“Doing good, Boss. I’ve got my long umbilical attached on the backpack, coiled for you to pay out as I go. Over-gloves and external visor are ready.”
Luke rummaged in a narrow open locker, carefully retrieving a large, square Hasselblad camera with a stubby lens, mounted on a pistol grip. He clipped it into the frame built into the chest of his spacesuit, listening for the click, and then unclipped it and stowed it with his other gear. He reached back into the locker and pulled out yard-long orange bolt cutters. After the mission changed, he and an EVA tech had bought them at a Houston hardware store. They’d wired a small metal ring to one of the handles so Luke could make sure they didn’t float away while he was outside. He tucked the tool under a bungee next to the camera.
Michael had unfolded the pull-out page with the communications system schematic from his thick reference checklist and was tracing wire lines on the diagram, looking for possible culprits. “Boss, check my thinking here. Our voice comm problem affected both of us, and only for downlink, so it’s got to be a specific failure in a common location.” He double-tapped a rectangle on the drawing. “My guess is inside the main USB transponder.”
He flipped to a following page. “We can get at it in the avionics bay if we need to, but we’d need to tear things down some to get there.”
Chad thought about it. “Let’s wait and see what Houston says.” He checked his watch. “Speaking of which.”
Right on cue, a voice cut in on the cabin speaker. “Apollo 18, this is Houston via White Sands, how do you read?”
“Houston, I have you loud and clear.” Chad paused. “How me?” The crew collectively held their breath.
“18, Houston, you’re weak but readable. We’re just confirming tracking now, will have the Almaz rendezvous burn pad up to you shortly.”
“Copy, Houston.” Weak but readable was good enough for now.
Gene Kranz wanted everyone in Mission Control to hear what he was about to say. “Everybody, listen up. This is FLIGHT. Give me a green when you’re ready.” He had a multicolored matrix on his console, with one small square for each officer in the room. When they each pushed the green button on their desks and Gene saw all lights turn to green on his, he knew he had everyone’s undivided attention.
“INCO, talk to me. What’s the workaround for 18’s comm problem?” With the first maneuvering burn rapidly approaching, the room needed answers.
“FLIGHT, it’s a weak signal on their return voice loop,” INCO said. “Looks like a partial short somewhere, likely the connectors or inside the USB transponder box itself. For now, we’ll have workable comms through the big antennas in Madrid and Canberra, as well as stateside. We’ll have everything but return voice through all other sites. Once we get past the Almaz rendezvous and TLI burn, we have crew actions that should fix the problem.”
Gene didn’t like the word “should.”
“INCO, what’s your confidence in the crew repair actions?” Without there being a high probability they could fix the comm malfunction, he didn’t want to fire the big engine that would take the ship out of the relative safety of Earth orbit and send them on an unstoppable three-day voyage across the void to the Moon. Counting three days there and three days back, it was basically a week of the crew’s lives he’d be gambling with. He needed the communications to work.
“FLIGHT, worst case, we’ll have what we just saw through White Sands—weak but readable. As we get farther from Earth it will get better, since we’ll be in range of one or two of the big antennas on Earth all the time. No gaps. Also, deploying the high-gain antenna on Pursuit will help boost the signal.”
Gene nodded. He had one more key question. “Will the Lunar Module have the same problem?”
“Nope, FLIGHT, the LM’s independent.”
Gene looked around the room. “We’re about to talk to 18 again via Madrid, and then we have the first rendezvous burn.” He paused. “Anyone have any concerns?”
Silence.
Not ideal, Gene thought. But we’ve seen far worse. We found a way to get Apollo 13 safely back; we should be able to solve this little problem.
“Good work, INCO,” he said. “Everyone, let’s uplink the rendezvous data ASAP. I’ll be looking for a GO for the burn from each of you as soon as it’s on board.”
Gene raised his eyes to the front screen, watching the white projected image of the Apollo spacecraft crossing the North Atlantic west of Ireland. Just ahead of it was a red rectangle, tracing the same curved path across the globe.