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Here's the mission patch . . .
. . . and here's the latest installment!
SEP-010, Chapter 7.
"Constitution, Houston. S-band radio check, over," CAPCOM, Astronaut Charlie Davis' voice rang impatiently in the cabin, and Mission Commander Brian Adkinson and Pilot Jamie Cunningham shared a look as the sunlight began to filter through the windows again.
"Roger, Houston, we have radio contact again," Adkinson said into his mic. He had just finished rolling Constitution back to a head's-up attitude with regards to the Moon.
"Houston, Constitution MS-1," He heard Sienna say. "Stand-by to receive our video downlink from the last five minutes."
"Roger that, Constitution. While Sienna is working on that, we're uplinking instructions to your GPC that we're going to need you to process and execute."
Jamie Cunningham cocked her head curiously as she turned to her instrument panel. Entering a series of commands into her terminal, she grunted her acknowledgement.
"We've got a new burn target," She said . . . and then she froze as her eyes widened. "It's calling for a retrograde burn to eighty-six our forward momentum entirely."
Adkinson shot her a look. "Did you just say . . ."
Her hand shot up, silencing him as she entered in another command. She called up the burn target on a lunar projection map.
"Burn target is to initiate about thirty miles east of Mare Smythii and terminate upon release of forward velocity. I've got an . . . a vertical descent profile on the next page."
Adkinson's hand shot to his PTT button. "Houston, Constitution," He called sharply.
"Go ahead, Brian," The voice replied softly.
"This data you just sent us; are we interpreting this data correctly?" He said lowly.
"That is correct, Brian. We have corroborated data from WIND, STEREO and the Solar Dynamics Observatory tracking a strong, fast-moving CME. It will arrive in a day from now. It looks strong enough that it might overrun us."
". . . and you mean to use the Moon as a shield for us," Adkinson said numbly as the facts whirled through his mind. He knew that a coronal mass ejection was no trivial matter to risk . . . and he also knew that the Hohmann transfer back to Earth would take too long -- and they didn't have the reaction mass to speed things up any further.
"That is also correct, Brian. While you're in radio contact, we want you to cycle your hover engines and landing gear, and make sure they all work. Also, we have a request from MMACS to work on closing your cargo bay doors and bring in your thermal radiators before you set down."
"Any particular reason for that?" Adkinson asked.
"They're concerned about the possibility of lunar dust contamination in the hardware."
Adkinson nodded. "Okay, Houston. Give us a few minutes to configure ourselves for this."
"Roger that, Constitution. For your information, we will have updated telemetry uplinked to you when you come back around, and we'll be able to guide you the whole way down."
"That's very comforting, Houston," Adkinson replied darkly.
* * *
". . . and in national news, we have a breaking story brewing at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Covering the events as they are unfolding is our KHOU affiliate correspondent, Jessica Hartley. Jessica?"
"Hi Beverly. I've just attended a press conference hosted by NASA's public affairs officer, Elliott Briggs, accompanied by the Director of Flight Operations, Edward Foulkes. I've got the content cliff-noted, but I'd like to air the fine points of the conference at this time."
The scene shifted to reveal Briggs and Foulkes. Neither man looked happy as they stood in front of the podium, and as a triangular "PLAY" icon flashed on the screen, they became alive.
"Good evening," Briggs said. "Earlier this evening, we successfully completed orbital insertion with the Shuttle-Derived Orbiter Constitution. What that means, is that at the right time and right place, we had them fire their engines to stabilize their orbit around the Moon. Now, our original plan was to have them stay up in lunar orbit for three days, before they'd fire their engines again to set them up on a transfer trajectory back to Earth for a landing no earlier than ten days from now."
"Our plans have changed slightly," Foulkes said dryly. "As many of you know, we have several satellites both in Earth orbit, and one station-keeping with one of the Lagrangian points near Earth. The purpose of these satellites is to provide constant surveillance on the Sun's activities; approximately ten minutes after Constitution achieved her orbit trajectory, all three of our major sun-tracking satellites detected and identified what's known as a coronal mass ejection in progress.
"Now, we are still evaluating the size, strength, and vector of this ejection, but as a precaution we have decided to radically alter our flight plan. We acknowledge the fact that the coronal mass ejection will arrive, and it will either strike Earth directly as it transits through the solar system, or will cut too close to be ignored. That time table is less than two days from now. We also acknowledge the fact it will take twice that amount of time to return Constitution to low Earth orbit. That is why we've made the decision to land Constitution on the Moon, near the terminator between light-side and dark-side, at Mare Smythii on its next orbital pass less than an hour from now."
An uproar was overheard as shouted questions lanced forth, and Foulkes put up his hand commandingly. The room hushed.
"I am going to answer your questions in order, but I would like to outline a few points before we begin," He said. "First off, the CME is not expected to provide any significant disruption to our activities here on Earth. Secondly, we do not expect any serious risk to the flight crew; we are having them land on the moon primarily as a precaution. Once the plasma and radiation have passed from the mass ejection, we will have them come back home. Now, I will take your questions. . ."
* * *
"I understand your misgivings, Jamie," Brian Adkinson said. "I wish I had more practice at this myself. But that doesn't change anything; we're going to do this . . . we're going to do it well, and I need your help to do it."
Jamie Cunningham tore her eyes away from the window in front of her, and she made herself look at Adkinson. His eyes drilled into her, and she nodded slowly. The idea of actually landing on the moon frightened her . . . in inexplicable ways. It was enough for her to be in orbit around it. That, she could handle. It was relatively safe. Now, they were going to try something that hadn't been done in forty years . . . and they had no training to do it.
She knew the premise of the burn programming. It was probably a sloppier way to go about it; kill forward velocity, let the Moon's gravity draw them in, and fire their hover thrusters to arrest the free-fall in time for a soft landing on the moon. There was probably a better way to do it, but the fact there was no time to even think about it weighed heavily on her.
She was the Pilot. Maybe a little more than a button pusher and status checker, but she also shared responsibility for the flight, the equipment, and the people inside her. That responsibility did strange things to her just then.
". . . you're not going to screw up," She heard him intone commandingly, and that was enough to yank her attention back. "You're going to do exactly what I say, when I say it . . . and you're going to thank me afterward."
A wintery smile played across her lips as she nodded again.
"Alright," She said, "I'm ready to do this."
"Good!" Adkinson barked. "Give me the APU's online, and close up those bay doors."
"I'm on it, boss!" She said, and Adkinson smiled.
* * *
"Flight, GC," Flight Director Matthew Payton heard.
"Go ahead, GC."
"Flight, I just got off the phone with the Goddard people. They said they've got Constitution on the LRO's camera."
Payton's eyebrows shot up. "The Lunar Recon Orbiter? They've got a picture?"
"That's affirmative, Flight."
"Then get it on the NASA TV loop!" He chirped.
* * *
"Thirty seconds to burn plot," Adkinson said. "Jamie, I'm going to need you to control the ship's attitude. Keep her level with the horizon. I'll control translation and hovers."
"Got it, boss," Jamie replied.
The flight deck fell silent as they whiled away the last few seconds.
"Alright. Fifteen seconds," He called out. "This is going to be a long burn at 1.6 G's. Ten seconds. . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . ."
* * *
"That's a beautiful picture," Matthew Payton observed as the camera zoomed in. Just above the surface of the moon, a shiny luminescent dot appeared in the blackness. The dot intensified, turning into an eye-tearing streak of light in the center of the screen.
* * *
"And that's it!" Brian Adkinson barked as the main engines extinguished themselves.
"Forward velocity down to twenty three knots," Jamie snapped. "We're losing altitude."
"Jamie, go ahead and yaw us around."
"On it, boss," She said as she heaved the rotational control. Constitution pirouetted in space, flanked by the bright ejecta of her RCS jets, and Jamie killed the motion as the ship settled on the correct orientation.
"Alright, Jamie. I'm going to need rotational stability from you," He reminded her, "and I'd like altitude call-outs, please. Go ahead and roll the landing gears down, un-stow the hover engines, and prime them up."
"On it, boss," She repeated. Her movements over the control panel were re-assuringly smooth, and the keypresses and switch-throwing were done without incident.
"Give me the retro doors, too, please," He prompted, and the hydraulic engines hummed briefly at her switch throw.
"Alright, Brian. Two hundred fifty thousand feet," She said. Looking out into the darkness, all she could see were stars . . . and a big black shape below them. "Uh, Brian?" She croaked.
"Yeah, Jamie?"
"How are we going to see where we're coming down?"
Brian Adkinson paused as he thought this one over. They could see Earth in front of them; a crescent-shaped gem of blue and white hovering over the blackness. Then the fact occurred to him.
"You remember those sensors you were testing in the landing gear wells?"
Jamie face-palmed as she winced. The gear well sensors. It was the best approximation of a short-ranged phased radar array meant chiefly for ranging information while landing. Well, they sure as hell were about to land, she reasoned, as she transferred electrical power to that subsystem and engaged the telemetry downlink.
Her backup flight computer display blinked, and a fuzzy map of what was below them replaced the standard display. Instantly at her eyes were ranging information that updated rapidly, as well as a radar image of the topography. She toggled the display information to test her own work . . . and it cycled through infra-red imagery, radar, and perceived density of the target environment.
What they were about to set down in was solid, cooled magma. There was a slight incline from the northeast of the mare below them that spanned for about twenty miles; the rest of the landscape below them was flat, punctuated by a crater in an occasional odd location.
"One hundred fifty thousand feet," She called out.
It looked like the ground underneath them was free of large boulders, she observed. That left out unusually thick regolith deposits, which could be embarrassing at best if Constitution were to become mired in them.
No manned vessel had actually done that, she knew. Historically speaking, any space agency intent on landing people on the moon had picked solid, safe spots to do it in. And Mare Smythii was one of those spots.
"Eighty thousand feet," She said.
"Alright. Give me a priming burn on the hover thrusters; I want to make sure one last time they'll actually fire," Adkinson said grimly.
They had already done that, she knew. The first burn was a twelve second long burn that raised their apilune to hundreds of miles above the surface, before they about-faced and burned the reciprocal direction to lower it back down. They had done this test three times before, while Constitution was transiting the dark side, away from NASA communications.
Now, she observed, this was for real.
"All yours," She said as she handed the thruster control over. Adkinson put his hand on the throttle collective and gave it a healthy movement.
The thrusters belched their gasses out into space, and they felt the acceleration push them downward slightly into their seats.
"Alright. Let's not waste gas out here," He said as he closed the throttle. "These things are rated for just over 1 G of thrust; I'm going to work out the math to figure out when to light them off for real. You do the same?"
"On it, boss" She said as she turned to her auxiliary keyboard. "We're at forty thousand feet now," Jamie said. "I'd start arresting our descent at no later than twenty thousand feet, just to be safe."
"I agree," Adkinson said.
"Thirty thousand feet."
"Constitution, Houston, we just passed our latest flight status check. Everyone on the ground here is 'go' for landing. CDR?"
"We're go, Houston," Adkinson said.
"PLT?"
"Go, Houston!" Jamie barked.
"MS-1?"
"Go!"
"MS-2?"
"Go for landing, Houston."
"MS-3?"
"We are go, Houston."
"Then from everyone on Earth, we wish you all a safe landing."
"Thank you, Houston," Adkinson said softly.
"Twenty thousand feet!" Jamie barked, and Adkinson's hand lanced out to the hover throttle collective. He felt the acceleration reef him under, and he heard the sound of the spaceframe creaking around him.
"Vertical velocity's twenty-six hundred feet per second, negative . . . twenty-four hundred . . . twenty-one hundred . . . eighteen hundred . . . twelve hundred . . . sixteen thousand feet in altitude . . . eight hundred feet per second . . . fourteen thousand feet . . . four hundred feet per second . . . thirteen thousand feet . . . two hundred feet per second . . ."
Adkinson let up on the thrust collective and forced out a sigh of relief. The thrusters had arrested their death dive, and now he had room to wiggle. Constitution was drifting forward and to the right, but her orientation was being held exactly at local vertical, local horizon. Jamie Cunningham was definitely doing her job, he observed.
"Vertical velocity now maintaining two hundred fifty feet per second. Altitude now six thousand feet. Five thousand five hundred. Five thousand. Four thousand five hundred. Four thousand."
He fed some thrust into the retro engines, working to kill any further forward momentum as Constitution settled in on her terminal approach.
"Two thousand five hundred, Brian . . . two thousand. One thousand five hundred . . . one thousand. Seven hundred . . . vertical is now one hundred fifty . . . five hundred . . . vertical now fifty per second . . ."
They couldn't see anything. Everything was black around them, except for the stars and the slight, strange glow the rocks below them provided as they reflected the light from their own rockets.
"Three hundred . . . two hundred . . . one hundred . . . vertical now twenty five per second . . ."
He flinched as a mass of something blew up in front of his window as the vertical speed stabilized below ten feet per second. This was still a painful descent rate, and he opened the throttles slightly more to kill the relative velocities. The stars suddenly became obscured.
"Forty feet . . . thirty feet . . drifting left a little . . . twenty five feet . . . we have a gear compress light . . . twenty feet . . . damn it!" Jamie Cunningham yelled as she reefed the rotational stick to the right as Constitution began to roll to the left. The RCS jets vented, and she felt an odd vibration in her seat.
"Gear contact!" Adkinson yelled as he snapped the hover throttle collective shut.
Then something inexplicable happened. As Constitution's hover engines came silent, she continued rolling to the left slightly. Jamie Cunningham found herself swearing under her breath as the RCS jets shot freely from the wing ports. The movement slowly abated . . . and then the ship began to roll the other way.
"God damnit!" Jamie gritted through her teeth as Constitution swayed like a drunken boat. The reverse-roll was only slightly less significant than the left-side component, and the ship bobbed on its hydraulic gear struts twice before becoming still.
The retinue of fans whirring away were the only source of noise inside Constitution.
* * *
. . . and here's the latest installment!
SEP-010, Chapter 7.
"Constitution, Houston. S-band radio check, over," CAPCOM, Astronaut Charlie Davis' voice rang impatiently in the cabin, and Mission Commander Brian Adkinson and Pilot Jamie Cunningham shared a look as the sunlight began to filter through the windows again.
"Roger, Houston, we have radio contact again," Adkinson said into his mic. He had just finished rolling Constitution back to a head's-up attitude with regards to the Moon.
"Houston, Constitution MS-1," He heard Sienna say. "Stand-by to receive our video downlink from the last five minutes."
"Roger that, Constitution. While Sienna is working on that, we're uplinking instructions to your GPC that we're going to need you to process and execute."
Jamie Cunningham cocked her head curiously as she turned to her instrument panel. Entering a series of commands into her terminal, she grunted her acknowledgement.
"We've got a new burn target," She said . . . and then she froze as her eyes widened. "It's calling for a retrograde burn to eighty-six our forward momentum entirely."
Adkinson shot her a look. "Did you just say . . ."
Her hand shot up, silencing him as she entered in another command. She called up the burn target on a lunar projection map.
"Burn target is to initiate about thirty miles east of Mare Smythii and terminate upon release of forward velocity. I've got an . . . a vertical descent profile on the next page."
Adkinson's hand shot to his PTT button. "Houston, Constitution," He called sharply.
"Go ahead, Brian," The voice replied softly.
"This data you just sent us; are we interpreting this data correctly?" He said lowly.
"That is correct, Brian. We have corroborated data from WIND, STEREO and the Solar Dynamics Observatory tracking a strong, fast-moving CME. It will arrive in a day from now. It looks strong enough that it might overrun us."
". . . and you mean to use the Moon as a shield for us," Adkinson said numbly as the facts whirled through his mind. He knew that a coronal mass ejection was no trivial matter to risk . . . and he also knew that the Hohmann transfer back to Earth would take too long -- and they didn't have the reaction mass to speed things up any further.
"That is also correct, Brian. While you're in radio contact, we want you to cycle your hover engines and landing gear, and make sure they all work. Also, we have a request from MMACS to work on closing your cargo bay doors and bring in your thermal radiators before you set down."
"Any particular reason for that?" Adkinson asked.
"They're concerned about the possibility of lunar dust contamination in the hardware."
Adkinson nodded. "Okay, Houston. Give us a few minutes to configure ourselves for this."
"Roger that, Constitution. For your information, we will have updated telemetry uplinked to you when you come back around, and we'll be able to guide you the whole way down."
"That's very comforting, Houston," Adkinson replied darkly.
* * *
". . . and in national news, we have a breaking story brewing at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Covering the events as they are unfolding is our KHOU affiliate correspondent, Jessica Hartley. Jessica?"
"Hi Beverly. I've just attended a press conference hosted by NASA's public affairs officer, Elliott Briggs, accompanied by the Director of Flight Operations, Edward Foulkes. I've got the content cliff-noted, but I'd like to air the fine points of the conference at this time."
The scene shifted to reveal Briggs and Foulkes. Neither man looked happy as they stood in front of the podium, and as a triangular "PLAY" icon flashed on the screen, they became alive.
"Good evening," Briggs said. "Earlier this evening, we successfully completed orbital insertion with the Shuttle-Derived Orbiter Constitution. What that means, is that at the right time and right place, we had them fire their engines to stabilize their orbit around the Moon. Now, our original plan was to have them stay up in lunar orbit for three days, before they'd fire their engines again to set them up on a transfer trajectory back to Earth for a landing no earlier than ten days from now."
"Our plans have changed slightly," Foulkes said dryly. "As many of you know, we have several satellites both in Earth orbit, and one station-keeping with one of the Lagrangian points near Earth. The purpose of these satellites is to provide constant surveillance on the Sun's activities; approximately ten minutes after Constitution achieved her orbit trajectory, all three of our major sun-tracking satellites detected and identified what's known as a coronal mass ejection in progress.
"Now, we are still evaluating the size, strength, and vector of this ejection, but as a precaution we have decided to radically alter our flight plan. We acknowledge the fact that the coronal mass ejection will arrive, and it will either strike Earth directly as it transits through the solar system, or will cut too close to be ignored. That time table is less than two days from now. We also acknowledge the fact it will take twice that amount of time to return Constitution to low Earth orbit. That is why we've made the decision to land Constitution on the Moon, near the terminator between light-side and dark-side, at Mare Smythii on its next orbital pass less than an hour from now."
An uproar was overheard as shouted questions lanced forth, and Foulkes put up his hand commandingly. The room hushed.
"I am going to answer your questions in order, but I would like to outline a few points before we begin," He said. "First off, the CME is not expected to provide any significant disruption to our activities here on Earth. Secondly, we do not expect any serious risk to the flight crew; we are having them land on the moon primarily as a precaution. Once the plasma and radiation have passed from the mass ejection, we will have them come back home. Now, I will take your questions. . ."
* * *
"I understand your misgivings, Jamie," Brian Adkinson said. "I wish I had more practice at this myself. But that doesn't change anything; we're going to do this . . . we're going to do it well, and I need your help to do it."
Jamie Cunningham tore her eyes away from the window in front of her, and she made herself look at Adkinson. His eyes drilled into her, and she nodded slowly. The idea of actually landing on the moon frightened her . . . in inexplicable ways. It was enough for her to be in orbit around it. That, she could handle. It was relatively safe. Now, they were going to try something that hadn't been done in forty years . . . and they had no training to do it.
She knew the premise of the burn programming. It was probably a sloppier way to go about it; kill forward velocity, let the Moon's gravity draw them in, and fire their hover thrusters to arrest the free-fall in time for a soft landing on the moon. There was probably a better way to do it, but the fact there was no time to even think about it weighed heavily on her.
She was the Pilot. Maybe a little more than a button pusher and status checker, but she also shared responsibility for the flight, the equipment, and the people inside her. That responsibility did strange things to her just then.
". . . you're not going to screw up," She heard him intone commandingly, and that was enough to yank her attention back. "You're going to do exactly what I say, when I say it . . . and you're going to thank me afterward."
A wintery smile played across her lips as she nodded again.
"Alright," She said, "I'm ready to do this."
"Good!" Adkinson barked. "Give me the APU's online, and close up those bay doors."
"I'm on it, boss!" She said, and Adkinson smiled.
* * *
"Flight, GC," Flight Director Matthew Payton heard.
"Go ahead, GC."
"Flight, I just got off the phone with the Goddard people. They said they've got Constitution on the LRO's camera."
Payton's eyebrows shot up. "The Lunar Recon Orbiter? They've got a picture?"
"That's affirmative, Flight."
"Then get it on the NASA TV loop!" He chirped.
* * *
"Thirty seconds to burn plot," Adkinson said. "Jamie, I'm going to need you to control the ship's attitude. Keep her level with the horizon. I'll control translation and hovers."
"Got it, boss," Jamie replied.
The flight deck fell silent as they whiled away the last few seconds.
"Alright. Fifteen seconds," He called out. "This is going to be a long burn at 1.6 G's. Ten seconds. . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . ."
* * *
"That's a beautiful picture," Matthew Payton observed as the camera zoomed in. Just above the surface of the moon, a shiny luminescent dot appeared in the blackness. The dot intensified, turning into an eye-tearing streak of light in the center of the screen.
* * *
"And that's it!" Brian Adkinson barked as the main engines extinguished themselves.
"Forward velocity down to twenty three knots," Jamie snapped. "We're losing altitude."
"Jamie, go ahead and yaw us around."
"On it, boss," She said as she heaved the rotational control. Constitution pirouetted in space, flanked by the bright ejecta of her RCS jets, and Jamie killed the motion as the ship settled on the correct orientation.
"Alright, Jamie. I'm going to need rotational stability from you," He reminded her, "and I'd like altitude call-outs, please. Go ahead and roll the landing gears down, un-stow the hover engines, and prime them up."
"On it, boss," She repeated. Her movements over the control panel were re-assuringly smooth, and the keypresses and switch-throwing were done without incident.
"Give me the retro doors, too, please," He prompted, and the hydraulic engines hummed briefly at her switch throw.
"Alright, Brian. Two hundred fifty thousand feet," She said. Looking out into the darkness, all she could see were stars . . . and a big black shape below them. "Uh, Brian?" She croaked.
"Yeah, Jamie?"
"How are we going to see where we're coming down?"
Brian Adkinson paused as he thought this one over. They could see Earth in front of them; a crescent-shaped gem of blue and white hovering over the blackness. Then the fact occurred to him.
"You remember those sensors you were testing in the landing gear wells?"
Jamie face-palmed as she winced. The gear well sensors. It was the best approximation of a short-ranged phased radar array meant chiefly for ranging information while landing. Well, they sure as hell were about to land, she reasoned, as she transferred electrical power to that subsystem and engaged the telemetry downlink.
Her backup flight computer display blinked, and a fuzzy map of what was below them replaced the standard display. Instantly at her eyes were ranging information that updated rapidly, as well as a radar image of the topography. She toggled the display information to test her own work . . . and it cycled through infra-red imagery, radar, and perceived density of the target environment.
What they were about to set down in was solid, cooled magma. There was a slight incline from the northeast of the mare below them that spanned for about twenty miles; the rest of the landscape below them was flat, punctuated by a crater in an occasional odd location.
"One hundred fifty thousand feet," She called out.
It looked like the ground underneath them was free of large boulders, she observed. That left out unusually thick regolith deposits, which could be embarrassing at best if Constitution were to become mired in them.
No manned vessel had actually done that, she knew. Historically speaking, any space agency intent on landing people on the moon had picked solid, safe spots to do it in. And Mare Smythii was one of those spots.
"Eighty thousand feet," She said.
"Alright. Give me a priming burn on the hover thrusters; I want to make sure one last time they'll actually fire," Adkinson said grimly.
They had already done that, she knew. The first burn was a twelve second long burn that raised their apilune to hundreds of miles above the surface, before they about-faced and burned the reciprocal direction to lower it back down. They had done this test three times before, while Constitution was transiting the dark side, away from NASA communications.
Now, she observed, this was for real.
"All yours," She said as she handed the thruster control over. Adkinson put his hand on the throttle collective and gave it a healthy movement.
The thrusters belched their gasses out into space, and they felt the acceleration push them downward slightly into their seats.
"Alright. Let's not waste gas out here," He said as he closed the throttle. "These things are rated for just over 1 G of thrust; I'm going to work out the math to figure out when to light them off for real. You do the same?"
"On it, boss" She said as she turned to her auxiliary keyboard. "We're at forty thousand feet now," Jamie said. "I'd start arresting our descent at no later than twenty thousand feet, just to be safe."
"I agree," Adkinson said.
"Thirty thousand feet."
"Constitution, Houston, we just passed our latest flight status check. Everyone on the ground here is 'go' for landing. CDR?"
"We're go, Houston," Adkinson said.
"PLT?"
"Go, Houston!" Jamie barked.
"MS-1?"
"Go!"
"MS-2?"
"Go for landing, Houston."
"MS-3?"
"We are go, Houston."
"Then from everyone on Earth, we wish you all a safe landing."
"Thank you, Houston," Adkinson said softly.
"Twenty thousand feet!" Jamie barked, and Adkinson's hand lanced out to the hover throttle collective. He felt the acceleration reef him under, and he heard the sound of the spaceframe creaking around him.
"Vertical velocity's twenty-six hundred feet per second, negative . . . twenty-four hundred . . . twenty-one hundred . . . eighteen hundred . . . twelve hundred . . . sixteen thousand feet in altitude . . . eight hundred feet per second . . . fourteen thousand feet . . . four hundred feet per second . . . thirteen thousand feet . . . two hundred feet per second . . ."
Adkinson let up on the thrust collective and forced out a sigh of relief. The thrusters had arrested their death dive, and now he had room to wiggle. Constitution was drifting forward and to the right, but her orientation was being held exactly at local vertical, local horizon. Jamie Cunningham was definitely doing her job, he observed.
"Vertical velocity now maintaining two hundred fifty feet per second. Altitude now six thousand feet. Five thousand five hundred. Five thousand. Four thousand five hundred. Four thousand."
He fed some thrust into the retro engines, working to kill any further forward momentum as Constitution settled in on her terminal approach.
"Two thousand five hundred, Brian . . . two thousand. One thousand five hundred . . . one thousand. Seven hundred . . . vertical is now one hundred fifty . . . five hundred . . . vertical now fifty per second . . ."
They couldn't see anything. Everything was black around them, except for the stars and the slight, strange glow the rocks below them provided as they reflected the light from their own rockets.
"Three hundred . . . two hundred . . . one hundred . . . vertical now twenty five per second . . ."
He flinched as a mass of something blew up in front of his window as the vertical speed stabilized below ten feet per second. This was still a painful descent rate, and he opened the throttles slightly more to kill the relative velocities. The stars suddenly became obscured.
"Forty feet . . . thirty feet . . drifting left a little . . . twenty five feet . . . we have a gear compress light . . . twenty feet . . . damn it!" Jamie Cunningham yelled as she reefed the rotational stick to the right as Constitution began to roll to the left. The RCS jets vented, and she felt an odd vibration in her seat.
"Gear contact!" Adkinson yelled as he snapped the hover throttle collective shut.
Then something inexplicable happened. As Constitution's hover engines came silent, she continued rolling to the left slightly. Jamie Cunningham found herself swearing under her breath as the RCS jets shot freely from the wing ports. The movement slowly abated . . . and then the ship began to roll the other way.
"God damnit!" Jamie gritted through her teeth as Constitution swayed like a drunken boat. The reverse-roll was only slightly less significant than the left-side component, and the ship bobbed on its hydraulic gear struts twice before becoming still.
The retinue of fans whirring away were the only source of noise inside Constitution.
* * *
That was Great! More...MORE!
