Zero Gee

Zero Gee

By Ben Bova

The bone-rattling roar and vibration of liftoff suddenly died away. Sitting in his contour seat, scanning the banks of dials and gauges a few centimeters before his eyes, Kinsman could feel the pressure and tension slacken. Not back to normal. To zero. He was no longer plastered up against his seat, but touching it only lightly, almost floating in it, restrained only by his harness.

It was the fourth time he had felt weightlessness. It still made him smile inside the cumbersome helmet.

Without thinking about it, he touched a control stud on the chair’s armrest. A maneuvering jet fired briefly and the poderous, lovely bulk of planet Earth slid into view through the port in front of Kinsman. It curved huge and serene, blue, mostly, but tightly wrapped in the purest, dazzling white of clouds, beautiful, peaceful, shining.

Kinsman could have watched it forever, but he heard sounds of motion in his earphones. The tow women were sitting behind him side by side. The spacecraft cabin made a submarine look roomy: the three seats were shoehorned in among racks of instruments and equipment.

Zero gee. Photo d'Elena.

Jill Meyers, who came to the astronaut program from the Aerospace Medical Division, was officially second pilot and biomedical officer. And chaperon, Kinsman knew. The photographer, Linda Symmes, was simply a passenger.

Kinsman’s earphones crackled with a disembodied link from Earth. « AF-9, this is ground control. We have you confirmed in orbit. Trajectory nominal. All systems go.”

«Check,” Kinsman said into his helmet mike.

The voice, already starting to fade, switched to ordinary conversational speech. “Looks like you’re right on the money, Chet. We’ll get the orbita parameters out of the computer and have ’em for you by the time you pass Ascension. You probably won’t need much maneuvering to make rendezvous with the lab”.

“Good. Everything heere on the board looks green.”