A white-suited tech was patiently holding the elevator door open. Chad tore his gaze away from the spectacle, trying to fix the image permanently into his memory, and led his crew into the elevator.
The Saturn V stood 363 feet, as tall as a 34-story building. The elevator was designed for freight, with just a framework of metal in place of walls, and the crew watched the rocket flash by as they climbed.
The thick first stage was 33 feet across—so big it couldn’t fit on any road or railcar, and had been brought to KSC from the factory in New Orleans by barge, a thousand-mile trip that had taken 10 days. It was now filled with nearly 5 million pounds of oxygen and kerosene; once the engines lit, it would burn through the fuel at 15 tons a second.
The white skin of the rocket looked rough, as it was covered by a thin coating of ice. The chilled liquid oxygen inside it made the whole rocket cold, and when the humid Florida air condensed on the skin, it froze.
A tall cold one, Luke thought.
The ice would shatter and fall off as the engines lit.
The elevator clattered them up quickly past the black-and-white checkerboard pattern of the wide metal sleeve that protected the five second-stage motors and joined the two rocket segments together. The first stage was going to push with 160 million horsepower, and this hoop of metal had to be strong enough to handle the force and vibration.
As they passed the 20-story mark, the width of the rocket narrowed to the third stage, its hydrogen and oxygen tanks feeding a single engine that would push them out of Earth orbit to the Moon. Like the second stage, it had been built in California; both had traveled to the launch pad by ship through the Panama Canal.
Luke leaned forward and looked down. Whoa! He felt unexpected vertigo. The elevator was slowing as they reached the Command Module level, and he lifted his eyes towards the beach house to settle his gyros. He could see the thin strip of sand just beyond it, pale brown against the Atlantic waves.
The doors opened with a clang. Chad picked up his ventilator pack and strode off first. Michael followed, then Luke, walking along an outer railing and through a gantry door, then out to the final swing arm that led to their spaceship.
Michael leaned his helmet close to Luke’s and yelled, “Like a gangplank!”
Chad had already started down the long, thin walkway of the swing arm. It was 320 feet above the launch pad, a latticework of orange-painted metal, with open sides and top. The metal grid of the floor was covered with rubber mats to block the dizzying view.
Luke yelled back, “You’re next, Michael—now or never!”
At the far end of the walkway was a small, tent-like enclosure nestled against the sloping side of the spaceship. It was covered in white fabric, and, with NASA’s typical artistic flair, it was called the White Room. It was just big enough for the suit techs to get one crewmember ready at a time. When Chad disappeared inside, Michael began walking.
He stayed solidly in the middle to avoid getting buffeted into the siderails by the wind. Like most pilots, he hated heights when he didn’t have wings to support him. He kept his gaze focused on the White Room door at the end, and felt irrationally safer when it opened and he was able to step inside. Chad was already swinging himself into the capsule’s darkened interior.
Luke took a few paces out onto the gantry and looked around while he waited his turn. His eyes followed the long crushed-gravel trail of the giant tracked crawler that had slowly carried the rocketship to the pad. At the far end were the Vehicle Assembly Building and the Launch Control Center; he peered at them, imagining the hundreds of engineers and technicians at their consoles, staring back at him through its windows.
He swung his gaze to the left, and could pick out the flag and crowds at the NASA Press Site. Squinting, he could just see the low, dark rectangle of the digital countdown clock. Farther left, across the water of the Banana River, he could see glinting reflections from the thousands of cars that were parked there, the spectators jockeying for position on the beach. His parents were somewhere in that mass of people, and he raised a hand and waved to them, thinking of how they must be feeling and silently thanking them.
Movement caught his eye, and he realized the door had opened and a tech was waving at him. He hustled down the gantry.
The techs were fast and methodical as they checked Luke’s suit. He handed them his ventilator and lifted his feet individually so they could slip off his protective yellow galoshes. Then he grabbed the handle-bar above the hatch and swung his legs inside, fighting the bulky suit. Chad was already strapped into his seat on the left, and a tech was tightening Michael’s restraint straps on the right. Since Luke would be doing the Almaz spacewalk soon after launch, he was in the center seat, nearest the hatch; it would simplify configuring his umbilical and getting himself efficiently outside. Lifting his weight, Luke slid on his back into place.