America One - The Launch

by T I WADE

  Even the lower-powered laser was dangerous; Ryan explained it would only take a two-second blast to burn a hole in any of the aluminum panels.

  Of course, these ideas for mining and meteor protection through deflection hadn’t been proven yet, but Ryan’s long deceased Russian mentor, Professor Ivan Yarkovsky, had studied the possibilities of meteor deflection several decades ago. The small nuclear battery VIN and Jonesy had carried up to Ivan would soon no longer be needed for the Russian space station because it would be getting direct power from the mother ship’s larger five-pound plutonium reactor. Rather, this two-pound piece of platinium-238 could give the second laser good strength. With the transfer of the nuclear battery from Ivan to SB III, the crew could test the laser in space.

  The five-pound plutonium reactor now bolted to the outside of America One could treble the laser’s output and power, so the main laser would be placed close to the reactor for drilling.

  “I’m sure this thing we have above our heads is pretty accurate,” Jonesy told Maggie, who was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, as Bob Mathews pulled the stick back and lifted the C-5 with the empty shuttle off the tarmac.

  “Ryan said that he got its aiming and target locking device from the company that produces them for the F-35,” Maggie replied. “If I remember from my days in F-16s, we could lock onto a stationery target at a much further distance than a moving target. The faster the target the closer you had to be to lock on.”

  “Well, Ryan stated that the two systems he purchased, I assume for large amounts of money, have been analyzed and redesigned by his team in Hangar Two,” said Jonesy, while looking through his final checks list, “and now the laser must have phenomenal accuracy. He told me that the locking screen has two aiming devices. The first consists of three long-range military cameras that can pick up a small target at 1,000 miles, like a car or an aircraft; it has normal, heat, and infrared search modes. The second aiming device is directly fed in from this radar screen. We know that the military satellites can pick up people walking on the ground from 4,000 to 12,000 miles in space. Nobody ever tells us how high the satellites are, but the drones can pick up the same human body at 40,000 to 50,000 feet. They say you can see the color of the person’s eyes if their face is looking directly towards the drone. This system Ryan has must be as good. Those two Russian software guys, the German computer specialist Hans, and the three American weapons specialists from Lockheed Martin he had dissecting the aiming systems, must be as good as anybody out there. Ryan placed that minute blue dot with his ballpoint pen on the metal plates, and then from 10,000 feet the laser hit it spot on. We didn’t see anything apart from the metal begin to glow orange and then vivid white.”

  “Eerie,” responded Maggie. “Let’s get back to our test checks–we must be in the 60 minute window to launch.”

  An hour later and at 52,000 feet the Dead Chicken released SB-III. For Jonesy and Maggie, who had piloted these launches sixteen times, it was just another walk in the park. They still had the most launches out of all the flight crews. Second were Penny and Michael with twelve and, catching up fast were Allen and Kathy with ten. It had taken twenty-five launches just to get all the panels into space, once the test flights of each shuttle were completed.

  The C-5 was going through JP-8 at a fast rate. Three tankers had arrived the previous day with the jet fuel needed for the next couple of launches. Jonesy figured that forty tankers a month were passing through the gates—fuel for the shuttles and another five or six per month for the C-5. He knew Ryan had more supplies than he wanted people to view going into the airfield. The boss thought out everything long before anybody else.

  The larger wings and tail on SB-III took the same amount of time, four seconds, to fully extend and, without a load, or power, Jonesy felt the lightness of the craft compared to the two older shuttles as he allowed the nose to dip and they headed towards earth.

  Ryan was outside with hundreds of personnel to watch SB-III come in as she arrived exactly as planned. She even flared out a little longer before gently touching down on the beginning of the runway. The parachutes were larger than in the earlier shuttles and load less, she quickly came to a halt exactly where the apron was connected to the runway.

  The success of this flight meant that another dozen scientists and their families would soon be heading home, back to their normal lives with money in their pockets. Their jobs were done.

  Hangars One and Two were half empty. Much of the equipment in Hangars Four and Five had already been transported into space or was loaded in canisters about to go into space. Hangar Six was dedicated only to the main mechanics group, a team of forty who restocked, checked, and refueled the incoming shuttles.

  Hangar Seven had a big secret hole. Hangars Eight and Nine which housed the biology, plant and animal projects were mostly packed up and ready to move. Ryan began to realize that with his new three-day launch window, all his remaining equipment would soon be in space.

  Ryan felt more relaxed. He had received a bank deposit from the first company in Russia that had purchased a substantial part of the rhodium and iridium he had flown over to Turkey. The deposits from the second flight of diamonds had been paid from Amsterdam, Antwerp and Tel Aviv, and for the first time in his life he had more than enough money to complete his project.

  Any members and their families leaving the airfield were happy with their bonuses, and had signed new non-disclosure agreements to not divulge any information to anybody outside the airfield for two years. They had all received half of their pay and half of their bonuses; the other half would be released to them after the non-disclosure period. Nobody leaving the airfield in small buses for Las Vegas had any desire to reveal anything, even the four scientists already working at NASA, and who were about to be joined by two more.

  Ryan watched as the tractor towed the shuttle back to the hangar and wondered what the powers-that-be were thinking about this 50,000-foot test flight—the first one in several weeks.

  The weather was getting cold. The mornings were beginning to get brisk and frosty for the morning runs and Ryan really looked forward to a busy airfield with fewer people. The airfield’s fuel stocks were at maximum, all the bills paid and only intervention by the government could now slow him down or halt his project. He was gambling on Scott and his “60 Minutes” team to buy him more time. He would be co-pilot on that flight to explain everything to the TV crew.

  Five days later the team from CBS arrived. It had been suggested that they arrive early to watch one shuttle arrive during the afternoon. Two of the team of five would be going into space the next morning.

  The television crew was introduced to Jonesy as they toured through the computer desks in ground control. The cameramen began recording footage for the twenty-minute segment to air in ten days, the first ever film crew to get so far into Ryan’s establishment. The huge screen above their heads was only showing the spacecraft Ryan wanted them to see; the shuttle was the only blip, about to reenter, and was lit up so that the cameras could film its reentry route. All Astermine’s other craft in space had been made to disappear on the display for the hour they were to be filming in the hangar.

  Scott, the famous anchorman was excited, chatting to Ryan off air. He had never had an invitation to blast off into space; his wife had hugged and kissed him several times more than usual before he left for the project. CBS was even advertising the upcoming segment on its news programs several days earlier than usual.

  “Colonel John Jones, you were a test pilot with the United States Air Force for most of your military career, were you not?” was Scott’s first question put to Jonesy while he sat in his flight overalls in Ryan’s office where any interviews were to take place.

  “That is correct. I started flying at a very early age,” he replied trying hard to be polite. He knew his father and mother would be watching.

  “When was the first time you actually touched the controls of an aircraft?” the interviewer asked.


  “I was fourteen,” he replied in his best manner, smiling at the white-haired anchor person.

  “That must have been in the early seventies. You certainly were very lucky to have parents who allowed you flying lessons at fourteen. What was the first aircraft you flew, Colonel?”

  “Actually, to tell you the truth, they didn’t know about my flying lessons, and the first aircraft I flew was a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress; I remember very well that this B-52 was an H model,” said Jonesy calmly with his eyes skywards in thinking mode. The interviewer coughed and the cameraman could see the surprise in the man’s face.

  “And where did you fly this B-52 to, Colonel Jones?” asked the interviewer trying to keep his voice calm.

  “Oh, several hundred miles across the Atlantic, once I took her off auto-pilot,” he replied sincerely.

  “Can you explain a little more how a fourteen-year old American kid is flying a $50 million bomber over the Atlantic, Colonel Jones? I’m all ears.”

  “Very simple, really. As a kid I always wanted to fly; my father was an air force officer, so we always lived on bases around the world. In those days it was pretty easy to stow away on aircraft; the security was sometimes nonexistent on the base aprons. The B-52 was the hardest to get aboard due to its confined space and number of crew, five. But it was my goal to get aboard one. There is a small area in-between the upper deck where the pilots, the gunner and the ECM operator sat and the lower deck where the two navigators sat. It was the old “Battle Station” concept. In this area was where the coffee was brewed, and it had two narrow bunk beds for flight crew to take a nap. In the B-52 I hid in the two-foot space under the lower bunk.”

  “Go on, Colonel Jones, I’m finding your story fascinating,” said the interviewer.

  “All I had to do was to wait until the two beds above me were occupied, and the sleeping crew started to snore. Usually the pilot-in-command went to the area to grab some sleep about two hours into the flight. The sound of two people snoring gave me the all clear. On this flight, I slowly edged out of my hole, checked around the area for a cupcake or Danish, and then looked into the flight deck. On my first successful attempt, the co-pilot was nodding half asleep in the right chair, so I put on the colonel’s flight jacket, his flight hat and the headphones that he had left on the back of the seat and sat down.”

  “Didn’t the co-pilot ask you what you were doing there?”

  “Yes, I was expecting that at any minute, but he sort of looked at me dressed up in his superior’s flight gear. I assumed then that he thought I was the chief pilot, and he turned to face the other way and began snoring.”

  “What about the autopilot? How did you know how it worked?” asked the announcer. A pin drop could have been heard in the office. Even Ryan was transfixed by Jonesy’s story.

  “Easy,” Jonesy replied smiling. “For about a year before my first flight, I had searched around the base for any manuals or material about flying B-52s that was left lying around. By the time I actually hid on this flight to Ramstein in Germany I had read every operating manual and all the training material for pilots on this actual aircraft, the H model. It had all of the latest equipment aboard in those days including a complicated auto-pilot system. It took me a minute to go through procedures before I could switch off the auto pilot and suddenly there I was fulfilling my dream.”

  “You were flying a $50 million dollar bomber with a full bomb load?”

  “No, actually, this was a milk run. That’s why the crew slept. The bomb bay I found out at Ramstein was full of medical supplies, and not much else.”

  “Go on about your first flight,” prompted the interviewer.

  “Well, I turned left and right using the stick and peddles I read about in the manual. The aircraft was really stable. Then I went into a descent, and then ascended a few thousand feet. I was enjoying myself. I was banking full circle about thirty minutes later when the radios woke up; ground control somewhere was asking the aircraft what the hell was going on. I returned the aircraft to auto-pilot which returned the aircraft back to its original altitude, speed and track and I returned to hide underneath the colonel’s bunk where he was still sleeping.”

  “You weren’t caught?”

  “Not on that flight,” Jonesy replied. I was, though, on our return flight two days later. I was caught flying the aircraft on the return flight, this time it did have bombs aboard.”

  “Cut!” shouted someone and they all looked at Colonel John Jones in disbelief.

  “And you have been flying ever since?” asked the white-haired interviewer shaking his head.

  “Ever since,” replied Jonesy.

  I think I feel much safer going up with you tomorrow, what do you think Mike?” Scott asked the cameraman.

  “I think we are pretty safe in the hands of Colonel Jones here, the youngest pilot to fly a B52,” Mike laughed.

  “The youngest pilot to fly a dozen different air force aircraft,” smiled Jonesy.

  “Are you going to add this segment?” asked Ryan.

  “The public will love this story, and it could be a great segment entrance,” replied the producer. “A great teenage tale. Thank you, Colonel.”

  A couple of hours later Allen Saunders and Kathy Pringle came in to land in the incoming shuttle. Their cargo had been the second load of plant life in thirty airtight aluminum canisters placed in Astermine Two’s three aft cargo bays. Each canister had a powerful battery-powered ceramic heater inside to keep the plants from freezing in the cold conditions of the mining craft’s rear holds.

  The landing was captured by the film crew and, then it was time for pre-launch checks and lectures for the two potential astronauts to acquaint them with what they needed to know before liftoff early the next morning. Again snippets of real life getting ready for a flight into space were captured by a backup cameraman while the two men were told what to do, and what to expect.

  “You will only be allowed to float inside the cabin for a short period, once Colonel Jones here allows you to unbuckle your safety harnesses. I will keep myself harnessed in the co-pilot seat to help you get back into your rear seats,” lectured Ryan.

  SB-III was well hidden in empty Hangar Five for the visit and had four armed security guards around the hangar. SB-II had just returned and SB-I was ready for launch, full of the third set of thirty plant canisters which had the battery powered heaters keeping them warm in the shuttle’s hold. The “60 Minutes” crew had been told that the returning shuttle was the newest one.

  Hours before dawn and, dressed in full space suits with helmets, the four men with one film camera were helped into the small side door of the shuttle’s cockpit. This was Ryan’s fourth flight and the television crew asked him if he could actually pilot the shuttle. Ryan explained that he had done well over 200 hours on the simulators they had filmed in Hangar One. With five computers aiding the pilot, he could leave the auto-pilot on during descent until 50,000 feet, when manual flight was needed, and he had trained to do that part on the simulator more than any other part of flight. The simulator was far more exciting that driving his Audi at breakneck speed, he told the crew, and he was addicted to the simulator.

  The film crew had actually filmed the final part of the landing with Ryan flying in the simulator, and it would be an exciting part of the segment for computer gamers. Ryan suggested that he was thinking of designing a game simulator for sale. On being asked how much it would cost, he had stated $50,000 to $75,000 per home unit and when the piece was aired ten days later, there were dozens of calls into the CBS offices wanting information on how to purchase these home simulators.

  The doors closed and the shuttle was rolled into the body of the C-5. Through the intercom, Jonesy narrated everything that was going on to the news crew.

  “We will be released at 50,000 feet or higher, depending on the weather out there. Colonel Mathews, who you met yesterday, will try and reach as high as he can. The air temperature is the biggest factor. The colder it is, the
more concentrated the oxygen is up there, which gives the C-5’s four engines more power to burn.”

  A second camera had been fixed onto a corner of the shuttle cockpit and would be turned on or off by Jonesy once the shuttle was released by the Galaxy.

  “When was the first time you flew a Galaxy, Colonel Jones?” asked Scott while the cameraman filmed and taped the conversation as Jonesy tightened up his seat harness. The space was tight and he had a wide-angle lens on the camera. Jonesy looked like he had a fishbowl on his head. So did all four of the men.

  “I think I was 17,” he replied. “It was the first C-5 I had ever seen at the base, an A model. I remember we then lived at Misawa Air Force Base in Japan. It was a beauty and I got in some flight time in the outward bound flight before being caught by the navigator. I hid wearing extra flight clothing I had scavenged from past attempts. The co-pilot noticed me; he told me I looked thinner than the pilot-in-command who he had just seen asleep in the sleeping area. I did get my first hour in before I was found flying the jet without the autopilot. These birds fly themselves they are so good. Mr. Richmond, ready for pre-flight checks?”

  During their first hour in the belly of the aircraft the TV crew felt very comfortable as they listened to Jonesy go over the checks with Ryan. Ryan seemed adept at confirming what Jonesy needed to do or receive.

  “OK, gentlemen,” said Jonesy as they heard Bob Mathews state over the intercom that they were passing through 45,000 feet and it was five minutes to release. “You guys in the back can talk between yourselves. You will hear me and Mr. Richmond at certain times, but we will not hear you until I turn the communication controls from two-way to four-way. Every flight needs concentration. Once we are in space, I will communicate with you every now and again, so will Mr. Richmond, but at certain times I need to concentrate so I will switch myself out of the system. You won’t be able to hear me, or talk to me, understood?”