The Mental Breakdown Horizon
It is the end of day one of my ownership of this fine simulator, and so I felt it proper to issue the following:
Dear Exciting Simulations staff,
My husband, among others, would hereby like to formally indict you for abducting me by remote control. Since I have gotten my hands on this lovely, lovely piece of software, I have absconded sleep, nutrition, rest, and even smoking. That's right! You are helping me
quit smoking. And how, you may ask?
I have done nothing but fly shuttles for thirteen and a half hours. Below you will find a brief summary of such, which may initially be used as praise for your handiwork, and eventually as proof of my madness, once I finally give up on reality and move into SSMS full time.
First Contact: Ape Touches Monolith
To say I was overwhelmed upon stepping into the Space Shuttle for the first time would be an understatement.
Now, a cockpit with lots of buttons and twisties and greeblies is hardly a novel thing for myself; twenty years worth of pixel plane experience can attest to that, as can the wide variety of eras in which I have flown my desk, so to speak. Everything, from World War 1 airplanes, generously heaps of paintings bound together with string and lawnmower engines, to modern jet fighters, I've taken a crack at. I am accustomed to the feeling of "oh dear God above, what am I looking at" when I first set foot into a plane, and the process of learning how all those buttons and so forth work is part of the joy of simming - the man-machine nightmare, this layered-upon graphing calculator from Hell, demystifies before your very eyes, and after just a few dozen hours, you're pushing and prising and pressing and twisting away, confident in what meagre skills you have and capable of deconflicting basic streams of incoming information into something readily digestible.
It is with this gusto, fortitude, and frankly
unseen hubris that I approached the Space Shuttle. It is this hubris which drove me to set the simulation difficulty to hard, because who, really, needs a checklist? I know this! I, a professionally flat-brained moron, looked at this machine, one of the most
complex and beautiful things humanity has ever created, put my hands on my hips, and said - "Well, this looks like an airplane, so
surely it must fly like one!"
Not so.
Oh goodness gracious me, not so.
None of the switches meant anything to me. Battery? Sure, we've got those, only it isn't one switch, but a whole panel. GPS? Oh yes, overhead, right there. Why are there three of them?
Lord, why are there three?! What about an APU? Airliners have those, and I know how to fly one, so surely, this has to be-
It was then that the clouds parted and the voice of Sally Ride echoed in my ears for the first time:
"My child," she said to me, "Read the flipping manual."
Unwilling to reject the advice of my betters and blurry-eyed from the shock and awe, I did, in fact, open the manual.
All 1161 pages of it.What have I gotten myself into? And why is my husband looking at me like
he knows that something terrible is about to happen?
STS-1 Launch: Chimp with a Machine Gun
Fine. I have the manual. With a wince and an audible groan of pain, I reduce the simulation difficulty to "medium," and proceed in that way. I have the manual, and then it occurs to me that it is only a digital manual. Real shuttle pilots had paper manuals. Some dark recess of my long-gone puberty suggests that I
am a real shuttle pilot, and therefore, if I must submit to the indignity of being tutorialised, I shall do so on my own terms. An assault on my home printer begins. Some 50 euros in paper later, my desk resembles the aftermath of an aerospace-themed mental breakdown. I begin to sift.
Imagine my surprise when I find out that I don't even need such - the checklist is provided for you in the game. My husband is glowering at me from the couch. I glower back. I shall prove him wrong. These many pages shall be useful still.
Onto the launch.
We begin the sequence. Setting up comms. Alright, fine, transmit/receive, fair enough, move the roller over to Vox, and that's when the giddiness hits.
I have wanted to do this since I was six years old.
I flush the vents, I fiddle with the lights, I kick on the HUD. In-between waiting, I use the time compression. Whilst I had initially promised myself that I would not do so, it occurred to me that the launch sequence is set to an hour and thirty minutes before T-0, and I don't have 90 minutes to spend sitting perpendicular to the ground. Occasionally, overcome by a puerile joy, I giggle to myself, and resist the urge to flail my arms wildly.
I am
in the thing. I am doing
THE thing.
I am doing it well, in fact. I am a productive, busy little bee, and so I spend said minutes comparing what is in the manual to what I am seeing. The CRTs are flooded with numbers and figures, endless arrays of calculations and timers and mathematical equations I was always too dim to fully grasp, but as I am comparing what is printed with what is shown in green and black, I begin to understand. It is a simple game of pieces fitting - component A goes into thingamabob B, and that produces outcome C, and if it does not, well, then we all explode. Fairly sensible, and about as high-stakes as I would expect out of a simulator built around doing
one of the most difficult things imaginable.Nine minutes to. It's the hold. We go through the checks - all the stations report in and so do we; and for the purposes of STS-1, I have body-snatched John Young. Beside me sits a statuesque Mr. Crippen, wide-eyed and stiff and, in my imagination, rigid with terror. Surely, he is aware. Surely, he knows that his colleague, a man with decades of spaceflight experience, has been temporarily vacated and replaced by the intellectual peer of Ham the Chimpanzee. If he could speak, I imagine he would pray.
But where we're going, Mr. Crippen, we don't need prayer.
Eighty seconds. Countdown begins. The tower retracts, and I watch as the dish which holds the central tank in place withdraws. I never imagined, in a million years, that I would be able to experience this from within a simulator of this complexity; the dish retracts and all around me there are a thousand switches and buttons, half of which I have next to no understanding of beyond knowing that they can be actuated, and as the countdown hits zero and the rip-roar of an uncountable quantity of high explosives vaporises any living thing several hundred feet below us and we begin to clear the tower, I once again laugh - only this time, it is not a giggle. It is a madcap laugh, a guffaw of a lunatic riding her desk chair to orbit, and I feel my fingers dig into the armrest, thus bracing me against the imaginary forces. Seven minutes to space, I tell myself, give or take. Seven minutes. The comms flood my ears. Roll complete.
We are climbing, we are, and we rise impossibly quickly and we pierce the blue and it dims into grey-black and finally into the peacable dark of space as stars appear from the depths, the plunge a complete one, headlong and upside-down into a place where there is no up, not in actuality. I am swimming in a lighted sea, tossed and turned and pressed against an infinite, black shore, and through the shuttle window I see the curvature of the Earth and for all the age of this software, the rolling white of clouds and green of landmasses as they mingle and mix with the Atlantic, all of it - it makes me tear up. We are so small, and we have built this, a lead sled without peer, and at once I am overcome with the most bewildering mix of emotions: a desire to float and to laugh and to play in an imaginary Zero Gee, and juxtaposed with it, an equally strong want to headbang to Metallica's 'Ride the Lightning' as I enjoy the sheer
lunacy of this absurd, wonderful piece of technology.
The emotion fades. It does so just in time, as there is work to be done. The main tank has separated. STS-1. The beginning of great things. Mr. Crippen, I say, to nobody - and to a confused stare from my loving husband, still on the couch some ten feet away - let's put her through her paces.
As it turns out, doing so requires me to master the astronaut floating controls first. It takes me half an hour, but sure enough, I go from bumping into things and quietly smushing my face into various panels to being able to control my direction, momentum, and overall destination.
I am doing the thing.We do a whole bunch of mystical, strange actions - something with the APU and then something else with the main tank separation doors, and all this is wrapped in a neat little bow. I keep pausing voraciously, as I need to check the manual and the notes I have begun taking in the interim to make sure I still follow. Sure enough, I do.
The order comes through: open the payload bay doors.
And that is when I have...
the moment.Now, everyone who has ever simmed has had
the moment at least once - it is a second of rousing clarity within which you become aware that you are no longer pushing buttons by the orders of some divine force, each press as mystifying as the next and actuating a thousand unseen levers and circuits, but that you
understand why you are doing this.
For me, this was when I was...well, opening the payload bay doors.
Please, proceed to laugh at me at this juncture: what sort of creature experiences catharsis at the hands of a glorified saloon flap? I mean, sure, it is only the most expensive and complicated saloon flap ever devised by human beings, but the point still stands.
But I do manage to connect it to something in my mind - the latches and their indicators on the screen. I watch as they go from CL to OP one by one, and the checklist suggests that, once all has been said and done, I should unlatch the radiators. I know what those are. I know what they look like and what they're for and I find the switch, and I press it, and only
after do I realise that it was me skipping ahead. Whether it was me glimpsing the checklist earlier and simply memorising what needed to be done without realising or
the moment, I shall leave up to you to decide - either way, it felt
awesome.It is then that I find myself glued to the rear window - the Earth rises from beneath the OMS pods, just behind the tailplane, and across the open payload bay, I once more watch the seas and mountains and dots of cities, all blurry due to age but present in my mind, starkly there, and I grin to myself. I have many, many more missions of this to go. For now, I am floundering. The switches are tools of myth. The vessel I am in is a chariot for mankind's finest, and I am, decidedly, not that. But soon, I'll know. I'll understand. I had
the moment and I will have it again and then it shall become infinitely prolonged, and each second will ring out with a clarity of motion and doing, and a synchronicity between both until I am one with the machine.
I am one with the machine.
STS-1 Descent: Great Balls of Fire
It is forty-five minutes later. I think. I don't know. I can't be sure. In fact, I cannot be sure of anything right this instant. My husband came in at some point, mumbled something about food. I don't remember. There was a slice of pizza in front of me at some point. How did it get there? Oh God, I need to do inputs. ITEM 23 EXEC. ITEM 27 EXEC. I eat the pizza. I lift it to my mouth. OPS 202. There is cheese everywhere.
This isn't a plane. Oh God this is
not a plane. This is something terrible and new and exciting and frightening and the RCS thrusters
respond to my inputs, but I have never in my life thought of a thing being able to move like this, with six degrees of total, beautiful, harrowing freedom. Calm down, I tell myself. Breathe, Belfry. Zeroize. Put the thing on the thing. Calm down and fly the flipping aeroplane. Wait, no - not an aeroplane. Fly the death toaster.
Fly the death toaster.
Re-entry. More procedures. More manuals. Pages. Pizza. I call my husband over. Feed me, Seymour. He blinks.
"Woman, are you alright?"
I turn to speak but all that comes out is procedure, and apparently a squeak, though the latter I cannot verify.
"Well, then."
He leaves, presumably wondering if he should have taken my bursting into tears at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center as a portent of grim things to come. No matter. The love of my life evaporates. So does the couch, the television, the sound of the postal flap as a mailman pushes some letters through for us, the chair and the desk and the pizza and, save for a lone string of cheese under my tongue, I am once more John Young, master and commander of the trackless sea.
Re-entry. Adjust this. Pray it works. Mission control knows. Mission control is aware of what that button does. Just press it. Press it, check the manual later. Press it. I do so.
Next step. I did it. Sometimes, I flip the switch the wrong way, but we remain alive. I need to cycle the O2 systems. I press the switch.
Alarms, blaring lights, a cacophony of instant violence and I seize my mouse, rapdily darting to the front panel. C/W. What on Earth...? I don't have time. I go to the oxygen panel. Retrace your steps, re-do. The checklist. I squint at my screen. The checklist. The alarms are silenced. I am alive. I remain alive.
We are descending. Plasma streaks the windows, glowing red hot and orange and shifting across the panes of thick glass, panes which I am at once praying are thick enough, and beside me the stiff-as-a-board Mr. Crippen says and does nothing. We are going, and we are falling, and we are doing so faster and more quickly than I have ever done in my entire life, down an invisible slope and I can see it on the screen - wait a moment,
I can see it on the screen!Glideslope. Come on, Belfry, you know this. You've done this before. Think of the simulations - North Africa, 1941, a crippled Hurricane with no power and holes in its wings big enough to play golf in, wobbling as you're serpentining towards a small stretch of cleared desert, the window smeared with oil as this one is with the vaporised molecules of air. You are moving at ten times the speed, a hundred times, but it is the same; it is
flight.We break into the atmosphere.
Now, she is an aeroplane again.I mutter something, a ditty to the effect of "Keep it up, you beautiful, white-tiled bitch," and as my hand grips the joystick and sweat runs down my forehead, I lean in and sniff the HUD. There is a caret, and a box, and by God, I am not a smart creature, but I know that the caret goes in the box if you wish to live a long and fruitful life.
Mentally, I am going through the essentials. Keybinds. Wait a moment...
keybinds. I don't have any. This is a sim from 2007. Alt-tabbing will kill it. My manual is in pieces. My notes are elsewhere. I don't have
time.We do a turn, 90 degrees. We follow the slope. On the dot, center the caret, breathe. It is more a heaving sound, but the faith is there. "Looking good, Columbia," mission control says. I am giggling. I am doing the thing.
Runway in sight. It barely looks like a runway. PAPI lights. I align them. Two white, two red. Optimal. Optimal, and somehow such against the grain, and I lower the sick and the HUD lights up with the spot of dirt and I keep it there. Five hundred, Crippen calls out. Three hundred. Two hundred. Airbrakes. I don't know where they are. All-right, I says to myself, no airbrakes. We're doing the movie 'Airplane!' now, only Mr. Crippen is not inflatable. He is a man of flesh and nerves and presumably a lot of tears and snot right about now, and so am I. Gear down. I flip into the 2D hud. Gear down, and released and locked and a thud, a great, walloping
thwap as she touches down.
Weight on nosewheel. B is brake. B is, indeed, brake. I hold it, she slows down. Chute already deployed. I do not remember doing so - I am a creature of pure automatism, neurotransmitters firing in conjunction with the piston-like jabs of my arms and legs and the stick tilts forward, and we are down.
"Welcome home, Columbia."
I fall back in my chair. Deep breaths. We made it, space cow...girl? Something like that. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot my husband.
"It has been thirteen hours," he says, smiling, and I am at once aware that he knows - and has always known - that I am
like this, "And we should eat."
"Didn't we just...?"
"That was three hours ago."
So it was.
Closing Remarks
Witticisms aside, I really have to commend you fine folks at Exciting Simulations. You've done it.
Tomorrow, it is STS-8 for me. And then all the rest.
And I
am an astronaut.
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