“Agreed. Accept. It’s going in.” Chad pushed the keyboard button.
This is happening! I’m going to land on the Moon!
Chad heard static in his headset, and then Kaz’s voice from Mission Control, 250,000 miles away.
“Bulldog, Houston. You’re GO at five, and your fuel quantity looks good here.”
Five minutes since they’d started descent. Kaz checked the clock. Seven minutes to go.
In the front row of consoles, the engineers were having an urgent discussion with the experts in their back room over signs of a steadily building navigation error. The Flight Dynamics Officer spoke his concern. “FLIGHT, FDO. Tracking shows they’re going to land 3,000 feet south of track.”
Damn! Gene Kranz cursed. We can’t afford to be that far off! “CAPCOM, give them a heads-up they’ll need to steer that out manually.”
Kaz agreed. “Bulldog, guidance is taking you half a mile left into the foothills.”
Chad had been looking ahead at the planned landmarks and had noticed the trend as well. “Yeah, the mountains aren’t quite where I expected. I’ll redesignate.”
In training he had repeatedly flown a robotic camera over a 15-by-15-foot model of the Moon, built by the US Geological Survey. It was a relief how familiar the actual view out the window looked. Carefully rotating his hand controller, he set the roll angle that would align the window marks with the correct reference craters. He watched to confirm the computer had accepted the update, and snapped his eyes back outside.
Show the world how to fly this thing!
Kaz was watching the downlinked data closely, picturing what Luke would have been telling Chad. “Bulldog, we see the update, and show 5,000 feet, engine at 41.” A mile above the surface, engine at 41 percent power.
“Copy.”
Kaz decided to just give key information to avoid being a distraction. “Two thousand feet, 42.”
“Copy.”
The Flight Director polled the room and heard no objections. All systems GO. Kaz relayed the vital bit of information.
“Bulldog, Houston, you’re GO for landing.”
“Copy, GO for landing.” Chad could feel his heart pounding, even as he kept his fingers light on the controls.
At the SURGEON console, JW smiled. That raised his heartbeat.
“Five hundred feet, eighteen down.” Just 500 feet up now, descending at 18 feet per second. Kaz spoke calmly, clearly.
“Copy.”
“Two hundred fifty feet, eleven, 9 percent fuel remaining, all okay.”
“Copy.”
Svetlana was entranced by the practiced complexity of what was happening. She loved the wonderfully precise demands of the manual task. I wish I were flying this! She could see brown dust starting to blow in all directions below them, pushed away by the engine’s down thrust. Through the hurtling bits, she caught sight of something silver ahead of them.
Chad’s voice had a hint of triumph. “I have the rover in sight.”
“Good to hear. A hundred feet, five.”
The blowing dust was now streaming away below Bulldog, partially obscuring Lunokhod and the horizon. Chad snapped his focus inside the cockpit, eyes flicking across the instruments to keep control and hold the steady descent. He rapidly cross-checked outside, straining to see rocks through the dust storm, evaluating height and forward speed.
Kaz figured he had time for one last transmission. “Fifteen feet, one down, 6 per-cent fuel.”
No response.
Fifteen long seconds ticked by.
Bam! The violence of the impact startled Svetlana. She’d been staring at the instruments, watching the artificial horizon and radar altitude, and was jolted by the sudden force up through her feet. She heard everything rattling in the ship, even through her helmet. She held her breath, waiting for alarms or for the vehicle to tip on a broken leg.
Nothing. Dead quiet. Bulldog sat solidly level. The astronaut was reaching and throwing switches. She leaned to look at his face through his visor. His mouth was curled in a smile, his eyes blazing.
“Houston, Bulldog is on the Moon.”
THE SEA OF SERENITY
43
Simferopol, Soviet Ukraine
The group was clustered around Gabdul’s workstation, all trying to get a good view of his small black-and-white monitor. The vista had been largely unchanged for months: the flat plain of the lava flow in Le Monnier crater, the occasional rock, small craters, the gray of the lunar dust.
Spot, drive, look, repeat. It had become a routine—the geologists seeing something, the drivers maneuvering close, and then the sensors gleaning what information they could. Excellent, methodical science, but not a spectacle everyone would gather excitedly to watch.