Opening Scene:

      The space-shuttle 'Major Grissom', having just entered lunar orbit, tumbled slowly on her long axis; this to bring her into a tail-first attitude in preparation for descent to the surface. Colonel Elizabeth May Chatley, piloting the one man transport ship, sat easily in the command seat monitoring the attitude control computers as they executed this routine maneuver. To keep her mind off the eerie shadows these attitude changes always cast about the ships interior she focused her attention on the moon above. For Colonel Chatley, these last few minutes before beginning the landing sequence were always the most anxiety provoking part of the flight. Backing a two hundred foot long spacecraft down onto the lunar surface atop a 500,000 foot-pound controlled explosion while simultaneously decelerating from 4,000 kilometers per hour to zero feet per second just at the precise moment of touch-down was the most demanding challenge in space flight. At these times she often found the ghostly multiple images reflecting off the faceted nose of the ship unnerving.

      Colonel Chatley was Lunar Commands finest performer. The organization's notorious colorblindness to her ancestorily black skin was precisely why she had chosen a life and career with Lunar Settlement One in the first place and she had indeed flourished here. Upon graduation from Annapolis Liz had been posted directly to the Naval Aviator's Flight Training Facility at Pensacola Florida. After flight training she had served two years in the Mediterranean flying atmospheric fighters off the decks of the Eisenhower before receiving the posting she'd been working towards her entire life; Lunar Command and space flight.

      Just two years after arriving at Lunar Settlement One Liz had been promoted to Major and given her own wing to command. Two years more and she had won her Colonel's Eagles and been appointed 1st Officer. In the six years she had been running shuttles between the Earth-orbiting Space Station Freedom and LS1 she had never experienced even an anomalous incident, much less and accident. She was acknowledged without challenge as the best pilot in Lunar Command. The 'Major Grissom', however, did not share such an illustrious record.

      This ship, much like it's namesake, had a history of minor mishaps and systems failures and had once suffered serious damage from toppling over onto its side on the landing pad. The incident had ruptured the Grissom's cargo bay spilling its contents out across the lunar landscape. Fortunately, it had been a freight hop. Had the ship been configured for passengers any aboard would certainly have died. No explanation for the accident had ever been found and many considered the Grissom just plain unlucky. The ship was the constant butt of bad jokes, and, on more than one occasion, pilots assigned to fly her had mysteriously come down with the 'Grissom flu' on the morning of their scheduled launch. Liz had flown her many times and had never experienced one of the Grissom's tantrums. Still, she always felt uncomfortable in her.

      She debated whether to roll the Grissom upright (in relation to the moon), or leave the ship up-side-down for descent. Technically, it made no difference. Liz simply felt more comfortable starting her landings heads-up and looking at the stars; she thought it bad enough the laws of physics demanded landing on the moon be performed backwards without adding up-side-down to the equation. And on this day there were passengers aboard. All of the nine members of the Lunar Settlement Council were tucked into their acceleration couches in the passenger configured cargo bay two stories below her. They had come on-board in a less than jovial mood after the three days of meetings with the corporate types they had gone to Freedom to see and she didn't wish to upset them further with anything other than a perfectly smooth landing. She decided to roll the ship upright.

      Liz waited for the attitude control computer to complete the pitch maneuver, then punched in the parameters for a roll. The catastrophe began the moment she hit the "Execute" button.

      As was her habit, Liz had elected the clockwise roll thruster. It makes no difference which direction one rolls a spaceship, it's a personal preference. Colonel Chatley always rolled right. She was just used to doing it that way. The thruster was programmed to fire for one second, just long enough to start the mass of the ship rotating. Momentum would then carry it around until the ship was one second away from the desired attitude. At that time the opposite thruster would fire for an equalizing one second, stopping the rotation at the desired point. Not exactly rocket science. This was a simple maneuver. But the clockwise thruster did not shut down after the programmed one second and the opposing counter-clockwise thruster never fired at all. As the hard-luck "Major Grissom" rolled faster and faster Liz tried every emergency procedure she knew--and she knew them all--but nothing she did had any effect. The thruster just kept firing, steadily increasing the ship's roll rate.

      Having exhausted her on-board options Liz struggled against the rapidly building G-forces to punch up Lunar Control on the com system and keyed her mike. "Lunar Control, this is the Major Grissom. I am declaring an emergency, over." Silence. . . She tried again. "Lunar control, this is Colonel Chatley aboard the Grissom. I am declaring an emergency! I have a malfunction in my attitude control system. You must initiate a ground controlled approach and landing ASAP. DO YOU READ?" Still, silence. . . She glanced over at the com system panel on the bulkhead to her right and, without speaking, dropped her thumb on the mike button several more times. The "TRANSMITTING" indicator did not light-up.

      Liz Chatley was not one to panic in a tight spot. She had survived several while flying atmospheric fighters off of the Eisenhower, always by keeping her head when things got sticky. But she found her current situation quite unbelievable. Sure, the Grissom suffered the occasional hiccup, but a simultaneous multiple systems failure of this magnitude was unprecedented. There had to be some kind of outside agency at work here. This kind of thing just didn't happen aboard a top-of-the-line Lunar Command space shuttle. This had to be sabotage!

      The rotationally created G-forces had now reached a level that made any further efforts on her part impossible. Liz routed her "I am declaring an emergency" message into the auto repeating transmitter and then pulled her restraints up as tight as she could get them. She controlled her fear by concentrating on the most recent blow-up with her fiancee (better to be angry than frightened, she thought), and waited calmly for Lunar Approach Control to recognize the Grissom's predicament and take control of the ship from the ground. But on the space traffic control radar screens below the duty officer saw only the images of a routine approach of the twice-weekly shuttle from Space Station Freedom and did nothing.

      As the Grissom's roll-rate continued to increase the heavier stern of the ship began to wobble in the yaw axis, initiating a cone shaped overall motion. This wobble rapidly increased to the point where precession began to also affect the ship in the longitudinal axis. In less than a minute the ship was tumbling crazily out of control in all three directions as the rates of roll, pitch, and yaw were steadily accelerated by the continuing fire of the offending thruster. The increasing pitch rate allowed the heavier stern to whip the nose mounted control cabin around the ship's aft positioned center of gravity at an ever increasing speed. The centrifugal effect of this increasing velocity caused the forward G-forces on Liz's body to build rapidly. At nine G's she blacked out. At fourteen the weight of her head snapped her neck and Colonel Elizabeth Chatley, Lunar Command's brightest star, was lost.

      Two minutes later, right on schedule for descent to the Lunar surface, the main engines fired. The up until now malfunctioning attitude control system still failed to shut down the roll thruster but performed flawlessly in controlling the mains; firing them each time the Grissom tumbled into proper alignment with the flight path and then shutting them off as the ship swung past this proper alignment. The net effect was to slow the Grissom enough to cause it to fall out of orbit but not nearly enough to bring it to a stop at the moment of landing. The horrendous impact of the ensuing high velocity crash first utterly destroyed the Grissom and then, in Luna's light gravity and absence of atmosphere, proceeded to scatter the ill-fated ship's pieces, parts, and personnel across two-hundred square kilometers of the moon's most tranquil sea.

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© Gary M. Pinkston, 1997.