“You can talk to Colonel Wentworth now,” he said, “when he comes up. He has been told to call you.”
What did all this mean? Janet found herself in the grip of a terrible fear.
She walked around the strange TV set, not touching it, and called the family friend in Space Control.
“There’s a shuttle going up to bring him out, isn’t there?” she asked. “They said there was.”
“I hope that’s true,” was the hesitant reply. “There aren’t many shots left right now. Everything depends on how the Joint Chiefs propose to use them.”
An hour later he called again. She had not yet been able to bring herself to touch the set.
“Janet, bad news. There’s only one rocket left that can get up there before the life support systems run out. The Joint Chiefs have ordered that shot to be used to replace a critical reconnaissance satellite taken out by Soviet interception.”
“You mean — they’re going to let Slim die, out there, when they could save him?”
“They have only one space shot left,” was the reply, “until Enterprise 103 can be pushed out again. That will take at least three days. With the damage done in the Soviet attack the systems in Slim’s ship won’t last that long. The only shot they have ready to go at Vandenberg is already set to take up the reconnaissance satellite they have to have there and I am afraid there is no way of changing that. The TV set they have brought you will bring in Slim. You can see him and talk to him. Turn it on — but you are going to have to be brave.”
“But… but… the newsman said a rescue mission was being urgently prepared and would soon be on its way. He said that.”
“I am sorry, Janet, truly sorry. That’s only PR to allay public anxiety. You have to be told the truth.”
Janet was silent for a moment.
“What about the others in the crew out there?” she almost whispered. “What about them and their families too?”
“That’s being taken care of,” was the reply. “But time is running on. You can switch on the set now and pick up Slim.”
She did so. There on the screen was Slim, her beloved Slim, one of the only three people in her whole world who really mattered. He was in the cabin of the spacecraft surrounded by all the gadgetry but blundering about in his spacesuit even more than usual and uncertain in his movements. His eyes looked strange.
“Slim!” she said.
“Hello, love,” he said. “My eyes aren’t so good and I can’t see you but my God it’s good to hear you. How are things?”
“Good,” she lied. “Nicholas and Pamela are here. Say hello to daddy, children.”
“Hello, daddy,” came up in chorus.
“That’s great,” was the reply.
Janet watched a weightless, sightless spaceman fumbling about in the cabin. The voice was the same. That was Slim’s voice.
“Janet,” it said, “I love you.”
“Oh, Slim…”
“It can’t last long now, perhaps an hour or so, perhaps only minutes. I love you, Janet, I love you dearly and I am switching off.” The image vanished.
Janet, in her much loved and lived in home, sat down upon a sofa, dry-eyed and too stricken even for grief.
Suddenly a wail came from deep within her as from a dying animal.
“I hate you all!” she shouted and then in a flood of tears snatched the children to her and held them close.
When the war ended, a space mission recovered the orbiting bodies of the Captain and crew of Enterprise 101 and brought them back to earth for burial with military honours in Arlington National Cemetery. The occasion was made an important one. The President sent an aide. Janet Wentworth stayed away.”[21]
In the three decades before the war, with vast investment and marvellous inventiveness from the superpowers, space technology and its applications raced ahead. Apart from well-publicized programmes for peaceful purposes, there was a strong military thrust behind this effort. All space activity had some military significance but at least 65 per cent of the launches before the war were for military reasons only. By January 1985 the Soviet Union had made 2,119 launches compared with 1,387 by the United States. The latter generally used bigger launching rockets with heavier payloads and their satellites had longer lives and wider capabilities.
Among the military tasks performed by unmanned satellites were reconnaissance, by photographic, electronic, radar and infra-red means; the provision of communications, early-warning, navigational and meteorological stations; and finally there were the interceptor/destroyer (I/D) counter-satellites. Manned vehicles like the orbiter Enterprise 101 were reserved for combinations of tasks which were interdependent or where the opportunity might be fleeting or variable. China, France and Britain also had modest space programmes and put up satellites for research and communications. France and China used their own launchers while the British, who were considerable designers and manufacturers of satellites, depended on US launchers, as of course did NATO, which had a three-satellite communications system.
Before the war ordinary people around the world had little idea of what was going on far above them. This was principally because much of it was shrouded in secrecy, but it was also because their attention was only drawn to space sporadically when people were shot up into it and the TV cameras followed their progress. As things turned out, heroic exploits in space did not figure much in the war. Human beings were needed in space for certain tasks and especially so in the early days of the research programme. When it came to military applications they were usually more of an encumbrance than an advantage. There were notable exceptions when multiple tasks needed direct human judgment and control. Colonel Wentworth’s tragic flight in Enterprise 101 was a dramatic example. But in the main space was best left to the robots.
To appreciate what happened in space during the war a little understanding of the governing science is helpful. Man-made earth satellites have to conform, as do natural planets, to laws discovered in the seventeenth century by the German philosopher/scientist Johann Kepler. What is probably most significant in the context of this book is that the plane of an earth satellite (or planet) will always pass through the centre of the earth. Under the inexorable discipline of this and the other laws, the movement of satellites is inherently stable and predictable. They can only be manoeuvred by the thrust of ‘on-board’ propulsive forces, usually in the form of liquid or solid fuel rocket motors. These manoeuvring engines and their fuel have of course to be carried up from the earth in competition with all other payloads. As the fuel is quickly exhausted, manoeuvrability is limited. It has in any case to be paid for at the price of other payloads.
The amount of electric power available to activate the satellite’s systems is another limiting factor. Solar cells can convert the sun’s rays into electricity quite readily but there are early limits to the power that can be generated and stored in this way. That is why satellite radars, which played such an important role in the war, were at some disadvantage. Radar hungers greedily for electric power. It was for this reason that the Soviet Union made use of small nuclear reactors as power generators in its radar reconnaissance satellites. It may be recalled that it was a Soviet satellite, undoubtedly engaged in ocean surveillance, that caused worldwide concern in 1978 when it went wrong and scattered radioactivity over northern Canada as it burnt up on falling back into the atmosphere.
Even without such mishaps a satellite’s useful life does not last for ever. It is largely determined by the height of its orbit and the endurance of its power supply. The exhaustion of its power supply sets an obvious limit to its functional life as distinct from the life of the vehicle. The lives of satellites range from days and weeks to (theoretically) thousands of years, depending on their orbits. Generally speaking, the lower the orbit the shorter the life and vice versa. The height of the orbit is determined by the characteristics of the satellite’s launch and is set to suit the tasks it has to perform. Photographic satellites are usually the lowest and are set as low as 120 kilometres from the earth. At the other end of the scale, the United States nuclear explosion detection VELA (velocity and angle of attack) satellites were pushed out as far as 110,000 kilometres into space in the war.