Rocket! An Ell Donsaii story 4

by Laurence Dahners

  Vivian said, “You should look at your news feeds, the Chinese supply rocket has arrived at the Space Station but they’re having problems with the hookup…”

  ***

  Emil Taussan turned white faced to the eager astronauts behind him. “The airlock won’t pressurize!”

  Dave Slager pulled himself forward to look at the display. “How can that be?! They flew the dummy airlock over to China from Houston. They tested it there and it mated just fine!”

  Emil looked back at the pale faces, “I don’t know. I think I must do a spacewalk to look at the connection and see if it can be repaired.”

  “No!” Jim Sasson said, “You know we vent a little air with each EVA. We can’t afford to lose any air now!”

  “James,” Emil said quietly, “we can’t afford a failed connection to the supply capsule either. If we can’t get at those supplies we’ll be in serious trouble.” He didn’t have to say, “we’ll be dead,” they all knew that already.

  Sasson swallowed spastically. Then nodded his head jerkily. “First let’s back it off and try to mate it again.”

  Emil nodded, “OK, that’s reasonable. You try it, I will start the oxygen pre-breathe procedure so that I can EVA.”

  ***

  Washington D.C.—NASA confirmed today that the Chinese supply mission had failed to make an airtight connection with the International Space Station. Emil Taussan, one of the astronauts, made an EVA to examine the problem and says that it appears that the metal used in the Chinese adaptor module has contracted differently in the cold of space than the alloys used by NASA. The misfit, though small, has prevented an airtight seal from being achieved. For a while there was hope that Dr. Taussan would be able to remove items from the Chinese capsule and move them to the Station airlock but safety interlocks in the Chinese capsule prevent it from being opened into a vacuum. Taussan has moved the adaptor into the sunlight in hopes it will heat enough to correct the misfit…

  Sheila said, “Mr. Miller we need four machinists today!”

  “Sweetheart, I heard you the first time. You just can’t have me or any of my people today. We have commitments to other customers. I can free you up some people in about two weeks. Even when we’re available, I would strongly suggest you just contract us to make the parts you need and let us make them here on the machines we’re familiar with.”

  Sheila had walked out to the research floor where everyone was desperately working on creating their rocket, “Just a minute Mr. Miller.” She turned to Ell, “I can’t get anyone to send us any machinists.”

  Without looking up Ell said, “Offer them $200 per hour, but they need to be here within the hour.”

  Wide eyed, Sheila said, “Mr. Miller, I’ve been authorized to pay $200 per hour.”

  A long period of silence greeted her, then Miller said, “Sorry, honey I don’t believe that.”

  “I’ve just transferred $20,000 to your public account.”

  A pause while Miller checked the account then, sounding surprised, “OK, we’ll be there tomorrow morning at 9AM.”

  “You’ll be here within the hour or the deal’s off.”

  ***

  Jim Sasson hung in front of the comm station. Normally, this was where he had audio video chats with his wife and daughter. With the specter of his death hanging over his shoulder he didn’t think he could hold himself together for a realtime conversation with them. He was, however, hoping to record something brave for them to watch after he was dead. Slager was expecting reduced oxygen concentrations in the Station’s air to begin in the next ten to twenty hours. Low oxygen could cause blackouts and drunken behavior so Sasson wanted to get the recording done before that happened. Idly he wondered why they didn’t just do themselves in before they ran out of air. There was no longer any chance of rescue. He used a tissue to dab gently at the tears which had welled up and threatened to float away, then reached out to switch on the recorder.

  Chapter Seven

  Cape Canaveral—People have begun to gather in a vigil for the astronauts on the Space Station. NASA has not provided estimates of how much longer the astronauts can last without resupply but several “unofficial” sources predict that they have days at best. NASA says it is exploring “all avenues” for sending up another supply mission and for extending survival without resupply. However, India, China, Japan, Russia and the European Space Agency have all been queried. All have said that they do not have a launch vehicle that can be ready to go within…

  Sheila said, “Ms. Donsaii, I have a Robert Braun here who says he’s the rocketry expert you hired?”

  “Great!” Ell straightened and turned.

  Sheila grinned as she watched Braun’s eyes widen when he came face to face with Ell for the first time. She found it amusing to watch the new hires as they realized just how young and attractive their new boss was.

  Donsaii said, “Come this way and look at the rocket we have on the test stand. We’re desperate to launch but would really appreciate your advice! We’re running oxygen-hydrogen in our current engine...”

  She took him to a window where a rocket nozzle could be seen and heard through the heavy glass. Braun estimated it about an inch and a half in diameter and must be mixing propellants in a terrible ratio because it was generating a huge cloud of exhaust rather than the clear flame oxy-hydro should produce. Braun frowned. The engine was burning steadily but didn’t seem to be hooked up to any tanks or supply hoses. He looked again, trying to see where the tubing was that supplied it. As near as he could tell just the motor was bolted to the test frame. Some of those bolts must be cannulated to run the fuel through, he thought. “Uh, your mix must be off, oxy-hydro shouldn’t be making all that smoke.”

  “Oh! That’s steam. We’re cooling the nozzle with water.”

  “Well, that won’t work for a real rocket, you can’t possibly carry enough water!”

  Braun listened goggle eyed as Ell explained the ports. He interrupted several times to tell her that this or that wasn’t possible. “Mr. Braun,” she said exasperatedly, “Look at the set up! There are no tanks hooked up to it, yet you see the motor burning. Trust me on the port stuff. Assume that that part of this stuff works. Please stop telling me that something you can see with your own eyes is ‘impossible.’ Please?!”

  Braun swallowed and nodded somewhat spastically.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be short with you, but the lives of the people on the Space Station may depend on your coming to grips with this stuff now, not later.”

  He nodded again and raised his eyebrows, “OK, I’ll suspend my disbelief and do my particular job. I’ll just assume all this other stuff actually works.”

  Ell turned back to the window, “So this particular motor has been burning for,” she looked up at her HUD, “thirty minutes now, and we’re planning to use it or one like it on our mission but I’m uncomfortable with the fact that we can’t see how the nozzle is heating behind all that steam.”

  “Can’t you cut off the steam… and the fuel itself, just long enough to get an infrared picture?”

  “Great idea! Allan” Then to her AI she said, “Allan, please shut off the coolant and then the motor.”

  The rocket snapped off, the cloud of steam dissipated and a screen lit with an infrared image of the nozzle which glowed warmly but evenly. In regular light it was red, not white.

  Braun raised his eyebrows and said, “That doesn’t look bad at all. But may I make a suggestion?”

  “Sure! That’s what you’re here for. As long as it isn’t another lecture about how the ports won’t work.” She cocked an eyebrow at him and grinned.

  “No, no, I’m giving up on that,” he grinned back. “But I’d like to suggest that using liquid hydrogen has a lot of problems that you could avoid. First of all, it’s so cold that sooner or later you’re going to have a problem with it freezing some part so that it breaks or plugs up. Second, the molecules are so small that they leak out of anything and you’ll have a fi
re. Third, as you’ve already seen, it burns very hot and melts nozzles. Fourth, it’s expensive and it’s dangerous to store.

  “If your ports work the way you say they do, the upside of hydrogen being light and easy to launch provides little benefit. I think you’d be much better off burning RP-1 or kerosene.”

  “RP-1?”

  “Rocket propellant number one. It’s just purified kerosene. You could still cool with your water shroud, but you wouldn’t have as many issues with overheating in the first place.”

  “OK, Allan resume the burn.” The rocket engine fired back up, “Come on,” she said to Braun, “Lets order some kerosene, then I want to review my flight plan with you.”

  “You’ve made a flight plan? To orbit?”

  “Well, my AI and I have. I fed him the numbers and he crunched them. My AI’s running on a supercomputer so calculating stuff like orbital mechanics is pretty easy for him. We want to launch to the Space Station in the next few hours. If it fails we want to have time for some ‘do overs’ before the Station runs out of air.”

  ***

  Everyone from D5R gathered outside the building to watch the launch. Ell had paid a premium to get some 50 gallon barrels of kerosene delivered immediately. They’d moved the input port for the test stand rocket into the kerosene and run the test nozzle for a while. It didn’t have the same thrust that it did with liquid hydrogen but it still had plenty. So they moved the input port for the launch rocket into the kerosene as well. The gate guard had been told to stop all traffic. Their rocket, which only measured 20 inches long by 2 inches in diameter was clamped to a launching rail that one of the new machinists had built and the engine was being given one last test before launch. Even though it was about a hundred yards away on the far side of the parking lot, almost everyone had their fingers in their ears. Ell’s military grade AI earpieces kept the sound to a comfortable level for her but she wished she’d thought to purchase earplugs for everyone else.

  Allan spoke in their ears, “Sensors on the launch stand report that thrust is nominal for LOX-kerosene at 100% and at 80 %.”

  “Good, let’s test the attitude thrusters.” These simply consisted of ports behind nozzles arranged radially at the front and back of the rocket body. The ports were connected to a pipe coming out of the top of the big liquid oxygen tank out back behind the research facility. Energizing the port behind a nozzle blasted the high-pressure oxygen from the tank out through the nozzle, providing thrust to push the nose or stern around depending on which nozzles were energized. Paired counter jets controlled axial rotation.

  Ell could see puffs of mist where the cold oxygen jetted out of the rocket here and there. A moment later Allan said, “All attitude thrusters are generating nominal thrust.”

  “Allan, are we still in a reasonable launch window to the station?”

  “Yes.”

  “No aircraft overhead?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK, folks,” Ell called out to the group, “Here we go!” more quietly to her AI she said, “Proceed with... Wait!” She turned to the group, “We need a countdown! Who wants to do the honors?”

  Ben Stavos shouted, “All together now! Ten, nine, eight…” everyone joined in by the time he got to the last six numbers, “three, two, one, blastoff!”

  The launch was anticlimactic. Everyone was used to billowing smoke and slow liftoffs from years of watching launches televised from Canaveral. Even those who should have known better were surprised by the pop of ignition and screech as the rocket shot out of sight into the sky. Some of those watching feared it had simply exploded after the “pop” and disappearing act they had witnessed.

  Seeing her team looking worried Ell said, “No worries team, launch was successful! You can see a faint steam trail going up if you look hard. Let’s go back inside where we can watch the take from the cameras on the rocket.”

  An exited babble greeted this announcement and everyone shuffled back inside. Allan put the feeds from the cameras onto several of the big screens scattered around the main research room. There were cameras on four sides of the rocket and one in the nose transmitting back to D5R over a PGR chip. The camera in the front showed a red glow. As they watched, the upper right part of the screen turned bright red, the image distorted and shifted, then with a snap all of the images disappeared. A moan came from many throats at once. Ben could be heard cursing in the back of the room.

  Ell’s heart sank. After a moment to work the frog out of her throat she said, “Allan, what happened?”

  “The PGR chip became un-entangled and telemetry was lost.”

  Ell relayed this to the room, “What do you guys think went wrong?”

  Braun said, “It looked like the optics of the forward camera melted in the heat of atmospheric passage. What do you have protecting them?

  “Of course!” Roger said, “The PGR chip and communication board is right behind the front camera. If we had a melt through there, it would have burned through the electronics right away.”

  Brian said, “The camera’s behind high temp glass, but the seal around that glass might not be able to take the heat.”

  Ell closed her eyes, it sounded right to her. “OK, that sounds like the most likely source of failure to me. Anyone have a good solution?”

  “We could travel up through the atmosphere more slowly?”

  “That might work but would take a very long burn on the rocket nozzle. Even though it wouldn’t even be at 80% the nozzles might not take it.”

  Fred said, “Cover the entire nose with high temp glass?”

  Brian shook his head, “We don’t have equipment to shape that kind of glass. We’d have to get it from an outside supplier and that’d be too slow for the Station.”

  “Can’t we cover the nose with a tungsten alloy cap until the rocket gets up through the atmosphere?” Roger asked.

  Fred said, “But wouldn’t we lose orientation?”

  Viv said, “We’re already using GPS to determine location. We can use GPS for orientation too, at least until we’re out of the atmosphere.”

  Ell frowned, “OK, we’ll have to put a forward facing thruster that we can use to blow the cap off the end of the rocket once we’re up there. Anyone see a problem with that plan?”

  “What if the heat makes the cap stick so it won’t blow off?”

  “I think the heat will make it expand so it will be looser but we’d better keep making plenty of rockets. OK team! Let’s get on with finishing rocket number two with a cap and a forward thruster. Anyone not busy on number two, keep working on numbers three and four. Number three we could send up slow and see if the nozzle will last through a slow launch and the camera tolerate the lower velocity. Set number four up for a ‘cap’ in case that looks like it would work but we need to do something different.”

  Two hours later some of the group gathered outside to launch the second rocket. Unfortunately, once the rocket started its test Allan said, “The thrust vector is not coaxial to the rocket.”

  Ell asked hopefully, “Is the vector misalignment small enough to compensate with the nose thrusters?”

  “No.”

  “Damn! Shut it down. The rocket nozzle’s misaligned or something folks. Let’s trouble shoot it.” Inside Ell felt a little frantic at the thought that they seemed to be flailing around when the lives of the people on the Space Station could depend on their ability to launch a functional rocket. Nonetheless, she did her best to project calm assurance to her team, as if the minutes weren’t ticking away.

  When they got the rocket back inside it turned out that the nozzle was aligned with the body of the rocket. However, it was slightly off center inside the “water shroud.” The steam blasting out of the water shroud as the water absorbed the heat of the rocket nozzle was asymmetric enough to produce the misaligned vector.

  “OK, let’s get the rocket engine from number 5 and mount it on number 2.”

  The switch only took thirty minutes and they mounted the rocket o
n the rail again. This time Allan reported thrusts were nominal and aligned. “Are we in a satisfactory launch window to the station?”

  “Yes, but it is closing.”

  Ell closed her eyes, “Is the airspace above us free of craft?”

  “No.”

  Ell sighed and her shoulders drooped.

  Braun said, “Wait, ask if we can still launch safely. Remember that you told your AI that you wanted the airspace ‘completely clear’ but it may be that the aircraft is actually pretty far out of our path.”

  Ell checked and Allan confirmed that the aircraft in question was actually near the periphery of their immediate airspace and should be safe.

  Ell had Allan launch without a countdown this time. They turned to go back inside.

  When they got back inside the views from the camera were already black! Depressed, Ell said, “Allan, play back the minute up to failure please.”

  A video image popped up showing the familiar red glow. In fact it looked exactly like the first failure!? “Allan, is this feed from the first or second launch?”

  “First launch.”

  “Show the failure from the second launch please.”

  “The second launch has not failed.”

  Ell’s eyes widened and then she slapped her forehead. Of course! The cameras are black because they’re covered by the cap! “Are we high enough to remove the cap yet or is there still significant atmosphere?”

  “The rocket is at 125 kilometers and thus above significant atmospheric drag.”

  “OK, pause thrust.”

  “Thrust paused.”

  “Fire forward thruster to remove the cap.”

  “Forward thruster firing.”

  They all eagerly watched the screens but they remained black.

  In an agonized tone Ell said, “Is the forward thruster on full?”

  “Yes.”

  She scrunched her eyes shut… “Fire the forward attitude thrusters in an alternating pattern, 1,3,2,4, each one for 50 microseconds and repeat the cycle times 3 keeping the forward thruster on full.”