Back to the Moon

by Travis S. Taylor

  Weeks later, after hundreds of engineers had a chance to review data from the voyage, it would be discovered that telemetry was likely lost due to a poorly potted connector in the primary communication system, stopping communication with the Earth but not stopping the flow of engineering, position, and velocity data between it and the Orion. The important data, that which was required to complete the rendezvous, was never disrupted. The backup communications system didn’t activate, because the primary system’s fault-detection software never detected the problem—after all, the Altair and the Orion never lost communication. Only the dirt-bound humans in mission control were cut off. The software routines never deviated; they assumed all was well with the data transmission and that nothing more needed to be done. Shortly thereafter, a bright console engineer would realize that he could have simply relayed the data from the Altair through the Orion feeds and then to mission control. Instead of getting egg on his face and making a big thing of it, he wrote an e-mail about it to the fault-response team that was duly noted and stored away.

  Despite the success of the mission, that type of fault was one of the worst kind—two separate and distinct failures in the same system had caused a failure of the primary and backup communications systems. Fortunately, the double failure happened in a rather benign system and didn’t imperil the mission. Had the failure resulted in a loss of communications between the Altair and the Orion, then a successful rendezvous would have most likely been impossible. That is, since there were no humans aboard either spacecraft. Bill’s craw got all tied up in knots every single time he thought about it. Every system, step, procedure, and control had been automated to the point that pilots could do very little during the test program to show that the mission could still succeed even if one or more of the automated systems failed. He kept to himself the thought that decades of flying in low Earth orbit and only sending out robotic probes had sucked the adventure out of his colleagues.

  “Damn it all to hell,” he muttered to himself. “This could have halted us by a couple of years.”

  Chapter 10

  Barely six weeks later, glimmering in the unrelenting Nevada sun, sat the Dreamscape, engines running with a loud rocket noise right out of a science fiction movie. It was just barely audible to those in the observation stands. The reusable spaceship was poised to make history, just waiting for the pilot to begin its maiden journey to Earth orbit. The unmistakable power of the vehicle was obvious to all onlookers as crisscrossing lines of exhaust poured from the thruster nozzles. But the restrained explosive beast was kept in check by its human masters.

  To the pilot, Captain Paul Gesling, the moment was anything but serene. Despite the air conditioner in his pressure suit running at maximum, Paul was sweating profusely—he barely noticed the cold air or the sweat. Instead, he cursed happily.

  “Hot damn!” he shouted over the spacecraft’s interior noise. He was elated to be in the pilot’s seat, even if it was just a test. He eyed the various status touch screens displayed on the iPhone-like LCD display that had replaced the old-fashioned gauges and dials of spacecraft and aircraft from previous generations. Then one of the icons turned from green to yellow and then to red. He uttered another stream of epithets. “Damn! Damn! Damn! Hell!”

  “Warning, ACS fuel pressure approaching critically low level,” the onboard computer voice, aka “Bitchin’ Betty,” announced over the ship’s internal communications system.

  “Control, what’s up with the helium repress?” Gesling said not quite calmly into his microphone. Hoping for a positive answer from the lead engineer in the control room barely one mile away, he reset that status display and pressed the attitude control system status icon one more time, hoping that the low pressure reading would go away, clearing Dreamscape for its first orbital flight. The gauge showed that the pressure in the fuel tank that fed the ship’s attitude control system was low. That was a critical function. It contained the subsystem that would allow the Dreamscape to remain in a stable orientation while in space—in other words, keeping it from spinning in random directions. There would be no flight unless the problem was resolved. The spin could induce too much of a g-load on the structure and tear the ship apart. Of course, that would be after the crew had either vomited themselves into oblivion or passed out.

  “Hold on, Paul, we’re looking into it,” was the reply from the engineer in the Space Excursions control room.

  “Warning, ACS system failure imminent.”

  “Well, check it faster!” Paul replied.

  Unlike their NASA counterparts, Space Excursions had no big control room full of specialized engineers. Instead, their mission control consisted of five people, each cross-trained in multiple engineering disciplines. At this time, all five were working frantically at their computer stations, looking at their status screens and a large replica of Paul Gesling’s screen prominently displayed on the wall at the front of the room. They saw what Gesling saw in addition to the next level of detail, available at the touch of a button. Having only five people running the mission saved the company a lot of money. And the automated systems now monitoring the health of the vehicle, though costing the company a load of cash to develop, were working flawlessly, reporting the status of every major and minor system to mission control. Any significant issues that could affect the flight were flagged and brought to the attention of the people who controlled it.

  “I’m still waiting.” Gesling tapped the red icon on his screen again.

  “Warning, ACS system is offline.”

  “Oh, shut the hell up,” he shouted to Bitchin’ Betty.

  It seemed to him that an intolerable length of time had passed, but to the flight controller, and to any external observers not impatient for a launch, barely three minutes had gone by. Paul chewed at the inside of his mouth, certain that he would have to wait a bit longer, quite a bit longer, before Dreamscape would make its full-scale test flight to space and back.

  “Damn.”

  “We have a technical problem with one of Dreamscape’s systems that I am sure will be resolved momentarily,” Gary Childers said to the VIP guests in the room with him. He scanned the readouts of the test from an observation room just outside his personally funded, high-tech, and oh-so-expensive mission-control room. Not that he understood all the data—Childers was a businessman. What he understood was that delays cost him money.

  Childers was clearly impatient, yet at the same time he remained firmly in charge. In his mind, VIP stood for “valuable investment people.” Childers had invited several potential investors to attend the test flight, with full expectation they would be so impressed with his operation that they would commit to helping him fund his next entrepreneurial space endeavor—a charter cruise to the surface of the Moon. Once Dreamscape was making routine flights around the Moon, Childers’s marketing surveys indicated that many of the world’s ultrarich would be willing to put up at least one hundred million dollars each to actually walk on the Moon. And he was ready to offer the service.

  Despite his sizable wealth, even Gary Childers didn’t have the money required to finance the construction of a spacecraft that could take people to the Moon and back. After all, the same mission was costing NASA billions of dollars. He had invited ten of his most promising investors to the test launch; seven accepted. And now he was in the position of having to explain to them what was going on and why the launch had already been delayed two hours.

  “Folks,” he began, nodding and smiling, “we’re experiencing some problems with one of the Dreamscape’s many systems, and my team is telling me that the launch will at best be delayed another hour or so.

  “I’m needed in the control room for a few minutes. Ms. O’Conner will take care of you until my return,” he said as he motioned for Caroline O’Conner to join him. As he moved toward the door, he lowered his head and softly said to O’Conner in passing, “I just hope it isn’t longer than that.”

  “The wolves look hungry,” she whispered back t
o him. Gary only raised an eyebrow at the comment and hurried to the main control room. The real control room.

  Childers entered the room just as Gesling’s voice once again came over the loudspeaker. “Control, the pressure is starting to drop again. We need to scrub. This whole thing is going the wrong way.”

  Not uttering a word, uncharacteristic of Childers in a business meeting, seemed entirely appropriate as he waited to hear the response from the experts, his experts, hired at considerable expense to make this whole venture happen.

  “Paul, we concur. Prepare to save onboard systems and stand down” was the only reply from the engineer responsible for the test flight.

  “Damn!” This time it was Gary doing the cursing. “Shit!” He promptly turned on his heels and began walking back to the VIP room. Now he had to explain this mess to his potential investors and hope that they would be willing and able to hang around until the problem was resolved and the Dreamscape could take flight. Childers was too smart to ever try to overturn a technical decision from his team. They were the experts; he paid them to make technical decisions, and he trusted them completely. That didn’t mean, however, that he was happy with them or the situation.

  But when he had started out on this venture, he had hired a company to complete an extremely detailed analysis of the space industry and why NASA was not economically viable. The space shuttle program had been designed to offer cheap access to space but turned out to be a money pit. The analysis showed that when NASA managers started putting pressure on the program to fly more missions to improve the cost efficiency of the shuttles, that was when the major accidents had occurred. Gary hadn’t paid heavy for the analysis just to ignore it. That was their job. He’d just have to find a way to make the day’s lemons into lemonade. That was his job.

  Aboard Dreamscape, Paul Gesling began the ground abort procedures with the skill of a trained pilot, always glancing at the checklist of required tasks and procedures as it scrolled across the LCD screen, checking each item off as required. In the back of his mind, he was frustrated. But he was a professional, and professional pilots knew that procedures saved their lives—taking out his frustration would have to come later. He was thinking about a bottle of scotch and a punching bag.

  The press was having a field day. Soon after Childers returned to take charge of his guests, Caroline O’Conner had the unpleasant task of going to the press observation room and telling the assembled reporters that today’s flight would not happen. She didn’t yet know when it would happen, and she didn’t exactly understand the reason for the delay, but she knew enough to provide the media with the immediate facts.

  O’Conner took up her position behind the podium and microphone at the front of the room and said, “May I have your attention, please?

  “Today’s maiden orbital flight of the Dreamscape has been scrubbed due to a pressure leak in one of the ship’s propulsion systems. Our experts are looking into the problem, and we will let you know soon when the next attempt will take place.” O’Conner, as usual, sounded knowledgeable and self-confident as she made the announcement.

  “Ms. O’Conner, Ms. O’Conner!” shouted the reporter from Space News, the major online news outlet covering all things space. “How will this affect your schedule? Your schedule shows that you’ll be taking paying customers around the Moon in just a couple of months. Do you expect to keep the schedule?”

  “At this time, we don’t know. The engineers tell me that the problem should be easily fixed, but I can’t say how the delay will impact our first commercial launch,” she said in response.

  “Ms. O’Conner!” shouted another reporter.

  And so it continues, thought Caroline to herself before pointing to the next anxious reporter. They really do seem like a pack of wolves circling the injured animal, waiting for the feast.…

  Chapter 11

  “Go, baby, go!” was all Gesling could utter as he alternated looking out the window at the landscape of Earth receding below him and the LCD display that showed the status of Dreamscape’s onboard systems. After fixing the faulty sensor on the fuel tank two days previously, the restarted countdown for the launch of Dreamscape had gone flawlessly. Now Gesling was nearing the point at which the scramjet first stage would separate from the vehicle and the powerful onboard rocket engines would fire, giving him the final acceleration needed to attain the seventeen thousand miles per hour required for orbit. Escape velocity was just one stage away.

  He felt his pulse quicken in anticipation of the stage separation, and he waited for the five small explosions that would soon sever the bolts holding the two parts of Dreamscape together. The explosive bolts had to fire within milliseconds of each other or the resulting unequal forces acting on the vehicle would tear it apart. Gesling knew the bolts had been tested, retested, and tested again, but that didn’t stop him from being anxious and replaying the catastrophic-failure simulation movies in his mind as the clock on the display counted down to zero.

  “Just fly the plane,” he told himself. The foremost thing all pilots trained themselves to do was to learn to fly the plane no matter what the instruments were saying or whatever else was going on around them. Fly the plane. He gripped the controls and swallowed the lump in his throat, forcing it back into his stomach. The stage-separation icon flashed, and the Bitchin’ Betty chimed at him.

  “Prepare for stage separation in ten seconds. Nine, eight, seven…”

  He felt only a small bump, and then the green light indicating successful stage separation glimmered before him. Seconds later, the Dreamscape’s rocket engines ignited, pushing Gesling back into his padded chair on the flight deck. The Dreamscape picked up speed.

  The first stage, now fully separated from the rocket-powered Dreamscape, began its glide back to the Nevada desert. Operated by onboard automatic pilot and with constant monitoring by engineers in the Space Excursions control room back at the launch site, the first stage was on target for a landing back at the location from which its voyage had begun. Onboard computers were sending a steady stream of telemetry back to the ground so the flight engineers could reconstruct all phases of its flight should the worst happen and the vehicle crash. Although the ship had black boxes on board, they were a redundant system at this stage. All operational data was immediately sent to the ground as long as the Dreamscape could get a communications link to a ground station or one of the orbital relay satellites that Childers owned time on. But once they were on the way to the Moon, the data rate would drop to the point that the black boxes would be the main system for flight-data storage and retrieval.

  On the ground, the Space Excursions computer was busy receiving, interpreting, and storing the data while Gary Childers was excitedly explaining each element of the flight, as it was happening, to his potential future investors—all of whom had decided to wait the extra two days it took to recover from the aborted launch and to this successful one. It was turning out to be worth their while.

  “As you can see, the Dreamscape is now under rocket power and accelerating as it approaches its three hundred kilometer orbital altitude. Once there, pilot Paul Gesling will shake her down during a minimum of ten orbits before he will rendezvous with our tanker satellite and test the refueling system,” Childers explained. Feeling more confident by the minute that his investors were becoming interested, he continued, “After that test, Gesling will begin the reentry process and bring the spaceship back home—landing only a few meters away from where it began its journey. Just future orbiting rides like this we can sell at ten to twenty million a pop and use them as training rides for the Moon missions. We might even consider building a copy of the Dreamscape just for that purpose.”

  Childers assessed the reactions of the seven multibillionaires in the room. They alternated between listening to his explanation and tuning him completely out as they surveyed the status board and the onboard-camera feed that showed them the same view as that being experienced by Paul Gesling. The view was difficult for Ch
ilders to compete with. The beautiful blues and whites that stretched across the Earth were quickly becoming a fixture at the bottom of the screen, and the dark blackness of space was growing in prominence. In low Earth orbit, the curvature of the Earth was clearly visible, but spectacular in a different way than the “blue marble” made so famous by the Apollo astronauts. That view would have to wait until Space Excursions’ customers were on their way to the Moon.

  What the heck, thought Childers, gazing at the view screen along with everyone else in the room. I think I’ll just shut up so we can enjoy the majestic view. Sometimes the best sales pitch was not pitching at all and just letting the product pitch itself.

  Fifteen miles away, perched on a small mesa, a Honda minivan was parked in the blazing Nevada sun. The motor was running and the air conditioner was at full blast to keep the occupants and their computers cool and safe from the unrelenting heat of the desert. Inside were three men, all Chinese, and all were watching their computer screens as the data they were collecting from the antennas mounted on the roof came streaming in.

  “And they didn’t even bother to encrypt the data?” asked the eldest man among them. He was incredulous, given that his last assignment was to intercept data from an American antimissile test rocket flown over the South Pacific two years previously. The encryption on that data had taken them months to break, and they still weren’t sure if they understood all of it. Without understanding how the instruments were calibrated, there would always be some uncertainty around the accuracy of the data intercepted.

  Zeng Li almost grinned at his colleagues at the thought. He had years of experience with his country’s foreign-intelligence community, for many of which he had been living in America working as the representative of a Chinese import/export bank. His other missions had proven much more difficult to acquire data access alone, and that was nearly as tough as breaking the decryption keys. This assignment seemed absurdly easy, and that made him nervous.