Chapter 18: Kings of the High Frontier



CHAPTER 18
...the idea of citizens being fully informed about what the government is
doing is merely another nonsensical notion.
-- Ferdinand Lundberg
The Myth of Democracy

5 January
Within NASA there dwelt a number of spies. However, as with many other federal
agencies, these spies worked for no foreign power. NASA's brace of spies reported to competing
federal agencies such as the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the
National Security Agency, the Sandia National Laboratory, and even -- for arcane reasons related
to the federal budget-- the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They routinely
monitored encrypted communications between the Shuttle and the Johnson Space Center in
Houston, the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, or the Marshall Space Flight Center in
Huntsville and devoted a good deal of supercomputer time in redundant efforts to decode one
another's transmissions. Many considered this task a vital part of the checks and balances that
keep a republic alive, or at the very least lively.
Montgomery Barron wasted no time with interagency intrigue. With a diligence that
bordered on monomania, he spent his days and evenings and sometimes nights in the hangar at
Washington Naval Air Station, overseeing Project Stark Fist, watching the nearly organic
growth of the spaceplane from simple titanium frame to where it stood now: an impressive
black skeleton housing the high-tech entrails of propellant tanks, plumbing, turbopump, and
high-pressure engine that awaited the connection of weapons, fly-by-fiber controls, and
heat-inhibiting skin to make her complete.
Barron, no lady's man, liked to think of the spaceplane in traditional feminine terms. He
picked the name Huntress and even ordered low-resolution decals with that name,
surmounted by nose art of a woman in a black trench coat and slouch hat gazing mysteriously at
the observer. Since hypersonic flight and reentry would sear the artwork off every flight, he
ordered scores of copies.
The fuselage and wing tanks gave her lines a solidity lacking in the basic skeleton. Her
graceful wings swept back more sharply than those of the shuttle orbiter, which made for a
smoother transition to hypersonic speeds, and their tips bent upward into winglets, which served
to extend the wing area without adding to wingspan. Her fuselage bore some of the traits of a
lifting body, though nowhere nearly as fat as the orbiter or as round in the belly as the old
Dyna-Soar. If anything, Huntress shared kinship more with a delta-winged version of the
X-15 once proposed but never built. She also shared lineage with an aircraft that would never
fly, the National Aerospace Plane.
Huntress would fly, though, for she was small and sleek and not designed to please
Congress or the ærospace business community. He ran a hand over her frame as he
approached the cockpit.
A pair of engineers hung heads-down in the cockpit, legs up in the air like celery stalks in a
cocktail glass. They worked quietly without argument or agitation. They paced themselves even
though the pace was swift.
"How's it going in there?" Barron called up to them.
Without disengaging, one of them said, "The specs on the light fiber were off by a fraction
of an inch each, so the bundle won't fit the holes. Tim's going to enlarge the holes, but we'll stay
within the stress limits. Barely within."
"Keep at it." Barron saw no need to double check their work. He trusted the men as far as
any NSA operative could trust anyone. When finished, Huntress would fly.
Charles Stansfield stepped up to him, tightly holding a fat file folder conspicuously marred
by purple classification stamps. "General Dardanelle is waiting at the hotel."
Barron nodded. Dardanelle was not his real name. And though it irked Barron to purchase
weapons for Project Stark Fist from the Israelis rather than buying American, he had
shopped the entire war market and the lightest, simplest, and most reliable weapons to serve his
purpose were those coming out of an industrial park in Hadera.
There was no way he would let the general see the spaceplane, though. NSA files contained
reports of a Hassidic sect attempting to reconcile space migration with Talmudic law and openly
promoting a new Exodus to construct an orbiting City of the Chosen. He might have dismissed
the report, except that several of the Hassidim were former Soviet rocket scientists who had
made aileyah to Israel just a few years before.
Barron sighed. Leaving the hangar meant staring into that damned retina scanner again.
* * *
Haley delivered the bad news to Grant in an almost apologetic tone. Beside him in Grant's
office stood Donahue, looking grim in a grey business suit and clutching a thick sheaf of
corroborating data in her left hand, pressed against her thigh for support.
"I've crunched the numbers and run the simulations, Mr. Grant, and there is just no way the
747's can do it."
Grant sounded irritated, if not downright peevish. "I ran my own numbers, Chad. That's
where I came up with the VR simulation."
Garbage in, garbage out, Chad thought, judiciously choosing not to say it aloud. He picked
the more diplomatic route. "Let me say that the case for orbiting a 747 is good, but hardly
practical. To lift something that heavy into orbit requires going supersonic--"
"They took one supersonic once," Grant cut in, looking for weakness in Haley's argument.
"The airframe can take it."
"Only barely," Joscelyn said. Her red hair hung down past her shoulders, unkempt and
bespeaking the days of relentless work on the problem. "You get tremendous transonic drag
because the shock wave forms over the wing while the rest of the plane is subsonic. Look, Marc,
I know you thought that flying up to the service ceiling puts it above most of the atmosphere, but
it turns out that the energy required to take it up to forty or fifty thousand feet and six hundred
knots plus is..." She plopped the stack of printout and notes on his vast desk. "Marc, it's just
infinitesimal compared to what you need to get from that speed and altitude to seventeen
thousand miles per hour and a hundred twenty miles altitude!"
"But I ran the numbers myself!"
Still the diplomat, Haley said, "It's marginal. Very marginal. And in the real world, we have
to have firmer numbers than that."
"What if we jettison excess weight?" The others watched Grant's mind at work, wheels
turning. "Jettison the landing gear just after liftoff, then have the wings and empennage rigged
with explosive bolts to blow at altitude, just before firing off the boost--"
"Mr. Grant... Marcus." Haley pulled up a chair and sat, leaning his arms against the edge of
the desk and spreading both hands. "The wings of a Boeing are the main structure to which the
fuselage is attached, not vice versa. And blowing the empennage means coming up with a new
bulkhead to maintain the cabin pressure. The cost of retrofitting six planes to do all that and do
it safely and then go supersonic and orbital, well..." He glanced at Donahue for support. She
nodded. Haley gazed at Grant with eyes that implored and commanded simultaneously. "Well,
it would cost just as much to build an entirely new system from scratch. That's all. And
Joscelyn and I think we've found one."
Grant leaned back in his chair, still digesting the fact that his space station concept had just
gone down in flames. "Found one?"
Haley deferred to Donahue, whose power of persuasion over Grant undoubtedly exceeded
his own.
"It's nearly forty years old," she said, "but don't let its age fool you. When it comes to space
travel, a lot of good ideas came out in the 'fifties and 'sixties, only to be ignored or suppressed by
NASA. This one's called a Neuffer Ring." She slipped a
CD-ROM into Grant's computer and the
wallscreen displayed a digital slide show to accompany her pitch. The first image looked like a
sketch of a woman's bracelet, round and composed of sixteen spheres intersecting together so
that their points of contact were actually circles, much as bubbles share a broad area when
squashed together.
The bracelet imaged was belied by a width mark from edge to edge that denoted a diameter
of two hundred feet.
Grant let out a low whistle and leaned forward, elbows on desk.
Donahue knew better than to let a smile overtake her. "The design is optimized to permit a
single-stage-to-orbit launch of a fully assembled space station consisting of sixteen pods, each
forty feet in diameter. The pods"--the image changed to a cutaway diagram of one of the
spheres--"serve as fuel tanks on the way up and -- once in orbit -- are voided of hydrogen and
filled with what remains of the oxygen from the LOX tank for atmosphere. Neuffer's design did
not allow for very much payload other than the station itself, but modern structural materials
such as composites and aluminum-lithium can bring the mass down so that a crew of twenty and
a minimal amount of life support and machinery can be added."
Grant peered at the diagram until it changed to a close up of the engine itself. "What is
that?" he asked. "An ærospike?"
Donahue nodded. "Classic design. Four concentric rings of one-hundred-eighty combustion
chambers each, arranged around a central plug. The plug contains a tube bundle heat exchanger
sec--"
"Save the details for later," Grant said. "Will this thing work?"
Haley laid a hand on the stack of printout. "It stands a better chance of working than the
747's and you don't have to assemble it in orbit. All the work is done of nice, safe terra
firma."
Grant mused on it for long moments before asking, "What would it cost to build?"
"Less than a modern skyscraper," Donahue said with a smile, "but more than a
supertanker."
"Less," Haley added, "than buying the planes and retrofitting them and buying the boosters
to lob them into orbit. We're not a government space agency. We don't have to waste money the
way they do. We can be cheap and safe. This"--he pointed at animation of the space station
climbing into orbit--"is Grant One."
After a moment considering the idea, Grant had only one question: "While we're building it,
where do we hide it?"

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