Island of Clouds: The Great 1972 Venus Flyby (Altered Space Book 3) Read online

  ISLAND OF CLOUDS

  ISLAND OF CLOUDS

  THE GREAT 1972 VENUS FLYBY

  PART OF THE ALTERED SPACE SERIES

  GERALD BRENNAN

  TORTOISE BOOKS

  CHICAGO, IL

  FIRST EDITION, MAY, 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by Gerald D. Brennan III

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Convention

  Published in the United States by Tortoise Books

  www.tortoisebooks.com

  ASIN: XXX

  ISBN-10: 0986092290

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9860922-9-9

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, scenes and situations are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Front Cover: Messenger Spacecraft Image PIA10124: Approaching Venus Image #2. Original B&W image converted to brown gradient. Original Image Credit: Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

  Back Cover: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory Image PIA18167: Magnificent Outburst. Image Credit: NASA/SDO

  First Diagram: Modified from NASA MSC Internal Note No. 67-FM-25, “Preliminary Mission Study of a Single-launch Manned Venus Flyby with Extended Apollo Hardware”, Jack Funk and James Taylor, February 13, 1967, Figure 4 - Transvenus Launch from High Energy Elliptical Orbit

  Second Diagram: Modified from MSC 67-FM-25 Figure 5 - Typical Venus Flyby (Heliocentric Trajectory). Dates changed to match mission plan.

  Third Diagram: Modified from Bellcomm, Inc. Document TR-67-730-1, “Preliminary Considerations of Venus Exploration via Manned Flyby,” D.E. Cassidy et. al., November 30, 1967

  “The City on the Edge of Forever” Copyright © Paramount Pictures Corporation.

  “All Summer in a Day” Copyright © Ray Bradbury

  The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard is in the public domain.

  Solaris Copyright © Mosfilm.

  Tortoise Books Logo Copyright ©2012 by Tortoise Books. Original artwork by Rachele O’Hare.

  “Then I reflected that all things happen to oneself, and happen precisely, precisely now.”

  – Jorge Luis Borges, “Garden of the Forking Paths”

  “Before I went to the moon, I was a rotten S.O.B. Now I’m just an S.O.B.”

  – Alan Shepard

  “He is such a curious mixture of magnificent confidence bordering on conceit and humility, this man I married.”

  – Joan Aldrin

  “If we truly saw the universe, perhaps we would understand it.”

  – Jorge Luis Borges, “There Are More Things”

  VENUS MISSION

  PART I: DEPARTURE

  I’m thinking of my last cup of coffee.

  It is my first breakfast in space in three years; I’m floating in an Apollo command module, sunlight blasting through the windows on the first full day of what looks to be the greatest voyage in human history, one that will shatter all records for time in space and distance travelled, while bringing three humans face-to-face with another planet for the first time ever.

  And yet here I am injecting hot water into a foil pouch of freeze-dried coffee, thinking back to that last breakfast at the Cape, the traditional steak and eggs. It occurs to me that it will be a year before I can do something everyone takes for granted: to simply take an open-topped ceramic mug and put it under a metal coffee urn, turn on the spigot and let gravity do its work, and add cream and sugar as needed.

  My mind tends to float off when I don’t stay busy. It’s been a life lesson of sorts: passive moments breed useless thoughts. So I hurry up with my breakfast. I do not want to wallow in the past. There’s no time for it, and much work to be done.

  We’ve folded up the center of the spacecraft’s three couches to make it feel a little roomier, and to let Joe sleep behind them, in the area of the spacecraft that’s somewhat grandly called the lower equipment bay. In front of us is the console, the old familiar Apollo panel with all the backlit gauges and buttons. And behind the center of that is the tunnel, the connection path out through the snout of the cone-shaped command module and into our home for the next year, the manned module. It launched with us yesterday on a Saturn V, tucked away where the lunar lander would have been if this were a moon mission. This module holds the experiment suite that will give our days meaning and purpose; it has the solar panels that will provide power to keep the spacecraft running; it contains the bulk of the consumables necessary to keep us alive.

  “Solar panels are still nominal,” Shepard says, floating back in from the manned module. He’s eating as he goes, polishing off the last item of his breakfast, a chunk of freeze-dried peaches the size and shape of a floor tile. “The voltmeter was steady as a rock. I think this sonafabitch is really going to happen.”

  “How about that,” I say, maybe too flatly.

  We have been monitoring every instrument with particular care ever since yesterday’s launch. The mission profile had us entering low Earth orbit, then reigniting the third stage to go into a high-energy elliptical orbit with a very long period, a full 24 hours from perigee to apogee. During that climb to the orbital high point, I turned the command and service module around so we could dock with the manned module, and we spent the rest of the day deploying its solar panels, checking out its systems, and in general making absolutely certain that it will be able to sustain us for a full year. This morning, at apogee, we’ll fire the service module’s engine to test it out, and continue to double- and triple-check the manned module. After all, tomorrow’s the big decision-point, the GO-NO GO day. If there’s any doubt as to the condition and safety of the manned module, we will simply jettison it and ride the command module home through a normal reentry and splashdown. (It says something about this trip that a highly elliptical orbit ending with a fiery reentry, something that was beyond man’s capabilities a mere decade-and-a-half ago, is now the safe option.) But assuming everything continues to check out, we’ll be swinging back towards Earth, picking up speed as we approach perigee, and then igniting the service module’s engine for the final burn, the one that will give us that last extra kick of energy that will send us on our merry way. TVI: Trans-Venus Injection.

  “You sound…less than enthused,” Joe observes, happily floating up between us.

  “Come on. Why would I be disappointed to spend a year in a tin can, going to and from a planet where we won’t ever be able to land?” I smile: forced, perhaps, but it’s there. “Why would anyone be disappointed? Hypothetically speaking, I mean.”

  “Why on Earth?” Joe asks.

  “Indeed.” I chuckle, late.

  “Need I remind you gentlemen, we’re all volunteers here,” Shepard says. He flashes a grin: bug eyes and a big smile, but lots of teeth, so it also looks sharklike. “If you’re mad at the sonafabitch that put you here, go stare at him in the mirror next time you’re shaving.”

  “Oh, I will,” I assure him.

  “He always stares back,” Joe says. “That’s the problem. The man in the mirror. You get angry, he gets angry right back. He’s relentless. Try going easy on him.”

  “He’s got a tough job,” Shepard says. “He’s gotta look at you every day.”

  “Ouch,” Joe observes.

  Here I chuckle for real. “There is a lot to be said for being up here. Get away from the paparazzi for a bit, take a vacation from the sauce so my liver can rest…”

  “There is that,” Shepard says.

  “How about…uhh, discovery, the thrill of expl
oration, the chance to seek out new life?” Kerwin asks.

  “But not new civilizations,” I smile. “The prospects for Mars are a lot better. But Venus…aerosolized life in the upper atmosphere, if we’re lucky.”

  “Still. The chance to boldly go where no man has gone before!”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I smile.

  “Explorer, Houston.” The radio reminds us there’s a roomful of people waiting on us. Today’s voice: Ron Evans, pulling CAPCOM duty. “Breakfast almost done?”

  “Going back to VOX, gentlemen,” Shepard says for our benefit: no more swearing or petty complaints. And then, to our bosses below: “Just finishing up, Houston. Wrapping up and cleaning house. Ready to get to work.”

  Joe’s been distracted by something; he’s turned his body and his attention to the large hatch window. “We might want to get a picture of this first,” he says.

  He backs away from the window and I take a look. We’re close to 70,000 nautical miles from the Earth, about a third as far as the moon, but our orbit’s taken us in the opposite direction, so Earth and moon appear as fat crescents, the Earth blue and glorious, and the moon hovering above and beyond it, smaller than anyone’s ever seen it, a drab little chip of rock that looks all the more depressing by comparison with our beautiful bright planet.

  It’s a breathtaking sight, and my skin goes to goosebumps. This is why I do what I do, this is why I’m up here: to see things nobody’s seen. Shepard hands me the Hasselblad, and I snap several pictures before leaving the window to give him a look.

  I float to one of the smaller windows. Our destination is, of course, on the opposite side of the craft, the sunward side, difficult to pick up in the glare but distant enough that it looks like it does from Earth, like little more than a bright star. And it occurs to me that, once we’re there, this scene we’ve just seen, this planet we’ve just left, will look every bit as small and insignificant.

  “Neat,” Shepard says.

  And that’s that. We start stowing our trash, and Joe folds the center couch back into place as we get ready to test the engine that will kick us away from all of this.

  •••

  I’ve never been much of a writer. I suppose there’s a ghostwriter out there who can pick up my thoughts and make them eloquent, squeeze feeling into my words. This mission will be long enough that I do at least want to keep some sort of diary, though. So before settling down, I set down my recollections from the day:

  3 APR 1972

  First full mission day. Smooth checkout of the manned module in high elliptical orbit. Amazing view of Earth and moon from 70k miles out. Trying to get some rest before TVI tomorrow.

  When all the lights are out, I peer into the darkness and wait to see if I see the flicker-flashes.

  •••

  Why am I up here?

  Obviously Shepard’s right. We are all volunteers.

  But I do blame Lyndon Johnson.

  I should be grateful for Johnson, because we wouldn’t have made it to the moon without him. The moon was Kennedy’s dream, of course, his speech echoing in newsreels and television coverage and our memories. But Johnson made it happen. He’s a typical Texan, uncouth, wearing his brashness like a badge, but I suppose you need someone like that in charge when you’re trying to actually get something done, as opposed to talking about it.

  Because that’s the thing: everyone wanted to go to the moon, but the will of the people can be fickle when a task gets too costly or time-consuming or hard. (I’ve been going back through Scripture recently, a little each night. And in Exodus you can see this with the Israelites: they were oppressed, and they wanted a leader to bring them out of Egypt, but during their empty desert wanderings they mourned for what they’d lost—they wanted to go backwards, rather than forwards.) You need democracy, but you also need a leader to tell the people: this is what we started, this is what you wanted, now let’s finish it.

  Johnson being Johnson, though, he wasn’t content to just do the things Kennedy talked about. He wanted destinations and goals of his own. The moon was not enough.

  Some planning group started talking about planetary flybys in 1967, when they were first starting to think of alternate uses for the Saturn V. When you’ve designed something with so much capability, it’s natural to start thinking of what else it can do, additional tasks like orbiting a manned laboratory, or flying past Venus or Mars. For if you build a rocket mighty enough to fling not only 3 men, but a command module, a service module, a lunar lander, and an empty S-IVB stage all the way to the moon, you can also throw that same mass anywhere in the Solar System: a big stack of metal, and three people on board, just to keep it interesting. The only trick is picking the right path to bring them back home, and giving them enough consumables to survive the trip.

  So the idea came up, and one of Johnson’s people caught wind of it, and the next thing you knew, he had a goal of his own, before we’d even fulfilled Kennedy’s. A new goal, the morning star: Venus. And plans beyond that for other flights, flybys of Mars in preparation for a manned landing.

  But for a while, it seemed like the man who’d gotten us moving towards the planets wouldn’t even be in office to see us reach the moon. There was the fire in ’67, that flash fire in the Apollo 1 capsule during the pressurization test. And although the crew wasn’t on board, we had to extensively redesign the capsule, and that of course set us back. And the country went through a rough summer after that. Even with all the training and work we were doing, all the cross-country T-38 flights and long workweeks in Bethpage or Downey or wherever, it was hard to ignore the screaming headlines on hotel lobby newspapers, all the riots, Detroit and Newark burning along with so many others. A year of fire.

  And when the Tet Offensive came in early ’68, it seemed impossible that Johnson could ever win re-election. There were rumors that he wouldn’t even run, that he’d sit it out and pass the torch to Humphrey and go back to the ranch so he could waste away his days drinking and playing dominos. But then there were rumors that Bobby Kennedy would be stepping in to the race, and I think Johnson didn’t have the stomach to even contemplate the possibility that a Kennedy might succeed him. And so he campaigned on, miserable poll numbers be damned; he campaigned on in the face of King’s assassination, and another round of rioting, and all the difficulties in starting the peace process. And of course Bobby stayed out, and Nixon and Wallace were both licking their chops to defeat Johnson, and the country itself seemed angry as hell at the leader they’d elected so triumphantly just four years before, but at the end of it, things were looking slightly better in Vietnam, and we were almost on the moon, and Nixon and Wallace split the angry vote, and still Nixon of course won the popular vote, but as we all learned that year, it’s the Electoral College that matters, and that’s how Landslide Lyndon squeaked back into the presidency with something around forty percent of the vote.

  And so we’ve had moon landings and now a Venus mission under Johnson, but also more protests, an ongoing war, multiple failed attempts at peace. For better or worse, he’s an obstinate man, and some of his critics are inclined to look at, say, Vietnam, as evidence that such obstinacy can get you in trouble as often as it saves you. I say there is some value to it, as long as you’re pointed towards a worthwhile goal.

  •••

  Now another day has passed. We are all strapped back in, side-by-side, waiting to be propelled into the void.

  Earth is large again in the windows; when we looked yesterday it had been a mottled blue and white golf ball, but now once more it occupies a large arc of our view, and I can see details in the landscape. (The thought pops up that, should something happen on the mission, this will be the last time I ever see it up close. But of course there’s nothing to be gained by dwelling on this.) I steal a glance here and there, but not too often.

  “We’re good on the tanks?” Shepard asks coolly.

  “Houston, Explorer. Tank pressures are looking fine,” I say.

 
; We are creeping up on the most eventful few minutes of my life, at least in the pure physics sense. (Even on my trip to the moon, most of the burns committed us to trajectories that were pretty short-term, compared to this.) For whatever intermittent qualms I’ve had, I’ve worked like hell to make it happen. I refuse to be the person who causes a failure.

  “Explorer, Houston, everything is good and you are a GO for TVI. Under a minute to go.”

  “I’ll know when it starts?” Joe asks.

  I say: “You’ll feel it.”

  There is a quick pulse of the thrusters to settle the fuel in the tanks. Ullage: a term stolen from the brewery industry.

  “And the light is out,” Shepard observes, as the couches press against our backs.

  “There it is,” Joe says.

  “We have ignition,” Shepard says.

  “Tank pressures are looking good,” I add. “H-dot as expected, less than one degree of pitch.”

  There is no noise and only a very slight vibration to even let us know we’re accelerating, and Shepard calmly observes: “Very nice, very smooth.”

  “Explorer, Houston, we copy a smooth ignition. Godspeed.” Up until now it’s been all business, but there’s a quiet reverence in this transmission, a certain awe for what we’ve undertaken.

  “Roger, Houston,” I acknowledge.

  We are monitoring the burn intently, of course. The numbers are climbing and there is not much to say, other than to read them off and watch the cue cards and keep comparing predicted values to actual ones.

  “Very good. Beautiful,” I say. “0.7 gs.”

  “Feels heavier,” Joe says.

  “Imagine what it’ll be like when we get back.”

  And at last, cutoff.