Wham! The crew was thrown forward against their straps as the four big engines stopped and the now-empty rocket body separated.
Slam! They were snapped back into their seats like they’d been rear-ended as the second stage lit, five new engines exploding into life.
“Holy shit!” Luke exclaimed. He’d been warned by previous crews of the violence of staging, but it was far more physical than he’d anticipated. Like crashing into a wall.
“Looks like we got all five,” Michael reported. The second-stage engines had lit properly, settling in to their six-minute push to near-orbital speed.
The NASA Public Affairs announcer spoke: “Apollo 18 now forty-six nautical miles in altitude, eighty nautical miles downrange. Coming up on tower jettison.”
They no longer needed the nose-mounted rocket that had been poised to yank the capsule off the Saturn V in an emergency close to the ground. A small rocket in its tip fired for a second and pulled it clear, and it tumbled, unused, into the ocean.
The flash of the tower separating reminded Luke that they were now 50 miles above the surface—the imaginary line where the US Air Force had decided Earth’s atmosphere legally ended. His thumb slid past the critical altitude in his checklist. “Congratulations, fellas, welcome to space! We’re officially astronauts!”
“About frickin’ time,” Chad muttered.
The spectacle of the launch was magnificent from the Captain’s ringside seat aboard the Kavkaz. As the American rocket rose off the pad, his men had broken into spontaneous cheers, and then again as they heard its rumble nearly a minute later. Their binoculars and cameras pivoted as one, tracking as it climbed almost perfectly vertically and then started to pitch over and head on its way.
A frown crossed the Captain’s face as he studied the rocket through his own binoculars. He’d positioned the ship almost perfectly east of the launch pad so the rocket would pass directly overhead. Instead, it was accelerating unexpectedly to the right, moving north.
The sensors mounted on the antenna towers on his ship were grabbing multiple frequencies, including transmissions from the ascending rocket. His optical sensors were also tracking the bright light of its engines. He turned to his communications officer. “Do you have a solid directional lock on the rocket’s transmissions?”
“Da.”
“Get me their launch azimuth.”
The comms officer set to work. He rapidly plotted the angle and estimated distance to the ascending Saturn V from the ship, building a series of points on his chart. He wished they also had a radar lock on the rocket, but they were restricted from pulsing energy at it. Still, with enough plot points, he should be able to figure out where Apollo 18 was headed. He expected the resulting line to be mostly easterly, like all previous Apollo launches. But as he added pencil marks, he stared at his chart: there was no denying the data. This line was tracking northeast.
As soon as he was certain he had it right, he aligned the straight edge of his chart protractor through the points, averaging the dispersion. He smoothly drew a pencil line on the chart, angling up from the Florida coast. He extended the line, and was intrigued to see it ran almost parallel to the coast of the Carolinas.
Flipping his protractor around, he took an accurate reading of the angle as it crossed the latitude and longitude grid lines. He sat back briefly and visualized the extended line all the way to the equator. He checked his numbers, and turned to report. The calculation had taken him less than 90 seconds.
“Tell me,” the Captain said.
“Apollo 18 launched out of the Kennedy Space Center inclined at fifty-two degrees, meaning it was tipped fifty-two degrees from the equator.” The comms officer had worked with the Soviet satellite fleet, and knew what that meant. “The same orbital inclination as our launches from Baikonur.”
The Captain nodded. “Prepare an encrypted message for immediate LF transmission to HQ in Severomorsk,” he said. He dictated the message, proofread the officer’s transcription and signed off for urgent transmission, warning his communications officer, “Keep this information to yourself.”
He turned back to stare at the sharp trail of smoke in the sky. Where are you going, my fellow captain? Are you truly a moonship? Or do you have some other star to guide you?
“18, Houston. You are GO for orbit—GO for orbit.”
They were 1,100 miles from Kennedy, 110 miles above the Earth, still accelerating.
“Glad to hear those words, Houston,” Chad replied. The second stage had done its work perfectly, and the third stage was now in the fine-tuning phase that would deliver them to the exact altitude and speed needed for their intercept of Almaz. They’d been rocketing for over 11 minutes, and this final stage was carefully pushing them with just a little over half a g.