Читать книгу Voyage - Stephen Baxter - Страница 13

Major Philip Stone joined the USAF in 1953, at the age of twenty.

He arrived in Korea in time to make a series of hazardous sorties. Well, Korea had been a turkey shoot. But Stone hadn’t enjoyed combat. His buddies called him too serious – a straight arrow. But for Stone, the important thing was what he could learn in each flight, either about his machines, or about himself.

After the war, his disciplined curiosity found a new focus.

In the early 1960s the most promising route to space, if you were inside the USAF, had looked like the experimental high-altitude rocket aircraft program. The X-15s could even give their pilots astronaut wings, by flying through the officially recognized lower limit of ‘space,’ at fifty miles high. The X-15s were to lead on to the advanced X-20 – the Dyna-Soar – in which a guy would have been boosted into orbit, and then he would have flown back down, landing like an airplane.

But with men routinely being hurled into space in ballistic capsules like Mercury and Gemini, the X-20 looked too advanced for its time, and it soon ran up a bill as large as that for the entire Mercury program without delivering a single flight article. And it was canned.

Now, the only way for a pilot to reach space was to transfer to NASA. Neil Armstrong was another X-15 pilot who had gone that way before. And so that was what Stone had determined to do.

But first he had some unfinished business.

In 1969, Stone was thirty-seven years old.

‘Drop minus one minute.’

‘One minute,’ Stone said. ‘Rog. Data on. Emergency battery on. I’m ready when you are, buddy. Master arm is on, system arm light is on …’

The B-52 reached its launch station over Delamar Dry Lake in Nevada. The rocket plane was suspended from the bomber’s wing pylon like a slim, black, stub-winged missile, crammed full of liquid oxygen and anhydrous ammonia, ready for its mid-air launch.

Stone was sealed up inside the X-15. The B-52’s engine was just feet away from his head, but Stone, cocooned inside the pressurized cockpit, could barely hear its noise. From the corner of his eye he could see the chase planes clustered close to the B-52. At last, this damn flight is going to be over and done with.

After fifteen years, the X-15 program was winding up. There was only one serviceable X-15 left: this one, X-15–1, the first to fly back in 1960, a veteran of seventy-nine previous missions. The Edwards people wanted to finish up the program with one last flight, the two hundredth overall; and they had asked Phil Stone to stay around long enough for that. But then there was a series of delays and technical hitches, and the winter weather had closed in; until by now the flight was all but a year later than it had originally been planned for.

For Stone that was a year wasted out of his life. But he’d spent the time preparing for his move to NASA, trying to be sure he started off his new career as well placed as he could be.

‘Fifteen second mark to separation. Chase planes on target. Ten seconds.’

He felt his heart, somewhere under the silver surface of his pressure suit, pumping a little harder. As it was supposed to at such moments.

‘Three. Two. One. Sep.’

With a solid crack the B-52’s shackle released the X-15, and the plane dropped away from its mother, and Stone was jolted up out of his seat.

Stone emerged from the shadow of the bomber’s wing, at forty-five thousand feet, into a shock of brilliant sunshine. He was already so high that the morning light was electric blue, more like dusk. The chase planes were little points of silver light around him, with their contrails looping through the air.

The land curved below the plane’s nose, as if the Mojave was some huge, smooth dome. He could see the worn hump of Soledad, the Lonely Mountain, brooding over Rogers Dry Lake, half a mile above sea level. Everywhere the dried-up salt lakes glistened like glass, speckled with gray-green sagebrush and the twisted forms of Joshua trees. It was a flat, desolate, forbidding place. But every summer the desert sun baked the damp lake beds to a flat and smooth surface. The whole place was like one huge runway, and you could land anywhere in reasonable safety.

It was a little after ten thirty in the morning.

Stone pushed the button to ignite the X-15’s rocket engine.

He was kicked in the back, hard. The plane’s nose was tipped up into the sky as ammonia and oxygen burned behind him, and he rode higher into the deepening blue. He could hear his own breathing inside his helmet; otherwise, there was barely a sound – he was outpacing the noise and exhaust plumes behind him.

Far ahead he saw a speck of light, like a low star. It was a high chase plane. It grew out of nowhere in a flash, and plummeted backwards past Stone, as if it was standing still.

At forty thousand feet he reached point nine Mach, and he could feel a bumping, like a light airplane flying in turbulence. He was moving so quickly now that the air molecules couldn’t get out of the way of his craft in time.

The turbulence smoothed out as he went supersonic.

Eighty thousand feet.

He moved the rocket’s throttle to maximum thrust, and he was pushed back into his seat by four and a half G. X-15–1 climbed almost vertically. The sky turned from pearl blue to a rich navy. He was already so high he could see stars ahead of him, in the middle of the day; so high there were only a few wisps of atmosphere, barely sufficient for his plane’s aerodynamic control surfaces to grip.

The sensations of power, of speed, of control, were exhilarating.

Ninety thousand feet; thirty two hundred feet per second. The Mojave spread out beneath him, over two thousand feet above sea level, was like the dried-out roof of the world.

Less than a minute into the flight, the problems started.

He got a message from the ground. It sounded like they were losing telemetry from the bird. The trouble was, the voice link had suddenly got so bad that he couldn’t tell for sure what they were saying.

A warning light showed up on his panel. Another glitch. For some reason his automatic reaction control rockets had deactivated. It wasn’t too serious for now; he was still deep enough in the atmosphere that he was able to maintain control with the aerodynamics.

The X-15 flew like an airplane in the lower atmosphere. It had conventional aerodynamic surfaces – a rudder and tail planes – which Stone could work electronically, or with his pitch control stick and rudder pedals. But above the atmosphere X-15 was a spacecraft. The automatic RCS (reaction control system) – little rocket nozzles, like a spaceship’s – was controlled by an electronic system called the MH96. And there was a separate manual RCS system Stone could control with a left-hand stick.

Quickly he was able to trace through the fault The automatic RCS had shut itself off because the gains of his MH96, his control system, had fallen to less than fifty per cent. The gains were supposed to drop when the plane was in dense air; then the MH96 was designed to shut itself off, to conserve hydrogen peroxide rocket fuel. But this time the gains had dropped because the hydraulics which controlled his aerodynamic surfaces were stuttering. So the automatic control system couldn’t rely on the data it was getting, and it had shut down the automatic RCS.

It looked as if the electrical disturbance that had started with the radio was spreading. Looks as if we might be snake-bit, old buddy.

Well, he was close to the exhaustion of his rocket fuel anyhow. He pressed a switch, and the engine shut down with a bang.

He was thrust forward against his straps, and then floated back.

He had gone ballistic, like a hurled stone; now X-15–1 would coast to the roof of its trajectory, unpowered. He lost all sensation of speed, of motion. He was weightless inside the cabin, and he felt as if his gut was climbing up out of his neck.

He tried to put the problems aside. He was still flying, still in shape. And, no matter what was happening to the MH96, he had a program to work through, a whole series of experiments for NASA and the USAF.

One minute forty-one.

He activated the solar spectrum measurement gadget, and the micrometeorite collector in his left wing pod.

Suddenly, the MH96 control system’s gains shot up to ninety per cent, for no apparent reason, and the automatic RCS cut back in.

He checked his instruments. Like most experimental aircraft, the X-15’s cockpit had a primitive, handmade feel, with rivets and wires showing. Well, it seemed he had full control ability for the first time since entering his ballistic flight path. He welcomed the return, but he was unnerved, all over again. What next?

He had very little confidence left in this battered old bird. Maybe she knows it’s her last flight; maybe she’d prefer a blaze of glory to a few decades rusting in some museum.

He would soon be going over the top, the peak of his trajectory, at two hundred sixty thousand feet.

It was time to begin the precision attitude tracking work required for the solar spectrum measurement. He needed a nose down pitch, and a yaw to the left. He was already flying at almost a zero degree angle of attack, but was yawing a little to the right, and rolling off to the right as well. So he fired his wing-mounted roll control thruster for two seconds to bring his wings level, and his yaw control thruster to bring the X-15’s nose around to the left. The X-15 was like a gimbaled platform, hanging in the air, twisting this way and that in response to his commands. To stop the left roll he fired another rocket –

He was still rolling, too far to the left. Christ. What now?

The MH96 had failed again, and had cut out the automatic RCS, just as he was completing his maneuver.

He continued to rotate. To compensate he held his right roll control for eight more seconds. But the air was so thin up here that his aerodynamic controls were degraded, and the response was sluggish. He fired his manual RCS yaw rockets.

He could feel sweat pooling under his eyes; one problem after another was hitting him, blam blam blam.

Suddenly the MH96 cut back in with its automatic RCS. That stopped his yaw, short of the correct heading. Stone fired his manual yaw again; this time as he approached the reference heading the yaw was countered by the automatics, apparently correctly – but now the damn thing cut out again, and he yawed past the reference.

And now, on top of that, his roll attitude indicator ball was rotating. He had started rolling to the left again. He tried to wrestle that back with three short pulses on the manual roll RCS, but he overshot, and started a roll to the right …

Fifty miles high. The sky outside his tiny cabin was a deep blue-black, and the control lights gleamed brightly, like something off a Christmas tree. At the horizon’s rim he saw the thick layer of air out of which he’d climbed. He could see the western seaboard of the USA, all the way from San Francisco to Mexico; the air was clear, and it was all laid out under him like a relief map.

Three minutes twenty-three seconds. His yaw deviation was increasing, five or six degrees a second. And his heading had deviated from the B-52’s, maybe as much as fifty degrees. His angle was becoming extreme, and the air started to pluck at his aircraft, rolling it over to the right. He was in danger of rolling off completely. He might even reenter at the wrong attitude.

And if that happened, he’d finish up spread over the welcoming desert in a smoking ellipse one mile wide and ten miles long.

To stop the roll he applied left roll RCS, full left rudder and full left aileron. Everything he had. But the roll seemed to be accelerating. And now the nose was starting to pitch down too.

The starry sky, and the glowing desert below, started to wheel, slowly, around his cockpit, while he continued to work his controls.

At two hundred forty thousand feet above the ground – still supersonic – the X-15 went into a spin, tumbling around two axes at once.

He reported his spin to the ground.

They sounded incredulous. ‘Say again, Phil.’

‘I said, I’m in a goddamn spin.’ He wasn’t surprised at their disbelief; there was no way of monitoring the X-15’s heading from the ground, and they would only see pronounced and slow pitching and rolling motions.

And besides, nothing was known about supersonic spin. Nothing. There had been some wind tunnel tests on X-15 spin modes, which had proved inconclusive.

There was no spin recovery technique in the pilot’s handbook.

Stone tried everything he knew, using his manual RCS and his aerodynamic controls. Full rudder; full ailerons. What else is there?

The plane began to shudder around him; he was slammed from side to side; it was hard to breathe, to think. It had all fallen apart so quickly. I lost my tail. I’ve had it.

Suddenly the MH96 armed the automatic RCS again, and the little rockets started firing in a series of long bursts, opposing the spin. Stone worked with it, reinforcing the RCS with his aerodynamics.

The X-15 broke out of the spin and leveled off. The buffeting faded away.

Stone felt a brief burst of elation. He was at a hundred twenty thousand feet, and Mach five. Now all I got to do is reenter the goddamn atmosphere.

He pulled up the nose; he muttered a short, obscene prayer as the controls responded to him. He reached the correct twenty-degree nose-up angle of attack, and opened the air-brakes, flaps on the plane’s rear vertical stabilizer. A sensation of speed returned as deceleration started to bite, and shoved him forward against his restraint. The leading edges of his wings were glowing a dark, threatening red.

The sky brightened quickly. He could see Edwards, a grid laid out over the desert below, two hundred and sixty miles from his takeoff point.

At eighteen thousand feet he pulled in his air-brakes, and hauled on the aerodynamic controls to initiate a corkscrew dive. The idea was to shed more speed, and energy, as fast as possible.

At a thousand feet above the dry lake bed he pulled out of his dive and, with the slipstream roaring past his canopy, jettisoned his ventral fin. He extended the landing flaps and pulled up the scorched nose, blistered from the reentry. Chase aircraft settled in alongside him.

The X-15 hit the dirt. The skids at the rear sent a cloud of dust up into the still desert air; Stone was jolted as the crude skids scraped across the lake bed. The nose wheel stayed up for a few seconds, before thumping down to add to the dust clouds.

A mile from touchdown the X-15 came to a halt. The chase planes roared overhead.

As the dust settled over his canopy, Stone switched off his instruments, closed his eyes, and slumped back in his seat.

The ring of his pressure suit dug into the back of his neck.

Stone had proved himself as a pilot today. But a flight like today’s wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good, with NASA. I got out of a supersonic spin! I got my hide back down, and if I can figure out how I did it, I’ll be in the manual. But I screwed up. I didn’t finish the science; I didn’t make it through the checklist. And for NASA, that was what it was all about.

A fist banged on his canopy. The ground crews had reached him; through the dusty glass he could see a wide, grinning face. He raised a gloved hand and joined thumb and forefinger in a ‘perfect’ symbol.

All in a day’s work, in the space program.