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Lifting body (2)
Apollo and lifting bodies
July 13, 1975
Music: Ozzy Osborne, Crazy train.
That night in Mojave, Story England was sleeping at the wheel of his Corvette, under the Milky Way scarred sky. He usually dreamed of naked women, but that night was different. He had a vivid dream of a handful of different spaceships flying in formation.
He was looking through the porthole of what was apparently an Apollo floating in orbit. He was looking at Skylab, the space station growing bigger and bigger. And suddenly he found himself aboard the station docking assembly, and he found he was wearing a pressure suit.
He floated through the tunnel, in the direction of a docking hatch. He vaguely remembered the orbital workshop had two ports, one for Apollo, the other only to be used in an emergency. Suddenly he was frightened; he didn't knew where Apollo was, how he had ended there, and whether he was in danger or not. The tunnel was dark and cold, and the docking hatch was gaping, wide open on the empty space – another anomaly.
He really had to look through that damn hole, and so he did, and now he found an old friend hanging there – a X-24 lifting body. Every detail was neatly drew, the flat underside, the pointed nose, the small ailerons that stuck out of the fat-assed body. On top of that was a small, translucent bubble: the canopy was wide open, as if the little machine waited for a pilot.
The next sequence in his dream had him sat in the cockpit with the canopy closed and the X-24 flying away from the workshop. And suddenly the Apollo was there again, flying in formation with him.
Story England was living a dream, a dream that, to date had only been embodied in theatre or in literature. That dream – or was it a nightmare ? - was called Marooned. Apollo closed from the X-24; the diminutive, unwinged aircraft gleamed silver against the blue of Earth. Story waved at the pilot, who raised a gloved thumb in answer - everything's A-OK.
The big, silvered Apollo backed-down in slow motion, flying around the lifting body in close formation, checking it out a last time. Now a pilot rather than an astronaut, Story felt a pinch to his heart as he watched his mothership move to a safe distance. When he glanced upwards thirty seconds later, Apollo was already much higher. Now he had to bring the thing down to the Cape – or to Edwards if weather decided otherwise.
In his dream, Story England could see how air started to bite at its ablative heatshield. He had to perform a series of banks to carry some of this heat way - four of them, carefully spaced. As he enjoyed the fiery inferno outside its fragile cockpit, he thought about the defunct shuttle.
It should have been like this, he thought, except that I wouldn't be alone; we would be six or eight, and behind my back I would have had a big payload bay crammed with satellites brought back to Earth for refurbishment.
He was smiling under his helmet – or perhaps at the wheel of his car. The ride was exhilarating. After perhaps ten minutes the lifting body gently touched down on Edwards runway.