Starfire

by Dale Brown

  “I’m fine, Jessica,” the passenger repeated. His eyes were as wide as a young child’s on Christmas morning. “My God, this feels incredible—and incredibly weird at the same time.”

  “You’re doing fine, sir. Now, what I’m going to do is step aside and let you maneuver yourself toward the cockpit. I could try to guide you into your seat, but if I’m not perfectly aligned and not applying the right amount and direction of force, I’ll spin you out of control, so it’s better if you can do it. Again, just think about moving. No hurry.”

  Her suggestions worked. The passenger completely relaxed his body and faced the hatch connecting the cockpit with the passenger cabin, and barely touching anything, he started to drift toward the hatch, with Boomer watching his slow progress over his right shoulder, a pleased smile visible though the visor of his oxygen helmet. In no time, the passenger had floated right up to the cockpit hatch.

  “You’re a natural at this, sir,” Boomer said. “Now Gonzo will unhook your umbilical cord from the passenger seat and hand it up to me, and I’ll plug it into the mission commander’s seat receptacle. You need to gently hold on to the hatch while we get you hooked back on. Again, don’t kick or push anything—gentle touches.” The passenger heard and felt the tiny puffs of conditioned air in his partial-pressure suit shut off, and soon the umbilical hose appeared. Boomer reached across the cockpit and plugged it in. “Hear me okay, sir? Feel the air-conditioning okay?”

  “Yes and yes.”

  “Good. Getting into the seat is the tricky part, because it’s a kinda tight fit. The technique is to slowly, carefully, bend at the waist and lift your thighs toward your chest, like you’re doing a stomach crunch. Gonzo and I will maneuver you over the center console and into your seat. Don’t try to help us. Okay, go ahead.” The passenger did exactly as he was told, curling his body slightly, and with only a few unexpected bumps and swerves he was over the very wide center console and into the seat, and Faulkner fastened his lap and shoulder straps for him.

  “Are you sure we didn’t pass each other in the hallways at NASA astronaut training in Houston, sir?” Boomer asked, his smile visible through his oxygen helmet’s visor. “I know veteran astronauts who get all hot, sweaty, and grumpy doing what you just did. Very good. Here’s your reward for all that work.” And he motioned outside the cockpit . . .

  . . . and for the first time, the passenger saw it: planet Earth spread out before him. Even through the relatively narrow cockpit windows, it was still marvelous to behold. “It’s . . . it’s incredible . . . beautiful . . . my God,” he breathed. “I’ve seen all the photos of Earth taken from space, but they just don’t compare with seeing it myself. It’s magnificent!”

  “Worth all the hoops you had to jump through to get up here, sir?” Gonzo asked.

  “I’d do it a hundred times over just to get the chance,” the passenger said. “It’s extraordinary! Damn, I’m running out of adjectives!”

  “Then this is a good time to get back to work,” Boomer said, “because things will be getting a little busy here. Take a look.”

  The passenger looked . . . and saw their destination in astonishing splendor. It was almost thirty years old, mostly built of 1970s technology, and even to an untrained eye it was starting to show signs of age despite minor but fairly consistent upgrading, but it still looked amazing.

  “Armstrong Space Station, named after the late Neil Armstrong, of course, the first man to step foot on the surface of the moon, but everyone who’s anyone calls it Silver Tower,” Boomer said. “It started out as a semiclassified Air Force program, combining and improving on the Skylab space-station project and President Ronald Reagan’s Space Station Freedom project. Freedom eventually became the American contribution to the International Space Station, and Skylab was abandoned and allowed to reenter and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, but the military-funded space-station program kept going in relative secrecy—as secret as you can keep a three-billion-dollar monstrosity like this that orbits the earth. It’s basically four Skylabs connected together and attached to a central truss, with enlarged solar arrays and improved docking, sensors, and maneuvering systems, tailored more to military applications than to scientific research.”

  “It looks fragile—kinda spindly, like those modules will fall off any second.”

  “It’s as strong as it needs to be up here in free fall,” Boomer said. “It’s certainly not as sturdy as a building that size on Earth, but then again, it doesn’t need to be. All of the modules have small computer-controlled thrusters that move all the pieces together, because station revolves around its axis to keep antennas pointed toward Earth.”

  “The silver coating is really supposed to protect against ground-based lasers?” the passenger asked. “Has it ever been hit by a laser? I’ve heard Russia hits it with a laser every chance they get.”

  “It gets hit all the time, and not just from Russia,” Boomer said. “So far it doesn’t seem to have done any damage; the Russians claim they are just using lasers to monitor station’s orbit. Turns out the silver material—aluminized spray-on polyimide—is good protection against micrometeorites, solar wind, and cosmic particles as well as lasers, and it’s a good insulator. But the best part for me is being able to see station from Earth when the sun hits it just right—it’s the brightest object in the sky except for the sun and moon, and can sometimes be seen in daytime, and can sometimes even produce shadows at night.”

  “Why do you call it ‘station’ instead of ‘the station’?” the passenger asked. “I’ve heard a lot of you guys say it that way.”

  Boomer shrugged against his seat harness. “I don’t know—someone started saying it that way in the first months of Skylab, and it stuck,” he said. “I know most of us think of it as more than just a collection of modules or even as a workplace—it’s more like an important or favorite destination. It’s like I might say, ‘I’m going to Tahoe.’ ‘I’m going to station’ or ‘I’m going to Armstrong’ just sounds . . . right.”

  As they got closer to the station, the passenger motioned toward the station. “What are those round things on each of the modules?” he asked.

  “Lifeboats,” Boomer replied. “Simple aluminum spheres that can be sealed up and jettisoned away from station in case of an accident. Each holds five persons and has enough air and water to last about a week. They can’t reenter the atmosphere, but they’re designed to fit inside the cargo bay of any of the spaceplanes, or they can be towed to the International Space Station and the survivors transferred. Every module has one; the Galaxy module, which is the combination galley, exercise room, entertainment room, and medical clinic, has two lifeboats.”

  He pointed to the lowermost center module, smaller than the others and attached to the “bottom” of the lower center module, pointing Earthward. “So that’s Vice President Page’s creation, eh?”

  “That’s it, sir: the XSL-5 ‘Skybolt,’ ” Boomer said. “A free-electron laser with a klystron, or electron amplifier, powered by a magnetohydrodynamic generator.”

  “A what?”

  “Power for station is generated mostly by solar cells or by hydrogen fuel cells,” Boomer explained, “neither of which produces enough power for a multimegawatt-class laser. A nuclear reactor on Earth uses the heat from the fission reaction to produce steam to turn a turbine generator, which is not doable on a space station because the turbine would act like a gyroscope and upset station’s steering and alignment systems—even the flywheels on our exercise bikes do that. The MHD is like a turbine-style power generator, but instead of spinning magnets producing an electron flow, the MHD uses plasma spinning within a magnetic field. The power generated by the MHD is massive, and the MHD generator has no moving or spinning parts that can affect station’s orbit.”

  “But the catch is . . . ?”

  “Creating plasma requires heating ion-producing substances to high temperatures, far past the steam state,” Boomer said. “In space, there’s only one way
to produce that level of heat, and that’s with a small nuclear reactor. Naturally, a lot of people are wary of nuclear anything, and that goes double if it’s flying overhead.”

  “But nuclear reactors have been orbiting Earth for decades, right?”

  “The MHD generator was America’s first nuclear reactor in space in twenty years, and is by far much more powerful than anything else up here,” Boomer replied. “But the Soviets had launched almost three dozen satellites that used small nuclear reactors to generate electricity using thermocouples until the USSR went broke. They never squawked about their nuclear reactors, but when the USA launched one MHD generator after the USSR canceled their program, they go berserk. Typical. And they’re still squawking, even though we haven’t fired Skybolt in aeons.”

  The passenger studied the Skybolt module for a moment, then remarked, “Ann Page designed all that.”

  “Yes, sir,” Boomer said. “She was just a young female whippersnapper engineer and physicist when she produced the plans for Skybolt. No one took her seriously. But President Reagan wanted a ‘Star Wars’ missile defense shield, and he had scared up the money, and Washington was frantically looking for programs to start up so they could spend all that money before it went to some other program. Dr. Page’s plans got into the right hands at the right time; she got the money, and they built Skybolt and stuck it on Armstrong in record time. Skybolt was Dr. Page’s baby. She even talked her way into attending partial astronaut training so she could go up in the shuttle to supervise installation. They say she lost thirty pounds of ‘executive spread’ in order to be chosen for astronaut training, and she never put it back on. When her baby said its first words, it shook the world.”

  “And that was almost thirty years ago. Amazing.”

  “It’s still state of the art, but if we had the funds, we could probably improve it considerably in efficiency and accuracy.”

  “But we could reactivate Skybolt now, couldn’t we?” the passenger asked. “Improve it, modernize it, yes, but load it up with fuel and fire it now, or in fairly short order?”

  Boomer turned and regarded his passenger for a moment with some surprise. “You’re serious about all this, aren’t you, sir?” he finally asked.

  “You bet I am, Dr. Noble,” the passenger replied. “You bet I am.”

  A few minutes later they had moved within a few hundred yards of Armstrong Space Station. Boomer noted the passenger’s eyes growing bigger and bigger as they closed in. “Kinda feels like you’re in a tiny rowboat paddling up beside an aircraft carrier, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s exactly what it feels like, Boomer.”

  Boomer unstowed a wireless device that actually did resemble a familiar console game controller and positioned it in front of the passenger. “Ready to do more than be a passenger, sir?” he asked.

  “You’re serious? You want me to fly this thing up to the space station?”

  “We could let it drive in automatically, and the computers do a fine job, but where’s the fun in that?” He repositioned the controller over in front the passenger. “I have a feeling you’ll do fine.”

  He entered commands into a keyboard on the center console, and a target appeared on the windscreen in front of the passenger. “The right control moves the spaceplane forward, backward, and side to side—we don’t bank like an aircraft, but just move laterally,” Boomer went on. “The left control is a little different: twisting the knob yaws the spacecraft around its center, so you can point the nose in a different direction than the spaceplane’s direction of travel; and you can adjust the spaceplane’s vertical position by pulling up on the knob to go upward vertically, or push down to move downward. Manipulating the controls activates thrusters—tiny rocket engines—positioned all around the spaceplane. Normally we would pay close attention to how much fuel we use for the thrusters to do a docking—another reason why the powers that be prefer we use the computer for docking, since it’s generally better and more fuel-efficient at docking than us mere mortals—but for this trip we loaded plenty of extra fuel on station so we can top the tanks before we leave and everything is cool.

  “So, sir, your task is to manipulate the controls to keep the aiming reticle you see before you centered on the docking target on station, which is that big ‘zero’ you see on the docking module. As you close in, director lights will flash and you’ll see more hints on what to do. Big mention here: Remember that station rotates along its long axis once every ninety minutes, so the antennas and windows are always pointed toward Earth as it orbits, but as long as you follow the director signals it will compensate for that. Remember also that not only do you need to spear the target, but you need to align the spaceplane as directed by the director lights, and you also need to control your forward speed so you don’t ram the space station and break Midnight, which would be bad for all involved.”

  “I’ll try not to do that,” the passenger said weakly.

  “Thank you, sir. As Jessica instructed you when moving yourself around in zero-G, gross movements are bad, and slight movements and corrections are good. We have found that thinking about a movement is usually enough to activate a measured, proper minor-muscle response. You seemed to have that concept well in hand when getting into your seat this morning, so I have full confidence that you will be able to do the same when maneuvering our spaceplane for docking.” The passenger responded with a very noticeable nervous swallow.

  “Your director indicators are telling you that you are closing at twelve inches per second, you are thirty yards low, ten yards right, range one hundred thirty-three yards, and sixteen degrees left of course for alignment,” Boomer went on. “When we get within fifty yards we’ll gradually decrease the closure rate so at five yards we’ll be less than three inches per second. You need to get within less than one degree in yaw and dead-on in heading and altitude and less than one inch per second to plug the bull’s-eye, or we’ll abort the approach and try again.”

  “Want to warn the station, Boomer?” Faulkner asked on intercom. She was now seated on the jumpseat between Boomer and the passenger.

  “I think we’ll be fine, Gonzo,” Boomer replied.

  Boomer could see the passenger swallow nervously, even through his space suit and helmet. “Maybe we’d better not . . .” he said.

  “I think you’ll do fine, sir,” Boomer repeated. “You have the touch.”

  Boomer noticed the passenger straightening his body and gripping the controller even firmer than before, and he put a hand on his left arm. “Wait, sir,” he said. “Wait. Just wait. Take a deep breath, then exhale slowly. Seriously. Take a deep breath, sir.” Boomer waited until he could hear the passenger take a deep breath then let it out. “Very good. The key to this maneuver is visualization. Visualize the approach before you even touch the controls. Visualize what the controls will do when you touch and activate them. Can you visualize what each control and input will do? If you can’t, don’t activate it. Positively determine long before you make a move that what you are about to contemplate doing is what you really want to do. Map it out in your mind before you hit any switch. Never be surprised by what happens when you press a switch. Expect that whatever happens when you press a switch is exactly what you intended to do; and if it’s not, identify immediately why it didn’t happen the way you wanted it, and fix it. But don’t overreact. All reactions and counterreactions should be deliberate, measured, and intentional. You should know why you are moving a thruster, not just where and how much. Let’s do it, sir.”

  The passenger responded . . . by doing exactly nothing, which was in Boomer’s opinion the best thing to do. The Midnight was already coasting to a nearly perfect rendezvous, and the passenger was very much aware that the technology that had gotten him this far was probably far better than were his own meager powers to complete, so he wisely decided to let the automated maneuver complete its evolution, study what extra needed to be done—if anything—and then complete it, if he could.

  Armstr
ong Space Station loomed closer and closer to the spaceplane Midnight, filling the tiny, narrow windscreen with its impressive bulk and obliterating all other visual inputs . . . except the important ones, which were the computer-generated images on the multifunction display in front of both the aircraft commander and passenger. The proper alignment with the dock on the space station was apparent—it was which controls to touch and adjust to correct the spaceplane’s movements that required some consideration.

  “I can’t start the spaceplane’s lateral motion,” the passenger mumbled, the frustration evident in his voice. “I keep on hitting the switch, but nothing happens.”

  “The correction you applied is in there—you just need to let it happen, sir,” Boomer said. His voice began to sound less military and more like a shaman or spiritual guide. “Nice, easy, gentle, smooth inputs. Remember: Even one little twitch of your thumb on the vernier controls generates hundreds of pounds of rocket thrust that alters the orbit of a spacecraft weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds, traveling at over twenty-five times the speed of sound hundreds of miles above Earth. Visualize the movement of the spacecraft, and visualize the corrective actions necessary to correct the flight path, then apply the necessary control inputs. Reacting without thinking is evil. Take command.”

  The passenger took his hands off the controls, letting the controller float before him on its tether, and he closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. When he opened them, he found that all of the inputs he had entered were indeed starting to register. “How about that?” he murmured. “I’m not a complete moron.”

  “You’re doing great, sir,” Boomer said. “Remember there’s no atmosphere or roadway to create friction, and gravity would take several dozen orbits to take effect, so whatever corrections you put in have to be taken out. These readouts here tell you how much correction you applied and in what direction, which is how much you need to take out. Also remember how long it took for your inputs to apply, so that will give you an accurate gauge about when to take them out.”