Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [122]
Mission specialist Roberto Vittori landed a seat on STS-134 through the European Space Agency. A colonel in the Italian Air Force, Vittori was one of my students at the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland. His space dreams also began when he was young, but he figured, “I’m an Italian. How will I ever be able to go?” Lucky for him, the Italian Space Agency was established in 1988. He is now one of five Italians to have flown in space.
The six of us, all adventurers, our boyhood dreams achieved, had now grown into men on a mission. We needed to find our way to the International Space Station, an outpost the size of a football field, but a mere dot in the universe.
We approached the space station on Wednesday, May 18. While I would be manually flying the later parts of the approach and docking, the rendezvous required a meticulously choreographed effort by the entire crew. It was a six-hour process that required tremendous focus, attention to detail, and coordination between the crew and the team in the mission control center. It’s a high-risk event to bring one spacecraft together with another spacecraft, when both are moving at 17,500 miles per hour. Though I knew Gabby was in surgery, I had to set aside my worries about her for those hours, so we could complete this procedure safely. It wasn’t easy. A few times I had to say to myself: “Gabby will be fine. The doctors know what they’re doing. She has people looking out for her. Focus, focus, focus.”
I’d long ago learned to compartmentalize. More than one hundred times in my career as a naval aviator, I had to land on aircraft carriers in the dark of night. Doing that, you figure out fast that you can’t let thoughts about the rest of your life interfere. Distractions could be deadly.
So it was on the space shuttle that day. During the rendezvous, I remained hyper-focused.
We performed multiple firings of our orbital maneuvering engines and used smaller jets to change our orbit and close in on the space station. For navigation, we started with a rough idea of the position of the space shuttle relative to the space station. Over time, we updated this geometry by improving our “state vector”—a calculation of position, speed, direction, and time—with sensors we had on board Endeavour. To dock with another spacecraft, you must have a really good idea of where you are and where the target spacecraft is. So we used a “star tracker” that optically tracked the space station to improve our state vector. (A star tracker determines a spacecraft’s position by tracking stars. It’s similar to how seafarers would use a sextant.)
Later in the approach, we tracked the space station with our Ku-band radar, which illuminated the target with electromagnetic radiation to determine its position and relative velocity. As we got closer still, we used a laser trajectory control system to give us an accurate picture of our position and closure on the space station. This system is similar to the laser devices police officers use to detect the speed of cars on a highway.
Using these systems, we were able to precisely place the orbiter about two thousand feet below the space station. At that point, it fell to me to take over manually and fly the shuttle for the final hour or so, sometimes looking out the window through an optical sight, which is similar to the sight of a gun. It is positioned in the shuttle’s window.
The final few feet, as always, were stressful. We had practiced this many times in the simulator, but that can’t replicate the thrill, tension, and difficulty of closing in on one million pounds of International Space Station with the planet Earth hovering below. As my crew completed the final items on the checklist, I inched closer, closing in at just one-tenth