“No…no, sir, it’s not that,” Boomer said, the smile disappearing from his face as he realized he might have unwittingly offended the President of the United States of America. “General McLanahan said you’d want to fly in it.”
“He’s right — he knows me too well,” the President said. “The general and I go way back — I knew him when he was a young, cocky, know-it-all captain like yourself. So what sort of training would I need to fly your spaceplane, Captain?”
“Training? No training, sir,” Boomer responded. “You look like you’re in good shape — I think you’d do fine. Let’s go. We’ll gas up the Stud, hop in, and in three hours we’ll be on the beach in Australia.”
“Fly right now? No one can get ready to fly into space that fast!” Sparks said perturbedly. “NASA astronauts train for years to get to fly into space!”
“That’s NASA’s way of doing things, sir,” Boomer said. “In the Stud, passengers are just passengers. We’re not interested in turning anyone into Buzz Aldrin or Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise—we just want to make sure you don’t flip the wrong switch at the wrong time. Let’s go.”
“The crewmembers spend considerably more time training, sir,” Patrick quickly pointed out, “but Captain Noble is perfectly correct: we don’t require anything from passengers except to be in good health — if you suffered some sort of injury or difficulty you’d have to hang on without any possibility of assistance for an hour or two, possibly longer, since the front-seat crewmember can’t get to you.” It was obvious that President Martindale’s head was churning — he wore a mischievous grin, as if running through his datebook and trying to figure out if he could spare the time. Patrick was sure he was going to agree. “Sir?” he asked. “Would you like to go for it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, General,” Sparks said. “The President is certainly not going to…”
“Carl, call Bethesda,” the President said to his chief of staff. “Ask the doc to come see me.”
“Mr. President!” Vice President Hershel exclaimed. “Are you really going to do it?”
“Why the hell not?” Martindale asked. “I was given a clean bill of health from the doc just a couple months ago, and that was the straight story, not just a blurb for the media. I’ve piloted a B-1 Lancer and a B-2 stealth bomber, landed a Hornet onto an aircraft carrier, drove a tank, and been in a submarine down to twelve hundred feet — all while I’ve been president or vice president. And no offense, McLanahan, but if you can do it, I can do it.”
“No doubt, sir. No offense taken.”
“We have meetings all day, Mr. President, and then we have the reception for the Turkish prime minister tonight, and that is a function we can’t postpone,” the President’s chief of staff Carl Minden said. “If you’re really thinking about doing this, let me discuss it confidentially with the White House counsel, the Cabinet, and the Leadership. They all have a stake in what happens if you didn’t come back.”
“He’ll come back — faster than you can imagine,” Boomer interjected.
“Riding in the spaceplane would be seen as an endorsement of the program,” Sparks said, “and I don’t think that’s what you want just yet.”
“All right, all right, I get the message,” the President said. “Carl, I still want to meet with the doc as soon as the schedule permits. And go ahead and put out the feelers to the usual players about this. And I want serious comments, not horrified reactions.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” Minden shook his head, already dreading the calls he had to make. “You realize, sir, that the press and the opposition will have a field day with this — they’ll call it an election-year stunt, an abuse of privilege…”
“An old Navy destroyer captain once told me that every month he went down to the turrets and fired the big guns, took a patrol shift in his helicopters, took the helm of his ship, and even spent a couple hours in the ship’s laundry and galleys,” the President said. “Being the commander-in-chief means more to me than flying in Air Force One — it means getting out in the field and experiencing the life your soldiers live every day in uniform. I will do it, and I don’t care what the opposition says.”
“If they had the office and the guts, they’d do it too,” Boomer chimed in.
Both Sparks and Minden gave Boomer warning glares, silently ordering him not to speak unless spoken to, but the President nodded. “Well said, Captain,” he said. “Someone’s got to be the first sitting president to fly in space or orbit the earth — I’m determined that I’m going to be the one. But Mr. Minden is right: business before pleasure, I guess.” He turned to Patrick. “Let’s hear it, Patrick. I nominated you four years ago to draw the new long-range strike blueprint to replace the aircraft and missiles destroyed by Gryzlov. What do you recommend I do about the bomber force?”
“Sir, I feel the decision isn’t just about the long-range bomber force but the entire future of the air force — even the future of the U.S. military,” Patrick said. “I strongly believe we’re on the threshold of changing the entire force in preparation for the future, and we shouldn’t shy away from it.”
“And what future might that be, General?” Sparks asked skeptically.
“Space,” Patrick replied simply. “The technologies demonstrated in weapon systems like the XR-9A Black Stallion spaceplane are clear indicators that the future of the U.S. Air Force and possibly the entire U.S. military rests in space. The Black Stallion today demonstrated the ability to carry out and improve upon two core centers of gravity of the Air Force and indeed of the entire U.S. military: rapid airlift and rapid long-range strike.”
“You were late to the meeting today, Patrick,” Maureen pointed out with a smile.
“It took longer for our helicopter to fly the sixty miles from Patuxent River to Andrews than it did to fly the Black Stallion from Nevada to Maryland, Miss Vice President,” Patrick replied with a smile of his own. “Instead of boosting up to three hundred thousand feet to launch the Meteor payload, we could have flown a straight-line trajectory and shaved sixty minutes off the flight time.”
“Or instead of a Meteor orbital payload,” Noble interjected, “we’ve developed a pressurized cabin module with seats and luggage space. We can fly eight passengers from Washington to Tokyo in less than an hour and a half, and they don’t need to wear space suits.”
“Damn,” the President muttered. “Now I know I want to ride in that thing.”
“Mr. President, I believe orbital and suborbital travel will soon become as commonplace as transcontinental commercial airline travel is now,” Patrick said. “In less than five years I believe we can stand up a wing of twenty spaceplanes and dedicated refueling tankers, plus the necessary hardware to allow us to deliver a wide variety of ordnance, satellites, and even people anywhere around the globe within hours. The array of payloads we can lift right now is small, but within those five years I believe the range of payloads will jump exponentially as manufacturers start building more microsatellites compatible with the Black Stallion.”
“Based at Battle Mountain or Elliott air bases, I assume,” Secretary of Defense Gardner interjected.
“The beauty of the Black Stallion launch system is that we can launch from almost any runway, sir — if it can handle a big fighter jet like the F-15 Eagle or F/A-22 Raptor, it can launch a Stud,” Boomer said. “Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral are good for large rocket launches not only because it’s more efficient to launch polar and equatorial flights from those bases, but the various stages fall safely into open ocean. We don’t drop anything. If the folks down below don’t mind a distant sonic boom, a Stud can go into orbit from anywhere.”