“I’m merely expressing my concern about the winds at altitude, Doctor Masters…”
“And I replied to your concerns,” Masters said with a smile. “My little baby here says it’s a go. Unless we fly somewhere else to launch, away from the jet stream…”
“DARPA is very specific about the launch area, Doctor. These satellites are important to the Navy. They want to monitor the booster’s progress throughout the flight. The launch must be over the White Sands range.”
“Fine. Then we continue to monitor the winds and let the computers do their jobs. If they can’t properly compensate without going outside the range, we turn around on the racetrack and try again. If we go outside the launch window, we abort. Fair enough?”
Foch could do nothing but nod in agreement. This launch was important to both the Navy and Air Force, and he wasn’t prepared to issue a launch abort unilaterally.
The object called ALARM that Masters so lovingly regarded was the Air Launched Alert Response Missile; there were two of the huge missiles on board the DC-10 that morning. ALARM was a four-stage space booster designed to place up to three-quarter-ton payloads in low-to-medium Earth orbit by launching the booster from the cargo hold of an aircraft — in effect, the DC-10 was the ALARM booster’s first stage, with the other three stages provided by powerful solid-fuel rockets on the missile itself.
The ALARM missile had a long, slender, one-piece wing that swiveled out from its stowed position along the missile’s fuselage after launch. The wing would supply lift and increase the effectiveness of the solid rocket motors while the booster was in the atmosphere, which greatly increased the power and payload capability of the booster. An ALARM booster could carry as much as fifteen hundred pounds in its ten-foot-long, forty-inch-diameter payload bay.
On today’s mission, each of Masters’ ALARM boosters carried four small two-hundred-pound communications satellites, which Jon Masters, in his own inimitable way, called NIRTSats — “Need It Right This Second” satellites. Unlike more conventional satellites, which weighed hundreds or even thousands of pounds, were placed in high geosynchronous orbits almost twenty-three thousand miles above the Equator, and could carry dozens of communications channels, NIRTSats were small, lightweight satellites which carried only a few communications channels and were placed in low, one-hundred- to-one-thousand-mile orbits. Unlike geosynchronous satellites, which orbited the Earth once per day and therefore appeared to be stationary over the Equator, NIRTSats orbited the Earth once every ninety to three hundred minutes, which meant that usually more than one satellite had to be launched to cover a particular area.
But a NIRTSat cost less than one-fiftieth the price of a full-sized satellite, and it cost less to insure and launch as well. Even with a constellation of four NIRTSats, a customer with a need for satellite communications could get it for less than one-third the price of buying “air time” on an existing satellite. A single ALARM booster launch, which cost only ten million dollars from start to finish, could give a customer instant global communications capability from anywhere in the world — and it took only a few days to get the system in place, instead of the months or even years it took for conventional launches. NIRTSats could be repositioned anywhere in orbit if requirements changed, and Masters had even devised a way to recover a NIRTSat intact and reuse it, which saved the customer even more money.
Masters’ customer this day was, as it usually was, the Department of Defense, which was why all the military observers were on hand. Masters was to place four NIRTSats in a four-hundred-mile-high polar orbit over the western Pacific to provide the Navy and Air Force with specialized, dedicated voice, data, air-traffic control, and video communications between ships, aircraft, and land-based controllers. With the NIRTSat constellation in place, the Navy’s Seventh Fleet headquarters and the Air Force’s Pacific Air Force headquarters could instantly talk with and find the precise locations of every ship and aircraft on the network. Coupled with the military’s Global Positioning System satellite navigation system, NIRTSats would continually transmit flight or sailing data on each aircraft or vessel to their respective headquarters, although the vessels might be far outside radio range. The second ALARM booster carried another four NIRTSat satellites and was aboard as a backup if the first launch failed.
Jon Masters’ cocky attitude toward this important launch made Colonel Foch very uncomfortable. But, he thought, the little snot had every reason to feel cocky — in two years of testing and over two dozen launches, not one ALARM booster had ever failed to do its thing, and not one NIRTSat had ever failed to function. It was, Foch had to admit, quite a testament to the genius of Jonathan Colin Masters. Worse, the bastard was so young. Boy genius was an understatement.
When Jon Masters was barely in grade school in Manchester, New Hampshire, his first-grade teachers showed Jon’s parents a one-hundred-page treatise on the feasibility of a manned lunar landing, written by a youngster who had only learned to write a few months earlier. When asked about the essay, Jon sat his parents down and explained all the problems inherent in launching a rocket to the moon and returning it safely back to Earth — and the Apollo space program had just gotten under way, with the first lunar landing still three years away.
It didn’t take Jon’s parents a blink of an eye to figure out what to do next: he was enrolled in a private high school, which he completed three years later at age ten. He enrolled at Dartmouth College and received a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering at age thirteen. After receiving a master’s degree in mathematics from Dartmouth, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and after a tumultuous five years finally earned a doctorate in engineering at the age of twenty.
The first love of Masters’ life was and always had been NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and in 1981 he went to work for the space agency immediately after leaving MIT. The Shuttle Transportation System, or STS, program was just heating up by then, and Jon Masters was an integral part of the development of special applications that could take advantage of this new flying workhorse. Almost every satellite and delivery subsystem developed for the shuttle between 1982 and 1985 was at least partially designed by Jonathan Masters.
But, even as the shuttle transportation system was gearing up for more launches per year and more ambitious projects, including the space station, Jon Masters saw a weakness. It was an obvious problem that was creeping into the successful STS program — the spacecraft were accumulating a lot of miles, with even more miles slated for them each year, and no more orbiters were being built. When the success of the shuttle program became obvious, Masters thought, NASA should have had one new orbiter per year rolling off the assembly lines, plus upgraded solid-rocket boosters and avionics. But they had none.
Jon Masters took an active interest in the numerous small companies that built small space boosters for private and commercial applications. In 1984, at age twenty-four, he resigned from NASA and accepted a seat on the board of directors of Sky Sciences, Inc., a small Tennessee-based commercial space booster company that sometimes subcontracted work for the fledgling Strategic Defense Intiative Organization, the federal research and development team tasked with devising an intercontinental ballistic missile defense system. Soon afterward he became vice president in charge of research for the small company. Masters’ presence on the board gave the company a shot of optimism — and a new line of credit — that allowed it to stay fiscally afloat.