Back to the Moon-ARC

Chapter 11

“Go, baby, go!” was all Gesling could utter as he alternated looking out the window at the landscape of Earth receding below him and the LCD display that showed the status of Dreamscape’s onboard systems. After fixing the faulty sensor on the fuel tank two days previously, the restarted countdown for the launch of Dreamscape had gone flawlessly. Now Gesling was nearing the point at which the scramjet first stage would separate from the vehicle and the powerful onboard rocket engines would fire, giving him the final acceleration needed to attain the seventeen thousand miles per hour required for orbit. Escape velocity was just one stage away.

He felt his pulse quicken in anticipation of the stage separation, and he waited for the five small explosions that would soon sever the bolts holding the two parts of Dreamscape together. The explosive bolts had to fire within milliseconds of each other or the resulting unequal forces acting on the vehicle would tear it apart. Gesling knew the bolts had been tested, retested, and tested again, but that didn’t stop him from being anxious and replaying the catastrophic-failure simulation movies in his mind as the clock on the display counted down to zero.

“Just fly the plane,” he told himself. The foremost thing all pilots trained themselves to do was to learn to fly the plane no matter what the instruments were saying or whatever else was going on around them. Fly the plane. He gripped the controls and swallowed the lump in his throat, forcing it back into his stomach. The stage-separation icon flashed, and the Bitchin’ Betty chimed at him.

“Prepare for stage separation in ten seconds. Nine, eight, seven…”

He felt only a small bump, and then the green light indicating successful stage separation glimmered before him. Seconds later, the Dreamscape’s rocket engines ignited, pushing Gesling back into his padded chair on the flight deck. The Dreamscape picked up speed.

The first stage, now fully separated from the rocket-powered Dreamscape, began its glide back to the Nevada desert. Operated by onboard automatic pilot and with constant monitoring by engineers in the Space Excursions control room back at the launch site, the first stage was on target for a landing back at the location from which its voyage had begun. Onboard computers were sending a steady stream of telemetry back to the ground so the flight engineers could reconstruct all phases of its flight should the worst happen and the vehicle crash. Although the ship had black boxes on board, they were a redundant system at this stage. All operational data was immediately sent to the ground as long as the Dreamscape could get a communications link to a ground station or one of the orbital relay satellites that Childers owned time on. But once they were on the way to the Moon, the data rate would drop to the point that the black boxes would be the main system for flight-data storage and retrieval.

On the ground, the Space Excursions computer was busy receiving, interpreting, and storing the data while Gary Childers was excitedly explaining each element of the flight, as it was happening, to his potential future investors—all of whom had decided to wait the extra two days it took to recover from the aborted launch and to this successful one. It was turning out to be worth their while.

“As you can see, the Dreamscape is now under rocket power and accelerating as it approaches its three hundred kilometer orbital altitude. Once there, pilot Paul Gesling will shake her down during a minimum of ten orbits before he will rendezvous with our tanker satellite and test the refueling system,” Childers explained. Feeling more confident by the minute that his investors were becoming interested, he continued, “After that test, Gesling will begin the reentry process and bring the spaceship back home—landing only a few meters away from where it began its journey. Just future orbiting rides like this we can sell at ten to twenty million a pop and use them as training rides for the Moon missions. We might even consider building a copy of the Dreamscape just for that purpose.”

Childers assessed the reactions of the seven multibillionaires in the room. They alternated between listening to his explanation and tuning him completely out as they surveyed the status board and the onboard-camera feed that showed them the same view as that being experienced by Paul Gesling. The view was difficult for Childers to compete with. The beautiful blues and whites that stretched across the Earth were quickly becoming a fixture at the bottom of the screen, and the dark blackness of space was growing in prominence. In low Earth orbit, the curvature of the Earth was clearly visible, but spectacular in a different way than the “blue marble” made so famous by the Apollo astronauts. That view would have to wait until Space Excursions’ customers were on their way to the Moon.

What the heck, thought Childers, gazing at the view screen along with everyone else in the room. I think I’ll just shut up so we can enjoy the majestic view. Sometimes the best sales pitch was not pitching at all and just letting the product pitch itself.

Fifteen miles away, perched on a small mesa, a Honda minivan was parked in the blazing Nevada sun. The motor was running and the air conditioner was at full blast to keep the occupants and their computers cool and safe from the unrelenting heat of the desert. Inside were three men, all Chinese, and all were watching their computer screens as the data they were collecting from the antennas mounted on the roof came streaming in.

“And they didn’t even bother to encrypt the data?” asked the eldest man among them. He was incredulous, given that his last assignment was to intercept data from an American antimissile test rocket flown over the South Pacific two years previously. The encryption on that data had taken them months to break, and they still weren’t sure if they understood all of it. Without understanding how the instruments were calibrated, there would always be some uncertainty around the accuracy of the data intercepted.

Zeng Li almost grinned at his colleagues at the thought. He had years of experience with his country’s foreign-intelligence community, for many of which he had been living in America working as the representative of a Chinese import/export bank. His other missions had proven much more difficult to acquire data access alone, and that was nearly as tough as breaking the decryption keys. This assignment seemed absurdly easy, and that made him nervous.

Li and his team were charged with monitoring the flight of the Dreamscape and collecting copies of all its telemetry during the test flight. The team had modified the Honda van and turned it into a mobile communications center, though the only external evidence of this was the antenna. Perched on top of the van was a small dish antenna, clearly designed to receive satellite space communications. Had the profusion of home-entertainment systems with satellite television not become commonplace in homes throughout the remote portions of the American southwest, the antenna might have stood out suspiciously. But satellite TV was ubiquitous, and almost every home and camper had the required hardware. Their van, therefore, looked no different than the many others who simply used their satellite communications system to watch Sunday Night Football.

“It looks like they are about to successfully achieve orbit,” said another of the men as they keenly watched the data scroll by on the computer screens.

“I could have told you that,” said the third man, who was watching the whole event live on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and the Science Channel.

No one paid any attention to the van or its occupants as they collected the data that would enable their colleagues at home to better understand the Dreamscape design recently stolen from the computers at Space Excursions.

“Dreamscape is in orbit,” declared Paul Gesling. Though he had been in space several times piloting the suborbital rockets that preceded Dreamscape, this was the first time he would actually circle the globe. Gesling was now euphoric. He was whizzing around the Earth in a 186-mile-high circular orbit at 17,253 miles per hour. One trip around the Earth at that altitude and speed took ninety minutes almost to the second. The mission plan included a total of ten orbits, which meant that he would be in space for the next fifteen hours. A lot of that time he would be busy, but there was enough of it to allow the occasional gaze out the window.

“Control, now preparing for orbit-orientation burn,” he read right off his checklist. “OOB in forty-five seconds.”

“Roger that, Paul. Preparing for OOB.”

At the Dreamscape’s circular orbit, the ship was still in an airplane-like flight path. That meant that the nose was forward and the planet was underneath the belly. It would be easier to fly and maintain a steady spacecraft orientation if the ship was rolled over and flying ass-first just like the old space shuttles used to. The view would be better, too. Paul toggled the OOB (pronounced “oh-oh-bee”) and the forty-five-second clock started to count down. The countdown allowed the onboard computer systems to interrogate the global-positioning data, the inertial-navigation units, and the exterior star trackers to determine the exact orientation of the ship with respect to the Earth and space. Then it calculated the appropriate sets of burns to safely rotate the ship into the upside-down-and-backward flight configuration. The clock hit ten seconds, and all the calculations showed complete.

“Warning, orbital-orientation burn in three, two, one.” Paul instinctively raised an eyebrow at the sound of the Bitchin’ Betty and gripped his restraints in preparation. The burn fired.

Several small cold-gas rocket thrusters fired on exterior of the ship, flipping it over and rolling it. Then the thrusters fired again to stabilize and stop the flight path. Burns, very small ones, would be needed over time to maintain the proper orientation of Dreamscape, but they would be so small they would barely be noticeable compared to the OOB.

“OOB is complete,” Paul announced as the Earth filled the view in all the windows. “All systems look good, and to quote John Glenn, ‘Oh, that view is tremendous!’ ” Gesling had been trying to think of something historic to say, but the best he could do was rob from history. The sentiment perfectly fit the moment as it stimulated the memory and feelings he had the first time he had heard that scratchy radio recording from 1962 when American astronaut John Glenn made his first journey into space—years before Gesling’s birth. Even though he had heard it as a rerun, it had instilled in him something amazing. Looking out the window now, he understood what it was. How Glenn must have felt that first time he looked out the window and saw that beautiful world beneath him…Paul felt the same way now.

“Roger that, Paul,” Childers replied from his own control-room link. “You’ll have to let me tag along for the ride sometime.”

“I’ll bring you up anytime you want to pay for it, Gary,” Paul replied with a chuckle.

A checklist icon turned yellow on his monitor. The changing color caught his attention, which was why it was designed that way. The icon told Gesling that he needed to begin preparations for the rendezvous with the refueling satellite, now only eight orbits away. That was about twelve hours—he had plenty of time.

Slowly but surely, Newton’s laws were guiding the Dreamscape and the refueling spacecraft closer together. Once they attained the same orbit and were separated by only some tens of meters, the most difficult part of this flight would commence. Dreamscape would gently bump into the orbital gas station, lock on to its docking ring, secure a connection, and demonstrate how fuel could be transferred from one vehicle to another. Without the extra fuel, the Dreamscape would not be able to go to the Moon. While no fuel would actually flow this time, they would test out every system so that when the actual Moon flight occurred, they would be reasonably sure that no problems would keep the transfer from happening.

Again speaking only to himself, Gesling said, “If NASA can do it, then so can I.”

About that time an icon labeled ISR Payload turned red, showing that it had priority in the mission timeline at the moment. Paul tapped the monitor and brought up the checklist for the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance package. Step one was to activate the system. This he did by tapping the appropriate key sequence. On the Lunar mission the ISR package would be controlled by the person in seat number 2B. It could be controlled by any of the seats, but the future occupant of seat 2B was the person who had trained for the ISR job. The job consisted of turning on a very nice twenty-inch commercially available telescope system.

The telescope was a Schmidt-Cassegrain type with real-time digital-color visible video and false-color infrared video cameras. There was a full zoom capability and pan and tilt controls, all software-driven from the touchscreen on the back of any of the seats. With the planned ten-mile closest flyby altitude of the Moon, called the orbit’s periapsis, the system could resolve an inch or two on the lunar surface. It couldn’t read the license plates on the moonbuggies (if they had them), but it could give a pretty good image of the thing. At Dreamscape’s 186-mile-high orbit above the Earth, it could resolve, at best, about fifteen inches per pixel on the camera—assuming there were no atmospheric distortions in the way. In other words, the smallest thing the camera could see was the size of a beach ball. Although the system was designed for fun viewing of the Moon and for finding potential landing spots there in the future, Paul knew that the company had funding from other, more terrestrial, sources for flying future rapidly deployable spy missions. The Dreamscape was, in essence, a quickly deployable spy satellite that could be maneuvered to “locations of opportunity.” Paul also understood that Gary Childers liked money, Dreamscape needed lots of it, and the U.S. intelligence community liked the product they had, and they had plenty of money. Space Excursions had gotten contracts for undisclosed amounts from various DoD and three letter agencies to try out the system while in orbit around the Earth. Childers planned to create a fleet of these things that could be used for Moon missions, Earth-orbit tourist missions, and DoD missions; based, of course, on when the customers could pay.

Paul ran the ISR telescope through its test sequence and then played around with it for the allotted thirty minutes he had available in the mission timeline. As he rolled around the planet, he could see Florida coming into view. He zoomed in on the Cape at the launch pads there and could see the Ares Vehicle Assembly Buildings. He could see motion around the pads like a flurry of ants on an anthill. A few minutes later he was over the Atlantic Ocean and couldn’t find much to look at. He put the system on auto and closed the icon on his screen. To close out the checklist for this item, there was only one other thing he had to do. He unstrapped himself and practiced floating back to seat number 2B, where he checked that he could control the ISR system from there. All was well. Check. He floated his way to all the seats and ran through their operation.

After the basic ship checkout and the occasional fun full backflip, he made his way back to his seat up front. It was time to start prepping for the rendezvous with the fuel depot. All the motion through the ship had made him a little dizzy, and he needed to strap himself in and focus to keep from getting motion sick. Microgravity was fun to him, but Paul knew to be careful until he was well adjusted or it could lead him down a dangerous and gut-wrenching path.

At launch plus fifteen hours, the Dreamscape had completed ten orbits, docked with the refueling satellite, separated, and was preparing to fly home. Childers was ecstatic. The Dreamscape had performed flawlessly. In just a couple of months, if this landing went smoothly, he would be sending his first paying customers on a trip around the Moon.

His soon-to-be partners were reassembling in the VIP area after a celebratory dinner and an abbreviated night’s rest to await the dawn landing of Dreamscape. Childers had already gotten verbal and e-mail statements from all seven investors of their excitement and plans to invest in the company. He would soon nail down the dollar figures and the paperwork, but it looked as though all seven in attendance would fully commit to the Moon-landing partnership, giving him and his company the money needed to begin work on Space Excursions’ next venture before the first one was even complete.

Looking out the windows, Childers, O’Conner, the VIP entrepreneurs, and the press gazed expectantly at the sky. The sun was barely above the horizon when they caught the first sight of the Dreamscape winging its way back from space. Applause broke out everywhere, even in the control room, though there the applause was brief due to there still being much work for them to do.

The vehicle glided onto the desert runway and bounced only once before rolling to a complete stop. As the air temperature began its daily rise from simply uncomfortable to totally unbearable, astronaut Paul Gesling opened the doors of Dreamscape, and awaited the portable stairs that would allow him to walk again on terra firma.

Childers didn’t rush to greet his pilot; he was too busy chatting up his new partners, taking their enthusiastic congratulations with appropriate modesty, deflecting credit to his engineers and to Gesling. Childers was an expert at working a crowd, large or small.

The Honda van on that mesa fifteen miles away was also bustling with activity. The roof antennas were being retracted and the hardware fastened down for travel. They had miles to go that day and a mountain of data to organize and send to their faraway homeland. As soon as they got to the local cyber café, their mission would be accomplished. Li was glad. He preferred cloak-and-dagger missions to require at least a cloak, if not the dagger, too. This was just too easy.