The gratification of wealth is not found in the mere possession or in lavish expenditure, but in its wise application.
-- Miguel de Cervantes
"Gaze at the power of money, Ger." Leora Thane watched with smug satisfaction as Aurora rolled out of the warehouse upright on its landing gear, which had been equipped with a caster-like arrangement of ballooning aircraft tires. Leora wore her finest evening gown of gold and bronze and copper lamé, despite the intense desert heat. She looked like a millionairess -- which she was no longer, after investing so heavily in Freespace -- witnessing the delivery of her newest limousine.
"All my life," she said, "I've wanted to be part of something big. I didn't know how to create anything, but I knew how to give people a good time. I started out delivering balloon bouquets, did you know that? I must have racked up a hundred thousand miles schlepping all over Manhattan with those helium-filled monstrosities, wedging into elevators, getting stuck in revolving doors. Then I organized parties. Murder-mystery weekends, Regency High Teas, romantic retreats. That gave me the bug, you know? So many rich people who for whatever reason wanted to forget their own lives and be somewhere else for a while. So much money itching to be spent. I became a travel agent. Spent years booking flights, arranging cruises, and couriering tickets out to businessmen running late."
Cooper looked at Aurora in the light of its namesake, dawn, and nodded. The framework above the sliding hangar doors had been removed to allow Aurora a dignified rollout. The spacecraft consisted of a blunt cone thirty feet in diameter at its widest point -- the ablative reentry shield -- and fifty feet high, that looked like an old Apollo command module with a thyroid condition atop a longish cylinder with a flared and curved base. Instead of ordinary bell-shaped exhaust nozzles that would have required actuators for pivoting and cover doors during reentry, Aurora contained twenty liquid-fueled combustors arranged in an annular ring-nozzle configuration around its base. Mounted flush with the ablative stern, it resisted reentry heating and used differential throttling for attiude compensation.
Painted an extremely pale blue that looked white in the desert sunshine, Aurora trundled past the constantly critical eyes of Cooper and his team to the outside world and a small group of reporters and onlookers.
Cooper noted the absence of Joseph Lester, who might have given him the most comprehensive coverage. The GSN reporter present gazed at the rollout with a faint disdain, as if Cooper were a modern sculptor displaying a pile of junk shamelessly palmed off as art. Others in the crowd expressed a greater enthusiasm, oohing and aahing. Scattered applause greeted the spacecraft when it stopped, and cameras clicked and hummed to capture the moment.
His attention clearly lay focused on the slow movement of the spacecraft. A single large dent in its aluminum-lithium alloy skin could conceivably deform the thrust structure -- the main internal weight-bearing frame -- since it was integral to the hull. Such damage could lead to destruction of the spacecraft during liftoff or re-entry.
So many ways to fail, he thought, but only for a fleeting instant. The simplicity of the Starblazer design served as its greatest protection against failure. Where the Space Shuttle employed hundreds of Criticality One components, Aurora utilized only a few -- none of them in the engines. Even the failure of several motors did not guarantee loss of the spacecraft: low thrust on one side could be compensated for -- much in the manner of an engine-out procedure on a multi-engine aircraft -- by throttling individual combustors to compensate for differnetial thrust. The onboard computer, monitoring the engines' performance thousands of times each second, could make the appropriate alterations before anything could go wrong.
Leora Thane continued to rhapsodize. Cooper did not blame her. He would have whooped in triumph if it were in his personality. Dressed in a somber navy-blue suit, though, he could have been a quiet accountant come by to watch the spectacle.
"I've never seen such quick results from just taking a pile of other people's money and throwing it at a challenge," she said, this time to Sherry Cooper.
Sherry, attired in a light beige safari shirt and matching shorts, nodded from behind her dark glasses and smiled. "Gerry spent ten years fiddling with the original design on CAD and lining up suppliers. So when you appeared with the investment, it was just a matter of modeming the specs to the sub-contractors' computers. He didn't design Aurora to consume a million man-hours and billions in taxes."
Leora nodded her head merrily. "It should say on the ingredient label 'No Pork,' which -- for more than one reason -- is OK with me."
Sherry walked with her husband around the base of the elongated gumdrop of the Starblazer prototype. From its gently curving base extended three sturdy landing gear through hatches in the ablative shield. Encircling the gear was the annular ring within which hid the twenty rocket nozzles. She admired the nearly seamless way in which the sprayed-on composite ablative material had been applied. Far cheaper than individually unique and hand-made thermal tiles, the coating could be reapplied within the seventy-two hour turnaround time allotted for the production version of the spacecraft.
Small attitude rocket nozzles that controlled pitch, yaw, and roll formed little trefoils of two oval exhaust ports on a transverse line with a single oval above them on the vertical. These were placed above where the center-of-gravity would be once the ship was in orbit with much of its fuel consumed.
The only other visible openings were the twenty trapezoidal viewing ports just above amidships (for the tourists) and the three clustered together higher up on one side of the flight deck (for the pilots). Here and there, streamlined bumps protruded from the fuselage to enclose the various antennæ for navigation and communication. Unseen beneath the blunt nose cone lay the universal docking adapter for which -- currently -- there was nothing in orbit to mate. Unless one counted the dead husk of Mir.
Sherry hazarded a glance at her husband. He beamed as any other father would at a son hitting a home run or a daughter performing a perfect gymnastic floor exercise. Or vice versa, she thought, and wondered whether they would consider starting a family, now that Gerry had given birth to his dreamchild.
Larry Poubelle wandered over from his hangar to watch the event. He left behind him a nearly complete Nomad, awaiting only the delivery and installation of its single powerful rocket engine.
"Hey!" he shouted in a jovial way. "Coop! You trying to beat me out of my own half-billion?"
"Better cut the check!" Cooper hollered back. "We static-fired the engines at Skull Valley last week, slapped them in, and now we move on to Vandenberg!"
Close enough now that he did not have to yell, and not wanting his voice to carry, Poubelle said, "Are you sure you want the Air Force involved in this?"
Cooper shrugged. "Someone at KSC convinced someone at Space Command to let me use the facilities, so even what's left of NASA knows that the game's changed. I think they want a reliable spacecraft as much as we do."
Poubelle made a tsking sound. "My design allows me to lift off from any long runway and launch in the air."
"Well," Cooper said, "I don't need much in the way of a spaceport to take off and land. Besides, you're receiving Air Force largesse, too!"
"It's not like either of us is accepting money from them, just using public property for as long as we're standing on it, reluctantly surrendering it back to an ownerless condition once we move on. I'll only be using Edwards for the landing strip on Rogers Dry Lake, if I can wrest permission from them."
"And if not?"
Poubelle smiled and drew a cigar from his safari jacket. "Then I'll just land at Cuddeback Lake and have the damned thing trucked out."
"You're not going to light that, are you?" Cooper asked.
Poubelle looked at the oversized cigar and handed it to Cooper. "Congratulations, new dad."
Cooper slipped it into an inner pocket. "Thanks. I'll smoke this after we make an orbital flight."
A man in a beige suit with a pale blue shirt and a paisley tie -- tied in an annoyingly foppish Windsor knot -- stepped up to them. He was young, probably mid-twenties, with brashly expensive shoes and a meticulously fashionable hair style. "Gerald Cooper?"
"Yes?" Gerry flashed a proud smile, then saw the other man's odd smirk.
"Thiel. Department of State. I'm here to inform you that you have not obtained an export permit for that shipment of munitions."
"I beg your pardon?"
Poubelle listened in, one eyebrow raised in interest.
"The State Department classifies rockets as 'munitions,' and -- in order to satisfy the mandates of the 1967 Treaty on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space -- requires an export permit for any munitions that leave U.S. territorial limits." Thiel smiled, reached into his jacket, and withdrew a thick, folded sheaf of paper to hand to Cooper, then turned to Poubelle and pointed a finger at him, pistol-like. "I'll be seeing you next week."
Cooper flipped through the papers incredulously. "I'm not exporting anything. I'll be sending it up fifty miles over Vandenberg and bringing it down again. It's not going to any foreign country!"
Poubelle cut in. "Yeah. In fact, since he doesn't touch down anywhere else and returns to his point of origin, the FAA would classify it as a local flight!"
"A permit," the man in beige said, "is required to allow the vehicle to leave the country regardless of where the vehicle goes or whether or not the vehicle actually changes ownership." His smirk widened. "Have a good one." He turned and departed.
Poubelle laughed. "You know, if he came here with agents to seize the ship, he'd have made sure the cameras were on him. He preferred to do this quietly. That ought to tell you something."
"What?"
Poubelle slid the papers out of Cooper's hands. "That he doesn't have a leg to stand on and would look like an idiotic spoilsport on TV. Let my lawyers handle this and just do what you need to."
"What I need is to borrow your Boeing to fly this baby to Vandenberg."
"If you've got the attach points, we've got the struts. I won't need the plane for months."
It took two weeks for State to back down from the export permit demand. Thiel did not even bother to attempt to serve papers on Poubelle. In that time, crews lifted Aurora by crane and gently lowered it on its side atop the Dædalus Project's 747. It had been Poubelle's idea to offer to design strut attach points on the airplane and suggested that Cooper design in matching points on the Starblazers. Though the points differed for Aurora and for Nomad, due to different centers of gravity, Poubelle magnanimously offered to set the Boeing up for Cooper's ship first, knowing full well that a launch from an Air Force facility would take far longer than an air launch from the back of his plane. He had no doubts that he would precede Cooper into orbit, retain his prize money, and open the door for widespread repudiation of UNITO.
At Vandenberg, the Coopers stood side-by-side in the chill, damp pre-dawn ocean air and watched Aurora move slowly into position on the launch pad. Very little pre-launch preparation would need to be done to the spacecraft, in keeping with its short turnaround-time design. Loading the cryogenic fuel and oxidizer was the only time-consuming process, and it would take only an hour or so. A compressed helium-hydrogen mix, used to pressurize the LOX, was already onboard in smaller tanks. The helium worked better if preheated, so the hydrogen was mixed in to provide the heat, flowing through a catalyst chamber where it reacted with precisely metered oxygen to form water and release sufficient heat to warm the helium and increase its pressure. This obviated the need for a more complex heat exchangers in the engines.
The toughest part of the whole pre-launch process, Cooper mused, had been convincing the Air Force range safety officer of the safety of the Starblazer design. The twenty rockets, each sixteen feet long, provided seventy thousand pounds of thrust during their eight minute burns, leaving enough unconsumed fuel for re-entry braking and a landing back at a wide, clear area of Vandenberg. The ship was diminutive and light -- any high-altitude disaster would result in the ship breaking up and falling to Earth in small, relatively harmless pieces. A lower-altitude disaster would not be much more destructive than the crash of a corporate jet -- and would kill far fewer people. Even so, Space Command insisted on strapping self-destruct explosives to the fuel and oxidizer tanks. If activated by range safety, they would rip open the tanks, allowing the two components to mingle and providing the spark to ignite the mix. The explosive power of the propellants would perform the actual demolition of Aurora.
This time, when the light of dawn came over the mountains to bathe Aurora in its golden light, Gerald Cooper felt a mixture of pride and exhilaration compete for supremacy within him. He slipped an arm around Sherry's waist.
"It's so beautiful," she said. "As simple and perfect as a robin's egg."
He nodded, then said seriously, "Let's hope it doesn't crack."
They headed back to Launch Control, where Freespace personnel mingled with Air Force and NASA people. NASA insisted on handling the launch, the Air Force overseeing range safety and flight control, which left Freespace to do the actual work. This was to be a crewless flight to fifty miles altitude. Straight up, straight down. No frills. It would verify the ability of the SSTO design to launch Aurora, shut down in mid-flight allowing the spaceship to decelerate and then plummet ass-backward toward the ground, and re-ignite at the proper instant to lower the spacecraft safely to the surface a few dozen yards from the launch pad.
If all went well, Cooper hoped to prove the ship's fast turnaround time by launching a crewed flight into orbit one week later.
The presence of three different groups in Launch Control provided no end of confusion, exacerbated, Cooper suspected, by a reluctance on the part of either NASA or the Air Force to cooperate with a private launch so soon after the Constitution disaster. Very few of the NASA people were experienced launch personnel -- half of Cooper's people, in fact, comprised old NASA retirees whom he had hired to fill in the gaps. And the Air Force people seemed more than rigorous in their efforts to root out problems with the vehicle. Cooper had no objection to that per se, but the range safety officer -- Lieutenant Chet Rollins -- spent much of his time checking and rechecking the arming mechanism for the Flight Termination System -- the euphemism for the spacecraft-destruction explosives -- and very little time reviewing the abort-and-return-to-launch-site sequence.
The relatively short two-hour countdown proceeded without incident. Cooper -- absorbed in the process -- felt as if he and Aurora became one, straining toward the moment of ignition like a thoroughbred horse at the starting gate. Only a successful launch could release the pent-up energy within him. Thom Brodsky, who would be monitoring telemetry, felt just as much pre-launch angst.
Conversations flowed on four different audio channels simultaneously. Monitors glowed with a dozen different camera angles, some on the entire ship and launch pad, one on the lines feeding the fuel and oxidizer tanks, one on the engines and clamps, several on security checkpoints around the complex.
"All systems nominal," the calm voice of the launch director said. "T-minus one minute. APU's functioning."
Sherry stood near her husband, who bent over a display near the range safety officer. The intense concentration he radiated was a palpable thing to her; it made her stomach knot with tension. Soon, though. Soon it would be over.
"T-minus thirty. Internal power. Pressure. Telemetry coming in."
"Roger on TM," Brodsky replied.
"Downrange clear," Lt. Rollins said. Since the flight was nearly vertical, the only "downrange" consisted of a small footprint where debris might land. Range safety, however, consisted of several hundred square miles of surrounding land and sea area.
"T-minus ten, nine, eight..."
Adrenaline sluiced through Cooper's body, creating an other-worldly sense of heightened reality. Turning his gaze away from telemetry and toward the monitor, he watched as seagulls, oblivious to the coming launch, flew past the spacecraft in the misty morning.
"Three seconds. Ignition sequence start."
"Valves open," a voice on Channel One said. "Release clamps."
"Abort!" cried a voice on Channel Two. "Subnormal thrust!"
Half of the engines on Aurora flared briefly into life and burned with a languid blue sputter. Instead of blasting out the exhaust nozzles with lifting power, the flames licked upward, blackening the composite structure.
"Abort! Abort! Stuck valve! Keep clamps locked!"
Lt. Rollins held his palm over the large red FTS button, prepared to destroy the bird if necessary. Others stood frozen in place, expecting anything, including the prospect of their own deaths in another ignition dissynchrony.
Cooper immediately shouted, "Vent the helium tanks! Vent through the engines!" The command was unnecessary, since the computer had already reacted to the problem and done just that. The helium, with the hydrogen already removed in the catalyst chamber, vented downward under pressure to act as a fire extinguisher, forcing the oxygen out of the combustion chambers.
"Fire out!" someone said.
"LOX still flowing!" a voice said on Channel Four.
"Close the valve!" Cooper yelled, racing over to the launch control panel.
"It's stuck," the director said in a level voice. "Won't move."
"Confirm flameout," another voice on Channel One intoned. "Vent oxidizer tank."
On the monitor, a cloud of white vapor erupted from the midriff of the spacecraft. In a moment, the mist dissipated to reveal Aurora encased in a thin crust of ice crystals everywhere but around its scorched stern.
Lt. Rollins reluctantly removed his hand from the destruct button.
"Damn!" Thom Brodsky said from the telemetry console. "I show the main oxidizer valve stuck one-third open. Thrust was only twenty percent. Give a medal to whomever kept the clamps on. If they'd released, it would have tipped over."
"It's safe," Sherry was the first to observe. "Damage looks minimal. We can fix it and try again."
"After we find out what happened," Gerry said.
"Valve froze," Colonel Alan Shepard Lundy said as he strode into the blockhouse. The military men sprung to attention but he waved them down.
"That didn't happen during the static firings," Cooper shot back. The alarm of the previous few moments faded into a weary, sullen anger. It was an anger Cooper directed at himself for missing a detail, but the words came out clipped and irritated.
"The ocean air out here does that unless you keep the chambers flushed with dry nitrogen." Lundy turned to the launch director. "Captain Fortney?"
Fortney pursed his lips, then said tersely, "It was not in our purview to determine if the customer had knowledge of what the dew point is, sir." The word "customer" carried an unusually ironic edge. So, in fact, did the word "sir."
Lundy narrowed his gaze. "My father and a couple thousand people died at Kennedy, Captain Fortney. That won't happen anywhere, anytime at Space Command, not even with private contract work. Is that understood, Captain?"
"Yes, Colonel."
Lundy turned toward Cooper. "After all systems are safely shut down, I'd like to invite you and Mrs. Cooper to the officer's mess for lunch."
Cooper nodded distractedly. Sherry smiled and inclined her head slightly with gracious appreciation.
"There are a lot of people in the US government who don't like what you're doing, Mr. Cooper." Col. Lundy sat with the Coopers in a private dining room separated from the rest of the officers by luxurious wood paneling.
"And my wife," Cooper replied. "We're a team."
Lundy turned to her and said, sincerely, "Of course. I apologize. My father and mother both worked for NASA. I didn't mean to imply--"
"Your mother -- did she also..." Sherry let her question simply hang.
"No. She saw it all, though, from a causeway. My father died on the crawler path. He had no business being there. He was trying to stop the launch. He knew what was going to happen." Lundy spoke the short, simple sentences as if he had recited them hundreds of times to hundreds of listeners. Sherry knew that his pain must be deeper than anything she could imagine.
"That's pretty much what we learned from that documentary." Gerry observed Lundy with no small degree of admiration and empathy.
"Range Safety is very important to monitor," the colonel said.
"We're addressing every aspect of safety issues," Gerry said. "As we saw, the design has several feature--"
"Range safety," Lundy said again, this time with disturbing emphasis, "is very important to monitor."
Sherry could tell that he wanted to say more. It showed in the pain knotted into his eyebrows and creased along his forehead. "Thank you," she said. "We'll monitor it. Closely." She glanced at her husband. His eyes gazed into space, his mind lost in contemplation of repairs and retrofits to Aurora. She knew that was where he had drifted to, and knew that Col. Lundy's veiled warning had utterly eluded him.
She returned to her meal, formulating a plan that she dared not reveal even to her own husband.