Launch: Marco

I can't help grinning at Don and the ladies while the man in the golden-white robes and the black priest hat showers us with water from the golden bowl. He isn't allowed to get near the actual rocket, but sprinkles towards it from afar. This is crazy, but meaningful somehow. Like, the ancient Earth and its peoples wish us Godspeed, they send us on our way with blessing, with the final kiss of our waterworld on our cheeks. It will be a long, long time before we four feel the rain on our upturned faces. Maybe never again.

Image credit: NASA

He chants in Russian and holds a thick golden cross up towards us. This old-school style doesn't connect well with what I remember about the Bible – it's foreign. But that's OK. Everything's golden: the cross, the robes, the sun as it burns up over the still line of the sea, our faces in the sudden light. Then the moment's fled, he waves and gets back on the bus. We can go now.

The elevator is the best part of this trip so far. Look at the view! I can occasionally see the ocean stretching far out to the east. That's the direction we'll launch, after the first few seconds in the vertical phase, when we begin to pitch and roll.

At last we can get settled into our couches in the Jamal. Camel. We fly in a camel. OK, I know it's named after that young Emirati amir, but we've joked and complained and discussed that so much that the name means almost nothing to me now. Just a camel. Hey Don, I left my M'n'Ms on the bedside table. I can't go without my M'n'Ms. He chuckles, even as he's squeezing himself, suit and all, into his couch. There's not much room in here, in the same capsule that will land us on Mars, perched on the very top of the Jamal's second stage, eighty metres above the ground. Better not think too much about that, or I'll get dizzy. I can't feel the stack swaying, it's still clamped to the tower. Good. We are not going to topple over.

We're all in, straps and restraints in place. Somehow there seems to be more room in here than in the sims – there's nothing outside but empty air and the tower. I'm behind Don, Asya is on my right, and Annika's next to Don.

My seat is the Flight Engineer's seat. The first few times I sat here, in training runs, my whole body was sweating. I was a nervous wreck, but now it's comfortable. It's my seat.

Asya's reporting electrical power system nominal, Don's reporting ECLSS nominal, I'm checking on the LOX and hydro pressures –  and they're OK, within tolerances. Annika's monitoring our biomedical readouts and switching from wired comms to radio. We have to launch soon before the subcooled liquid hydrogen leaks away. It's tricky stuff. Control gives us the standard countdown hold at ten minutes, then we move on. We pass T minus nine minutes. I'm doing everything just like in the sims, reading the rocket like a book. She's a big cat purring, the fans up here pushing the air around, the turbopumps haven't yet started spinning way down below. I love this rocket. OK, so only the first stage is reusable, but even that's a huge achievement for SSI in just a few years. Catching up with NewSpace was never going to be easy. They had a long headstart.

We switch to internal battery power, Annika gives us the Go for that, and the tower can start retracting its grips on us, little by little. The big tanks below us are being pressurised now. I hear Pump and valve chilldown commencing, and almost forget to give them the 'Check!' for that. Here, Mission Control has a cool Indian accent. God bless ISRO. We're on schedule. My heart is pounding. Asya is checking the newly-loaded flight program and responding to Control in terse bursts: Roger Flight on main load… Second stage upload underway… Ignition system check… Annika is on top of the power systems. No battery failures now, please.

T minus four minutes. Are we almost go for launch? Could it be that easy? Our training sims were peppered with all kinds of emergency failures. It's eerie to run through the checks so cleanly. I call out, Thrust vector control, check! Annika says, CES checks out. That's good. The Crew Escape System was one of the first things to be developed but seemed cursed by production faults and only just made qualification by our deadline. Soon after that Asya gives the word to get helmets on and lock them. We're sealed in now, and all I can hear is my own breathing – loud and fast – and voices calling out checks every few seconds. I'm glad they can't hear my heart hammering. Or can they?

This is insane. We're balancing on top of two hundred tons of explosive hydrogen and oxygen. And we're going to light it up and shoot skywards. We must be nuts. Did I really sign up for this? Don't let the panic get to you. Turn it into silent laughter. Concentrate now! I check the tank pressure and the pump temperature – wait, that's odd. I have a high temperature on the secondary turbopump outlet! It felt like I was shouting. My voice seemed to reverberate inside my helmet. Am I right? Look again, hard. Yes, I'm right. I wish so much that I was wrong. Big feeling of sinking deeply into a pit latrine.

Roger, Jamal, we see the same, comes Control's response. Let's check other telemetry.

Asya can see all this too. Confirm high pump temperature reading. No go for launch. Repeat, we are no go for launch. Standing down ignition system, standing down flight program.

We did it by the book. We had a pretend crisis like this in training at least once. But it punches me in the gut. The pump temperature is only about ten degrees above the red line. Probably the cooling system failed. I understand the seriousness of precooling the pump, though: the cryogenically sub-cooled, densified oxygen and hydrogen will come rushing through the pump and other gear, and if the pump is too warm, bubbles will form in the liquids and can lead to damage in the pump and further downstream. Cavitation can be catastrophic.

I have to check all the other temperature gauges now, and the fire detection systems and flow rates. OK, it all looks normal. I let Control know that. They respond with Copy that, Jamal, we're holding at T minus three minutes. Soon after that they rewind to ten and connect us back to external power.

We hold. We sweat. I notice a ghost of condensation on the inside of my helmet visor. Then the tiny fan comes on again and it gradually vanishes. The rocket engineers are drinking in all the telemetry from the rocket systems. Nobody wants to scrub the launch, not even those of us who know the rocket isn't as well-tested as it could be. Today is our only chance. The first attempt to launch this type of rocket must be near the forefront of everyone's mind: that one exploded on the pad when a valve jammed and burst. But if we scrub today, tomorrow will be too late. Mars will be that much further away. We're riding the edge of the possible, and we seem to be toppling off the wrong side.

Annika's voice comes over the suit comm. It's not the private channel – we decided not to use that until we're well on our way and on orbit. Hey, so are you telling me I could have stayed in bed five extra minutes? No fair! We chuckle and respond. She's good at that – defusing the tension without distracting our focus.

Asya: Best if we take a brief break. We have a hold for at least fifteen, so just keep watching readouts quietly. Shout out the moment you see anything else off nominal. In other words, we can stop the constant reporting and radio chatter.

I'm tense. I can feel my shoulders bunched up and my stomach is clenched in a fist. Any final requests? I say.

Hey, none of that, says Don.

No, man, I mean what would you do one last time? Before we leave it all behind?

Leave it all behind? Hey, you should see what I brought along in my Rengo. Golf set, Queen sized bed, barbecue, surf board, ATV, all the comforts of home. Rengo is the contractor that made us the small, lightweight strongboxes we are bringing our personal effects in. Ten kilo limit each, and Don knows it. Annika giggles.

I leave behind this sweating weather, Asya mutters, laced with a few curse words in Russian. She is more used to the icy winds of Kazakhstan and Moscow, and has made sure everyone knows about it most days we were here.

Annika gets right into the spirit of it. Waterfalls, birds and rainbows.

Ooooh! say Don and I. And unicorns? I add cheekily.

Don tries again. I never got to see Sac Actun, or the pyramids, or the Taj Mahal, or Australia. The Barrier Reef. He sounds pensive.

Asya speaks up again. Marco, what you leave behind? All those cute Brazilian girls? When Asya teases, it's sharp. She knows I finally broke up with my girlfriend eighteen months ago. I'm surprise to know that it still hurts like surgery without the anesthetic.

You said it, Ma'am, is my cheerful reply. I am watching the temperature readings. The pump's down by a degree and a half, but that's not enough. I hear on the comm that Control is going to try shutting down and restarting the pre-cooling system. I think there's a procedure for this and they've already tested it. I think. Yes, they did test it. A couple of days ago, as I seem to remember.

There's some to-and-fro between Control and Asya about the restart. She refers one question to me, and I OK it. I can picture the turbopump down there, the precooler, the inlets and outlets. The temperature probe – wait. That might be it. I speak out loud, riding my hunch. Control, I continue, could you go over the layout for the pump left temperature probe assembly? Isn't there a point where the electrical bundle for the ignition system goes close by? I'm thumping my brain, kind of, trying to remember the exact arrangement. They reply quickly, confirming what I thought and jumping to the same conclusion I had.

The ignition system cable delivers a punch of electrical power in the form of great sparks to the hydrogen-oxygen mix when it rushes out of the nozzles, making sure it starts burning right. The igniter was on, and was checked, but wasn't meant to be at full power the whole time since then. It didn't level down like it was meant to. The engineers confirm the mental image I have: the ignition system was somehow up to full amperage and the warm cable was heating the temperature probe on the pump: just one end of the probe, not the pump itself. They check this by flicking the ignition circuit on for a minute, then off again. Yes! The temperature rises half a degree, then falls. It shouldn't happen like that. I know the cable used to be further from the probe, but I suspect the fasteners are loose. Give us another year! Just one more year, and this baby would be foolproof.

All we need now is to make absolutely sure that the pump is being cooled as it should be. The cable may only be heating the probe, but we don't know that. There's a secondary probe on the other side of the pump. I switch to that readout. It's reading pretty steadily around nominal. Hmm. We all talk a lot more about this. Nobody is eager to rush ahead and declare everything's fine. I wish that Abdul Qawi were sitting in Control. I think he knows the Saqr engine better than I do. I won't suggest that they call him – we need a decision to go or no-go in the next couple of minutes.

There's a turbopump engineer talking whom I recognise, Lablanc Davis from California, and I ask him about switching on the igniter a few seconds before it's actually needed, rather than running it even at half power for five whole minutes. The Flight Director, a Japanese air force colonel, ex-JAXA astronaut, and as hard as granite, says, We'll work on that. Please hold. I almost expect some elevator muzak while they go offline and discuss the plan.

Good stuff, spaceboy, says Don. I'm glad his nickname for me doesn't come out too often. If I keep from reacting, I hope he will give it up.

The seconds tick away. Pretty soon too much hydrogen will have leaked away that we won't be able to make orbit or rendezvous with Naqsh. And Naqsh is moving pretty fast up there, of course, and we need to be able to catch up with it. Come on, come on! Exactly how much of a window do we have?

The channel crackles on again. Jamal, adjusted ignition procedure approved. We'll recommence the count from T minus five on my mark.

Yay! But I respond as calmly as I can and we get on with it. They need someone to hit the ignition button from inside the rocket at the right moment, to cut out a lot of time-consuming reprogramming. Asya assumes that's her role, but it turns out that I have the right switch right in front of me. So it's down to me. I swallow extra-hard, because it seems there's a lump of saliva or something stuck in there all of a sudden.

If I miss the switch, unburned liquid oxygen and hydrogen will sluice out of the nozzles onto the pad and probably combust, then it could be CES for us, or burn. Even if it doesn't explode, there would be no launch this year. I don't want to think about it. There's the switch, near my right glove. I can reach it easily. I will need to arm the switch first.

We step through the final checks and call-response pairs like clockwork. Suddenly we're at Engine chill completed, and I know we're finally leaving town. Arm ignition switch, they say, and I flip up the arming cover. Glad to see my hand is not shaking. OK, not much.

The Launch Director gives a 'Go' for launch; there's a final brief hold for abort, but nobody calls it; Asya calls out, her voice rock-steady, almost bored, Control, Jamal, Launch, let's go, go, repeat go for launch. 

Control calls out, Ignition, ignition! 

I watch my glove flick the switch forward. Nothing to it. A moment later the turbopump powers up and the liquids are forced through towards the rocket pintle injectors.

Then I'm deafened by Jamal's roar, Control okays our engine performance after a gut-twisting pause of a few seconds, the clamps release the rocket, my couch thumps me in the spine and it's show time. The ignition system cuts out automatically. We're flying.

Onwards to Launch: Marco, continued

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