Apollo capsules, turning ploughshares into swords. And now Peterson lay on his back, feet in the air, wedged between two other astronauts, an expanse of grey instrument panel before him, and waited for the gentle push in the back which would tell him the S-IB’s eight H1 rocket engines had ignited. He’d spent the last twelve months training for this mission and he knew more about this Apollo spacecraft than he had ever known about the aircraft he’d flown, the interceptors, the reconnaissance planes—he knew the placement and function of every switch, dial and readout. Yet if anything malfunctioned during the launch, he could do nothing, he was merely a passenger, and all his training had done was teach him facts and figures over which he had no control or influence. From somewhere far below him came a low rumble, as if a distant trapdoor to Hell had just opened, and he felt a slow pressure begin to build between his shoulder-blades. The capsule jerked from side to side, only fractions of a degree but noticeable, as those eight engines gimballed on their 1,600,000 lbs of combined thrust, and everything was vibrating, the readouts a blur, and he imagined the launch tower slowly sliding past as the S-IB rose on a tower of flame and thunder. One hundred and forty-six seconds later, Peterson was jerked forward against his straps, and then moments later kicked painfully back into his seat as the second stage ignited—but the ride now was smoother, although the roar transmitted the length of the S-IVB was louder. Ten minutes after they had launched, the J-2 engine cut off, and the silence felt to Peterson like a presentiment of catastrophe, a flame-out perhaps, and his hands itched for a stick to hold, for a means to control this errant craft. He’d brought hypersonic planes down to deadstick landings at Groom Lake after crossing the oceans at Mach 6, he’d hit the ground at two hundred knots in F-108D supersonic interceptors after Mach 3 dashes to the DEW Line, and he felt his present lack of control, his inability to pilot, keenly. Something rose past him, a washer, floating serenely across his vision, so he relaxed his arms and they lifted up of their own accord until his hands bobbed and swung before his face, and he felt a momentary fear as though he had lost control of his limbs and jerked his hands back down and balled them into fists. As he shifted in his seat, he realised he could no longer feel his rear pressing into the surface beneath it, and he began to relax, and revelled in this strange new freedom, his ties to the Earth so weak he could no longer feel them, and they no longer affected him, and it was enough to make him forget he was only a passenger on this trip. This was a taxi mission, the spacecraft would rendezvous with Space Station Freedom, and the three astronauts aboard would spend the next eight weeks in the station’s military module, although Peterson had spent so long in mock-ups and simulators and USAF’s own Weightless Environment Training Facility at Vandenberg he felt as though he had already completed his mission. This detailed and exhaustive training the astronaut corps practiced still took some getting used to, going through everything he would be doing in space again and again and again, until it was written into the fabric of his muscles, until every possible eventuality had been studied and plotted and planned and documented. It meant he felt like a puppet when it came to the actual doing of it, a weird sense of déjà vu accompanying every flick of a switch, every meter reading taken, every report made