Houston, Is There a Problem? by Eric Walters

Author:Eric Walters [Walters, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781459828759
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

We stood in our bathing suits—official NASA suits that even had the little emblem—on the deck of the pool. This was the second time in the past two weeks that I’d stood on the side of a pool. It wasn’t just a pool, though. It was the biggest indoor pool I had ever seen. It was long and wide and deep. They told us it was forty feet deep at this end of the pool. Peering through the distortion of the water I could see what we were told was an exact, life-size copy of part of the International Space Station—where we were going to live if we made it to space.

I could make out blurry shapes of astronauts in full space suits below the surface, doing simulated work on the simulated space station. We’d be doing that eventually, but there was a hitch. They didn’t have space suits in our sizes. It would be at least two weeks. It seemed scary enough to think about going down there to train—so what was space going to be like?

I felt a shiver go through my whole body. What was I doing here? Technically I knew why we were here. We’d been training for the past hour to prepare us. Just the four of us—Colonel Sanderson was along with us—and the two instructors on the deck and the two scuba divers sitting on the edge of the pool.

One of the instructors got ready to test the machine again. It was an airplane cockpit—well, the cut-off front of an airplane, at least. It sat at the top of a set of rails connected to the flight of stairs we’d have to climb to get inside of it. We’d spent the morning in class with the two instructors telling us what was going to happen. We’d listened, learned and then taken a written test.

“Clear!” one of the instructors yelled.

The machine slid down the rails, splashed into the pool, throwing water into the air, and then flipped upside down and quickly sank toward the bottom. My stomach flipped along with it. The next time it went down, one of us would be inside.

“The secret is to remain calm as you sink,” the instructor said. “You can’t force open the door until the pressure between the outside and inside has neutralized. Houston, how is the pressure neutralized?”

“By the inside being flooded with water.”

“Exactly. And do you undo your safety harness before that happens?” he asked. “Ashley?”

“No. The harness holds you in place until you’re floating inside the cockpit. When the chamber is almost completely filled, you push the center release button, pop off the cockpit lock and swim to the surface.”

He nodded his head. “I think you three have absorbed the lesson. Any questions?”

“Why are we pretending to be in a plane crashing into the ocean when we’re heading into space?” Teal asked.

“Does somebody else wish to answer that?”

“At splashdown, at the end of our space trip, we could end up underwater,” Ashley said.

“And?” the instructor asked.

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