The mission rules were clear enough. In the event of a failure like this at such a point in the launch, Conlig, as Booster, should push his abort switch. The little icon representing the Saturn continued to deviate from its path. But…

But the deviation wasn’t as bad as it had looked at first. And there clearly wasn’t any tumbling.

The S-NB was a smart bird. It could exert a lot of control over its trajectory by gimbaling its engine bells. It looked as if the booster was doing all it could to keep to its target path. The trajectory was still under control.

Conlig forced himself to reply to Donnelly. “Uh, Flight, Booster.”

“Jesus Christ, Booster. Go.”

Conlig took a deep breath. “Flight, Booster. We seem to have good control at this time.”

Then calls began to come in from the other controllers: Guidance, flight dynamics, the systems guys in the row behind Conlig. Apart from the oscillation around the trajectory, everything was performing nominally.

Donnelly said: “You sure, Booster?”

Are you really sure you have this bird under control? Are you sure you shouldn’t ask for an abort?

Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Conlig?

Conlig felt as if the room, the world, was closing in around him; the headset seemed to burn on his ears, and the little Saturn icon on the plot board was like an image of his own wavering determination.

I should abort. But the thing is flying.

“You sure, Booster?” Donnelly pressed.

“Data indicates it, Flight.”

“Roger.” I’ll trust you, Conlig.

Conlig stared at the icon, willing it to keep on climbing, up toward orbit.

He knew it was in nobody’s interests to abort if they didn’t have to.

The burn lasted two and a half minutes. Apollo-N was boosted five miles higher and another 250 miles downrange.

Then the S-NB stage shut down its NERVA engine.

Jones read off the DSKY display before him. “Natalie, you can tell the boys at Marshall that their rascally bird performed beautifully. Except that we’ve ended up in orbit ass-backwards.”

“Roger,” York replied laconically. “I’ll relay that, Chuck; thanks.”

Mike Conlig was aware of Natalie sitting, as capcom, just a few yards away from him.

I should have aborted. But I didn’t. I got away with it.

He didn’t turn; he didn’t want to meet Natalie’s eyes.

Donnelly felt some of the tension drain out of him.

He went around the horn, polling his controllers; they all reported a ship that was, in spite of everything, reasonably close to nominal. We got through it. How, I’ll never know.

Bert Seger knew they had been lucky. He determined to poke a hot stick up the asses of those guys from Marshall over this. The S-IC had pogoed. The Saturn first stage should not be letting them down, not after more than a decade of experience, not after so many flights.

Seger walked into the MOCR and leaned over Donnelly’s station. “I want you to make damn sure you’re confident about that NERVA engine of Marshall’s. Otherwise, bring those guys straight back down.”

Friday, November 28, 1980

APOLLO-N; LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

They shoved their pressure suits into net bags and crammed them under their couches; Jim Dana was wearing only a pair of Beta-cloth coveralls over his long johns.

He was a hundred miles up, a thousand miles downrange from the Cape, and covering five miles every second. There in his center couch, his feet pointed up at the stars, he was peering at his home planet through the Command Module’s window.

He couldn’t get over how beautiful the sunlit Earth was. It was a wall of color and light, gently curving, which divided the universe in two; cloud lay across land and ocean in brilliant white plumes, like feathers.

Ben Priest, to Dana’s right, was grinning at him. “How do you feel?”

“Like I was born to be up here.”

Chuck Jones unbuckled his seat belt and pushed himself out of the left-hand couch. He floated up toward the instrument panel. “Hot dawg,” he said. “We is in orbit, gentlemen. Welcome to the astronaut corps. Now all we’ve got to do is figure out if we can stay here.”

Priest and Jones set to work on checking out the craft’s flight path and velocity estimates with the ground stations and instrumentation aircraft. Dana could hear Jones humming as he worked. Meanwhile, Dana’s job was to make sure the guidance platform was aligned.

He floated up into the air and folded back his couch, the center of the three. In microgravity, the cramped cabin seemed roomy. Dana pushed a fingertip against an instrument panel; it was enough to launch him slowly down past the others into the equipment bay under the couches.

He drifted among coolant pipes and storage compartments. There was room to stretch out, for the first time since the launch, with his feet by the hatch and his head pointing at the floor. As he stretched he felt twinges at his stomach, chest, and knees: the aftermath of the pogoing. It was actually less painful than he’d expected; his pressure suit had evidently protected him.

Dana floated down to the Inertial Measuring Unit. The guidance device was a metal sphere the size of a beach ball. Inside the casing a platform was maintained in position by three nested spheres. The whole thing was like a table on a boat, gimbaled to remain level regardless of the boat’s heeling. The system was the spacecraft’s way of being able to sense where it was relative to a reference trajectory.

Checking the alignment was a routine chore; it was a checklist item on every flight. But there was a big fear that the pogoing and wild gyrations Apollo-N had suffered during the launch might have thrown the platform out of line.

To align the platform Dana had to take sightings on various stars through a small optical telescope and sextant. The idea was to pick a couple of stars from a standard list, then tell the spacecraft to find them. If the star wasn’t exactly centered in the crosshairs of the telescope, Dana would make an adjustment to correct it, and the computer would enter the adjustment into the platform, which would then reset itself.

He selected the constellation of Orion, with its distinctive three-star belt across the middle. He shielded his eyes more carefully from the glare of the Earth and the cabin lights, and he pointed the ’scope where he knew Orion ought to be. At last he made out the three faint dots, and bright Sirius nearby, right where they were supposed to be…

He grinned. The alignment was fine. Maybe the worst was over, and the rest of the flight was going to work out.

After all, the first objective of the flight test had already been achieved: to prove that the S-NB could loft itself, and a crewed spacecraft, into orbit. From here on out the mission was to show that NERVA could safely be restarted several times. During the week-long flight Apollo-N would be sent on thin, elliptical orbits, looping a hundred thousand miles into space — halfway to the Moon.

There would be plenty of science to do, with an extreme ultraviolet telescope, helium observations, high-altitude atmospheric studies, and Earth observation and photography; there was equipment inside the Command Module, and various external experiments and sensors stored in an instrument bay in the Service Module. But the science was nominal, Dana knew. The real purpose of this mission was simple: make sure the damn NERVA works, and can be controlled from the spacecraft, without smearing nuclear waste all over everything.

When he’d taken his star readings, he used the sextant to measure the angle between two fixed stars. It was a check of the platform’s memory; Dana had to get his calculations to agree to within a ten-thousandth of a percentage point: the goal, in fact, was to get five balls, a perfect reading of .00000 on the star angle comparison.