A Routine Departure, Terry Wilson [reading strategies book txt] 📗

two and a half weeks into the training camp nobody was in the mood to continue, Thomas, rubbing the contusion on his buttocks from falling off his quad the day before, opened the morning meeting by saying, "Folks, this isn't a decision. I'm just pointing out a painfully obvious fact," he rasped, "Ronny's in charge."

<Piloting the crew ferry,> the commentator chuckles, <in the unlikely event of a guidance emergency, is thirty-one year old Lucy Graheme…> The blonde hides her Daniel Craig eyes behind the visor by closing up her helmet. She had put the NorSTOL K301 Feather Tip airliner through competition trials as a tactical transport for the Royal Australian Air Force, including a daring mid-ocean ditching. She was so impressed that the rumors that chief designers Juubi Kurato and Kurea Golden had angels' wings were believable … almost.

<Commanding the mission, is forty-seven year old->

"Oh, shut up," he mutters from under his salt-and-pepper mustache.

<-Thomas Shinra, native of Malton, Ontario, survivor of the Sprint Crew Ferry's tumultuous maiden flight three years ago->

"I've heard enough of that, too," he mutters as he closes the visor on his helmet. Sinking himself as deep into his seat as he can manage, he remembers it. When he was in junior high school, German musician Peter Schilling wrote a song called Coming Home, which inspired him to become a Canadian Aerospace Society astronaut. He got sick of that song by the end of that first flight, described so perfectly by it: amber light doubt about the service module main thruster prior to launch, the series of development flight experiments. After the requested override by the control center in Malton, the thruster exploded at the start of his deorbit maneuver, sending his ship into a tumble and destroying his communications antenna. The last thing he said before he hit the switch was a joke for only ten seconds: "Give my wife my love." For an hour, the world thought he was dead. They figured out otherwise an orbit later when the Backup Maneuver Motor fired. Thomas despises the solid fuelled motor … it kicks like a mule. The longest thirty-two seconds of his life: spinning the unbalanced ship at twelve revolutions per minute, damping out the wobble caused by the motor by hand. A week later, when the motor's manufacture presented him with a handmade scale model of it as a reward, he ran out of the room screaming.

"I bet ya he's got that song stuck in his head again," Lucy laughs.

The infamous "Major Tom" (who has never been in the military) turns the key arming the Backup Maneuver Motor, and grunts, "Shiny Toy Guns, all the way."

Each Lilmax Booster module was shipped from its factory in New Jersey in sections and assembled in Titusville, Florida, just across the Banana River from the Cape. Each section was sized to be the biggest that would fit on a standard road trailer, but usually were shipped two to a rail car. Each needed a special cradle to keep from sagging, since the tanks were designed to be pressure-stabilized, leading to simple shells with little expensive machining. These cradles also acted as the assembly jigs in Titusville. It took a special, but not uncommon, road permit to tow the rocket modules to the launch pad, where they were joined side-by-side in an open revetment to the west and stood up on the pad. All three of these modules had flown before, having been fished out of the sea and proof-tested before being restacked and refueled. Unlike the Shuttle's solid rocket booster, they didn’t have to be taken apart, nor shipped three thousand miles back to the factory to be refueled, nor shipped the three thousand miles back to Florida at launch weight, nor reassembled at the pad. This easy reusability saved money, lots and lots of money.

Thomas Shinra is up close and personal with the downside of such cheap launch costs. Spacecraft builders would rather fly and see, now that it's cheaper than making dang sure it's going to work before they go through the expense of launching it. He was on board one, a calculated (mis-calculated?) risk that almost cost him his life, but it was a risk he signed up for, was willing to take, and unlike the fourteen who died in the delta-winged penguin during its checkered thirty year career, his (in his own opinion, at least) would have been excusable: a death in a brand-new spacecraft designed to help humanity expand into the solar system.

Four engines in each first stage module roar to life four seconds before the count reaches zero-point-zero, drops its minus sign, and starts to count up from the moment the bolts were released, allowing the booster to leap from the pad. It accelerates into the sky, leaving a diffuse trail of black soot and a cloud of steam the gantry stands in, poking through as though pining after the booster, sad at its sudden angry departure.

Lucy monitors the ascent guidance, while Thomas monitors the propulsion, just as they've trained. The booster's first maneuver is a thirteen degree roll, followed by a tilt to gently guide the booster through the middle of an optimal corridor on Lucy's screen. The booster guidance was given a program sixty seconds before launch, replacing its default still-air program with one compensating for the winds as measured by sounding probes launched by Symtex, the only rocket Ascent International sells to the public (and then, only to dedicated fanatics with deep pockets and a certificate from either the Tripoli Rocket Association or the Canadian Association of Rocketry.)

Half a minute after launch, the centre module's engines throttle back to fifty percent. Lucy notices the wobbles in the trajectory, and feels the subtle, low frequency vibrations in her seat.

"Flow sep?" the pilot asks her commander.

"Affirmative," Thomas dryly responds, watching the core module's engines buck their gimbals through the electronic gauges on his screen. In the atmosphere, the air around a rocket nozzle fights to get into the nozzle. When it wins, it causes the rocket exhaust to separate from the nozzle walls. When that separation isn't symmetrical, the engine's plume goes a bit sideways, causing it to buck. Within a few seconds, the rocket exhaust is again in charge of the nozzle because the booster is rapidly rising to where the air is thinner.

The centre module is still fully loaded because the modules attached to its sides feed its engines propellant from their own tanks. This crossfeed arrangement makes the booster more efficient by reducing the effect of pushing the deadweight of empty tanks. Now just over two minutes into the flight, the crossfeed valves shut off the flow to the centre module, and it now starts to use its own propellants. The outer modules throttle down their engines, keeping the ride gentle for the astronauts, and keeping the winding down of the turbines in each engine gentle as well.

The boosters cut off and separate, leaving the centre module to rush ahead from between them.

"Plus three-two-point-two," Lucy says.

"Cool!" Thomas smiles. The booster was going 32.2m/s faster than expected when the side boosters shut down, a good thing ... probably.

Three minutes later, the core, leaving a grey cloud of soot and steam as wide as a football field behind the booster, cuts off and falls away from the ascending upper stage and spacecraft. The now-useless abort rockets strapped to the side of the bullet-shaped descent module fire, making up for some of their added weight in this perfectly normal ascent, then drop away. The cylindrical shell around the service module splits into two halves and departs.

The Lilmax lower modules use liquid oxygen and kerosene, the cheapest propellant combination. The third stage uses the same combination, but as the booster gets faster and faster, it is becoming more and more expensive to get to that point. As the shrinking vehicle sheds parts, what's left more closely resembles its expensive older brothers: lighter, more efficient, flimsier and more expensive. Ascent International's designers call this step tapering.

A couple hundred metres south of the launch pad sits the ordinary looking drum-shaped kerosene tanks and their little pumping station. So ordinary is this lamp oil, used by every booster currently in service, that the media will sometimes forget about it. One of Ascent's designers falls on her husband's lap laughing herself silly as Coyote News Network's reporter narrating the flight erroneously explains that Lilmax is fueled with "liquid hydrogen".

The third stage extends its single oversized nozzle as the core second stage pulls away. The pump is the same as those in the larger lower stages, but for an inducer added to the eye of the LOX impeller, and the slightly narrower fuel impeller. A few of the hundreds of fuel injector ports in the combustion chamber are plugged with little pin rivets, completing the slightly leaner feed system of the space-only version of the Lilmax engine.

Each of the three lower modules descends on a trio of big parachutes stored in a pod next to the engines, letting each module hit the water nose first, saving the expensive engines and their turbine powered pumps from the impact. The pressurized and sealed tanks refuse to let water in, so the booster modules bob on the waves like empty drums while speedy little ships rush out to gather up their parachutes and drag them to shore.

Lucy feels the gentle push of the throttled down engine of the third stage, "Beats, can you pop the radar, please?"

"Sure," the black lady sighs, "I was just waiting for Malton." She puts a finger on her left hand under the edge of the switch, lifts its little plunger and moves it to the DEPLOY position.

Behind the bullet-shaped descent module, the service module looks like a bridge truss rigged with all sorts of electronics boxes, tanks, thrusters, antennae of various styles and buried deep in the middle, the cylindrical black backup maneuver motor. A dish antenna swings away from the visual cacophony of the service module and points aft, past the still burning Lilmax third stage.

<Malton, Equinox, no reply,> the Flight Director's voice squeaks in the radio speakers in each of their helmets, <Beatrice, we see your radar. Lucy you can take that as soon as you get the train. Thomas, we see your verniers press to low energy, SMMT reverse for uncommanded. You can disarm your BMM.>

Thomas twists the "Backup Maneuver Motor" key left to "Safe", putting the mule back to sleep.

Most television commentators can't sort out that complicated call (one of about three dozen during the whole ascent), but part of it related to a possible sudden explosion of the booster: the dreaded "uncommanded abort".

During the twenty minute coast after the engine cuts off, the astronauts spend their time monitoring the "train" catching up with them at almost three kilometres per second. It is on a highly elliptical orbit that takes it 24 hours to complete. Every day at about noon, it whips by over Morocco at almost ten and a half kilometres per second, spending the rest of its time floating around on the lazy part of its orbit. It was assembled from four previous launches over the past three weeks: two maneuver stages launched by Falcon boosters, the rover and space habitat launched by Lilmax. The maneuver stages are filled with LOX and liquified natural gas shaded