astronauts and for the success of our planned rescue attempt. I’m going to turn it over to Mr. Calvin Ross, Administrator of NASA, to provide the details.”
Childers listened to enough of the details to get at least some understanding of what was planned and then keyed in the access code on his workstation that would allow him to speak directly with the
“Paul. This is Gary. How are things up there?” Childers asked.
“Mr. Childers. Thanks for asking. I think your passengers are having the time of their lives—or they would be, if they weren’t thinking about those trapped Chinese astronauts. It’s a mixture of elation and sadness up here. But I don’t believe anyone will ask for a refund.” Gesling sounded like he was trying to put the best possible face on what had become of their interplanetary vacation.
“Well, put me on the speaker. I have news.”
“Go ahead.”
“Hello!” Gary Childers greeted his customers, still about a hundred thousand miles from home. “I have good news. NASA is going to attempt to rescue the stranded Chinese astronauts that you found on your trip. It sounds risky, and it may not be successful, but if it weren’t for you and the flight of the
“Gary, thanks for telling us. You’ve got six smiling faces up here.”
“Tell them I’m smiling, too. See you soon,” Childers said.
Gary leaned back in his chair. He meant every damned word of what he’d said. He had just gotten the best publicity anyone could have imagined and perhaps saved some lives to boot. With that, Gary Childers was both a happy businessman and an elated human being. And he did have a big smile on his face to prove it.
Chapter 19
Not since Apollo 13 had so many NASA engineers been working with such urgency. Every room Stetson passed on his way to briefing room 1A was full of people pouring over printouts and busily making calculations on their laptop computers. Normally, with launch only two days away, all the analysis would have been completed long ago—checked and rechecked weeks before. Now, with so many changes in the flight, many analyses were being performed for the first time. This wasn’t in any of the simulations, so there was no backup plan to pull out and follow. This one was being created on the fly.
As he walked down the hall, he picked up snippets of conversation.
“…enough fuel for ascent if we remove another fifty kilograms, but…”
“We’ve never done an aerocapture! If we’d funded that flight experiment…”
“Shit! The lander can’t do that! Look, here are the specs and I…”
Stetson smiled. These were good people. The best. They would figure it out. Stetson had flown combat missions, three shuttle missions, and two Orion flights to the space station. He knew what the hardware could do, and he knew the engineers would catch up with him eventually. Or so he hoped.…
The first thing Stetson noticed when he walked into the briefing room was the presence of the four Chinese. They were standing together in the corner, conferring among themselves with their NASA liaison and translator standing a few feet away, looking anxious. Although Stetson didn’t know any of them, he could immediately tell that one of the men—they were all men—was not an engineer. He was the tallest of the bunch, and he stood slightly back from the other three, apparently listening but really watching everyone else in the room. His eyes caught Stetson’s as Bill entered the room, and then they quickly darted back to the conversation of the other three.
The conference room was long and broad, with windows that looked out at the distant launch towers at which both the pencil-like Ares I and the much larger Ares V were poised for takeoff. A simulated cherry table shaped into an ellipse sat in the middle of the room, equipped with individual power, network, and optical-fiber links at regular intervals to allow those in attendance to remain connected.
“Bill! Come on up here. We need to get started.” It was the voice of NASA’s Chief Engineer, Tom Rowan. Rowan, the man ultimately responsible for all the technical aspects of the mission, looked like he hadn’t slept in days. His close-cropped hair was somehow matted to his head, and his clothes had that “day old with sweat” look. He also looked about ten years older than his forty-six years.
“Tom, good to see you.” Stetson slapped him on the shoulder and shook his hand.
“You, too. You need to meet our Chinese counterparts. They flew in last night. That’s also when we got their best data regarding the crash site. But we still don’t know why they crashed. That’s one of the items they are supposed to tell us this morning. I’ve got your coffee for you. Let’s get this show on the road.”
With that, Rowan convened the meeting, with more than two dozen people in the room scurrying for chairs and the four Chinese taking seats directly across from Stetson. After the introductions and obligatory handshakes, the Chinese lead designer, General Xiang Li, took the microphone.
Xiang, not looking a day over thirty-five but probably at least ten years older than that, gazed around the room, pausing briefly as he glanced at “the manager” from his group before moving on.
“Thank you for what you are doing. My country is deeply appreciative. I believe our engineers communicated to yours all that we know about the crash. The
“We’re still looking at the engineering data that was being transmitted to Earth autonomously by the spacecraft up until the point at which contact was lost. It’s beginning to look like there was some sort of malfunction with its attitude-control system. The ship was beginning to rock back and forth, and it was building to a point at which the attitude-control thrusters would no longer have been able to compensate. We believe they, in fact, failed—causing
