Last Flight of the Samson

Edward Baxter had been in second grade when the first men walked on the moon. He could still remember watching blurry black and white TV images of Grissom and Chaffee on that Thanksgiving Day in 1968. Baxter knew then and there that he wanted to be an astronaut.

 He participated in enough sports and other extracurricular activities to get into the Air Force Academy. As a young captain he flew combat missions over Korea after the decades-old armistice collapsed in the late 1980s. Baxter was a test pilot at Edwards Air Force base when he was selected for astronaut training.

Baxter had been to the Moon twice as pilot of Athena 4 and commander of Athena 10 when NASA announced the manned Mars mission. He knew he wouldn’t be selected for the first crew but was pleasantly surprised to be assigned as the commander of the back-up crew. Under NASA policy that meant his crew would be the primary for the third mission.

The crews had a month long training break so Baxter volunteered to make the milk run piloting NASA’s heavy space transport Samson from Cape Canaveral to the international space station jointly operated by the United States and the Soviet Union and back. (Sometimes Baxter wondered how things would have turned out if Gorbachev hadn’t been deposed). As a mission commander Baxter did not get to do much piloting and he missed it. Most of the space station run was automated but there were still some things that a human hand and brain were better at doing.

Baxter had been one of the first astronauts trained on the heavy space transports and had hundreds of hours logged on both Samson and its sister craft Delilah as well as several thousand more hours on the simulators. The two heavy transports were the largest reusable ground-to-orbit craft ever built. Baxter had been to a secret briefing about the Soviet’s heavy transport program. Their design was remarkably similar to the US one, which raised a few eyebrows in the FBI. But the Soviets were still years away from a launch.

The return from the space station started out uneventfully. Samson was carrying half a dozen American and Western European astronauts who had completed their tour of duty (the Soviets used their own transports for their personnel) as well as science experiments and several containers of trash.

The cause of the hydraulic system failure was later determined to be a faulty valve that remained shut when it was supposed to open. Because of its location in the system the faulty valve caused failures in both the primary and back-up systems. But when the hydraulic systems failed during re-entry Baxter and his co-pilot had no time to worry about the cause.

“Mission Control, we have a problem.” James Lange, the co-pilot, managed to sound calm as he proceeded to explain the situation to the ground controllers.

 “Get the emergency procedure manual, James. We’ve both been through this scenario in the simulator so let’s do this by-the-numbers.”

“Isn’t that the scenario that always ends in a crash?” Lange asked as he retrieved a thick binder.

“If you mean no one can land at Canaveral, Edwards or any of the other alternate landing sites then yes. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get Samson on the ground more or less intact. Let’s get started on those procedures.”

The two men were busy for the next several minutes keeping Samson under controlled descent. Baxter had switched to manual control as soon as the hydraulics had failed. The craft was so far off its flight plan that letting the computer try to recover would have resulted in a fatal stall. Under normal conditions Samson handled like a brick compared the fighter planes Baxter had flown over Korea and without hydraulics the craft was even more sluggish. Too sluggish to properly align for a runway landing.

The flight crew and Mission Control settled on landing at a dry lakebed at the White Sands Missile Range. Baxter agreed with the recommendation in the emergency procedure manual and did not attempt to lower the landing gear manually. If all three landing gear struts did not lock into position there was a good chance the craft would spin or cartwheel if a strut collapsed. Baxter and Lange fought to keep Samson level as it dropped lower and lower.

A sudden wind gust pushed up the nose at the last minute and the rear of the craft struck the ground. The left wing dipped and struck the ground next. Baxter shoved the control wheel forward to drop the nose before Samson could cartwheel. The craft slid across the lakebed in a slow counter-clockwise spin shedding pieces as it went and travelled several thousand feet before coming to a rest.

Incredibly no one on board was seriously injured despite the damage to Samson. The craft was quickly evacuated and everyone moved to a safe distance to await the rescue helicopters.

Baxter and Lange stared at the wrecked craft.

“You know what they say, sir,” Lange said. “Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.”