world, sat at their launch towers complete with the Zihuang lunar landers. Each Long March had a crew of ten Chinese air force personnel aboard. The mission had been planned so rapidly that the Chinese engineers were still evaluating the return specs for the two-capsule twenty-man flights. Nothing had been assured, not even a successful landing on the Moon.
The three-staged Long March launch system had four solid rocket boosters attached to the mainframe of the rocket. The main system itself had four powerful Shang-7 engines, almost equal in thrust to the American version from which the engines had been “borrowed” in the late seventies. At T-minus thirty seconds and counting, all four hundred engineers in the nearby control center watched with wide eyes as the elevator system and fuel hoses started popping free of the two giant rockets. Television cameras from China’s state-run facilities were carrying the launch to over 800 million Chinese on a five-minute delayed “live” broadcast.
The first rocket and crew to be lifted from the pad was named Glorious March. The second was Magnificent Dragon. Each was hastily built and each of the twenty-man crews knew that an explosion was more likely that a clean liftoff. But no crew member, even the military personnel who were prepared to do battle if necessary, would have traded places with any other man or woman on Earth. Every rocket had a glorious red band separating each of its three stages, and each band had the golden Chinese stars encircling it, with the stars ultimately shooting off toward the next stage in line. Other than that bit of color, each system was ivory white and stood out magnificently against the clear morning sky above the Gobi. Finally, at T-minus ten seconds, the loudspeakers came to life as the crowds of reporters watched on the chilly morning.
“… ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, we have main engine start,” the Chinese announcer called from the mission control building as the four main engines fired, sending a tremendous cloud of gases and fire free of the spacecraft. “… two, one, we have solid booster ignition on all four solid rocket boosters.”
Every journalist present could hear the excitement in the voice of the announcer as he watched the cloud of hot gases pour out of the engines on launch pad 1-C. The cameras zoomed in as the first movement of the giant rocket became apparent. The extending arms that carried oxygen and fuel to the main engines finally separated and the vehicle started to move. The clock was now running on Glorious March as its bulk lifted free of the Earth. Before it cleared the tower’s uppermost reaches, the ten-second countdown of Magnificent Dragon began. The same sequence sent the main engines to flame as Glorious March fully cleared the giant tower. Men and women, engineers from around the world, couldn’t help themselves, from Houston to Guiana, to Baikonur Cosmodrome, men and women from every country stood and cheered or pounded their fists as the two Chinese rockets cleared the restraints of Earth’s gravity. No one ever wanted to see astronauts die or an attempt at space fail. It was a human weakness to see greatness and cheer it.
The two massive rockets rotated, sending their bulk dangerously close to the stall point as they rolled 15 degrees in the clear sky above the desert. Reporters from the world over were stunned at the power of the Long March launch system as the ground still shook beneath their feet. The Glorious March led the way, followed four miles behind by Magnificent Dragon as the first stages separated.
The Chinese mission to the Moon had begun.
The F-14 Tomcat climbed at a 45 degree angle. Then, as Green watched with his dark visor down, he saw the bright red and gold plumes of the two launches out of the Gobi. His radio was crackling with warnings from the North Koreans and the Chinese that the Tomcat was in violation of their joint airspace. Green reached out and shut down his communication system. He then pushed the Tomcat’s throttle as far forward as it could go, sending JP-4 jet fuel into the exhaust of the nacelles. The exhaust rings expanded and the F-14 was pushed into afterburner. Green pulled the stick straight back into his belly and the Tomcat turned nose up as it started its climb through the Earth’s lower atmosphere.
As he climbed, Green raised the small protective cover on his control stick and pushed the blue button. The seeker head in the first ASAT came to life as it started its infrared sweep of the area in front of the F-14. First one and then the other missile locked on its particular target-each of the two Chinese rockets as they climbed for high Earth orbit.
“It’s in God’s hands now,” Green said, as he thumbed the red switch. He closed his eyes and again whispered an almost silent prayer as the first ASM-135 ASAT left its launch rail. With the Tomcat facing straight up into the air, the missile’s exhaust streamed back along the clear canopy of the jet, fogging the plastic. The plane was starting to shudder as it fought for altitude against the turbulence created by the giant ASAT, which was now trying desperately to close the gap between it and the second stage of the Long March rockets. The Tomcat’s GE engines fought and struggled for air in the high reaches of sky.
As Green switched seeker heads and missiles, he locked on to the Magnificent Dragon as it lagged behind the first rocket. He pushed the trigger and waited three seconds as the powerful engine of the ASAT cleared the aircraft. Green immediately pulled away as his starboard engine started to flame out due to a lack of breathable air. Green swung the jet over onto its back and then he rolled and fell into a nose-down dive for the deck. It was at that exact moment that his threat radar illuminated from the west and the east. He was being tracked by air-to-air weapons.
“Thank you, Lord, for this final challenge, this last test of my faith and my allegiance to your cause,” he said into his oxygen mask as he saw the eight radar blips on his screen. Chinese and North Korean fighters were trying to prevent him from reaching the Sea of Japan, where his rescue boat was to be waiting for him. Green smiled and switched the control stick selector to guns, as he knew he had no defensive or offensive missiles left. In fact, they had never been loaded. “As I walk into the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil…”
The Tomcat dove straight into the advancing communist fighters as the first ASAT found its target.
The giant first stage separated with a bright flash as the controllers followed the ascending rockets on the long-range telemetry and photo analysis provided by a MiG-31 chase plane. As the fighter climbed on afterburners, its cameras, three still and two video, transmitted a continuous stream of pictures to mission control. Suddenly, a dark object streaked toward the leading Long March just as its first stage separated from the second. All eyes watched as the bright flash of exploding bolts and the ignition of the second stage blurred the picture momentarily, and when it cleared they saw the object and were horrified when they recognized it as a streaking missile. Just as the ASAT’s radar and IR seeker head came into the thirty-foot-diameter target range, the missile broke apart and a ten-pound explosive charge detonated, sending out five thousand ball-bearing-sized steel projectiles. The bulk of them struck the empty first stage as it fell back to Earth, but enough fought their way through the disturbed air and heat to connect with the three engines of the second stage. They struck the exhaust bells of the engines and punctured through the fuel lines that provided the combustion chambers the needed oxygen and nitrogen mix.
As millions of eyes watched in horror, the second stage simply vanished in a white and red plume of fire. The second and third stages fell apart in the expanding fireball that sent the lunar lander smashing up and into the ten-man compartment of the crew module. The debris expanded even further, slowly spiraling in all directions as the Long March ceased to exist in the blink of an eye.
The witnesses to the tragic happening then noticed another streak of light as it plowed through the remains of the first rocket. A second antisatellite missile shot upward and was on track to strike the Magnificent Dragon as the first spent stage went flying past the ASAT. As luck and fate would have it, a fortuitous accident occurred. The remaining fuel of the solid propellant rocket boosters was being spent even though the first stage had separated cleanly. As they spun out of control, falling back toward the Earth, a sudden burst of flame shot from the exhaust nozzle of one of the boosters, catching the ASAT as it flew past. The heat was tremendous and burned through the hard plastic nose cone of its seeker head. With molten circuit boards and damaged processing units, the ASAT exploded before its outer casing could be blown free; thus the ball bearing shrapnel was slowed by 50 percent of its normal velocity. The particles shot up and over the second stage, scraping along the aluminum fuselage and then past the third stage where only five of the steel balls penetrated the outer casing into the lunar lander’s protective shell. The rest, over a hundred fragments, hit the crew module, three of them penetrating.
The crewmen reacted fast, even though they had little training in this event, as it had not been foreseen. The three holes threatened to destabilize their environment, and as the second stage fired and separated from the third,
