Turning, he identified for her the office building that rose four stories on one side of the hangar, the Hangar B on the other side, and the machine shops and assembly buildings beyond it.
“And there,” Dan stretched his arm, “is the bird we’re going to launch this morning.”
Two miles distant, the rocket booster stood tall and slim against the brightening morning sky. It was painted stark white with a big ASTRO corporate logo stenciled in Kelly green along its upper length.
“That’s not the spaceplane,” Vicki said.
“No, this is an unmanned launch. We’re putting up an OTV, like I told you.”
“There are people up there?”
Shaking his head, “Nope, the satellite’s unattended now, waiting for a crew to go up and finish the final assembly tasks before we turn her on and start generating energy.”
“When you send a crew up, they’ll go in the spaceplane?”
“Right. As soon as we find out what went wrong in the test flight and get the fault fixed.”
“But the spaceplane only goes to low orbit,” Vicki said, obviously trying to get her facts straight, “while the power satellite’s up in geosynch orbit.”
“Which is why we need the OTV,” said Dan. “To transfer work crews from the low orbit to geosynch.”
She nodded her understanding and then turned to look out at the booster. Dan expected the usual comment about a phallic symbol. Instead, Vicki said, “I don’t see any vapor coming from it. No frost where the liquid oxygen tanks are.”
His estimation of her climbed several notches. “It’s not a liquid-fueled rocket. Solid fuel, like the old Minuteman missiles. Just a big, dumb, cheap booster. Fire it off like a skyrocket.”
“Oh.”
Pointing again, he explained, “The upper stage has all the sophistication: guidance, rendezvous and docking systems, all that. The first stage just belts her the hell off the planet and then plops down into the Atlantic.”
“You mean the Gulf?”
“No, the Atlantic, nearly a thousand miles from here. We send a command to break up the booster shell once she’s exhausted her fuel and disengaged from the upper stage. Pieces burn up in the atmosphere, mostly. Some small debris falls into international waters.”
“Then why do you need the spaceplane?” she asked.
“To carry people safely and economically. The big dumb booster’s fine for carrying freight. We need something better to get people up there. And back down again.”
“Oh. Back down.”
“That’s the trick. We’ve been leasing Russian spacecraft and launching them from an oceangoing platform that a private company operates. Damned expensive. If we’re going to generate electricity at a competitive price, we’ve got to bring down the costs of sending people to the powersat. That’s what the spaceplane is for.”
“I see,” said Vicki. She took her miniature camera from her handbag, then slipped the bag over her shoulder. “How long until the launch?”
Dan fished his cell phone from his shirt pocket and called the launch center. Everything was going on schedule. Solid-fuel boosters were simpler to operate than the more complex liquid-propelled rockets. The launch countdown was going smoothly.
Vicki began panning across the skyline of square, blocky buildings. She took close-ups of Dan and zoom shots of the booster standing on its launchpad. The clock ticked down.
April came up at T minus ten minutes with two of the FAA investigators with her. Dan saw little knots of people clustering on the roofs of Hangar B and the office building.
“Five… four
…”
Dan felt his innards tightening. No matter how many launches he had seen, how many he had participated in, there was always this heart-thumping anticipation.
“…one… zero.”
A blossom of flame flared at the bottom of the rocket’s tall cylindrical shape. Dan felt the building beneath his feet rumble. The rocket stirred, lifted slowly, majestically. The roar of a million demons carried across the miles between them, growling louder as the rocket rose higher, higher, gaining speed, a brilliant stream of fire rushing from its tail. Wave after wave of throbbing, pulsing sound washed over them, a physical thundering that shook the bones and tingled every nerve in the body. The rocket was hurtling through the sky, up, up, up, growing smaller, the throaty roar of its engines diminishing now, deepening into a rolling distant thunder.
And then it was gone. The tiny blazing star of the rocket exhaust winked out; the sound dissipated. The sky seemed suddenly empty, the launchpad deserted.
It took Dan a few moments to get his breathing back to normal. When he looked at Vicki Lee, he saw that her eyes were full of tears.
“I’ve never seen anything…” she said in a near whisper, her voice faltering. “It’s an experience…”
Dan nodded and suddenly realized that Jane had never seen a rocket launch. Not one.
Matagorda Island, Texas
Within a few minutes, though, Vicki recovered from the emotional rush. Suddenly she was in a mad hurry to get back to her office in Houston. Chattering frantically into her cell phone as she scampered back down to Dan’s office, Vicki grabbed a gulp of warm orange juice that had been left on his desk and then headed for the door. Dan hustled after her, asking April to set up a corporate plane to take Vicki to Houston, then drove her to the airstrip in his convertible.
“Thanks, Dan, that was wonderful,” she said as he walked her to the waiting twin-jet Citation. She gave him a peck on the cheek. No sentimental good-byes, no “When will I see you again?” Just as well, Dan said to himself as he followed her down to the parking lot. Just as well.
Dan watched the plane take off, then drove back to his office the long way, around the airstrip and along the shore road, with the Gulf of Mexico lapping placidly against the white sand of the beach. Much of Matagorda Island had once been a ranch, its scrubby vegetation used as grazing for cattle. Decades earlier, a real pioneer in the space industry had launched a rocket from the island, one of the very first launches by a private industrial firm rather than a government agency. Dan had bought the old ranch when he first started Astro Manufacturing Corporation. He had bulldozed a three-mile-long landing strip and thrown up the hangars, test stands, and cinderblock office buildings that comprised Astro’s headquarters complex. The region’s environmentalists howled, but the local building inspector hesitantly okayed the buildings as tenable under the county’s hurricane safety code. The inspector departed from the Astro complex with a large bulge of cash in his pocket.
A hurricane—that’s all we need, Dan thought as he parked his forest green convertible in his personal space. He tried to keep the ten-year-old XJS in mint condition; before the spaceplane crash he had often tinkered with the auto himself. Not now, though. He walked briskly past the DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE sign that marked his slot, eager to get out of the hot, humid air. Hurricane season coming up, he reminded himself.
Inside the air-conditioned hangar Dan clanged up the steel stairway to his office on the catwalk that ran across three sides of the big open barnlike structure. The spaceplane’s wreckage was spread across the floor, one lonely technician squatting on his heels in the middle of it, looking puzzled. Dan thought about how much it cost to air-condition the whole hangar. The building wasn’t insulated, either, he knew: just bare metal walls frying in the sun. Be cheaper to keep just the offices under air. But as he looked down at that one technician Dan realized that cutting the air-conditioning bill wasn’t going to save Astro from bankruptcy.