“You told them we weren’t in orbit yet when we flew over Russia, sir?” Captain Hunter Noble asked incredulously. He was meeting with Patrick McLanahan, Dave Luger, Ann Page, Hal Briggs, and Chris Wohl in the Battle Staff briefing area at Elliott Air Force Base.
“What did you expect the general to say, Boomer?” Dave asked.
“Lie, of course,” Hunter replied matter-of-factly. “The only guys that could have tracked us were the Russians, and nobody believes what they say any more.”
“You need a little more experience talking with the President of the United States before you go around giving tips on lying to the national security staff, Boomer,” Patrick suggested. “If I recall correctly, you had a tough time saying anything when we visited the Oval Office.”
“Touche. I’ll be quiet now, sir.”
“Thank you.”
“So we’re grounded now?” Ann Page asked. “I just got here! I love those little Studs! Can’t we do something? You’re the special adviser to the President and a three-star general, General — pull some strings, throw some weight around.”
Patrick was silent for a few moments, adopting his infamous “thousand-yard stare” as his mind turned over possibilities. “Look out, everyone — the ‘Rubik’s Cube’ is in motion,” Dave Luger commented.
Patrick winked at Dave. “The spaceplanes are grounded, we can’t launch any more NIRTSats, and the ones we have monitoring Iran will fall out of the sky in less than six days,” he summarized. “What else do we have?”
“Squat,” Boomer said. “We’re shut down.”
“Maybe not,” Patrick said. “We still have one asset we can bring online to help us — we just need someone who can fly the thing over to where we need it.”
Ann Page noticed Patrick and Dave Luger looking…at her. “What?” she asked. “I’m grounded, same as you guys. Get me permission to fly the Stud again and I’ll take her anywhere you want.”
“I’m not thinking about the Stud,” Patrick said. “I’m thinking about bringing Armstrong Space Station online again.”
“Silver Tower!” Ann exclaimed. “You serious?”
“It’s the greatest surveillance platform in existence,” Patrick said. “It can scan every square foot of the entire Middle East or Siberia in one pass, including underwater and underground. If we want to find out what’s happening in Iran — or Kavaznya, if we have to go up against that thing again — that’s what we need.”
“Sounds fine with me, Patrick — I love going up to that thing and turning it on,” Ann said happily, so excited she could hardly keep her seat. “But the only way we have to get up there is with the Shuttle, and it takes at least two months — more like six — to get it ready for a mission.”
“We have access to Ares,” Dave Luger said. “We’ve been involved in testing from the beginning, and we can put together a launch in no time.”
“The new Crew Launch Vehicle?” Ann remarked. Ares was the next generation of low-cost, highly reliable, reusable heavy rocket launchers. Its first stage was a five-segment solid-rocket booster similar to the Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Boosters; its second stage was a liquid-fueled booster uprated and improved from the Saturn-V’s J-2 engine. “Cool. But what about Orion?”
Dave shook his head. “We never got to play with the Crew Exploration Vehicle, only the booster,” he said. Orion was the name of the new series of manned space vehicles destined to replace the Shuttle Transportation System. Resembling the Apollo spacecraft, Orion could carry as many as six astronauts and was designed to be configurable for any space mission from low Earth orbit to a trip to Mars. “But we do have a cargo stage that we used to test the Meteor weapon dispenser.”
Ann shook her head. “Ares won’t help if the cargo stage can’t carry passengers,” Ann said. “We need at least two persons aboard Silver Tower to bring it online again and operate the surveillance systems.” She paused, smiled, and said, “And me to command it, of course. We need a Shuttle mission. We hitch a ride on the next Shuttle flight, get on board, restart the environmental systems, and reactivate the station’s sensors and datalinks,” Ann Page said. “When’s the next flight?”
Dave queried the “Duty Officer,” the electronic virtual assistant at Dreamland, and got the answer moments later. “Four months,” Dave Luger replied. “Too long. Whatever’s going to happen in Iran will happen in four days.”
“Well, let’s put together an earlier one.”
“Are we talking about the same National Aeronautical and Space Administration as I am?” Patrick asked. “NASA is so ultracautious that if we make a simple five-pound payload change they will either cancel the flight or slip it six months to study all the possible ramifications. If it was an Air Force program, like the Black Stallion, we might have a chance.”
“What about the America spaceplane?”
“Canceled years ago.”
“The Stud can make it,” Boomer said.
“No way,” Ann said. “Last I knew, the Silver Tower was in a two-hundred-mile-plus orbit. How high can you take the Stud? I didn’t think it could go higher than one hundred miles or so.”
“It can do two hundred easily — if it was a one-way mission,” Boomer said matter-of-factly.
“A one-way mission?” Patrick asked.
“I haven’t computed the exact fuel requirement, sir, but I’d guess the Stud would use just about all of its fuel to get up to two hundred miles,” Boomer said. “Since I assume we’d be using the cargo bay for passengers, some supplies, and the docking system, there’s no room for extra fuel for the return, even for a ballistic Shuttle-like re- entry. It would have to be refueled on the station to return.”
“Which means if you can’t reach the station or fail to dock…”
“We’d be stranded in orbit until we were rescued,” Boomer said. “But we’d just have to make sure we got it right the first time.”
“The passenger module is ready to go?”
“Sure. We can fit a docking adapter and airlock onto the passenger module. We can carry two passengers plus the Stud’s crew and still transfer everyone to the station. We’d have to bring jet fuel and ‘boom’ up on a Shuttle or on the Ares booster with the cargo stage. Can that be done?”
“The station has a Soyuz- and Agena-compatible cargo dock and a universal crew docking adapter, so we can dock and resupply at the same time,” Ann said. The unmanned Russian Soyuz modules resupplied the Russian and International Space Stations, while the Agena modules resupplied the American Skylab station. “We refueled America on the station several times.”
“We can use the cargo stage of Ares to bring jet fuel and BOHM to the station to refuel the XR-A9,” Dave said. “It has plenty of room to carry that, and the stuff is stable enough to handle a launch. We would just need to be sure that Silver Tower has the gear necessary to service the Stud.”
“You’ve got the exact same gear the America spaceplane used for servicing,” Ann said. “It’ll work. You get the Stud and the Ares cargo stage to Silver Tower, and we can fill ’er up.”
“I’ve never docked the Black Stallion before,” Boomer said. “I mean, I know I can do it — I can fly that thing anywhere you want — but…”
“If he can’t do it, the crew is stranded,” Dave said.
“Can’t you just park the spaceplane near the station and then just spacewalk from the spaceplane to the station?” Patrick asked.
“You can, but a spacewalk is by far the most dangerous activity in all of space flight,” Ann said. “It takes training and practice to get the movements just right. Push when you’re not supposed to, miss a leap or a grasp, activate the wrong switch, and you could go flying off into Neverland in the blink of an eye — or fall to Earth and burn up like a meteorite. Get a tether or umbilical tangled and you could be like Captain Ahab lassoed to Moby Dick for all eternity. The longer the distance between spacecraft, the greater the danger. Twenty feet will seem like twenty miles up there.” She looked at Hunter. “I don’t even think we can fit a Shuttle-style EVA getup in the Black Stallion. We’ll have to use Gemini- or Skylab-style spacesuit setups — pressure suits and emergency oxygen bottles only, with simple tethers. I don’t even think the Black Stallion is set up for umbilicals, is it?”
“We never intended to do spacewalks from the Stud,” Boomer said. “Heck, we’ll have to modify the safety squat switches to allow us to open the canopies with the landing gear retracted.”
