Hearing that the Nighthawk had passed Max Q reduced Gowdy’s anxiety a bit. Many things could still go wrong, catastrophically wrong, but the largest hurdle had been cleared.
He glanced down to the middle tier of the amphitheat
er-style room. That level was the domain of the flight director. In this case, an Air Force Colonel named Frank Hansen. Hansen was a steely-eyed veteran of thirty years, a former fighter jock and test pilot who’d survived two ejections and a crash in his time and was now head of the 9th Space Operations Squadron.
Hansen turned, made eye contact and offered a nod. So far, so good.
Among all the controllers and system specialists and experts, Hansen was the only man in the room—aside from Gowdy himself—who understood just what a monumental risk they were taking. And if Gowdy measured him right, Hansen was just as nervous.
Hansen pressed his intercom switch. “Give me a status update,” his calm voice called out.
Down on the lowest level of the room, the individual systems controllers went into action. Each of them had one thing to worry about; guidance, telemetry, propulsion, etc. . . . Like the front row in a movie theater, their positions made watching the main screen a neck-craning exercise, but since every bit of information they needed was displayed on smaller monitors directly in front of them, they rarely looked up until their tasks were done.
Gowdy sat back and listened as the stream of replies poured in over the loop, his finger continuing to drum.
“Telemetry: Go.”
“Electrical: Go.”
“Flight controls: Go.”
On it went, each man or woman reporting, confirming good news, until all the controllers had reported in but one.
An awkward pause ensued. Down below, Hansen waited and then pressed the button on his transmitter. “Guidance, what’s your status?”
There was no response.
“Guidance?”
The room went deathly quiet. Gowdy’s finger stopped its tapping. In all the simulations, he’d never heard a delay, not even a few seconds. He stood up, gazing down over the rail toward the bottom row, where the guidance controller sat.
A young airman with a crew cut was working furiously, typing and tapping things on his keyboard, switching screens.
“Guidance?” Hansen called out. “I need a response.”
“Guidance is go,” the airman finally replied, “but we’re seeing a delay in the repeat.”
Because the Nighthawk was a pilotless craft and controlled remotely from Vandenberg, the system had been designed to repeat every instruction back to control center before executing a maneuver, much in the way a pilot repeated the instructions to air traffic control to make sure everyone was on the same page.
Gowdy tapped his own intercom button, which went directly, and privately, to Hansen. “What’s happening? What does it mean?”
“A delay in the repeat could be anything,” Hansen replied. He spoke with a practiced indifference. “It could mean a problem processing the command, an error on our end, or even—”
Before anything else could be said, the Telemetry controller spoke up. “Telemetry is yellow. Signal intermittent.”
On the big screen with the numbers, two boxes had begun flashing yellow alarms; a third began to flash red.
“Course deviation detected,” the tracking controller said. “Two degrees south and turning . . . Five degrees and turning . . .”
Gowdy felt his throat clench up. He buzzed Hansen again. “What’s happening?”
Hansen was too busy to reply and Gowdy turned his gaze back to the screen. The Nighthawk’s projected line had begun to curve, angling to the right, away from California and toward Central America.
“Eleven degrees south and still turning,” the guidance controller said. “Speed dropping, descent arrested. Altitude maintaining nine-one thousand.”
Gowdy could hardly believe his eyes. Instead of descending as planned, the Nighthawk was leveling off at ninety-one thousand feet and losing speed because of it. Since the craft was a glider at this point, it was imperative that it maintain the proper descent profile; otherwise, it would bleed off so much speed that it would no longer be able to reach California.
Gowdy felt his legs shaking. He gripped the rail in front of him with one hand while the other went into his pocket, fumbling for a key.