The Orphan in Near-Space (The Space Orphan Book 2)

by Laer Carroll

  "Sure. Fine with me," came back his answer.

  "Do it."

  Chapter 5 - Space Station

  The next Monday morning Jane and her crew boarded Princess at the El Monte Airport. Their destination was Edwards Air Force Base, a distance of some sixty miles north over a mountain range that separated the LA Basin from the Antelope Valley desert area.

  Klaus was the pilot of record as the most capable and senior of the crew. Nicole was his copilot and actual pilot. She was the least capable pilot of the four and wanted the experience. She deeply felt her lesser state and took every chance to build up her capabilities. Klaus acted as the communications officer, a role he needed practice in.

  Jane pretended to doze but was actually in her cyborg state, monitoring both of them. Overall she was satisfied with their performance.

  From liftoff to setdown the trip took 35 minutes. Only five minutes was spent traveling the sixty miles. Most of the time was spent getting up to and getting down from 20,000 feet under the control of the two air traffic control authorities which Princess traversed.

  At 10:00 am Riku spoke to Jane. She pretended to wake up. Nicole was being waved into the hangar which would be Princess's home during the few weeks Jane and her crew would be in space. The aircraft would not be idle, however. NASA engineers would be running all sorts of tests on one of the few aerial vehicles in the world using all three kinds of flight regimes: floater, VTOL lift jet, and air jet.

  Nicole killed the engines, locked the control panel, and pocketed the control key.

  Everyone got up and exited the craft, carrying small duffle bags with clothing and toiletries which they'd need in the next few days. Greeting them were three NASA engineers led by a tall blond man. He gave his name as Dave Arkham but told them to call him "Tex." After introductions he took the key from Nicole, who said, "Take good care of our baby. You bend her, we'll bend you."

  He laughed, a bit nervously because Nicole had on her deadly serious face. Her tall toned body was well set off by a tailored summer-lightweight camouflage utility uniform. From her it was not a threat to take lightly even in jest.

  Tex handed the key to one of the other engineers and gestured for the five visitors to follow him. Just outside the hangar he led them to a white SUV with red NASA letters on its sides.

  "It's gassed up. Just park it here when you're done and give the key to the reception desk."

  He told them how to get to the Orbital Technologies office just outside the base. They were the company which had won the competition to supply the World Space Station from a base on the West Coast. Riku took the SUV key; he'd be the chauffeur most of the time the next few days.

  "Administrator McIntosh invites you all to have lunch with her at the NASA cafeteria tomorrow--she's the head of the Armstrong Research Center."

  "I've met her. We'll be happy to oblige. What time?"

  "Noon if it fits with your schedule."

  "It does. We'll be back then. Meet her at the cafeteria?"

  He nodded and handed her a print-out with a map of the NASA facility. On the side opposite was a map of Edwards. Jane thanked him and took it though she didn't need it. She'd been here three times before.

  <>

  Orbital Technologies occupied several large buildings built next to Edwards as it used one of the base's runways to launch their spaceplanes. It included three huge hangars for the vehicles.

  Riku parked in a slot in the parking lot near the entrance to the tall main office building. Inside there was a reception desk with a female guard who had them sign in on a tablet computer. Meanwhile she made a phone call. Shortly an older black man with short grey hair wearing a business suit came out to meet them.

  "Captain Kuznetsov. So glad you all could make it. The president sends his regards. I'd like you to meet some people who are very eager to see you. We thought an early lunch would be a good venue."

  "'Never turn down food' is my motto," said Riku.

  They had to traverse several hallways to reach the cafeteria. It was in an attached building, fairly large. At barely 11:00 there were only a few people in it. Jackson Peterson, their host, led them to a room on one side of the big space, only semi-private because one side was open to the main space.

  They all went through a serving line or lines which featured hot and cold items. They got drinks from large glass-fronted refrigerators. Peterson paid for all their food.

  They were just settling into seats when five more people joined them, all dressed informally and a mix of sexes and races. Everyone exchanged greetings, sat down, and began to eat.

  A young half-Caucasian half-Chinese man spoke to Jane.

  "I just read your paper on hyperspace, Captain. Do you really think we can communicate faster than light?"

  "Only theoretically. The technological challenges are daunting."

  An older woman with very short hair dressed in a loose muumuu kind of garment with large flowers upon it spoke up.

  "It does suggest why SETI has not detected any alien communications using radio waves. Advanced civilizations are using hyperspace to communicate. They'd no more use radio than we would use smoke signals."

  Peterson looked on but did not join in the discussion which followed for the next half hour. Finally he spoke when there was a lull.

  "One of the reasons why we're so eager to see you, Captain, is to get some input on the final prototype of our single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane. After lunch I thought we'd head on over to where we're housing it."

  Jane agreed and a half hour later they entered one of the three huge hangars.

  Inside seemed to be devoted exclusively to the SSTO spaceplane. It contained a full-sized prototype, three quarter-sized vehicles, and almost a dozen miniatures stacked in a corner with wings removed. At 148 feet long it was half the length of an American football field or the length of a Boeing Stretch 737 jet liner.

  The body had a pilot's cabin but no windows for passengers. Its wings were sharply raked back with the upturned tips of most jet aircraft and a V-shaped tail. It had big oval air intakes in the front of each wing near the body paired with jet exhausts at the ends of the wings.

  "We thought about lift-jets in the wings but they presented too much of a streamlining problem. Our spaceplanes don't suffer the extreme re-entry forces of the old-style space shuttles but they are stringent nevertheless. Let's take a look inside."

  The entry way was a fold-down door-stairway combination mid-body. It opened into a room the width of the vehicle.

  "This is an airlock at need, though entry and exit should normally be from and to a pressurized volume. This is only one of many safety features, among them that all passengers wear spacesuits. Fully one-fourth of our budget is devoted to safety features and contingency planning."

  Riku said, "Because dead millionaires have plenty of live relatives able to sue."

  Peterson nodded at the quasi-joke.

  The rear half of the plane was taken up with super-batteries, engines, and the tech supporting the engines.

  Forward of the airlock was forty feet of open space that people would have to take to reach the pilot cabin. In the back of the airlock was a low oval doorway.

  "We service the engine room from this only in an emergency. Normally engineers use two outside entrances halfway down the body toward the tail."

  They went from the airlock into the open space.

  "This will either be a cargo hold or a passenger cabin. We added fixtures for the addition of either but didn't bother with actual bins or seats for the prototype. Now let's look at the pilot cabin."

  Upon seeing it Klaus said, "Big." It was unusually roomy for a flying vehicle.

  "Yes. One reason is that the plane will be in free fall a lot of the time. A small cabin would make it too easy to bump something which shouldn't be bumped.

  "This has one happy result. The windows can be a bit large, but not very large because normally the interior of the craft will be pressurized. A lot of that safety bud
get I mentioned early was spent on making this room resistant to blowout. That would be a big problem even though pilots will be wearing spacesuits."

  He pointed out the relative simplicity of the controls. "We've heavily used AI tech to support pilots and the navigator and maybe a cargo manager who would sit either there or there." He pointed to two seats behind the pilots' seats. On the wall to each side of the two navigator/cargo manager seats were numerous screens. There was also a pullout keyboard on each side so those crew members could use them as well as the vear inputs in their helmets.

  "All in all we're pretty happy with the result, but we really want your input, Captain, and that of your crew. Expert outside viewers always pick up problems we don't see. Can you all really spend two whole days helping us out?"

  "Of course," said Jane. "That's why we budgeted those two days. Plus this afternoon. I'd like us to power up the vehicle and begin. First, I want to spend all that time in the pilot's seat alone with the craft while my aides discuss matters with your engineering staff."

  "Alone?"

  "I'll work better that way initially, then it will be a group effort."

  Peterson looked doubtful but was ready to accommodate the whims of an engineer sometimes referred to by teens and even some of the media as Super Engineer. Or the teeth-grating "SuperEnge."

  Thus Jane spent the next two hours in her cyborg state, one organism made up of Jane+Robot+spaceplane. During this time SHE found numerous issues, mostly minor, with the spaceplane.

  At 3:00 she left the vehicle as her organic self but with a long list of issues on her SuperSmart. After a snack break she and her crew (who'd come up with a list of their own) had a session with the spaceplane project engineers that went almost to 6:00. Then Jane called an end to the session, suggested the engineers break off too and come back fresh in the morning.

  The five then left Orbital Tech for their hotel in Lancaster thirty miles to the west, five adjoining rooms in a Marriott hotel.

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  Tuesday morning the five visitors spent much of that time trying on their spacesuits. Orbital Tech was the company which made them as well as spaceplanes. The company kept them stored for up to a year waiting for their owners to use them.

  One problem surfaced: since her suit had been fitted Jane had grown. She'd added two inches of height which brought her up to 5 feet and 5 inches tall. She'd also gone up a bra size and added two inches to the width of her hips.

  Riku joked that she was finally growing up, but secretly Jane knew he was correct. Robot's memory still had big gaps but was improving. From it Jane had discovered that people in whose society she'd been born had been gene-modified for over a thousand years. For them a very long life span meant that physical adulthood occurred a dozen years later than among Terran humans.

  Her changes was not a problem for Orbital. Years of work making spacesuits and the 3D printing revolution meant that they could make a new suit overnight. Wednesday morning Jane had a second fitting and had only a few minor problems with her new suit. Those were put right by that afternoon.

  Thursday night Jane and her crew went to a barbecue put on by the spaceplane pilots. She was famous among them for the improvements to aerospace craft made possible by her telemagnetic inducement theory and tech.

  Plus she knew two of them personally. Rachel McMasters, their hostess for the evening in her house, was one. Clark Simmons was the other. They had been the test pilots for NASA's SSTO spaceplane research vehicle which had served as the inspiration for Orbital's spaceplane.

  Lounging around the pool Jane caught up with Rachel about what had been happening since Jane last saw her three years ago. The pilot was a new mother as of nearly two years past.

  "How do you manage the home/career lifestyle?"

  "With difficulty, of course. But times have changed. My husband helps a lot with Rose, thinks nothing of it. Men--well, some men--grow up nowadays expecting to be more of a dad than when I grew up.

  "Plus, women at Edwards and NASA and Orbital have this little club where we help each other out. It was a big reason why Randy and I decided to have a child: we knew we'd not be alone."

  Later on Jane cornered Clark and, after catching up, asked him when he was going to tie the knot. He reacted with mock horror but cast a thoughtful look at a little knot of people on the other side of the pool. They included a tall redhead with very bright very curly hair.

  "Oh, so it's like that, is it, Clarky boy?"

  He put on an innocent look.

  "I have no clue what you're going on about. Maybe you should not drink so much at parties, JANEY GIRL."

  <>

  Friday morning the team went through much the same routine for travel to the World Space Station as they would have if taking a long-distance flight to some other part of the planet. One major difference was that everyone wore spacesuits. Jane, her crew, and a few others on official NASA or Space Force business wore suits able to work outside the space station. The very rich tourists wore attractive luxury suits which could be used outside the station but only for light activities like vacuum sports or travel to one of the several free-floating factories near the station.

  As soon as everyone was settled in their seats Jane leaned back, closed her eyes, and became JANE: Jane+Robot+Voyager. Voyager was the combination of Liftcraft 7, a huge aerospace plane which was mostly a flying wing, and Spaceplane 11, the spaceship latched onto the bottom of Liftcraft 7. It took off from Edwards' main runway heading in the southwesterly direction toward the seventy-mile distant Pacific Ocean.

  The spaceplane curved further south to make a U-turn heading toward Phoenix. It climbed quickly to 20,000 feet. Near the California border with Arizona the launch craft switched on its space jet engines. Air pressure at that height was half that of ground level so they provided extra thrust to the air jet engines.

  They passed over El Paso and entered Texas airspace at 40,000 feet, still accelerating. Air pressure was 20% of sea level and the space jets were providing most of the thrust. They were traveling over 11,000 miles per hour, about two thirds of the speed needed to go into orbit.

  The second stage Spacecraft 11 powered on its space jet engines and dropped loose from the launch craft, which began to make a huge curve to return to California. The second stage began to angle more southeasterly as it climbed at a sharper upward angle to match the World Space Station. It was in an equatorial orbit at four hundred and something miles above Earth's surface.

  At a little over two hours from liftoff the second stage matched velocities with the space station. By now the acceleration was slight enough that the passenger cabin was effectively in zero gravity.

  The spaceship began to spin slowly around its long axis so that it would match the orientation of the station when it docked. The station was spinning to provide artificial gravity to its habitation modules. A few of the passengers showed symptoms of dizziness, controlled by Dramamine or something similar in a few cases. No one needed a barf bag, for which Riku expressed thanks which only his friends heard.

  To distract passengers from their symptoms the stewards sent outside views of the space station to the video screens mounted on the seatbacks in front of each passenger's seat.

  JANE was already seeing the station through 11's video and radar senses but opened HER eyes and leaned forward, pretending the same interest that HER crew and the other passengers showed at the sight.

  The World Space Station was a huge white box with a black rectangle in the center where doors had opened to let in the space vehicle. Yellow lights came on within the huge hangar. To left and right of the center section long columns held two "cans" which were the living and most of the work spaces of the station.

  The rotation of the station provided one-sixth the gravity of Earth to those in the cans. This matched the gravity of the Moon and helped accustom travelers to the weight they'd have when they arrived at the lunar surface. More importantly the artificial gravity kept the general muscles, heart muscles, an
d other organs of those in the station from weakening enough that they'd be temporary invalids when they returned to Earth.

  The mouth of the hangar grew large until 11 entered it and docked with an almost imperceptible jolt. Most of the passengers, experienced in travel to the WSS, waited for the lengthy delay for the station to extend an exit tunnel to the ship and lock onto it. Finally the seal was complete and there was a slight hiss as the spaceship's cabin matched the air pressure of the station.

  JANE lapsed into Jane and looked around as the other passengers got up at the stewards' prompts. She and her crew were forward near the cockpit and had to wait for the other passengers to open a lane toward the back and the exit of the plane.

  "OK. Up, but take it slow. We're in zero gravity here in case you've forgot. Please don't blunder into any of the nice people." She avoided mentioning the even more important "don't puke on the nice people" as that might set off said puking.

  Her four companions got out of their seats and began to float toward the back of the spaceplane in reasonable order. Jane followed them, keeping a careful eye upon them.

  One of the two stewards, a woman, said, "Thanks for traveling with us, Captain Kuznetsov."

  "My pleasure--Cynthia," Jane said, eyeing the name plate on the woman's uniform spacesuit. "Give my compliments to the cockpit crew for a nice boring flight."

  She smiled and the woman smiled back.

  Outside in the station corridor floated/stood an older woman in station uniform. She greeted Jane.

  "Captain Kuznetsov. Welcome to the World Space Station. I'm here to help you and your friends get settled in."

  "Thank you."

  "Your luggage is being forwarded to your rooms. If you'll follow me."

  She turned and launched herself further into the station using handholds attached to the walls. Her use was totally unnecessary to experienced station inhabitants but served to educate these new arrivals to travel in a weightless environment.

  Jane's crew followed the woman's example but soon were just using every several handhold. This was as Jane expected; they were all smart people in excellent physical condition. Soon they'd be ready to do zero-gravity acrobatics but would wait for Jane's OK.