Jon Masters liked to accomplish this last check himself instead of sitting up on the launch-control console — it was his last look at each missile before sending it out into the world, like a parent dressing the child before sending him off for the first time to kindergarten.
Both launch officers and Masters checked the long, slender scissor wings and vertical and horizontal stabilizers on the tailplane. When they reported OK, Kaddiri activated the flight-control self-test system. The scissor wings swiveled out two feet until several inches of the wingtips were visible, and the rudder and stabilators on the tailplane jumped back and forth in a pre-programmed test sequence.
“Self-test in progress,” Masters called out. “X-wing to fifteen-degree position, left wingtip right… rudder right… rudder center… rudder left… left stab up… center… down… center… right stab up… center… down… center.”
The test lasted only ten seconds. Kaddiri canceled the self-test, then manually set the booster to launch configuration. The wings swiveled back to he along the top of the booster’s fuselage. “Verifying flight-control settings for launch,” Masters called out. “X-wing centered. Rudder centered. Stabilators set to trailing-edge down position.” With the horizontal stabilizers in the trailing-edge down position, the nose of the ALARM booster would dive down and away from the DC-10 after launch, minimizing the risk of collision.
“T minus sixty countdown hold checklist complete,”
Kaddiri reported. She checked the navigational readouts. “On course as directed by Roosevelt-One, time remaining in launch window one, six minutes fourteen seconds.” By then Jon Masters had walked up beside her and had taken his seat again, taking a big swig from a squeeze bottle.
“Resume the countdown,” Masters said, watching the TV monitors on the console. As he spoke, the pressure-secure bay doors on the lower fuselage snapped open, revealing a light-gray cloud deck a few thousand feet below. Other cameras mounted on the DC-10’s belly, tail, and wingtips showed the gaping forty-foot hatch wide open, with the ALARM booster suspended in the center of the dark rectangle. “Doors open. Thirty seconds to go…”
Those thirty seconds seemed to take hours to pass. Masters was about to call to Helen to ask if there was a problem when she started counting: “Stand by for launch… five… four… three… two… one… release!”
It was a strange sensation, a strange sight. The ALARM booster just seemed to shrink in size as it fell out of the launch chamber — it continued to fly directly underneath the open doors as if it were frozen in place. The doors stayed open long enough so that Jon could see the X-wing begin to move slightly to provide a bit of stability as it cruised along. The DC-10’s tail heeled upward as the twenty-one-ton rocket dropped away — it would take a minute for the movable counterweight tank to rebalance the plane. The crew members in the cargo section held on firmly to handholds in the ceiling or bulkheads as their bodies were pressed to the floor.
“Rocket away, rocket away,” Helen called out. Immediately, the DC-10 began a 30-degree bank turn to the left, and Roosevelt-1 was lost from the bomb-bay camera. Helen switched to a wingtip camera to monitor the motor firing.
“We’re clear from booster’s flight path,” Kaddiri called out. “Coming up on first-stage ignition… ready, ready… now.”
Like a giant stick of chalk drawing a fat white-yellow line across the sky, the first-stage motor of the ALARM booster ignited, and the rocket leaped ahead of the DC-10 in a blur of motion. When the rocket was about a mile away, the X-wing scissored out until the wing was almost perpendicular to the rocket’s fuselage, and the ALARM booster reared its nose upward and began to climb. Nineteen seconds after launch, the booster was traveling almost twice the speed of sound and had recrossed its launch altitude as the wing generated lift. Seconds later, the rocket was lost from view, traveling too fast for the high-speed cameras to follow.
“T plus thirty seconds, Roosevelt-One on course, all systems normal, passing one-twenty-K altitude, velocity passing Mach three,” Kaddiri reported.
“Launch-chamber doors closed, chamber repressurized,” one of the techs reported. “Ready to reload.” They were in no hurry to load Roosevelt-Two into position on this mission, but Masters liked to practice rapid-fire procedures to demonstrate that a multiple ALARM launch within a single launch window was possible.
“T plus sixty seconds, fifteen seconds to first-stage burn-out,” Kaddiri reported. “Altitude one-eighty K, passing Mach six, pitch angle thirty degrees. All systems nominal.”
Using the scissor wings to augment the motor’s thrust with lift, the booster climbed quickly through the atmosphere. As the air started to thin and less lift was being generated by the wings, they scissored back closer and closer to the booster’s fuselage until, just before first-stage motor burnout, the wings were fully retracted back along the body of the rocket. Seventy-six seconds after ignition, the first-stage motor burned out and the rear half of the fifty-feet-long booster, carrying the rear tailplane and the scissor wings, separated from the rest of the booster. The rocket was at the very edge of space, nearly 250,000 feet above Earth. Nine seconds later, the second-stage motor ignited, sending the booster streaking into space.
The first-stage section began its controlled tumble to Earth, and four recovery parachutes opened at sixty thousand feet above ground. A specially equipped Air Force C-130 cargo plane would snag the parachute in midair and reel the first-stage booster in somewhere over the northern section of the White Sands Missile Test Range. This recovery procedure would allow them to use the ALARM booster system anywhere in the world without hazard to people on the ground, even near heavily populated areas. The second- and third-stage motor sections would re-enter the atmosphere from space and burn up.
“Good second-stage ignition,” Kaddiri reported. “Altitude passing three hundred forty K, velocity passing Mach eleven, on course.” She turned to Foch with a look of concern, then at Masters. “Second-stage nozzle reports a gim-bal-limit fault, Jon. It might have overcorrected for winds at altitude and sustained some damage.”
Masters had a stopwatch counting down to the second-stage burnout. “Forty seconds to second-stage burnout,” he muttered. “Is it still hitting a stop? Is it correcting its course?”
“Continuous faults on the nozzle,” Kaddiri replied. “It’s maintaining course, but it might slip out of stage-three tolerance limits.” The third-stage section of the booster was much smaller than the first two stages, designed only to increase the booster’s velocity to Mach 25 for orbital insertion; it could not perform large course corrections. If the second-stage motor could not hold the booster within a gradually narrowing trajectory corridor, the booster could slip into a useless and possibly dangerous orbit. Numerous “safe” orbits were computed where the NIRTSat satellites would not interfere with other spacecraft and where they could be “stored” until it was possible to retrieve them, but it was usually very difficult to place a malfunctioning booster into a precomputed “safe” orbit. If it could not be placed in a position where it was not a hazard to other satellites, it could damage or destroy dozens of other payloads and reenter the atmosphere over a populated area. Before that could be allowed to happen, they would destroy it.