by Dale Brown
Masters was barely in grade school in Manchester, New Hampshire, his
first-grade teachers showed Jon's parents a one-hundred-page treatise on
the feasibility of a manned lunar landing, written by a youngster who
had only learned to write a few months earlier. When asked about the
essay, Jon sat his parents down and explained all the problems inherent
in launching a rocket to the moon and returning it safely back to
Earth-and the Apollo space program had just gotten under way, with the
first lunar landing still three years away. It didn't take Jon's parents
a blink of an eye to figure out what to do next: he was enrolled in a
private high school, which he completed three years later at age ten. He
enrolled at Dartmouth College and received a bachelor of science degree
in aeronautical engineering at age thirteen. After receiving a master's
degree in mathematics from Dartmouth, he enrolled at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and after a tumultuous five years finally earned
a doctorate in engineering at the age of twenty. The first love of
Masters' life was and always had been NASA, the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration, and in 1981 he went to work for the space agency
immediately after leaving MIT. The Shuttle Transportation System, or
STS, program was just heating up by then, and Jon Masters was an
integral part of the development of special applications that could take
advantage of this new flying workhorse. Almost every satellite and
delivery subsystem developed for the shuttle between 1982 and 1985 was
at least partially designed by Jonathan Masters. But, even as the
shuttle transportation system was gearing up for more launches per year
and more ambitious projects, including the space statiOn, Jon Masters
saw a weakness. It was an obvious problem that was creeping into the
successful STS program-the spacecraft were accumulating a lot of miles,
with even more miles slated for them each year, and no more orbiters
were being built. When the success of the shuttle program became
obvious, Masters thought, NASA should have had one new orbiter per year
rolling off the assembly lines, plus upgraded solid-rocket boosters and
avionics. But they had none. Jon Masters took an active interest in the
numerous small companies that built small space boosters for private and
commercial applications. In 1984, at age twenty-four, he resigned from
NASA and accepted a seat on the board of directors of Sky Sciences,
Inc., a small Tennessee-based commercial space booster company that
sometimes subcontracted work for the fledgling Strategic Defense
Intiative Organization, the federal research and development team tasked
with devising an intercontinental ballistic missile defense system. Soon
afterward he became vice president in charge of research for the small
company. Masters' presence on the board gave the company a shot of
optimism-and a new line of credit-that allowed it to stay fiscally
afloat. With the NASA shuttles grounded indefinitely following the
Challenger disaster in 1986, expendable boosters were quickly back in
vogue. While NASA was refurbishing old Titan ICBM rockets for satellite
booster duty and bringing back the Delta line of heavy boosters, in 1988
Jon Masters, now the twenty-eight-year-old chairman of the board and new
president of Sky Sciences, soon renamed Sky Masters, Inc., announced
that he had developed a new low-cost space booster that was small and
easy to transport and operate. Called SCARAB (Small Containerized Air
Relocatable Alert Booster), it was a groundlaunched rocket that could be
hauled aboard a Boeing 747 or military cargo plane, set up, and launched
from almost anywhere in a matter of days or even hours. SCARAB restored
NASA and the military's ability to launch satellites into Earth orbit on
short notice. His next project was a booster system similar to SCARAB
but even more flexible and responsive. Although SCARAB could place a
two-thousand-pound payload into low Earth orbit from almost anywhere on
Earth, it still needed a runway for the two cargo aircraft that carried
the rocket and the ground-launch equipment, an extensive ground-support
contingent, and at least fifteen hours' worth of work to erect the
launch structures and get the rocket ready to fly. In several practice
tests, Masters needed no more than thirty hours from initial
notification and delivery of the payload to T minus zero. But he wanted
to do better. That was when ALARM was born. ALARM was merely a SCARAB
booster downsized to fit in a transport plane and fitted with wings. It
used the launch aircraft as its first-stage booster, and it used lift
from its scissor-action wings to help increase the efficiency of the
smaller first- and second-stage boosters. Two ALARM boosters could be
standing by on board the carrier aircraft; they would only need to bring
the payloads on board and take off. With aerial refueling, the ALARM
carrier aircraft could stay aloft for days, traversing the country or
even partly around the world, ready to launch the boosters. Masters had
developed several different payloads for his small air-launched
boosters. Along with the communications satellites, he had developed a
small satellite that could take composite radar, infrared, and
telescopic visual "photos" of the Earth, and the resulting image was
dozens of times more detailed than standard visual photos. The images
could be digitized and transmitted to terminals all over the world via
his small communications satellites, giving commanders real-time
reconnaissance and intelligence information. Combined with powerful
computers, users from the Pentagon or White House to individual aircrew
members on board strike aircraft could conduct their own sophisticated
photo intelligence, plan and replan missions, and assess bomb damage
almost instantaneously. With several different payloads on board, the
flexibility of the ALARM system was unparalleled. A
communications-satellite launch could immediately change to a
satellite-retrieval mission or a reconnaissance-satellite mission, or
even a strike mission. A single ALARM carrier aircraft could become as
important a national asset as Cape Canaveral. "Fifteen minutes to launch
window one, " Masters' launch control officer, Helen Kaddiri, announced.
Kaddiri was the chief of Masters' operations staff and the senior
launch-control officer, in charge of monitoring all flight systems
throughout each mission. In her early forties, exotically attractive,
she'd been born and raised in Calcutta. She and her parents immigrated
to the United States when she was twelve and she changed her name from
Helenika to Helen. She was a completely career-minded scientist who
sometimes found it very frustrating working for someone like Jon
Masters. She regarded Masters warily with her dark, beautiful,
almond-shaped eyes as he studied the command console. Masters was so
relaxed and laid-back that all the uptight techno-types he worked with,
especially those developing new space technologies, got really
rankled-herself included. Maybe
it was because Masters seemed to treat
everyone and everything the same... like work was one big beach party.
The government officials they dealt with almost always shuddered when
working with Masters. Even socializing with him was a strain. Kaddiri
thought that every time they got a new government contract was a matter
of luck. If it weren't for his genius... "Fourteen minutes to launch
window one, " she said. "Thanks, Helen, " Jon replied. He pushed his
baseball cap up higher on his forehead, which made him look even
youngerlike "Beaver" Cleaver. "Let's get Roosevelt-One in position and
ready." Kaddiri grimaced at another of Masters' quirks-he named his
boosters, not just numbered them. He usually named them after American
presidents or Hollywood actors or actresses. Helen thought that if Jon
had a dog, he would probably number it instead. Jon swung his headset
microphone to his lips: "Crew, Roosevelt- 1 is moving stage center.
Stand by." The interior of Masters' converted DC-10 was arranged much
like the firing mechanism of a rifle. Like a cartridge magazine, the
two boosters were stored side by side in the forward section of the
one-hundred-twenty-feet-long, thirtyfoot-wide cargo bay, which afforded
plenty of room to move around the fifty-feet-long, four-foot-diameter
rockets and their stabilizers. Forward of the storage area was the
control center, with all of the booster monitoring and control systems,
and forward of the control room was a pressure hatch which led to the
flight deck-for safety's sake, the flight deck was sealed from the cargo
section so any pressurization malfunctions in the cargo end would not
prevent the flight crew from safely recovering the plane. The back fifty
feet of the cargo hold was occupied by a large cylindrical chamber
resembling the breech end of a shotgun, composed of heavy steel and
aluminum with numerous thick Plexiglas viewports all around it. The
boosters would roll down a track in the center of the cargo hold into
the chamber, and the chamber would be sealed from the rest of the
aircraft. Just prior to launch, the chamber would be depressurized
before opening the "bomb-bay" doors. With this system, the entire cargo
section of the aircraft did not have to be depressurized before launch.
Floodlights and high-speed video cameras inside the launch chamber and
outside the DC-10 launch plane were ready to photograph the entire
launch sequence. With two of Kaddiri's assistants with flashlights
watching on either side, the first forty-three-thousand-pound space
booster began rolling on its tracks toward the center of the cabin. The
crew, especially the cockpit crew of two pilots and engineer, had to be
notified whenever one of these behemoth rockets was being moved.
Whenever they moved a rocket, the flight engineer had to begin
transferring luel to the side where the booster was moved to keep the
launch aircraft stable. The booster moved about ten feet per minute,
which was the same speed that a similar weight in jet fuel could be
transferred from body tanks to the corresponding wing tanks. In two
minutes the booster was in position in the center of the launch cabin,
and it began its slow journey aft into the launch chamber. This time, to
ensure longitudinal stability as the twenty-one-ton rocket moved aft, a
large steel drum filled with eight thousand gallons of jet fuel in the
belowdeck cargo section would slowly move forward as the booster moved
aft, which would help to keep the aircraft stable; after the booster was
launched, the drum would quickly move aft to balance the plane. It took
much longer for the booster to make its way aft, but it was finally
wheeled into position in the chamber and the heavy steel hatch closed.
Once in place, retractable clamps held the booster in place over the
bomb-bay doors. "Roosevelt One in position, " Kaddiri called out as she
peered through the observation ports in the chamber. "Flight deck,
confirm lateral and longitudinal trim."
"Aircraft trim nominal, " the flight engineer reported a few seconds
later. "Standing by."
"Roger. Confirm hatch closed and locked." Masters checked the console
readouts. "Launch-chamber hatch closed, locked, green lights on."
"Engineer cross-check good, green lights on, " the flight engineer
reported after checking his readouts from the flight deck. Kaddiri
reached into a green canvas bag slung over her shoulder into a portable
oxygen pack and withdrew an oxygen mask, checked the hose and regulator,
and then clicked the mask's built-in wireless microphone on. Her
assistants in the aft end of the DC-10 did the same; Masters and Foch
had already donned their masks. "Oxygen On and Normal, " she said. She
got thumbs-up from her assistants after they checked their masks, then
said, "Ready to depressurize launch chamber." Masters got a thumbs-up
from Foch, then replied, "Oxygen On and Normal at the control console."
He called up the cargosection pressurization readout and displayed it in
big numerals on a monitor screen so both he and Foch could read them
easily-two sets of eyes were always better than one. "Launch chamber
depressurizing-now." For all that cross-checking and preparation, it was
quite unspectacular. In two minutes the launch chamber was
depressurized and the cargo-bay pressure was stable. After monitoring
it for another minute to check for slow leaks, Masters removed his mask
and radioed, "Cargo-section pressure checks good, launch chamber fully
depressurized, no leaks." The computer would continue to monitor the
cabin pressure and warn the crew of any changes. Masters and everyone
else kept their masks dangling from their necks . . . just in case.
"Data-link check." Masters checked to be sure that the booster was
still exchanging information with the launch computers. The check was
all automatic, but it still took several long moments. Finally: "Data
connection nominal. Two min utes to launch window." Masters turned to
Colonel Foch. "We need final range clearance, Colonel." Foch was
staring intently at one of the screens on the console, which was
displaying atmospheric data relayed from the White Sands Missile Range
headquarters through their extensive sensor network. "I show the winds
at the maximum Q limits, Doctor Masters, " he said. "We should abort."
"Roosevelt says he's a go, " Masters replied, ignoring the warning and
checking the readouts again. "Let's proceed."Jon looked at Kaddiri as
he hit the intercom button. "Helen?" She removed her oxygen mask as she
walked back to the command console. "It's pretty risky, Jon."
"Helen, 'pretty risky' is not a 'no." Unless I hear a definite no, I'd
say we proceed." Foch cleared his throat. "Doctor, it seems to me
you're taking a big chance here." He glanced at Kaddiri, expecting a
bit more support from someone who obviously wasn't sure of what Masters
was doing, but he got nothing but a blank, noncommittal expression.
"You're wasting one of your boosters just to prove something. This
isn't a wartime scenario. "Colonel, this might not be a war we're
fi
ghting, but to me it's nothing less than an all-out battle, " Masters
said. "I have to prove to my customers, my stockholders, my board of
directors, and to the rest of the country that the ALARM system can
deliver its payload on time, on target." He turned to Foch, and Kaddiri
could see a very uncharacteristic hardness in Masters' young face. "I
programmed these boosters with reliability in mindreliability to deliver
as promised, and reliability to do the mission in conditions such as
this." Foch leaned forward and spoke directly at Masters in a low voice.
"You don't have to tell me all this, Doctor. I know what you want. You
get paid if this thing gets launched. My flight parameters insure both
safety for ground personnel and reliability of the launch itself. Yours
only covers the launch. My question is, do you really care what happens
after that? I think you care more about your business than the results
of this mission." Masters glared at him. He whipped off his baseball
cap and stabbed at Foch, punctuating each sentence: "Listen, Ralph,
that's my name on that booster, my name on those satellites, my name all
over this project. If it doesn't launch, I take the heat. If it
doesn't fly, I take the heat. If it doesn't deliver four healthy
satellites in their proper orbits, I take the heat. "Now you might think
you know my contracts, Ralph. You're right-I do get paid if
Roosevelt-One is launched. I get paid if we bring it back without
launching it, too. I've already gotten deposits for the next six
launches, and I've already received progress payments for the next ten
boosters. But you don't know shit about my business, buddy. I've got a
dozen ways to fail, and each one can put me out of business faster than
you can take a pee. I do care about that. And still I say, we launch.
Now if you have any objections, say it and we'll abort. Otherwise issue
range clearance, sit back, and watch the fireworks." Helen Kaddiri was
surprised. She'd never seen Jon so wound up. He was right about the
pressure on him and the company-there were more than a dozen ways to
fail. Friendly and unfriendly suitors were waiting to snap up the
company. The aerospace sector had fared very poorly in the recent U.S.
economic mini-recession, and it was worsened by the declining outlook on