John Nance - Orbit

Two green lights flash on, indicating both tail booms are locked, and he pulls hard, feeling the g-forces climb as he searches for a meter or an indication of how heavy they are. He thinks he knows what three g’s feel like, and he holds that until the nose is up and he realizes he’s no longer riding a spacecraft, he’s flying a high-speed, heavyweight glider, and probably headed in the wrong direction.

I don’t want to go due east, do I?

He looks back down at the screen, relieved suddenly to see airfields indicated, apparently in response to the reconfiguration of the tail. But the direction he’s now flying, at nearly five hundred miles per hour, is showing no airports within the purple arc on the screen that he assumes is his gliding range and he banks back left, startled at the responsiveness of the craft and frightened by the descent rate which is over twelve thousand feet per minute.

He can barely see anything through the small windows with the seat pitched back, and he remembers he’s supposed to change it upright again. He moves the two levers on the right of the command chair, relieved when the seat slides back into a normal pitch.

He pulls the nose up more, diminishing the descent rate and the forward airspeed as he shifts his eyes to the screen.

There’s got to be an airport beneath me somewhere! Kip thinks, trying not to imagine the consequences of impacting the parched landscape of western New Mexico at two hundred miles per hour.

Roswell is sixty miles to the west, and it looks like the biggest and maybe the only available runway. The purple circle has increased in size as his descent rate has decreased, and he slows more now as he brings Intrepid around to a western heading, hoping to expand the range circle by slowing until it includes Roswell’s airport.

And finally it does! Roswell is within gliding distance.

But at what speed?

He’s dropping through forty thousand feet with a forward airspeed of three hundred fifty miles per hour.

Slow more… under two hundred.

He’s squeezing his memory for every ounce of his limited flying experience, and decides that finding the stall speed is the most important element.

He brings the nose up even more, now to almost twenty-degrees nose-high, watching the rate of descent decrease to nearly zero as he trades airspeed for maintaining altitude.

One ninety. She’s still controllable.

He’ll let her slow, he figures, until the nose drops suddenly and he’s in a stall, then he’ll simply recover like all airplanes recover. At least he’s always assumed that’s how it works.

One hundred sixty .

She’s mushy now but still flying, the nose way high, and suddenly he realizes the descent rate has started increasing again quickly to four thousand feet per minute even with the nose up at almost thirty degrees above the horizon.

Somewhere he’s read about this sort of thing, a stall in a high-speed jet with the nose up, and he feels the cold possibility that he’s gone too far.

Kip shoves the control stick forward, but nothing happens. The nose remains high, the airspeed languishing at one hundred sixty knots. He’s falling straight down with Intrepid ’s belly in a nearly horizontal position, and the descent rate is now over ten thousand feet per minute as he comes through thirty thousand, feeling again fear creep into his gut. In a nanosecond his mind has dredged up all the old feelings of insecurity and assaulted the incredible idea that he could survive everything else and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by screwing up basic flight. How dare he try something he didn’t fully understand? Now Intrepid is stuck in a nose-up stall, and even as he starts rocking the wings back and forth, she won’t come out of it. It’s like he’s back in the reentry configuration, his ship’s belly to the ground as he screams toward it. The impact will be too great to feel, of course. He’ll simply disintegrate. But how damned unfair that he could come this far and still die.

Something in that last series of thoughts snags, and a kaleidoscope of images flashes through his mind until the tail appears clear and unmistakable as the solution. The hydraulic pump keeping the tail in a horizontal position for reentry is still on!

With one quick stab at the appropriate button he once more ports the hydraulic pressure to unlock the twin boom tail and move it toward the UP position, poising his finger over the opposite control switch as he feels the aerodynamics drastically changing.

Suddenly Intrepid flops forward, nose down, and just as quickly Kip punches the retract button as he keeps forward pressure on the stick, once again seeing the two green locked lights illuminate before pulling g’s to raise the nose and slow the renewed airspeed that peaks at less than three hundred miles per hour.

But now he’s below twenty thousand, and a quick glance at the map tells the tale. The purple glide range circle has shrunk drastically, and Roswell is completely out of reach.

There is, however, a new target colored red just to the southwest, and he understands: a short runway. But if he runs off the end of concrete at a slow speed, he might survive.

He knows now to keep Intrepid above a hundred and ninety miles per hour. Maybe even two hundred since he’ll need energy to flare and bring his descent rate down to a survivable vertical speed at touchdown.

He banks to the right, bringing the ship to a southerly heading, the altitude now coming through fifteen, but the rate of descent only three thousand per minute and holding.

He sees a few towns below, and he can see roads and section lines and a few rail lines.

Eleven thousand.

He can see evidence of wind below, plumes of dust when he looks closely, indicating a strong west wind.

And he can see the purple circle retracting away from the airport he’s trying to reach, the edge of the circle finally passing over it.

No more airports within the circle.

Kip feels his pulse rate climbing again as he begins searching through Intrepid ’s windows. Empty fields everywhere. A few railroad tracks and a small number of cultivated fields, but, other than a few country roads, no runways, no airports, no ribbons of concrete.

Except for the highways .

He has no choice. There will be power lines and signs and maybe even an occasional overpass—not to mention cars and trucks going one heck of a lot slower than two hundred miles per hour—but he’s through eight thousand feet now with nowhere else to go.

He searches for an interstate, but whichever ones may be around are probably too far north. He’s close enough to the ground to confirm that the wind is still out of the west, and he sees a two-lane highway running east and west and turns to the east, paralleling it, putting what seems a comfortable distance for a turn between the roadway to his left and Intrepid, and at the same moment he rolls out of the turn it hits him that there’s no logic in waiting until he’s lower to turn into the wind. He keeps Intrepid turning left, bringing it around steadily and overshooting slightly, then moving left a quarter mile until he’s tracking straight down the highway below and coming through four thousand feet. There’s a small rain shower off to the south and what looks like a dust devil off to the right of the highway, and he can see a big truck moving toward him perhaps a mile distant.

Landing gear!

He checks the airspeed, holding at two hundred ten, and flips the switch for the gear. He hears a whooshing noise and several “thunks” and three green lights appear on the upper right-hand panel. Unlike the first private suborbital craft, Intrepid actually has a steerable nosewheel, and he reminds himself that the rudder pedals control it.