"Here's the plan," I said to Tabitha, not giving her time to interrupt once I had her attention. "You sneak the telescope and the focal plane instruments away from the Japanese. I'll give the optics and detectors a once over. Then Terrence and I will go out into the Shuttle and attach the thing to the radar assembly of his experiment. We feed the telemetry, point and track data, and the focal plane images through the modem on Terrence's experiment. Tomorrow, during the rendezvous, we send the Japanese the feedback control sequences and let them point the telescope for the experiment. When it's over we cut the circuit and fly off in the Shuttle." I paused for air.
"We have to get approval first!" I knew she would say that.
Believe it or not, we got approval for the EVA and for the process we planned. The biggest hurdle was getting Terrence's bosses to okay the project but we assured them no damage or exfiltration of the equipment technology would take place.
Typical of NASA, some group of engineers dirtside were put to work developing a schedule for us. After the bright boys figured out about how long it would take us to do the job, they added a twenty percent contingency to that, then added another time delay according to some formula for designing EVAs. Tabitha was told to schedule a four-hour later departure from ISS than in the original flight plan. I really didn't believe that it would take us four extra hours to complete the tasks, but I kept my mouth shut. Besides, Terrence and I had to start preparing for the EVA. The Shuttle environment would have to be brought back down to lower than atmospheric pressure immediately. Lowering the pressure in the environment would help prevent getting the bends in the very low pressure environment of the spacesuits.
Since this was a NASA-sanctioned plan, Tabitha didn't have to sneak the telescope away from Wangche after all. She just explained that we had a fix and the Japanese astronauts couldn't be involved with it. Then she asked them plainly if they wanted to get the data for the rendezvous or not.
The JLNOIP focal plane detectors were all in good and operational condition. The primary optic on the other hand, had a scratch about an inch wide across it from one side to the other. Even worse, the scratch had been caused when the support for the secondary mirror, called a spider, collapsed into the larger primary mirror due to the force on it from the "Lemote Manipuratol Alm" or Remote Manipulator Arm. So, a new spider had to be rigged somehow or other. I was able to repair the -structural pieces from parts on the Shuttle and the ISS. However, the large primary mirror couldn't be made as good as new without serious repolishing and recoating. I did some quick calculations on a scratchpad and discovered that the total aperture of the telescope wouldn't be required in order to gather enough light to image the satellite rendezvous only twenty-eight thousand miles away. This meant that the efficiency of the primary optic could be a little worse than its original specifications. I did comment that the inch wide scratch across the optics diameter wasn't to factory specs. I also did some image calculations and decided that the error in the image that the scratch would cause would be negligible. Some slight spatial filtering would take place, but that just couldn't be helped. Maybe the Japanese team had an optical wavefront guru working for them who could clean that part out of the images later.
I managed to bang the telescope and the rest of the JLNOIP back in working order and Terrence and I completed the EVA to mount it on his radar pointing and tracking experiment hardware in the Shuttle bay. We used some bungee cord, a few hose clamps, a lot of duct tape, and some ISS camera-mounting hardware we "McGuyvered" into a mount for the JLNOIP. Terrence and I played with the point-and-track algorithms until we had the telescope pointing to classified parameters. Duct tape is amazing. Then Terrence wrote a random noise function into the code that would cause the JLNOIP to demonstrate a pointing jitter just short of state-of-the-art. I was impressed by Lieutenant Fine's engineering prowess.
We handed the datalink over to the Japanese about thirty minutes before the rendezvous. From the oohs and ahs and the machine gun Japanese banter we could hear over the UHF, they must have been impressed. I high-fived Terrence and reminded him that we weren't getting paid for this work since we were payload specialists.
"Hey! Perhaps we should bill NASA when we get back," he joked.
"I'll have my lawyer look into it," I agreed only a little more seriously. "I'm certain there would be a way to call this misuse of private resources or some other legalese term. Maybe since you're Air Force, we could get the Inspector General involved."
We left ISS about three hours and fifty-eight minutes later than the original flight plan. Those bright boys at NASA are good at schedules I guess. As we departed from the Docking Module I muttered to myself, "Glad I kept my mouth shut about the schedule thing."
"What's that?" Terrence overheard me.
"Nothing. I'm just glad to be here."
"Me too!" he said.
CHAPTER 9
Two sleep cycles later I was on the line with Jim doing my preflight fire-up sequences. Zephram, the warp flight demonstrator, was itching to be put together and fired off—or at least I was ready for it to be put together and fired off. The computer bus for the three ECCs was placed on standby mode. The star trackers and the attitude control system (ACS) was brought online and the onboard command and data handling or C&DH was powered up.
"Jim, does the plumbing check for the ACS thrusters?"
"Roger that, Anson. Lox and Hydrazine tankage is nominal. My numbers show the same as yours."
"Okay, I'm going to run the sequence to bring the data stream off the hardwire direct connection with the Shuttle to the temporary wireless UHF link."
"Have you cut the circuit breakers to the probe main communications bus? We don't want to fry the TWeeTA system." Jim reminded me.
"Roger, Jim. Per the checklist the TWeeTa bus circuit breakers are open. Here we go. I'm cutting the hardline." I waited to see if data still flowed through my laptop from the wireless digital UHF modem connection. "Jim, I read a strong radio signal with eight-seven percent signal quality. Copy?"
"Roger, Anson. My numbers concur. It looks like we're done until you go out there and start snapping some parts together."
"Yeah. Jim, I'll start suiting up and will be back online in about fifty-six minutes or so. Anson out."
I made my way through the forward cabin to the flight deck. The air in the Shuttle was a little thinner today since an EVA was planned. I was trying to acclimate myself to it again. It was easier this time than before the EVA at the ISS. On the way to the forward section of the flight deck I bumped, and I mean that literally, into Tracy and Malcom Edmunds. They seemed busy. I'm not sure doing what. How could they have been training for a Shuttle mission while stationed on ISS for the past two or three months?
"What're you guys doing?" I asked.
"Malcom and I are working on the video equipment. We thought we would help document your EVA." Tracy smiled, then turned back to her work.
"Have you guys seen the boss?"
"She's up front," Malcom responded.
Tabitha was reading some flight data from a monitor and marking checks on a pad. I watched her for a second before I considered interrupting. I had a lot on my mind. An EVA, the first ever warp drive, and the woman I love—quite a bit to process while navigating close quarters in microgravity.
"Just a sec, Anson," she said without looking up. How she knew it was me I will never know. I didn't even get to interrupt her. She finished flipping a switch or two and checking boxes on her pad. She stuck the pad to a Velcro patch on the side of her seat and turned to me, "Ready to go outside?" She had a big girly grin and looked less business-as-usual.