Back to the Moon-ARC

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.