Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [104]
5…4…3…We finally entered new countdown territory.
2…1…At zero there was no doubt we had finally slipped the surly bonds of earth. As the hold-down bolts were blown, we were slapped with a combined thrust of more than 7 million pounds. A new wave of intense vibrations roared over us.
“Houston,Discovery is in the roll.”
“Roger, roll,Discovery. ”Discovery ’s autopilot was in control. Hank and Mike reached to their Attitude Director Indicator (ADI) switches and flipped them to change the mode of the ball. I watched Hank’s ADI reflectDiscovery ’s tilt toward the risen sun. If our ascent was nominal, the ADI switch would be the only switch touched until MECO…8½ minutes, 4 million pounds of propellant, and 17,300 miles per hour away.Please, God, that it be so. Having to use other switches could only mean one thing: something wasn’t nominal. My eyes fell on the contingency abort cue card Velcroed to Hank’s window frame. It detailed procedures for ditching the shuttle, which all of us knew would be death. NASA called all the other abort modes “intact aborts”—the orbiter and crew would be recovered “intact” either in the United States, Europe, or Africa. But they couldn’t bring themselves to call a ditching abort a “not intact abort.” Like sailors of old painting the decks red so the blood of battle wouldn’t shock a crew, NASA camouflaged the ditching procedures with the title “contingency abort.” One of the card’s helpful suggestions was to ditch parallel to the waves. Astronauts joked that the contingency abort procedures were just something to read while we were dying. For some reason the joke seemed funnier while standing at the office coffee bar.
Except for the noise, vibrations, and G-forces, the ride was just like the simulator, which is akin to the circus Human Cannonball saying, “Except for the earsplitting explosion, the G-forces, and the wind up your nose, it’s just like sitting on a case of unlit dynamite.” NASA would never duplicate this ride in any ground simulator.
“Throttle down.” We were forty seconds up and the vibrations intensified as the vehicle punched through the sound barrier. Everything was shocking the air…the giant, bulbous nose of the ET, the pointed cones of the SRBs, the orbiter’s nose, wings, and tail, the struts holding everything together. The interplaying shock waves were an aerodynamic cacophony and the engines throttled back to keep the vehicle from tearing itself apart.
Our seats wiggled and groaned under the stress. I was amazed by the flexibility of the machine. It reminded me of times in my childhood when I would slide down a bumpy, snow-filled arroyo in a cardboard box. Now, as then, I wondered how my cockpit could stay together through all the bouncing and shaking.
“Throttle up.” The air was thinning and the aerodynamic pressure decreasing. The three Rocketdyne beauties at our backs were once again spiraling to full power. What a rush it was to feel the buildup of thrust, just like jamming the throttles of a fighter into the afterburner detents. I suspect every shuttle pilot would have loved to snatch the controls from the autopilot and manually throttle the engines to full power. How many times in your life would you have 1.5 million pounds of thrust wrapped around your fingers?
The prayers flying from the souls of everybody in the cockpit were identical, that God would continue to smile upon the SSMEs. We most feared these engines, and for good cause. There had been many SSME ground-test explosions and premature shutdowns. We were also strapped to two SRBs, each burning nearly 5 tons of propellant per second, but nobody gave a second thought to them. No engineer had ever come to a Monday morning meeting to explain away a SRB ground-test failure. The SRBs had always worked. But even as we scorched the prayer line with our pleas for flawless SSME function, both SRBs were betraying us. A primary O-ring at different joints in each tube had failed to seal as the motors had ignited. Tentacles of flame from the combustion area had wiggled between