by Dale Brown
…which was a piece of cake for a young guy like Hunter “Boomer” Noble, just twenty-three years old, but problematical for a guy pushing fifty like Patrick McLanahan. But he was experienced, determined, and still in pretty damned good shape, thank you very much, and it took him only a few moments longer to get situated and strapped in than it did Boomer.
The ground technicians had already performed the “Preflight,” “Before Power On,” “Power On,” and “Before Engine Start” checklists, but both crewmembers checked them again before allowing the computers to proceed with engine start. Like all of Dreamland’s aircraft, checklists and most everything else were accomplished by computers and checked and monitored by humans — they merely prepared themselves to take over in case of a major malfunction, which was rare. Much of what the engineers did at Dreamland these days was design unmanned aircraft and convert formerly manned aircraft to unmanned ones — in fact, unmanned aircraft far outnumbered manned ones at Dreamland.
Ten minutes after strapping in, the canopies motored shut and the aircraft was ready to taxi. There was no control tower at Elliott Air Force Base — ground control and tower functions were handled by cameras and sensors that detected the position of any object larger than a rabbit for miles in any direction. Like most everything else, taxiing for takeoff was done by computers — the sensors and satellite-based navigations systems on board the aircraft were much more precise than a human’s senses, and the bomber never left the yellow taxi lines as it lined up for takeoff.
It was another opportunity for Patrick to think about all the oddities of not just this mission, but the entire XR-A9 program. Although Lieutenant-General Patrick McLanahan was fully qualified to fly any aircraft based at Elliott Air Force Base, including the XR-A9, he always flew with a fully qualified pilot — but he was unaccustomed to flying with someone less than half his age. Hunter “Boomer” Noble was one of the new breed of men entering the twenty-first-century aerospace industry: highly intelligent, highly motivated by technical challenges if not geopolitics and military affairs — and completely unresponsive to the notion that there was just one way to do anything, or that anyone over the age of thirty knew anything about anything worthwhile.
But in the cockpit, this young playboy test pilot was all business. “Ready to go, General?” Boomer asked.
“Yep,” Patrick replied, and he put his hands on the side-stick controller and throttle. “I’ve got the airplane.”
“Uh…sir, I thought the rules said no manual takeoffs on operational test flights,” Noble pointed out.
“We’ve been working together for about a year, isn’t that right, Boomer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you should know by now that if a three-star general wants to fly the plane, even manually, you say ‘yes, sir’ in a smart military manner, and then doing everything in your power to make sure he doesn’t crash the plane.”
Boomer smiled and put on his oxygen visor. “Yes, sir. It’s your ass, I guess.”
“That’s more like it. I’ve got the airplane.”
“You got it, General.” Boomer switched all of the navigation and flight control screens over to Patrick’s supercockpit display and placed the engine and system monitor screens on his panel. “Aircraft configured for manual takeoff, mission-adaptive systems set to auto, navigation display set, everything’s in the green. You’re ready for takeoff.”
“Roger. Brakes on,” Patrick said. He applied the brakes, then slowly advanced the throttles. When he was at full military power he let the brakes go, then eased the throttles into full afterburner. It did not take long for the Black Stallion to reveal its legacy as the fastest air-breathing aircraft in the world as the speed built up quickly. It leapt off the runway in less than three thousand feet and climbed at a dazzling ten thousand feet per minute to forty thousand feet.
They proceeded to the air refueling track, which led westbound out over central California to the Pacific Ocean, then descended to twenty-four thousand feet, rendezvoused with a Dreamland KC-77 tanker, a modified Boeing 777 airliner a few minutes later, made contact with the tanker’s refueling boom, and started to take on fuel. The tanker made two contacts: the first to fill up the Black Stallion’s jet fuel tanks in the wings and aft fuselage, and the second to transfer another substance into a separate, larger storage tank in the center fuselage section of the aircraft. The second transfer took much longer because the substance was much thicker than jet fuel, but after almost an hour the refueling was complete. The aircraft was now over three times heavier than it was at takeoff: the aircraft carried twice its own weight in fuel. If it had this same fuel load on the ground, it would never have been able to take off.
After the tanker departed the area, Hunter reconfigured the bomber’s computers for the next phase of flight, then began checking all of the engine and flight systems carefully. Patrick steered the Black Stallion north, then began a slow climb and gradually began applying full throttle. At full afterburner power at forty thousand feet about a minute later, they were at Mach 1.8, or about fourteen hundred miles an hour. “Airflow has stabilized and is in the green, lasers ready — we’re ready to spike the leopards, General,” Boomer reported.
“Let’s see what this thing has under the hood,” Patrick said. He hit a small control stud on the side-stick control and spoke, “Spike engines.”
“Engines spiking, stop spike,” the female computer-synthesized voice responded, adding the command to stop as a reminder. The airspeed slowed to Mach one point six, enough to tug at their shoulder harnesses. On the front of each engine, heat-tolerant vanes extended across the engine inlets, diverting airflow around the fan blades and compressor section of the engines. As the air was turned it was also mixed with tiny amounts of jet fuel and compressed. As the air-fuel mixture was squeezed, several diode laser emitters in each engine ignited it, and the jet exhaust was forced out of the back. The airspeed almost immediately jumped back up to Mach one point eight and quickly rose, exceeding Mach two, three, four, and even began approaching Mach five. The vertical velocity readout was equally as impressive — as the airspeed increased, the pitch angle became steeper and the Black Stallion climbed faster.
The LPDRS, or Laser Pulse Detonation Rocket System, nicknamed “leopards,” was Boomer’s engine design that would change the face of high-speed travel. The LPDRS engines were a new generation of advanced rocket engines that used instantaneous, pulsed detonation of jet fuel using blasts of laser energy, producing fifty percent more thrust than the conventional chemical rocket engines. Patrick was squished back into his seat as the “leopards” engines began their high-frequency hammer-like pulsing and the spaceplane rapidly picked up speed.
Finally, the engines began to throttle back and the pitch angle decreased, until they were straight and level again. The curvature of the Earth began to become apparent, although a few thunderheads on the horizon seemed to reach their altitude. “All engines stabilized and running perfectly at Mach four point five-one,” Boomer reported a few minutes later. “We’re level at flight level eight-zero-zero — eighty thousand feet. Incredible,” Patrick breathed. “Simply incredible. Almost five times the speed of sound.” He glanced at the engine readouts. “And I don’t even detect any fuel burn at this speed.”
“The lasers are hot enough to ignite the compressed air, but we use a few hundred pounds of fuel an hour to help the process along,” Boomer said. He checked some position readouts, then said, “We can turn eastward now and I can have you in Washington in about forty minutes, sir.”
“You could…but that’s not why I came on this ride, Boomer,” Patrick said. “Besides, we have a job to do too — this isn’t just a taxi ride. Let’s do it.”
“Yes, sir,” Noble said excitedly. He checked some more readouts; then: “Ready for suborbital burn, sir.”
“Roger that,” Patrick said. He took one last sip of water from a canteen, then flipped his oxygen visor back in place, tightened up all of his straps, and
situated himself in his seat. “Here we go,” he said. “Computer, commence suborbital insertion burn.”
“Commence suborbital insertion burn, cancel suborbital insertion burn,” the computer responded. When the countermanding order was not received, the computer said, “LPDRS engines activated…ignition in three, two, one, zero.”
At that moment they heard four distinctive and rather unnerving “BAARRK!” sounds reverberating through the fuselage, and the XR-A9 suddenly accelerated so fast that a puff of air was forced out of Patrick’s lips. Patrick’s vision blurred and tunnel-visioned as his eyeballs were squished against his skull, but the last thing he saw clearly was the airspeed jumping past Mach five, less than a minute after main engine start. As the airspeed increased, the flight control computer nosed the XR-A9 higher and higher, until their climb rate now exceeded one hundred thousand feet per minute. At that point the readouts switched to thousands of feet per second — two, five, then ten thousand feet per second. The Mach numbers, or times above the speed of sound, were approaching double digits.
Once above three hundred thousand feet at the edge of space, the spikes in the inlets of the four LDPRS engines closed even more. Instead of using the atmosphere to burn jet fuel, the “leopards” engines used borohydrogen tetroxide, or BOHM — nicknamed “boom”—as the oxidizer. The thick soupy substance was a hundred times more efficient as liquid oxygen, and increased the specific thrust of each engine by several thousand percent.
As the numbers climbed, so did the G-forces — the number of times the forces of gravity was being exceeded on the human body. Patrick had pulled as much as twelve Gs before, but only for a few seconds at a time. The G-forces now were not excessive, only about 2.75 Gs (times the force of gravity), but it had been going on for a relatively long time, something that Patrick was definitely not accustomed to. Patrick practiced moving his arms to activate switches on the instrument panel in case voice commands didn’t work, which was a real possibility since his chest felt like someone was sitting on it, and it took effort and control to breathe, let alone speak.
Patrick began to feel as if he had been tackled by the entire Penn State linebacker squad. His vision blurred, then tunneled, and the air was forced out of his lungs — fortunately the life support system immediately sensed this and started shooting pure oxygen into his lungs under pressure to keep him from asphyxiating. Although he was quite uncomfortable, the pressure was not painful, just disconcerting. Could a crewmember stand this kind of pressure flight after flight? he wondered. How long could someone serve with the Black Stallion before something bad happened?
After what seemed like an eternity — but he knew from flying the simulator that it was less than eight minutes — the engines shut down. Suddenly the cockpit was deathly quiet and the G-forces, which had built up to about four times the normal force of gravity, stopped suddenly as well. The sudden quiet and relief from the pressure on his chest made Patrick pause in fear. What caused that sudden stoppage? Was everything OK? Was this the end…?
“General?” Patrick found he had his eyes closed and his breathing had all but stopped. “General sir?” Still no response. Then, louder: “Yo, Muck!”
Patrick took a deep breath, like a free-diver coming up from three minutes underwater, then blurted out, “What?”
“Welcome to space, General,” Boomer said.
Patrick opened his eyes — and he saw the Earth from space for the first time. The view was simply unbelievable. He had to look on his supercockpit display to see what he was looking at: it was northern California and Nevada, all the way from Lake Tahoe to the Pacific Ocean — at least five hundred miles in all directions. The edge of the Earth was rimmed in bluish-white; the sky was absolutely stark black. He still had a sense of altitude and velocity: he could discern differences in altitude of peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range, and he could see enough ground details to get a feeling of how fast they were traveling over the ground. As he watched in absolute awe, the Bitterroot Mountains hove into view, and on the horizon he could start to see the snowcapped Rocky Mountains. The speed was amazing.
“We made it,” Patrick breathed, quickly regaining his composure. “Station check.”
“In the green up here, General,” Boomer said. “You okay up there, sir?”
“I’m in the green.” He moved his arms and shoulders experimentally, then took a couple deep breaths. “Everything seems OK. How did the Stud do?”
“Another typical suborbital insertion,” Boomer said casually. “Altitude seventy-four point two-one miles, velocity Mach twelve point one-two-eight. Fuel flows looked a little high on number four — I’ll give that a check when we get back. Good job, General. You just earned your astronaut wings — any flight above sixty miles is considered a space shot.”
“Thanks, Boomer.” He tore his eyes away from the beauty and grandeur around him and checked all of his instruments, flipping quickly through all of the different display pages on the supercockpit screen. “On course, on speed,” he reported. “Fuel levels in the green.”
“Always the navigator, eh, General?” Boomer chided him. “Sit back and enjoy the ride, sir — you’re in space. Only a handful of humans have ever done this.”
The air inside the cockpit was filled with tiny bits of floating dust and dirt and the occasional tiny washer, which Patrick collected and put into a plastic bag. He then took a pencil from a storage compartment near his right elbow and let it go in front of his face to watch it hover in mid-air. He had done that a few times in terrestrial aircraft, putting it in a gentle dive so the object fell at the same speed as the aircraft, making it seem “weightless.” But that had lasted only seconds, and the windscreen had been filled with clouds or the ground coming up to meet him. This would last for a lot longer period of time, and his windscreen was still filled with clouds and Earth, but at this rate he wouldn’t hit it for quite some time.
“Feeling OK up there, General?” Boomer asked.
“No problems so far,” Patrick said. That wasn’t quite true, but he wasn’t going to admit anything else.
He had been fortunate in his Air Force career and had only been airsick a couple times, during really violent maneuvers or disorienting, smoky, tense situations as in combat, but he never suffered from plain motion sickness. Right now there were no violent maneuvers going on; there was stress, certainly — they were over seventy miles in space, cruising at almost seven thousand miles an hour — but in microgravity, with no real sense of up or down, he could feel that creeping queasiness building in the pit of his stomach. The shoulder and lap belts helped to maintain his sense of weight and orientation, and he had to turn his attention to his assigned tasks instead of stare out the windscreen and think about how high up he was — or even try to determine which way was up. Despite Boomer’s rakish tone and the immense beauty outside, it was not hard for Patrick to turn his mind to the task at hand. This was not simply a joyride: they had work to do.
Patrick made several radio calls and entered commands into his computer terminal. “We’re ready for payload release,” he announced a few minutes later. “Range reports clear. Bomb doors coming open…Meteor away. Doors closed.”
The BDU-58 Meteor was a simple orbital delivery system designed specifically for the XR-A9. It was nothing more than a large heat-shielded container fitted with a liquid-fuel rocket booster, guidance system, datalink communications system, and payload release mechanisms. Once the BDU-58 was released, the first stage rocket motor pushed the weapon down and away from the Black Stallion, then up on a tongue of fire into its own Earth orbit. Once in orbit, the Meteor’s rocket engine could push the spacecraft out of orbit, change course, or propel it to a higher or differently shaped orbit, depending on the payload. After releasing its payload, the Meteor could be deorbited and allowed to burn up in the atmosphere, or it could be retrieved by another spacecraft, brought back to Earth, and reused.
On this mission, the Meteor carried three inert test articles, each weig
hing about twelve hundred pounds. The Meteor would be deorbited at a particular point in its orbit, penetrating all the way through the atmosphere in order to protect the test articles inside; then each test article would be released at different altitudes above the target area. Each test article had a triple-mode guidance system that would locate targets using millimeter-wave radar, infrared, and satellite steering signals, but then each test article would “tell” the other which target it was tracking and the quality of its target identification and lock, so the other test articles could locate and attack other targets. The test articles had tiny winglets that allowed it to home in precisely to its target or glide long distances if necessary to locate targets. When released from extremely high altitudes, the test articles could glide for as far as two hundred miles, or loiter over an area for several minutes searching for targets.
“Payload released successfully, bay doors closed,” Patrick reported. “It’ll make two orbits, then attack its targets inside the White Sands Missile Test Range.”
“I’d hate to be under those bad boys when they come in,” Boomer remarked. “Okay, sir, we’ll alter course slightly southeast, then in exactly eleven minutes and nine seconds we’ll start our descent for Washington. Let me brief you on the descent procedures…”
“I’ve got a better idea, Boomer,” Patrick interrupted. “How about we take her up?”
“Up? You want to go to a higher altitude?”
“No. Let’s take it up…into orbit.”
“Are you sure, sir? That wasn’t on the flight plan.”
“I’m sure.”
“But during takeoff…”
“I’m okay, Boomer — really. Maybe I blacked out a bit, but I feel fine now.”
“I’m thinking about re-entry, that’s all,” Boomer said. “The g-forces are heavier and more sustained.”
“I’ll be fine…Captain,” Patrick said, adding the formal title “Captain” again to signify his desire to terminate the discussion.