Jack Du Brul - The Medusa Stone

Seated on his back for the last three hours and strapped to four and a half million pounds of explosives, Air Force Captain Len Cullins listened impatiently to the monotonous drone of the launch director. He assumed the lack of emotion was meant to reassure the flight crew, but he found the voice irritating beyond reason. With his first launch only two minutes away, Cullins still had time to fantasize about reaching through the radio link and strangling the director in his air-conditioned control center several miles away. The thought made him smile behind the dome of his helmet’s face shield.

“ Atlantis , this is Control. H-two tank pressurization okay. You are go for launch. Over.”

“Roger, ground. We are go for launch. Out,” Cullins intoned by rote.

The seconds dripped by, ground control and Cullins speaking in a prescripted speech devoid of any of the drama for what was about to take place. Outside the orbiter’s heat-resistant windows, the deep black of the night shrouded eastern Florida. The stars beckoned and Cullins knew in a few minutes he would reach them. “Light this candle, for Christ’s sake,” he muttered.

“ Atlantis , you are on your onboard computers. Over.”

“Roger.”

When Ground finally reached the critical final seconds of the countdown, Cullins could no longer hear the throb of the auxiliary power units or the fans and motors that hummed in the cabin. To him, all was silent in those last moments.

“Five… four… we have main engine start…” Within a third of a second, the orbiter’s main engines were pouring out a million pounds of thrust, white-hot exhaust searing the metal launch platform of pad 39A. However, all of this power did nothing except sway the Atlantis slightly forward on its mounts, what astronauts called “twang.” From the pilot’s seat, Cullins could not yet see the light from the controlled detonation of the liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel, but the noise generated by the combustion shook Atlantis violently. For a brief instant he wondered just what the hell he had gotten himself into.

“Three… two… one…”

Just as the spacecraft righted itself from its expected wobble, the solid rocket boosters ignited, each of them putting out more than double the power of the orbiter’s internal motors. It was as if Len Cullins and the other three men of the shuttle’s crew had been collectively slammed against a wall. At the moment of ignition, thousands of gallons of water were dumped under the multiple exhaust nozzles in an effort to reduce the deadly vibrations caused by the roar of her throaty power plants. The water turned to billowing clouds of steam that reflected the fiery yellow exhaust.

“And we have liftoff.” No shit !

In five seconds, the shuttle cleared the tower, and it was as if dawn had come to the Florida coast long before sunrise. The shuttle rose up and out of the mangrove swamps on a flaming trail of plasma that slashed the night like a knife stroke, chemical energy becoming kinetic so quickly that forty seconds after lift-off, the sound barrier was broken and then broken again only a few moments later. In two minutes, as the solid rocket boosters belched the last of their fuel, the orbiter was traveling four and a half times the speed of sound and was already twenty-eight miles above the earth.

While the onboard computers manipulated fuel flow into the Atlantis’ internal engines to keep G-forces below three times normal, Len Cullins felt as if his body was being smeared into the contoured seat. Training had prepared him for this, but he still couldn’t believe the feeling. So simple a matter as lifting a gloved hand from the armrest took nearly all of his strength.

“ Atlantis , we have SRB separation.”

“Roger. What a sight!” Cullins exclaimed.

The twin boosters attached to the bulbous external tank blew away from the orbiter like Catherine wheels, the last of their fuel spinning them in blazing arcs of fire and hot gas. And still the orbiter climbed, accelerating the entire time, past Mach ten like a mile marker on an empty interstate.

At an altitude of sixty-two miles, the crew was treated to the sun rising over the diminishing horizon. Even as they gasped like primitives at the reassuring sight, the Atlantis powered out of the atmosphere, to the realm where the Earth was little more than a painted backdrop, stripped of its warmth and beauty by the frigid vacuum of space.

“ Atlantis , Ground. You are negative return. Do you copy?” Negative return meant that the orbiter was too high and too far downrange to land at their emergency fields in North Africa or Europe. Either Atlantis made it into space or died trying.

“Roger, Ground,” Cullins replied to Houston Control, which had taken over the flight from Cape Kennedy as soon as the craft had cleared the launch tower. Ground Control for America’s space program was located in Texas because of Lyndon Johnson’s machinations during the program’s infancy, a legacy that had since cost the agency millions in redundancies.

Eight minutes after the first rumble of the orbiter’s main engines, they sucked the last of the fuel from the external tank, and suddenly a profound silence rushed in on the crew. It was at that exact moment, when the thrust of the engines died, and his arms lifted off his chair to float like swaying kelp in a tidal pool, that Cullins realized he had slipped Earth’s bounds. He’d also done something every person in the world envied. He’d obtained a childhood dream.

“ Atlantis , Ground. Go for ET separation.”

“Roger. External tank separation… now.”

Explosive bolts shoved the huge tank from the orbiter, and it began its long tumble back into the atmosphere, where it would harmlessly burn up.

“Gravity may be a law,” Dale Markham, the payload specialist seated behind Cullins, joked. “But Newtonian mechanics is one hell of a ‘get out of jail free’ card.”

Two hours after reaching orbit, with the payload bay doors open to vent excess heat, the crew got down to their primary mission task. They were already feeling the debilitating effects of zero gravity, and by tomorrow the crew would be about worthless. Therefore, NASA had scheduled a payload launch as soon as the shuttle had reached a stable orbit 250 miles above the planet.

Len Cullins and the other three men were still running on the adrenaline from the launch, yet nausea was becoming more than a nuisance and would soon impair them all. Videos and practice aboard NASA’s converted Boeing 707 Vomit Comet could not prepare them for what it truly felt like to be in perpetual free fall. Sitting grim-faced in the pilot’s chair, Cullins promised himself that he would not be the first to throw up the steak and egg breakfast prepared for them in Florida.

“ Atlantis , Ground, prepare for transfer to Vandenberg for payload deployment.” Vandenberg Airforce Base in California was in charge of the satellite in the shuttle’s cargo bay, and its safe deployment was the principal mission for the shuttle’s launch despite NASA’s official press release about a communications satellite.

“Roger,” Cullins said, and swallowed quickly, his stomach roiling just a few inches below his throat, his salivary glands on overdrive. “Vandenberg, go ahead, this is Atlantis .”

“ Atlantis , this is Vandenberg. We show green across the board for payload deployment.”

“Roger, Vandenberg, we are go for payload deployment. Deployment is eighteen minutes.” Cullins knew the window for launching the satellite from the cargo bay was very narrow due to the bird’s particular mission. He switched to the internal radio net. “Dale, you’ve got eighteen minutes. How you doing back there?”