“At this time, we don’t know. The engineers tell me that the problem should be easily fixed, but I can’t say how the delay will impact our first commercial launch,” she said in response.
“Ms. O’Conner!” shouted another reporter.
And so it continues, thought Caroline to herself before pointing to the next anxious reporter. They really do seem like a pack of wolves circling the injured animal, waiting for the feast.…
Chapter 11
“Go, baby, go!” was all Gesling could utter as he alternated looking out the window at the landscape of Earth receding below him and the LCD display that showed the status of Dreamscape’s onboard systems. After fixing the faulty sensor on the fuel tank two days previously, the restarted countdown for the launch of Dreamscape had gone flawlessly. Now Gesling was nearing the point at which the scramjet first stage would separate from the vehicle and the powerful onboard rocket engines would fire, giving him the final acceleration needed to attain the seventeen thousand miles per hour required for orbit. Escape velocity was just one stage away.
He felt his pulse quicken in anticipation of the stage separation, and he waited for the five small explosions that would soon sever the bolts holding the two parts of Dreamscape together. The explosive bolts had to fire within milliseconds of each other or the resulting unequal forces acting on the vehicle would tear it apart. Gesling knew the bolts had been tested, retested, and tested again, but that didn’t stop him from being anxious and replaying the catastrophic-failure simulation movies in his mind as the clock on the display counted down to zero.
“Just fly the plane,” he told himself. The foremost thing all pilots trained themselves to do was to learn to fly the plane no matter what the instruments were saying or whatever else was going on around them. Fly the plane. He gripped the controls and swallowed the lump in his throat, forcing it back into his stomach. The stage-separation icon flashed, and the Bitchin’ Betty chimed at him.
“Prepare for stage separation in ten seconds. Nine, eight, seven…”
He felt only a small bump, and then the green light indicating successful stage separation glimmered before him. Seconds later, the Dreamscape’s rocket engines ignited, pushing Gesling back into his padded chair on the flight deck. The Dreamscape picked up speed.
The first stage, now fully separated from the rocket-powered Dreamscape, began its glide back to the Nevada desert. Operated by onboard automatic pilot and with constant monitoring by engineers in the Space Excursions control room back at the launch site, the first stage was on target for a landing back at the location from which its voyage had begun. Onboard computers were sending a steady stream of telemetry back to the ground so the flight engineers could reconstruct all phases of its flight should the worst happen and the vehicle crash. Although the ship had black boxes on board, they were a redundant system at this stage. All operational data was immediately sent to the ground as long as the Dreamscape could get a communications link to a ground station or one of the orbital relay satellites that Childers owned time on. But once they were on the way to the Moon, the data rate would drop to the point that the black boxes would be the main system for flight-data storage and retrieval.
On the ground, the Space Excursions computer was busy receiving, interpreting, and storing the data while Gary Childers was excitedly explaining each element of the flight, as it was happening, to his potential future investors—all of whom had decided to wait the extra two days it took to recover from the aborted launch and to this successful one. It was turning out to be worth their while.
“As you can see, the Dreamscape is now under rocket power and accelerating as it approaches its three hundred kilometer orbital altitude. Once there, pilot Paul Gesling will shake her down during a minimum of ten orbits before he will rendezvous with our tanker satellite and test the refueling system,” Childers explained. Feeling more confident by the minute that his investors were becoming interested, he continued, “After that test, Gesling will begin the reentry process and bring the spaceship back home—landing only a few meters away from where it began its journey. Just future orbiting rides like this we can sell at ten to twenty million a pop and use them as training rides for the Moon missions. We might even consider building a copy of the Dreamscape just for that purpose.”
Childers assessed the reactions of the seven multibillionaires in the room. They alternated between listening to his explanation and tuning him completely out as they surveyed the status board and the onboard-camera feed that showed them the same view as that being experienced by Paul Gesling. The view was difficult for Childers to compete with. The beautiful blues and whites that stretched across the Earth were quickly becoming a fixture at the bottom of the screen, and the dark blackness of space was growing in prominence. In low Earth orbit, the curvature of the Earth was clearly visible, but spectacular in a different way than the “blue marble” made so famous by the Apollo astronauts. That view would have to wait until Space Excursions’ customers were on their way to the Moon.
What the heck, thought Childers, gazing at the view screen along with everyone else in the room. I think I’ll just shut up so we can enjoy the majestic view. Sometimes the best sales pitch was not pitching at all and just letting the product pitch itself.
Fifteen miles away, perched on a small mesa, a Honda minivan was parked in the blazing Nevada sun. The motor was running and the air conditioner was at full blast to keep the occupants and their computers cool and safe from the unrelenting heat of the desert. Inside were three men, all Chinese, and all were watching their computer screens as the data they were collecting from the antennas mounted on the roof came streaming in.
“And they didn’t even bother to encrypt the data?” asked the eldest man among them. He was incredulous, given that his last assignment was to intercept data from an American antimissile test rocket flown over the South Pacific two years previously. The encryption on that data had taken them months to break, and they still weren’t sure if they understood all of it. Without understanding how the instruments were calibrated, there would always be some uncertainty around the accuracy of the data intercepted.
Zeng Li almost grinned at his colleagues at the thought. He had years of experience with his country’s foreign-intelligence community, for many of which he had been living in America working as the representative of a Chinese import/export bank. His other missions had proven much more difficult to acquire data access alone, and that was nearly as tough as breaking the decryption keys. This assignment seemed absurdly easy, and that made him nervous.
Li and his team were charged with monitoring the flight of the Dreamscape and collecting copies of all its telemetry during the test flight. The team had modified the Honda van and turned it into a mobile communications center, though the only external evidence of this was the antenna. Perched on top of the van was a small dish antenna, clearly designed to receive satellite space communications. Had the profusion of home-entertainment systems with satellite television not become commonplace in homes throughout the remote portions of the American southwest, the antenna might have stood out suspiciously. But satellite TV was ubiquitous, and almost every home and camper had the required hardware. Their van, therefore, looked no different than the many others who simply used their satellite communications system to watch Sunday Night Football.