Warp speed

Colonel eyes or her Tabitha eyes. She'd make one hell of a card player. Actually, I had heard she was one.

'Well, something is a rather broad topic. Not sure what I think about it. Could you narrow it down a little?'

'Okay smart guy. The Japanese wrecked the telescope on the 'back-porch' yesterday.' Colonel Ames (not Tabitha) said. That solved that.

'I know. Wang told me. Or is it Che? Do Japanese use their first name as their first name or their last name as their first name?' I asked, and then repeated it to myself to make sure I said it correctly.

'Wangche is his surname. And Wangche was supposed to use that telescope tomorrow to image a planned rendezvous of two satellites. They're meeting up for the first in-space robotic satellite repair.' Tabitha spoke as if she were giving a debriefing.

'Hold on a minute. Does it have to happen tomorrow? I mean, why can't they wait?' I was perplexed by the dilemma.

'The microspacecraft has used up most of its fuel supply to achieve a matching orbit with the satellite. More than a few more days of attitude corrections would use all of its fuel and not leave enough for the orbit raising to the GEO disposal or junkyard orbit.'

She continued with the main problem. 'There are a few smaller telescopes here on the station that could be used but they would require an EVA to locate them in line of sight of the rendezvous.'

'I don't think that would work anyway.' I interrupted her again. 'The pointing and tracking system required for that type of rendezvous would be high-tech stuff. I don't think you could just move a telescope over here to watch it. There are a couple of commercial scopes and software packages that might could do it. You reckon Meade delivers up here?'

'I was afraid of that. Any other suggestions? You're the astronomer after all.' She held onto a rail and righted herself a little closer with respect to me.

'Pointing and tracking is the big bugaboo here. Let's see . . .' Something dinged in my mind. 'Let's go find Fines.'

We found Terrence in the Russian Zarya Control Module poking around.

'Terrence, my man, I have a puzzle for you.' I filled him in on the problem. The two of us started talking and drawing on pads. Tabitha interrupted with an occasional comment. After about an hour of deliberation we still hadn't come up with any brilliant ideas.

'Well Tabitha, I guess it is an EVA after all.' I admitted. She seemed disappointed. While we were talking, one of the Russian crewmen drifted by with a piece of equipment in his hand and a roll of duct tape in the other. I watched out of the corner of my eye as the cosmonaut delicately taped the instrument he was carrying to a telescopic extension rod he was supporting against a control panel.

'What's that?' I asked him, interrupting Terrence mid--sentence.

'This is a star tracker camera. It needs to be extended further from the airlock door for the experiment we're performing.'

'You mean that the duct tape will survive in space?' I was flabbergasted.

'You Americans always think things must cost billions before you can use them.' He scowled and drifted back out of the module with his star tracker on a makeshift extension pole.

He was right. NASA would have done a study for six months on extension poles and then released a Request For Quote to several different contractors to bid on the pole. After Peer Review Services paid, fed, and boarded a small army to grade them and Legal okayed the decision, an award would be given to one of the contractors. The contractor would have to build three or four of these things and destroy them in shake tests, vacuum tests, and the like. Then a fancy new space-qualified extension pole would be manufactured. Of course it would fail somehow and need a modification. All of this to the tune of about three million dollars. How much does a roll of duct tape cost? Heck NASCAR has been using it for years. But I digress again. I went back to the conversation with Terrence and Tabitha.

'Terrence, how much mass is the dish on your mini radar system?' I thought aloud.

'No way, Anson. If we use that system for pointing and tracking, it would give away the accuracy of it to the Japanese. No more secret.' Terrence tugged at his lower lip.

'Can't we just not use it at optimum capacity? Besides, If we duct tape a telescope to it, there would sure be a heck of a lot of jitter in that connection.'

Tabitha interjected, 'No matter anyway. Terrence's system is in the payload bay of the Shuttle. I just don't see a way to do this without an EVA.'

'How much time do we have before the rendezvous?' I asked.

Tabitha looked at her watch, 'About twenty-two hours.'

'Even if we do an EVA, what do we do?' I wasn't sure if this problem had a good solution.

'The Japanese do an EVA and bring in their broken telescope. Wangche has been depressurizing for a while now. Then we go from there.'

'Yes ma'am, Colonel.' Terrence saluted and departed. I hadn't seen anybody salute Tabitha before. It must have been an instinct for Terrence.

Wangche Lynn brought the Japanese Low Noise Optical Instrument Package in through the airlock a couple of hours later. While waiting, Tabitha and I had dinner in the Habitation Module. We played around for about ten minutes in the microgravity. I spun her around a few times and she had me do some flying spin kicks. I soon realized that spin kicks are virtually impossible without gravity. Tabitha did a few dazzling spins and tucks and flips that affected me in just the right way. I really wished there were some hidey-hole that we could find and get friendly. That just wasn't going to happen. This was the longest period of time we'd been in space that Tabitha was just Tabitha and not Colonel Ames—and it was very short-lived, too short- lived. I had had something on my mind that I wanted to talk to her about at the right moment, and this one didn't last long enough. Or I chickened out.