Launch on Need by Daniel Guiteras (best ereader for manga .txt) 📕

“Then we’re gonna need satellite or ground-based imagery, right?” Metzer asked without hesitation.

Brown looked at Metzer, knew he was right. Doesn’t he know it will take an act of Congress to get outside imaging?

Chapter 2

Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas

Space Shuttle Program Office

Jan. 17, 2003

SPACE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM (STS)-107 Mission Management Chair Julie Pollard snapped back from a rare moment of inattention and daydreaming. She found herself staring at the STS-107 milestones-to-launch posters, “Go For Processing,” “Go For Stacking,” and “Go For Pad,” she had placed prominently on the wall behind her office computer. Back to work.

She resumed updating her notes from the teleconference that had ended just five minutes earlier. She would get the official meeting minutes later that day, but she always took a few notes on things she needed to personally review after a teleconference.

On her computer screen, the cursor flashed patiently, waiting for further additions to the open document. It read:

Mission Management Team Teleconference

STS-107

Flight Day 2

Friday, Jan. 17, 2003

Follow-up Items:

1)    Having trouble with KU-band transmission from SPACEHAB-experiment-data to ground. May be a payload provided equipment problem—checking with contractor. Ground team at the POCC worked it last night but wasn’t able to resolve the problem.

2)  Crew is now back on preflight time line after shifting sleep/wake schedules by one hour.

3)  Some minor onboard power fluctuations noted by crew.

4)  SRBs have been recovered and are in tow as of yesterday afternoon…evidence of possible SRB forward skirt buckling…should arrive at CCAFS [Cape Canaveral Air Force Station] by Monday.

5)  Next MMT teleconference is Tuesday (instead of Monday) at 8:00 A.M. for those who will be taking Monday as their Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Pollard could not help having a good feeling about this mission. So far the problems with Columbia and her crew seemed relatively minor. The crew would be staying within the protective confines of Columbia. There were no planned space walks. She would not have the worries that came to an MMT whenever the mission objectives required astronauts to work outside their spacecraft. It was turning out to be a relatively easy mission to chair. In 14 days Columbia would return home, and then she would be on to her next assignment.

She waited for her document to print with a calm feeling of control. But what she could not have known was that there was no contingency plan for what was about to happen. It was not something she failed to plan for, something she had done wrong. And there was no 300 page manual that would help her out of this mess.

In less than an hour she would receive an e-mail revealing a problem with Columbia of mind-bending magnitude.

Chapter 3

Cocoa Beach, Florida

Friday, Jan. 17, 2003

10:27 AM EST

VETERAN SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT John Stangley stepped slowly from the shower of his Cocoa Beach hotel room into a cough-inducing fog heavy as Bucksport, Maine, sees in mid-January. He stood before the bathroom mirror gazing at his image, a private moment to evaluate his mind and body, both of which seemed equally distorted behind swirling tentacles of moisture-laden air. He rested his hands on the cool marble countertop and leaned in for a closer look.

“Well, I’ve finally done it,” he said rather proudly, dabbing the towel over his forehead and face. He felt proud of himself for having taken a step, but was acutely aware he hadn’t shaken the looming apprehension and uncertainty over his future. After more than ten months of sleeping in late, waking to an empty house, and refusing to do any work, he had finally accepted and completed an assignment.

“Don’t you think it’s time you tried to do some work? We really think you’d feel better,” Stangley remembered hearing the pleas of his colleagues—their begging really—that he do something productive, get back in the groove. Their comments had started out as casual suggestions, but more recently had evolved into mandates cleverly disguised in the form of one part concern mixed with three parts “Man, you’d better get it together soon.”

Stangley had stacked his bereavement leave, vacation and sick benefits end to end and, having exhausted them all, was now at risk of ruining his career. No matter how terrifying the prospect of moving forward in the world seemed, Stangley needed to do it.

His first assignment since his wife died had taken him to the Kennedy Space Center, where he attended the STS-107 pre-launch press conference, watched the launch, then wrote an article for the New York Times describing the launch and the mission objectives. Stangley had seen more than 80 shuttle launches in person, so the assignment asked very little from someone with his experience.

Stangley had traveled to the Cape and surrounding areas so often that he and his wife Claire had seriously considered buying a second home in Cocoa Beach. But that turned out to be just an idea, an unrealized dream, something they had talked about long before she became ill.

Stangley had been a mainstay of the science-reporting community for decades and a regular on CNN as their Senior Science Correspondent. He was a familiar face to millions of viewers, who had become accustomed to his use of fancy graphics and models to explain a story. Following the Challenger accident, a grieving nation had looked to him for comfort—they felt he could help them understand what went wrong.

Nearly a year had passed since Stangley’s last television broadcast, longer still since his last newspaper article. He had been gone so long now that no one was asking where he was or what had happened to him; the inquires had stopped. People had moved on.

Columbia was in space, and Stangley had written his article—his work was finished. Now came the hard part: facing the familiar surroundings of Cocoa Beach