Launch on Need Daniel Guiteras (interesting books to read .TXT) 📖

the stack—or the orbiter, external fuel tank, and solid rocket boosters—out to the launch pad for final testing and preparation before the launch.”

He knew he had about 25 days until the launch, which in turn meant he would need 25 days of content.

“What the heck are we going to talk about for 25 days?” Stangley asked himself, letting muffin crumbs fly as he spoke.

Chapter 28

JULIE POLLARD FELT the growing weight of the rescue mission. Pressure on her mounted with each meeting that seemed to create more questions than it answered and each phone call from a department head terrified to take the next step without consulting her first. Each hour seemed to bring a new problem, a new challenge.

But she never flinched, never veered off course.

With all the responsibility that had fallen on her, one might have expected her to falter, expected her legs to buckle or that she would stagger and shudder like a pack burro adjusting to the weight of added parcels.

But she didn’t; it just wasn’t her style.

Pollard had completed her five-minute warm-up jog and had stopped on a patch of grass to perform her stretches. She became aware of yesterday’s perfume—subtle, powdery, floral—which had been reactivated by the glistening rivulets at her throat. It’s a super-efficient cooling system, great for running, she thought, but in the desert I’d be dead in an hour.

She took off running, reaching her cruising speed by her tenth step. Nothing hurt, nothing felt tight—each step progressing without opposition, spring-loaded propulsion, effortless.

All systems were go!

Running was her lifesaver. She knew that. Since the moment Columbia’s wing damage had been confirmed, the hours at work had grown considerably longer, the demands greater.

Pollard had switched to triage mode and had jettisoned everything in her life that took time and focus away from her work—but she had always allowed enough time for her daily run. She knew it went against the work culture at NASA, knew the expectation was that her life should be put on hold until after the rescue effort had ended. But running had become an integral part of her self-discipline, the cornerstone of her mental framework. Running fit so seamlessly into her routine that she suffered no feelings of drudgery from the exercise; it served a basic physiologic need.

She just ran, and made no excuses or attempts to explain her behavior to anyone.

“Flight day seven,” she spoke aloud, as if voice-commanding some digital file system to open where she had left off. It was how she got her mind’s attention—made it focus its powers on a single subject. She had been carefully watching the rescue timeline from both ends—how many days had elapsed and how many were left. The canisters will be empty in twenty-three-and-a-half days, she thought. Every morning during her run, she updated the critical data, checked the status of the rescue plan.

Watch the timeline.

The thought sent a cascading tingle down her spine. But the sensation did not give stall to her flight; rather, it reinforced the notion that she was a doer and not a watcher. Doers take those feelings and run with them, she reminded herself.

She had been careful over the years not to mention to others the thoughts that often swirled in her head. Her private thoughts remained private. She feared others just wouldn’t understand, that they would take her the wrong way, see her as nothing more than a cold, uncaring person, a robot.

People’s lives were on the line, and others’ careers were too. She had remained mindful of this as she helped manage expenditures from NASA’s $6 billion human spaceflight annual budget. She never forgot the magnitude of her responsibility, nor the role she played in keeping teams working together and each mission on schedule.

Crazy as it seemed, her one constant thought—the one she feared revealing the most—was that she actually liked it when things went wrong—not when harm came to person or property, but when problems arose, big scary problems, the kind of problems that sent others cowering.

When things were going smoothly, she practically had to fight off boredom, keep after the throttle to prevent stalling, all the while her brain complaining from inactivity like a Ferrari held up in traffic.

To Pollard, Columbia’s predicament was a treasured cerebral gift, one from which she carefully removed each layer of wrapping, savoring the growing complexity, the ever-increasing stakes.

The rescue mission had a narcotic hold on her, akin to what BASE jumpers feel before stepping off, or the way a firefighter loves a great fire.

Pollard had found herself at the epicenter of a shitstorm, and she was having the time of her life.

Chapter 29

Columbia Flight Day 7

Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2003

STANGLEY LOOKED OUT HIS WINDSHIELD on a line of sight high above the slow-moving line of traffic ahead of him, and saw NASA’s huge vehicle assembly building (VAB) faintly silhouetted against the nearly white morning sky. There were few buildings around for comparison and the flat Atlantic horizon extended to the south. Even the adjacent orbiter processing facility (OPF) seemed small in comparison; so once again he found himself fooled as to the VAB’s incredible size. Stangley had been on the grounds of the Space Center countless times, and still the sight of the VAB always sent a shudder of patriotic excitement through him.

Stangley could not remember seeing so many armed guards in the OPF parking lot before, but he quickly realized that a lot of things were going to be different for this mission. He got out of his car and walked around to the passenger side to get his briefcase. Stangley was not particularly skilled at traveling light, so in his briefcase were his laptop and iPod, a 120GB external hard drive, and 10 DVDs full of his file archives related to everything to do