The harbor’s entrance had been dredged and widened as ships got bigger, and the USS New Orleans, a flat-topped amphibious assault ship, required at least 30 feet of depth. As she exited Pearl Harbor and cleared Hammer Point, headed out to sea, she came left to exactly 154 degrees to stay in the center of the 1,000-foot-wide channel. Captain Bob Carius, standing by the forward windows of the conning tower, was relieved to see the depth sounder fall away rapidly, from 50 to 100, and then to over 1,000 feet as they cleared the island’s shore. The brief stay at Pearl had been pleasant for the crew after a nine-month cruise, helping with Philippine flood relief and de-mining the coastal waters of North Vietnam as the last American combat troops were finally leaving. But he was looking forward to the tasking they’d received.
The New Orleans was sailing to recover the Apollo 18 crew.
Captain Carius wasn’t sure what the post-Vietnam era was going to mean for the Pacific Fleet, but the New Orleans had acquitted herself well, and helping to bring the Apollo astronauts home was a definite feather in their cap. He’d even heard that Al Shepard, the first American in space and a Navy Rear Admiral, was going to be aboard to see the splashdown.
They passed the red and green harbor entrance buoys, and he relaxed, walking around the bridge, looking out at his ship. Most of the 700 crewmen had come up onto the large, flat deck as they’d left port, and he’d had the Apollo rescue helicopters proudly positioned on the bow to let everyone know where they were going. The maintainers had made sure that the Sikorsky SH-3A Sea Kings were freshly painted bright white, and the crews of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron SIX had been practicing recovery procedures for several weeks.
They’d been waiting at Pearl for the exact location of the splashdown, and now NASA had given the Navy the coordinates: 300 miles north and a bit west of Oahu. An easy sail out, a little over a day to do final preparations on station, and they’d be ready.
Fun, really. Deploy the helos as soon as the capsule was under parachute, drop divers into the water next to it at splashdown, attach the flotation ring and help the crew into the rescue raft, hoist them aboard the New Orleans and welcome them back to Earth.
Unless something went wrong. He’d gotten a detailed briefing while in port, and he’d been running over his crew’s readiness for multiple scenarios. There’d been storms in Apollo 11’s planned landing area, and the rescue ship had to steam full-speed to meet the capsule hundreds of miles downrange. The Apollo 12 capsule had hit a wave hard at splashdown and an internal camera had broken loose; it hit an astronaut in the head, knocking him out. The ship’s doctor had to give him six stitches. Apollo 15 had vented caustic hypergolic fuel that had melted parachute lines, collapsing one of its three canopies. And several capsules had landed upside down in the water, and the crew needed to quickly inflate emergency flotation balls to right them. From the briefing it was clear that Apollo 18 had had its share of serious trouble already, but he was confident that his ship and crew could deliver. They’d proven themselves on this cruise, in both war and peacetime, and they still had a couple of days for final polish. No matter what NASA threw at them, they’d be ready.
Carius leaned forward and looked up at the blue Hawaiian sky. This one should be a piece of cake.
Under the hot Sun on the surface of the Moon, Lunokhod was dying. Like a child with an uncontrollable fever, it was slowly shutting down internally, less and less capable to survive its own rising body heat.
Gabdul had worked frantically to try to save it just before the Apollo craft had lifted off. He’d alternated between driving and braking as violently as he could, trying to dislodge the layer of dust on the radiator, all while moving as close to the lander as possible, hoping its rocket blast might scour the flat surface clean. The team had talked quickly about the risk of debris damage, but it didn’t matter. If they couldn’t clear the dust, their mission was over.
They’d sent commands to close the camera covers just before liftoff, squinting their rover’s eyes against the sandblast. But the light upper stage had left the surface so fast that it had blown only a little of the sand off; the rate of heating had slowed, but it hadn’t stopped.
Gabdul had announced one last idea hurriedly, and had clicked the eyes back open while mashing the hand controller to full speed. His team had mapped a small, steep-sided crater a couple hundred meters away that they’d steered around on the way to the landing site. Now he was driving directly at it.
“I need the best timing countdown you can give me. Start at ten!” he urgently told his navigator. They needed to guess exactly right as they watched the new images slowly process, blurred with the bouncing motion, delayed by the enormous distance.