Chapter 32: Kings of the High Frontier



CHAPTER 32
The gratification of wealth is not found in the mere possession or in lavish
expenditure, but in its wise application.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

30 May
"Gaze at the power of money, Ger." Leora Thane watched with smug satisfaction as
Aurora rolled out of the warehouse upright on its landing gear, which had been equipped
with a caster-like arrangement of ballooning aircraft tires. Leora wore her finest evening gown
of gold and bronze and copper lamé, despite the intense desert heat. She looked like a
millionairess -- which she was no longer, after investing so heavily in Freespace -- witnessing the
delivery of her newest limousine.
"All my life," she said, "I've wanted to be part of something big. I didn't know how to create
anything, but I knew how to give people a good time. I started out delivering balloon bouquets,
did you know that? I must have racked up a hundred thousand miles schlepping all over
Manhattan with those helium-filled monstrosities, wedging into elevators, getting stuck in
revolving doors. Then I organized parties. Murder-mystery weekends, Regency High Teas,
romantic retreats. That gave me the bug, you know? So many rich people who for whatever
reason wanted to forget their own lives and be somewhere else for a while. So much money
itching to be spent. I became a travel agent. Spent years booking flights, arranging cruises, and
couriering tickets out to businessmen running late."
Cooper looked at Aurora in the light of its namesake, dawn, and nodded. The
framework above the sliding hangar doors had been removed to allow Aurora a dignified
rollout. The spacecraft consisted of a blunt cone thirty feet in diameter at its widest point -- the
ablative reentry shield -- and fifty feet high, that looked like an old Apollo command module
with a thyroid condition atop a longish cylinder with a flared and curved base. Instead of
ordinary bell-shaped exhaust nozzles that would have required actuators for pivoting and cover
doors during reentry, Aurora contained twenty liquid-fueled combustors arranged in an
annular ring-nozzle configuration around its base. Mounted flush with the ablative stern, it
resisted reentry heating and used differential throttling for attiude compensation.
Painted an extremely pale blue that looked white in the desert sunshine, Aurora
trundled past the constantly critical eyes of Cooper and his team to the outside world and a small
group of reporters and onlookers.
Cooper noted the absence of Joseph Lester, who might have given him the most
comprehensive coverage. The GSN reporter present gazed at the rollout with a faint disdain, as
if Cooper were a modern sculptor displaying a pile of junk shamelessly palmed off as art.
Others in the crowd expressed a greater enthusiasm, oohing and aahing. Scattered applause
greeted the spacecraft when it stopped, and cameras clicked and hummed to capture the
moment.
His attention clearly lay focused on the slow movement of the spacecraft. A single large
dent in its aluminum-lithium alloy skin could conceivably deform the thrust structure -- the main
internal weight-bearing frame -- since it was integral to the hull. Such damage could lead to
destruction of the spacecraft during liftoff or re-entry.
So many ways to fail, he thought, but only for a fleeting instant. The simplicity of
the Starblazer design served as its greatest protection against failure. Where the Space Shuttle
employed hundreds of Criticality One components, Aurora utilized only a few -- none of
them in the engines. Even the failure of several motors did not guarantee loss of the spacecraft:
low thrust on one side could be compensated for -- much in the manner of an engine-out
procedure on a multi-engine aircraft -- by throttling individual combustors to compensate for
differnetial thrust. The onboard computer, monitoring the engines' performance thousands of
times each second, could make the appropriate alterations before anything could go wrong.
Leora Thane continued to rhapsodize. Cooper did not blame her. He would have whooped
in triumph if it were in his personality. Dressed in a somber navy-blue suit, though, he could
have been a quiet accountant come by to watch the spectacle.
"I've never seen such quick results from just taking a pile of other people's money and
throwing it at a challenge," she said, this time to Sherry Cooper.
Sherry, attired in a light beige safari shirt and matching shorts, nodded from behind her dark
glasses and smiled. "Gerry spent ten years fiddling with the original design on CAD and lining
up suppliers. So when you appeared with the investment, it was just a matter of modeming the
specs to the sub-contractors' computers. He didn't design Aurora to consume a million
man-hours and billions in taxes."
Leora nodded her head merrily. "It should say on the ingredient label 'No Pork,' which -- for
more than one reason -- is OK with me."
Sherry walked with her husband around the base of the elongated gumdrop of the Starblazer
prototype. From its gently curving base extended three sturdy landing gear through hatches in
the ablative shield. Encircling the gear was the annular ring within which hid the twenty rocket
nozzles. She admired the nearly seamless way in which the sprayed-on composite ablative
material had been applied. Far cheaper than individually unique and hand-made thermal tiles,
the coating could be reapplied within the seventy-two hour turnaround time allotted for the
production version of the spacecraft.
Small attitude rocket nozzles that controlled pitch, yaw, and roll formed little trefoils of two
oval exhaust ports on a transverse line with a single oval above them on the vertical. These were
placed above where the center-of-gravity would be once the ship was in orbit with much of its
fuel consumed.
The only other visible openings were the twenty trapezoidal viewing ports just above
amidships (for the tourists) and the three clustered together higher up on one side of the flight
deck (for the pilots). Here and there, streamlined bumps protruded from the fuselage to enclose
the various antennæ for navigation and communication. Unseen beneath the blunt nose
cone lay the universal docking adapter for which -- currently -- there was nothing in orbit to
mate. Unless one counted the dead husk of Mir.
Sherry hazarded a glance at her husband. He beamed as any other father would at a son
hitting a home run or a daughter performing a perfect gymnastic floor exercise. Or vice versa,
she thought, and wondered whether they would consider starting a family, now that Gerry had
given birth to his dreamchild.
Larry Poubelle wandered over from his hangar to watch the event. He left behind him a
nearly complete Nomad, awaiting only the delivery and installation of its single powerful
rocket engine.
"Hey!" he shouted in a jovial way. "Coop! You trying to beat me out of my own
half-billion?"
"Better cut the check!" Cooper hollered back. "We static-fired the engines at Skull Valley
last week, slapped them in, and now we move on to Vandenberg!"
Close enough now that he did not have to yell, and not wanting his voice to carry, Poubelle
said, "Are you sure you want the Air Force involved in this?"
Cooper shrugged. "Someone at KSC convinced someone at Space Command to let me use
the facilities, so even what's left of NASA knows that the game's changed. I think they want a
reliable spacecraft as much as we do."
Poubelle made a tsking sound. "My design allows me to lift off from any long
runway and launch in the air."
"Well," Cooper said, "I don't need much in the way of a spaceport to take off and
land. Besides, you're receiving Air Force largesse, too!"
"It's not like either of us is accepting money from them, just using public property for as
long as we're standing on it, reluctantly surrendering it back to an ownerless condition once we
move on. I'll only be using Edwards for the landing strip on Rogers Dry Lake, if I can wrest
permission from them."
"And if not?"
Poubelle smiled and drew a cigar from his safari jacket. "Then I'll just land at Cuddeback
Lake and have the damned thing trucked out."
"You're not going to light that, are you?" Cooper asked.
Poubelle looked at the oversized cigar and handed it to Cooper. "Congratulations, new
dad."
Cooper slipped it into an inner pocket. "Thanks. I'll smoke this after we make an orbital
flight."
A man in a beige suit with a pale blue shirt and a paisley tie -- tied in an annoyingly foppish
Windsor knot -- stepped up to them. He was young, probably mid-twenties, with brashly
expensive shoes and a meticulously fashionable hair style. "Gerald Cooper?"
"Yes?" Gerry flashed a proud smile, then saw the other man's odd smirk.
"Thiel. Department of State. I'm here to inform you that you have not obtained an export
permit for that shipment of munitions."
"I beg your pardon?"
Poubelle listened in, one eyebrow raised in interest.
"The State Department classifies rockets as 'munitions,' and -- in order to satisfy the
mandates of the 1967 Treaty on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space -- requires an export permit
for any munitions that leave U.S. territorial limits." Thiel smiled, reached into his jacket, and
withdrew a thick, folded sheaf of paper to hand to Cooper, then turned to Poubelle and pointed a
finger at him, pistol-like. "I'll be seeing you next week."
Cooper flipped through the papers incredulously. "I'm not exporting anything. I'll be
sending it up fifty miles over Vandenberg and bringing it down again. It's not going to any
foreign country!"
Poubelle cut in. "Yeah. In fact, since he doesn't touch down anywhere else and returns to
his point of origin, the FAA would classify it as a local flight!"
"A permit," the man in beige said, "is required to allow the vehicle to leave the country
regardless of where the vehicle goes or whether or not the vehicle actually changes ownership."
His smirk widened. "Have a good one." He turned and departed.
Poubelle laughed. "You know, if he came here with agents to seize the ship, he'd have made
sure the cameras were on him. He preferred to do this quietly. That ought to tell you
something."
"What?"
Poubelle slid the papers out of Cooper's hands. "That he doesn't have a leg to stand on and
would look like an idiotic spoilsport on TV. Let my lawyers handle this and just do what you
need to."
"What I need is to borrow your Boeing to fly this baby to Vandenberg."
"If you've got the attach points, we've got the struts. I won't need the plane for months."
13 June
It took two weeks for State to back down from the export permit demand. Thiel did not
even bother to attempt to serve papers on Poubelle. In that time, crews lifted Aurora by
crane and gently lowered it on its side atop the Dædalus Project's 747. It had been
Poubelle's idea to offer to design strut attach points on the airplane and suggested that Cooper
design in matching points on the Starblazers. Though the points differed for Aurora and
for Nomad, due to different centers of gravity, Poubelle magnanimously offered to set
the Boeing up for Cooper's ship first, knowing full well that a launch from an Air Force facility
would take far longer than an air launch from the back of his plane. He had no doubts that he
would precede Cooper into orbit, retain his prize money, and open the door for widespread
repudiation of UNITO.
At Vandenberg, the Coopers stood side-by-side in the chill, damp pre-dawn ocean air and
watched Aurora move slowly into position on the launch pad. Very little pre-launch
preparation would need to be done to the spacecraft, in keeping with its short turnaround-time
design. Loading the cryogenic fuel and oxidizer was the only time-consuming process, and it
would take only an hour or so. A compressed helium-hydrogen mix, used to pressurize the LOX,
was already onboard in smaller tanks. The helium worked better if preheated, so the hydrogen
was mixed in to provide the heat, flowing through a catalyst chamber where it reacted with
precisely metered oxygen to form water and release sufficient heat to warm the helium and
increase its pressure. This obviated the need for a more complex heat exchangers in the
engines.
The toughest part of the whole pre-launch process, Cooper mused, had been convincing the
Air Force range safety officer of the safety of the Starblazer design. The twenty rockets, each
sixteen feet long, provided seventy thousand pounds of thrust during their eight minute burns,
leaving enough unconsumed fuel for re-entry braking and a landing back at a wide, clear area of
Vandenberg. The ship was diminutive and light -- any high-altitude disaster would result in the
ship breaking up and falling to Earth in small, relatively harmless pieces. A lower-altitude
disaster would not be much more destructive than the crash of a corporate jet -- and would kill
far fewer people. Even so, Space Command insisted on strapping self-destruct explosives to the
fuel and oxidizer tanks. If activated by range safety, they would rip open the tanks, allowing the
two components to mingle and providing the spark to ignite the mix. The explosive power of
the propellants would perform the actual demolition of Aurora.
This time, when the light of dawn came over the mountains to bathe Aurora in its
golden light, Gerald Cooper felt a mixture of pride and exhilaration compete for supremacy
within him. He slipped an arm around Sherry's waist.
"It's so beautiful," she said. "As simple and perfect as a robin's egg."
He nodded, then said seriously, "Let's hope it doesn't crack."
They headed back to Launch Control, where Freespace personnel mingled with Air Force
and NASA people. NASA insisted on handling the launch, the Air Force overseeing range safety
and flight control, which left Freespace to do the actual work. This was to be a crewless flight to
fifty miles altitude. Straight up, straight down. No frills. It would verify the ability of the SSTO
design to launch Aurora, shut down in mid-flight allowing the spaceship to decelerate
and then plummet ass-backward toward the ground, and re-ignite at the proper instant to lower
the spacecraft safely to the surface a few dozen yards from the launch pad.
If all went well, Cooper hoped to prove the ship's fast turnaround time by launching a
crewed flight into orbit one week later.
The presence of three different groups in Launch Control provided no end of confusion,
exacerbated, Cooper suspected, by a reluctance on the part of either NASA or the Air Force to
cooperate with a private launch so soon after the Constitution disaster. Very few of the
NASA people were experienced launch personnel -- half of Cooper's people, in fact, comprised
old NASA retirees whom he had hired to fill in the gaps. And the Air Force people seemed more
than rigorous in their efforts to root out problems with the vehicle. Cooper had no objection to
that per se, but the range safety officer -- Lieutenant Chet Rollins -- spent much of his
time checking and rechecking the arming mechanism for the Flight Termination System -- the
euphemism for the spacecraft-destruction explosives -- and very little time reviewing the
abort-and-return-to-launch-site sequence.
The relatively short two-hour countdown proceeded without incident. Cooper -- absorbed in
the process -- felt as if he and Aurora became one, straining toward the moment of
ignition like a thoroughbred horse at the starting gate. Only a successful launch could release
the pent-up energy within him. Thom Brodsky, who would be monitoring telemetry, felt just as
much pre-launch angst.
Conversations flowed on four different audio channels simultaneously. Monitors glowed
with a dozen different camera angles, some on the entire ship and launch pad, one on the lines
feeding the fuel and oxidizer tanks, one on the engines and clamps, several on security
checkpoints around the complex.
"All systems nominal," the calm voice of the launch director said. "T-minus one
minute. APU's functioning."
Sherry stood near her husband, who bent over a display near the range safety officer. The
intense concentration he radiated was a palpable thing to her; it made her stomach knot with
tension. Soon, though. Soon it would be over.
"T-minus thirty. Internal power. Pressure. Telemetry coming in."
"Roger on TM," Brodsky replied.
"Downrange clear," Lt. Rollins said. Since the flight was nearly vertical, the only
"downrange" consisted of a small footprint where debris might land. Range safety, however,
consisted of several hundred square miles of surrounding land and sea area.
"T-minus ten, nine, eight..."
Adrenaline sluiced through Cooper's body, creating an other-worldly sense of heightened
reality. Turning his gaze away from telemetry and toward the monitor, he watched as seagulls,
oblivious to the coming launch, flew past the spacecraft in the misty morning.
"Three seconds. Ignition sequence start."
"Valves open," a voice on Channel One said. "Release clamps."
"Abort!" cried a voice on Channel Two. "Subnormal thrust!"
Half of the engines on Aurora flared briefly into life and burned with a languid blue
sputter. Instead of blasting out the exhaust nozzles with lifting power, the flames licked upward,
blackening the composite structure.
"Abort! Abort! Stuck valve! Keep clamps locked!"
Lt. Rollins held his palm over the large red FTS button, prepared to destroy the bird if
necessary. Others stood frozen in place, expecting anything, including the prospect of their own
deaths in another ignition dissynchrony.
Cooper immediately shouted, "Vent the helium tanks! Vent through the engines!" The
command was unnecessary, since the computer had already reacted to the problem and done just
that. The helium, with the hydrogen already removed in the catalyst chamber, vented downward
under pressure to act as a fire extinguisher, forcing the oxygen out of the combustion
chambers.
"Fire out!" someone said.
"LOX still flowing!" a voice said on Channel Four.
"Close the valve!" Cooper yelled, racing over to the launch control panel.
"It's stuck," the director said in a level voice. "Won't move."
"Confirm flameout," another voice on Channel One intoned. "Vent oxidizer
tank."
On the monitor, a cloud of white vapor erupted from the midriff of the spacecraft. In a
moment, the mist dissipated to reveal Aurora encased in a thin crust of ice crystals
everywhere but around its scorched stern.
Lt. Rollins reluctantly removed his hand from the destruct button.
"Damn!" Thom Brodsky said from the telemetry console. "I show the main oxidizer valve
stuck one-third open. Thrust was only twenty percent. Give a medal to whomever kept the
clamps on. If they'd released, it would have tipped over."
"It's safe," Sherry was the first to observe. "Damage looks minimal. We can fix it and try
again."
"After we find out what happened," Gerry said.
"Valve froze," Colonel Alan Shepard Lundy said as he strode into the blockhouse. The
military men sprung to attention but he waved them down.
"That didn't happen during the static firings," Cooper shot back. The alarm of the previous
few moments faded into a weary, sullen anger. It was an anger Cooper directed at himself for
missing a detail, but the words came out clipped and irritated.
"The ocean air out here does that unless you keep the chambers flushed with dry nitrogen."
Lundy turned to the launch director. "Captain Fortney?"
Fortney pursed his lips, then said tersely, "It was not in our purview to determine if the
customer had knowledge of what the dew point is, sir." The word "customer" carried an
unusually ironic edge. So, in fact, did the word "sir."
Lundy narrowed his gaze. "My father and a couple thousand people died at Kennedy,
Captain Fortney. That won't happen anywhere, anytime at Space Command, not even with
private contract work. Is that understood, Captain?"
"Yes, Colonel."
Lundy turned toward Cooper. "After all systems are safely shut down, I'd like to invite you
and Mrs. Cooper to the officer's mess for lunch."
Cooper nodded distractedly. Sherry smiled and inclined her head slightly with gracious
appreciation.
***
"There are a lot of people in the US government who don't like what you're doing, Mr.
Cooper." Col. Lundy sat with the Coopers in a private dining room separated from the rest of
the officers by luxurious wood paneling.
"And my wife," Cooper replied. "We're a team."
Lundy turned to her and said, sincerely, "Of course. I apologize. My father and mother both
worked for NASA. I didn't mean to imply--"
"Your mother -- did she also..." Sherry let her question simply hang.
"No. She saw it all, though, from a causeway. My father died on the crawler path. He had
no business being there. He was trying to stop the launch. He knew what was going to happen."
Lundy spoke the short, simple sentences as if he had recited them hundreds of times to hundreds
of listeners. Sherry knew that his pain must be deeper than anything she could imagine.
"That's pretty much what we learned from that documentary." Gerry observed Lundy with
no small degree of admiration and empathy.
"Range Safety is very important to monitor," the colonel said.
"We're addressing every aspect of safety issues," Gerry said. "As we saw, the design has
several feature--"
"Range safety," Lundy said again, this time with disturbing emphasis, "is very
important to monitor."
Sherry could tell that he wanted to say more. It showed in the pain knotted into his
eyebrows and creased along his forehead. "Thank you," she said. "We'll monitor it. Closely."
She glanced at her husband. His eyes gazed into space, his mind lost in contemplation of repairs
and retrofits to Aurora. She knew that was where he had drifted to, and knew that Col.
Lundy's veiled warning had utterly eluded him.
She returned to her meal, formulating a plan that she dared not reveal even to her own
husband.

Proceed to Chapter 33
Return to the Table of Contents