by Larry Bond
“No, Robert. No one seems willing to discuss the payload, and our requests to visit SLC-2 have been denied by the air force. The best I can do is give you my informed speculation, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude it has something to do with the Chinese assault on the GPS constellation. The most likely option is the mystery payload is a GPS replacement satellite, but that makes little sense to me unless the air force has found a way to defend a satellite from attack.
“The rumors of the launch have only added to the fury of speculation on the Internet about Defender. Fantastic stories about exotic weaponry or orbital-deployed nuclear weapons are most common. A recent post on a space-enthusiast Web page early this morning said the rocket’s payload is an armed defensive satellite that could protect the GPS constellation and that Defender could also control it once both were in orbit. All these theories sound pretty far-fetched, but at this point anything is possible.”
“But even if we don’t know what the payload is, I think it’s safe to say that the United States is finally responding to China’s attacks. Don’t you agree?”
“Absolutely, Robert, and after eleven destroyed satellites, this response is long overdue.”
The news anchor frowned; he seemed displeased. “But, Mark, this doesn’t sound like much of a response, particularly if it’s just a replacement satellite.”
“Normally I would agree with you, but there are also rumors of activity at Cape Canaveral as well. These rumors are considerably more vague than what I’ve been able to find out here at Vandenberg, but, if true, this would suggest multiple launches. And while not unprecedented, it is very unusual. But everything depends on the payload, Robert. Until we know what these space-launch vehicles are carrying, we won’t be able to say one way or the other if this response will be effective or not. And since the U.S. government is reluctant to say anything meaningful about this space war, we’ll just have to wait until we have better information.
“But there is one thing I can say. If the technical details about Defender are accurate, we are looking at a historically unique situation. For the first time, a manned, armed vehicle is being built to wage war in space. This is not even remotely similar to military reconnaissance satellites or even a missile’s reentry vehicle. This is a dedicated, reusable spacecraft with weaponry on board to defend U.S. space assets or to attack an adversary’s—both in space and on Earth. Defender, if it works as advertised, will change forever how space is used. Back to you.”
Ba Dinh District
Hanoi, Vietnam
November 9, 2017
The door opened as soon as the bus came to a complete stop. A sudden burst of people rushed out, impatient to get where they wanted to go. After the crowd had exited, a grandmotherly figure slowly climbed down the steps to the pavement. At sixty-two, Vinh Thi Nhung was still quite mobile, but steps, particularly steps down, greatly aggravated her arthritis. Since her glacial pace didn’t sit well with the younger people, who always seemed to be in such a hurry, she made it a habit of being the last one out. Once clear, she waved to the driver and thanked him. Vinh still believed in old-fashioned politeness.
She walked along the sidewalk with a throng of other people toward a major intersection four blocks away. The bus stop she chose wasn’t the closest one to her destination, but it was closest to an intersection with a policewoman who directed traffic. Even though Vietnamese traffic laws are very strict, the ever-growing number of cars and motorbikes that crammed the streets largely ignored them. Traffic lights, stop signs, and pedestrian crosswalks were often completely disregarded, resulting in serious accidents and injury. After being nearly hit two years ago in a crosswalk, Vinh now only crossed the busy streets where a police officer directed traffic. She also preferred the women police officers, as they were tougher on traffic violators than the men.
Vinh was becoming less and less enamored with Hanoi with each visit; it always seemed to be more crowded than the last time, and the chaotic hustle and bustle of city life chaffed badly against her quiet suburban upbringing. But Vinh’s daughter had insisted that she meet her and the grandchildren at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum for a family outing. The children had just started their lessons on the great war with America, and her daughter thought it was important for the children to hear the stories from their grandmother, who lived during that “titanic struggle.” Vinh smirked as she walked—only the elderly could appreciate the irony of their situation. During that war, the United States was the enemy, and China was an ally. Now, some forty-odd years later, the roles had reversed: China was now the enemy, and the United States the ally.
The crowd had thinned as she walked past the government offices along Hung Vuong Street, and she paused to appreciate the well-planned gardens that surrounded many of the buildings. Abruptly, a loud wailing sound started winding up, filling the streets. Many passersby looked around for the source with curiosity.
Vinh froze. She knew exactly what it was, even though she hadn’t heard that sound since she was a young woman. Frantically, she looked for shelter, her reactions driven by embedded training. She started walking as fast as she could. The mausoleum was the closest and the sturdiest building that the general public had access to. The nearest underground metro station was blocks away. As the air raid siren continued to blare, the rest of the pedestrians finally figured out its meaning, and the people began to panic—screaming and running in all directions.
She was still a block away from the mausoleum when the first government office building was struck. The explosion was deafening. The missile’s warhead tore huge chunks out of the building’s façade and threw the debris high into the air. Shards of glass and shattered bricks rained down around Vinh, but she covered her head with her arms and kept moving, all the while praying that her daughter and grandchildren were already safely inside the mausoleum’s thick stone walls. The next missile hit a nearby building across the street, and the blast knocked Vinh down behind a collection of large earthenware planters. Pieces of broken pottery, clumps of dirt, and uprooted flowers poured down around her as the shrapnel disintegrated the planters.
Rising slowly, Vinh cleared her eyes of dirt and plant fragments only to see the mangled body of a young woman a mere two meters away. The shock brought back the nightmare memories of that hideous month in late 1972, when bombs fell on Hanoi like rain.
“It’s happening again!” she groaned out load. Vinh then shook her head to clear her thoughts. “Keep moving; get to shelter.” She could still hear her mother’s words so clearly. Vinh tried to walk but only managed a single step before falling back to the ground, a stabbing sharp pain in her left leg. Looking down, she could see blood on the sidewalk, her blood. Grabbing a piece of a torn window frame and using it as a crutch, she stood back up and began hobbling toward the mausoleum.
Vinh managed to keep walking, but at an agonizingly slow pace. She wanted to rest, but the exploding missiles far behind her spurred her on. As she worked her way in front of the Ministry of Finance building, a Chinese missile targeting it fell short—Vinh never heard the warhead explode.
Cape Canaveral Air Force Station
Space Launch Complex 17B
Cape Canaveral, FL
November 10, 2017
“We have liftoff,” squawked the announcing system as the Delta II’s main engine and strap-on solid rocket boosters began pushing the space launch vehicle upward. Unlike the space shuttle that seemed to rise slowly at first, the much-smaller Delta II rocket leapt from its launchpad and quickly picked up speed as it cleared the gantry. The initial stage of the launch had been oddly silent, but ten seconds after ignition, the deep rattling roar of the main engine and the solid boosters shook the area near the launch complex.
As the rocket’s altitude increased, the noise dropped to a low rumble. Now only the rocket’s exhaust could be clearly seen. A little over a minute after launch, the three air-start solid-rocket boosters kicked in, maintaining the vehicle’s acceleration. Seconds late
r, the six strap-on boosters that had fired earlier began to peel away from the rocket’s first stage. Their fuel spent, the casings were now just dead weight that had to be jettisoned. A minute later, the air-start rocket boosters also fell away.
Well downrange, the Delta II was now over thirty miles above Earth’s surface. Far beyond the thicker portions of the atmosphere, the atmospheric pressure was one-thousandth that at sea level. The first-stage main engine generated sufficient thrust to keep the rocket on its desired trajectory. Two minutes later, a little over four minutes after launch, with the first stage’s fuel depleted, the main engine cut off and the first stage separated from the rocket; moments later, the second-stage engine ignited, continuing the climb.
The first firing by the second-stage engine ended some seven minutes later. The rocket would now coast for nearly an hour in a preplanned parking orbit over one hundred miles high. By this time, the vehicle was on the far side of the planet, and the Guam tracking station picked up the telemetry data and began feeding it back to Cape Canaveral. Everything was proceeding according to the flight plan, and the operators saw that the second-stage engine had restarted for a short forty-second burn to boost the rocket into a transfer orbit. There, the second stage separated and the third stage fired, lifting the satellite to its final orbit. Seventy minutes after launch, the Cape Canaveral flight control team confirmed the GPS satellite had successfully separated from the Delta II third stage and had begun deploying its solar panels. After a quick checkout by the Fiftieth Space Operations Wing in Colorado, the satellite was declared fit for service and was brought online. Her sister from Vandenberg would join her three hours later.
16
Setbacks
U.S. Space Force Headquarters
Edwards Air Force Base
Office Annex
0650 hours
November 13, 2017
Ray usually met Biff Barnes about fifteen minutes before the crew training sessions began. There was always business to go over, and they both liked to get it cleared away so they could focus on training.
When Biff didn’t show up as usual, Ray went looking for him, first in his trailer, then his office. He found Biff slouched in front of his computer screen, watching a grainy black-and-green video. When Ray knocked on the door frame, Barnes looked up, surprised. His face was puffy, and he hadn’t shaved.
“You look like hell,” Ray observed. “Were you here all night?”
Barnes didn’t bother answering but gestured at the screen. “Results from the first strikes near Lang Son.”
“How does it look?”
“It could look a lot better,” Biff answered grimly. “I’m seeing way too many misses. This area is a nightmare for an attacker—mountain valleys with only one road. We should be clobbering them. The Vietnamese are doing their best to hold them south of the river, but we were supposed to be attacking the Chinese rear areas. It’s the obvious move, though, and they’ve brought in enough antiaircraft guns and SAMs to shoot down Wonder Woman.”
Barnes clicked on a video. “This is a reconstruction of a strike on a SAM nest near the Khon Pat Bridge. They’ve got HQ-9 long-range SAMs, with HQ-7 and HQ-17 shorter-range systems covering the immediate area, and mobile and fixed guns from twenty-three all the way up to one hundred and thirty millimeters.”
Ray could see a string of symbols laid out over a hilly landscape. A single two-lane highway crossed a trestle bridge at right angles. The bridge was down, but it looked like the Chinese were constructing a replacement pontoon bridge a short distance to the west. He wasn’t familiar with the ground-unit symbology but could pick out vehicles filling the road north of the river and what were likely defenders arrayed on either side of the road. Biff pressed the “play” arrow, and new symbols appeared at the edge of the display. “Those are four F-22s, each loaded with eight Small-Diameter Bombs. Watch.”
A few moments after the planes entered from the south, dozens of red circles appeared on the map. “Those are the targets for the F-22 weapons—the SAM batteries and gun radars,” he explained.
The letters IP appeared and then, a few moments later, RELEASE. The aircraft symbols suddenly reversed course. “They’ve done a zoom climb and released their loads, then pulled out facing away from the target. Perfect delivery.” Ray could hear the admiration in his voice. “While the Raptors are safe and heading away, the bombs are using their GPS guidance to correct their trajectory. Flight time with a nine-mile release was just under a minute.” Ray noticed a timer in one corner, counting down the seconds.
“There.” The circles flashed, then either turned bright red or black. There were more blacks than reds.
Barnes sighed heavily. “That strike should have taken out at least every radar and the short-range SAM vehicles. Instead, we got about half. We even doubled up on the HQ-9’s radars, but they all missed!” He sounded disgusted. “Stealth got the planes in and out safely, but the only air-to-ground weapons the F-22 carries are GPS-guided. The Chinese have pulled their teeth. There was a squadron of Super Hornets thirty seconds behind the Raptors. The plan was to bomb the crap out of all that armor once the air defenses had been removed. The Hornet squadron commander had to abort, and the entire chain of command’s saying he made the right decision.” Barnes shrugged. “They had to try it, just to see how bad it would be.”
Ray pointed to his watch. “Crew training in three minutes.”
Biff stood up quickly, then paused for a moment and ran his hand over the stubble on his chin. “One second. I can’t show up like this.” He pulled open a drawer and took out an electric shaver.
As Barnes removed his overnight growth, Ray asked, “Would you have called for the abort?”
After a thoughtful moment, the captain answered. “Yeah, probably. It’s too early in the fight to take that kind of risk. We could have lost four, maybe six, aircraft.”
“And it could have been you in one of those Raptors—if I hadn’t shanghaied you.”
“I dunno,” Barnes answered as he put the shaver away. “But, yeah. If I were in that squadron, I’d be out there, of course. And if the air force calls, I don’t know what I’d say right now.” He headed for the door and the stairs down, with Ray close behind.
Ray ventured, “You can do a lot more damage to the Chinese as Defender’s mission commander.”
They clattered down the stairs. “I’ll keep telling myself that. You just make sure that thing will actually fly.”
U.S. Space Force Headquarters
Edwards Air Force Base
Battle Management Center
November 13, 2017
After the crew training was finished, Ray had decided to visit Jenny. Originally, she had been assigned to set up the command and control network that would support the mission. It was an immense job. She had to integrate links between the air force’s Space Command, navy tracking stations, NASA, and even some civilian facilities. It had to be done quickly and with the real purpose secret.
All that data would be fed to a single point, the Battle Management Center, and her task had such an impact on the center that she ended up taking that over, too.
She’d done both jobs well, almost elegantly, but her progress reports had recently become pessimistic, and she’d missed her last milestone by two days. It was not a good trend.
They’d set up the Battle Management Center in a purpose-built prefab building. Located a short walk from the hangar, the BMC was separated from the rest of the facility by a double chain-link fence, reinforced by rows of concrete Jersey barriers that would stop a charge by anything but an armored fighting vehicle. The single gate was manned by armed Marines at all times, and there were spots on the roof for Stinger teams and heavy weapons.
Although work was well under way inside, more still needed to be done before the BMC was finished. Engineers were adding emergency diesel generators and a buried fuel tank, and technicians were doubling up the center’s communications and data lines. Jenny was still debating the
merits of a separate backup computer, at a different location, in case of a hardware problem with the system here.
The building itself already looked weathered and misused. The metal walls were primed pale gray but not painted, and modifications to the exterior were only roughly finished.
Jenny had met Ray at the door, standing proudly under a hand-painted sign that read BATTLE MANAGEMENT CENTER. He was glad to see her, of course. He’d smiled, and she smiled back, but it was a tired smile. He hadn’t seen her in several days, and she seemed different. He realized she looked a little thinner, and wondered if the strain showed on him as well.
Ray tried to stay focused as Jenny Oh explained the BMC’s status. He found her presence distracting and feared missing details as his mind wandered, but she was maintaining a professional attitude. He did his best to follow her example.
Jenny then led him down the main hallway, past security, past rooms crammed with electronic equipment or people hunched over workstations, into a large two-story open area surrounded by support spaces and offices. The central space held the main command displays. There was more security at the door to the operations center, and a vestibule that served as a security checkpoint.
An elevated scaffold had been erected that ran around three sides of the room. It was about fifteen feet wide, with a waist-high rail on the inside edge. The fourth wall was lined with gray equipment cabinets, and Ray could see more boxy shapes tucked under the scaffolding.
Jenny trotted up the steps to the scaffolding, putting them one story up, then led Ray along the walkway. Desks lined it, facing the center, with an aisle behind them. “This section’s communications, that’s electronic warfare, that’s intelligence.” They turned the corner. “This wall is spacecraft systems. We don’t get a third of the telemetry that NASA gets, but we still monitor critical systems.”
