CHAPTER 12

More than 30 years ago, the Air Force was routinely dropping the X-15 spaceplane from a B-52 bomber, flying it to the lower reaches of orbit, and bringing it back for standard landings on runways. The X-15 program was put together quickly, didn't cost much...

The spaceplane does have one drawback that drives NASA crazy: It would be impossible to build a huge spaceplane.... It is for this reason that NASA hates, hates, hates any mention of the word spaceplane.

-- Gregg Easterbrook

25 October

The design stage for the Dædalus Project ended when Larry Poubelle sat in a VR simulator and flew a successful hypersonic flight to the edge of Space. The specs fed into the computer created a virtual Nomad 70 feet long, eighteen feet longer than the X-15 A-2, which it more or less accurately copied. Forty of those feet consisted of the propellant tanks, ten feet of two-seat, tandem cockpit and avionics, and twenty feet of rocket engine. Dry weight tipped the scales at 20,000 pounds; GLOW, the gross liftoff weight with fuel and including the hypersonic drop tanks, maxxed out at 85,000 pounds. The engine, a surplus Rocketdyne J-2 with 68 tonnes of thrust, provided a specific impulse of 390 -- just enough to tweak out orbital velocity.

Chemar, sitting behind him in the simulator, backhanded sweat from her forehead. "Deadstick landings," she cursed.

"Nothing to fear," Poubelle said, climbing out of the cockpit and extending his hand to her. "Energy management is a snap using the onboard computers."

The difference between the old X-15 and Nomad had less to do with any size or shape changes and more to do with nearly four decades of materials development. Iconel steel remained Poubelle's choice for the main skeletal structure of the spaceplane, but nearly everything else benefited from lighter construction. The drop tanks and inner fuel and oxidizer tanks utilized a spun graphite-fiber composite material. The dorsal and ventral fins used a similar composite. The onboard navigation and flight-control computers possessed as much power as a building-full in 1962 and weighed only ten pounds. The fly-by-light system likewise weighed much less than the original pioneering fly-by-wire system, and responded with nanosecond speed.

Much of what Poubelle used came off-the-shelf from ærospace suppliers hungry for the business -- and the publicity. The official logo of the Dædalus Project, the spaceplane rampant surmounted by a disembodied arm-and-wing, appeared in advertisements in industrial magazines, encircled by the phrase "Official Parts Supplier for the Dædalus Project."

Since the X-15 had flown 199 flights, twenty-one in Phase IX, the X-15 A-2 design phase, there existed a mountain of flight data that Poubelle's bright boys pounded into the simulator, then adapted for the upsizing and up-powering of the spaceplane. The simulator utilized a massively parallel supercomputer more powerful than anything used in flight research outside the military, which had long ago abandoned the hypersonic flight regime almost entirely, except for the persistent rumors of pulse-detonation jets flying out of Edwards and Groom Lake, Nevada, to rattle windows in Los Angeles at Mach 7.

All the groundbreaking, trailblazing work done by NASA in its vigorous infancy convinced Poubelle that they would not need many test flights. In fact, he had only planned one. One flight that would earn him the last remaining aviation cherry: the all-time, absolute aircraft altitude record.

Outside the simulator, he addressed the assembled crew of volunteers and salaried genii, Chemar at his side. They had been working for months, most of the volunteers on a come-and-go basis, most of the paid workers on 14 hour days with overtime enthusiastically provided.

"I don't know how many of you have had time to learn the history of the X-15," Poubelle said, standing before a screen that replayed his simulator flight, "but there's a fascinating fact that the Dædalus Project is going to exploit, both for publicity and as a personal salute to the original builders.

"The X-15 achieved the enviable velocity for an aircraft of Mach six point seven and a still-unbeaten aircraft altitude record of three hundred fourteen thousand feet, though never simultaneously. The X-15 actually flew higher, to three hundred fifty-four thousand, two hundred feet with pilot Joe Walker at the stick. Here's the weird part, though: it didn't count as an altitude record! Since the official organization that bestows such records -- the Federation Æronautique Internationale -- defines space as beginning at one hundred thousand meters, which is three hundred twenty-eight thousand feet, and since an aircraft would have to beat pilot Bob White's altitude by 3 per cent or about ten thousand feet, there's only one final, slim opportunity to exceed White's altitude and not be disqualified by entering Space at three hundred twenty-eight thousand feet. Only the narrow zone between three hundred twenty-four thousand and three hundred twenty-seven thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine feet will be acceptable to the fai. It's that altitude range that the simulator's training me to achieve. We're going to shoot our arrow there and hope we hit the mark."

Smiles and applause arose from the group. To set two different and enduring records with Nomad was more than they had expected.

An assistant burst into the room carrying a celphone. "Better take this, sir," he said. "It's Senator Woolsey's office."

Poubelle cracked a smile and held up the phone in his robot arm. "Getting a call from someone's office is like getting a letter from someone's desk. Good afternoon, Senator..." He listened for several moments, the sardonic smile fading then relighting wickedly. "Well, Mr. Barkley, tell the senator that I'd be more than pleased to accept his gracious subpoena." He shut the phone, placed it back in the young volunteer's hand, and said, "Friends, nomads, countrymen! It appears that the Senate subcommittee on Space requests my presence. Consider it more free publicity. I'll do my best to make you proud."

With that, he and D'Asaro retired to his office to plot strategy.

"Woolsey's out to nail us," she said once the door closed.

"Now, why do you think that?" Poubelle said, lighting a cigar with a flourish of his arm. "Perhaps the servants merely want to be informed as to what one of their bosses has planned."

"Naïf republican," she muttered.

"Cynical anarchist," he retorted.

"Get on the desk."

"Tempting," he said. "However, I want a disc copy of that simulator flight, a screen large enough for the audience, separate SkyPilot goggles for each committee member, and patch cords so that the networks can download the video portion for added impact on the news. Contact Bill Braverman personally."

He clapped the errant arm around her shoulder. "Let's take some press kits... what, five hundred or so? Bring a thousand. Plus buttons and patches to hand out. Find out which senators have kids and bring them model kits, and the premium mahogany models for the senators themselves. I want a cheering section of about a dozen scattered throughout the room, and have publicity dispatch a mass-media fax about this. Oh, and wear something sexy."

"You've got your nerve, monsieur."

"We'll need all the nerve we've got to turn this to our favor."

28 October

Ludlow Woolsey III displayed nerve in spades. His stout frame no longer possessed the rugged attractiveness that had won him so many votes in the Eisenhower era. His nose, as ripe as a rotting tomato, revealed a network of alcohol-ruptured capillaries and leaned slightly to the left where it had been broken in a literal floor fight during the Watergate hearings. His eyes, somber and very nearly dead, hid darkly beneath folds of flaccid skin and bushy, wayward eyebrows that not even his wife had the temerity to suggest he trim.

His hair, what little was left, sparsely covered a liver-spotted scalp with grey-white strands. His age-enlarged ears earned him the cruel cloakroom nickname Toby, from the mug handles they mimicked.

He could have coasted through the last few years of his final term. Instead, the impending end instilled in him a furious activism, as if many scores remained to be settled before he departed the federal zone.

"Mr. Poubelle," he said in a low rumble. "How can you sit there and tell this committee that your rocket plane is safe when it hasn't even been built yet, let alone tested?"

Poubelle sat next to D'Asaro at the green table facing the elevated panel of committee members. He smiled in wry amusement at the attempted optical illusion. He knew his own stature, and no trick of architecture could rob him of that. He realized, though, that the illusion was for the benefit of the other members of the audience, as well as for the committee members themselves.

D'Asaro sat beside him with regal aplomb, dressed in a light-rust jumpsuit with emerald piping. The front of the suit, zipped modestly up, revealed as much to the imagination as it pretended to hide. The panel addressed questions to Poubelle, but their attention constantly wandered back to her.

"May I remind the committee," Poubelle said, "that the original X-15 flew nearly two hundred flights with only one fatal crash, pilot Mike Adams, twenty-five November, Nineteen sixty-seven, and few enough survivable crash landings to count on one hand? The design proved far safer than the design of the Space Shuttle, which has already killed seven and stands poised -- by NASA's own estimate of the odds -- to kill again."

"Neither NASA nor the Shuttle are in question here, sir." Energy slowly returned to Woolsey's face as he warmed up for confrontation. "What I want to know is how you think you can plan this without any coordination with NASA, the Department of Transportation, or the Department of Defense, all of who have jurisdiction over outer space."

Poubelle smiled. "The first flight of Nomad is not intended to enter the realm of Space, senator. And as with any experimental aircraft, we are keeping a meticulous log of the construction procedure, including photographs and video, for final inspection by an FAA official. As far as the law is concerned, sir, that is all we need to do. We mailed our application for an N-number on September seventh."

"But you do plan to make an orbital flight, am I correct?"

"If Nomad checks out on the test flight, yes."

"At that point, then, you will submit to NASA oversight?"

Poubelle shook his head. "No."

"And why not, sir, since it is the law?"

The subpoenaed man leaned on his artificial elbow and eyed the senators one by one, then said, "Because, ladies and gentlemen, it is not the law. There are statutes on the books, and regulations, yes; but these are not the law. If there is any law in America, it is the Constitution, and that law is not a restraint upon me as a citizen, it is a restraint upon you as members of the government. I do not have to apply for a permit to pursue life, liberty, or property. I do not need your approval to build, to travel, or to explore a new frontier. May I remind this committee that with the American Revolution, the sovereignty devolved to the people, and that as government employees, all of you act not as our masters but simply as our agents?"

"Well, Mister Poubelle, this 'agent' works for many more of the people than just you. I have a sacred duty to protect--"

Chemar spoke up. "How many people do you work for, senator? According to published figures, you received three hundred-eighty four thousand, two hundred ninety-one votes in your last election. We have received votes of confidence in the form of purchases and contributions in excess of five-hundred sixty-seven thousand people."

"Mr. Poubelle, Miss D'Asaro. I am afraid I cannot allow -- this country cannot allow -- such historically blind and obstinately reckless attitudes to prevail. Understand that one of the purposes of these hearings is to establish guidelines for the transfer of spacecraft and facilities to UN control in light of the expected passage of the Interplanetary Treaty. And if you are such a Constitutional scholar, you will know that international treaties supersede even the Constitution."

"As a constraint of government, not as an infringement upon--"

Woolsey's voice rose to near-filibuster strength. "I do not need to be lectured on the document I have sworn an oath to protect. These proceedings are about outer space and about preventing its exploitation by publicity-hungry peddlers of cheap knick-knacks who would risk the safety of millions of persons just to satisfy his own monomaniacal desire to play space cadet with the wealth he's plundered by exposing Americans to the risk of nuclear power pla--"

"And I say," Poubelle clenched his fist in a manner deploying several utilities from his robotic arm so that it looked like a Swiss army knife on steroids, "that it's an honor to be labeled a space cadet by one committed to keeping us in the trees eating grubs. This show trial is over." He and Chemar rose as one.

"You have not been dismissed, sir." Woolsey's voice dripped with the polite viciousness.

"No!" Poubelle slammed his fist on the table, denting the surface and crazing the finish. Cameras strobed with mad abandon. He raised and pointed a titanium finger toward Woolsey. "Public servant, you are dismissed!"

The pair turned and strode out of the chamber, past clots of reporters and onlookers. Some visitors cheered. No senator or senate employee smiled. An attack of such a nature against one constituted an attack against all.

Woolsey shook his head almost imperceptibly when the sergeant-at-arms looked in his direction. No need to bring him back, the senator thought. It's war, now.

* * *

Montgomery Barron watched the proceedings on his office TV with an ominous foreboding. This is just one. One audacious enough to flaunt his plans. There have to be others.

With both a sense of dread and an overpowering elation, Barron realized that Stark Fist may very well see a clear and imminent mission. And Laurence Poubelle's Nomad might be its first taste of blood.

* * *

"Hooyeh!" someone shouted over the general din at the South Bronx spaceship factory. "That's a gauntlet thrown if ever there was one!"

"All right already!" Crockett hit the remote to turn off the screen. "This guy's a zillionaire and could have something in orbit within a few months. We've got the jump on him and we've got to maintain it!"

"So we're in a race, Davy?" Penny Giannini lowered the tig torch she sought to repair rather than replace. Her olive skin dripped with sweat from the welding work, unrelieved by the pervasive humidity this time of year or by the break she took to watch the interrogation. Her short, buzz-cut hair made her look like a butch Marine cleaning a weapon.

Crockett shook his head. "No race. I just intend us to be first." He gazed over at the skeleton of the spacecraft. Beside it stood sixteen wooden crates, each of which held a man-sized rocket engine. "We've got a lot of plumbing to do. Let's get back to work."

* * *

Instead of watching Laurence Poubelle, "Ace" Roberts took a break from adjusting the gimbals on the forty-foot long cylinder in his driveway to watch something more significant to him. Over his satellite dish, he received live, unedited footage of the rollout of the sixth Space Shuttle orbiter, Constitution.

An anonymous NASA announcer spoke as the orbiter, mated to the external tank and solid rocket boosters, moved slowly on its massive conveyor toward pad 39B. "It's a stately pace befitting the sixth and undoubtedly last of the first generation orbiters. Constitution -- built as a bailout for ærospace companies hurt by cutbacks in military spending -- was designed for fast turnaround and long-range missions. Its first flight -- scheduled for November fifteenth -- will be the much-anticipated month-long Enduro flight. Several firsts will be established on this ninety-third flight of the STS: first flight of Constitution, first use of the South American Laboratory for Space Agriculture, first test of the Advanced Crew Cleanliness System, and -- most significantly -- the first flight with a female shuttle commander, astronaut Tammy Reis."

Ace perked up his ears and put down the grease can. He had followed Tammy's astronaut career with the pride of a surrogate uncle, taking the time to watch her two previous flights. This, though, was news to him. She never wrote him anymore.

11 April, 1981

The first time he met her, she was just this runt of a teenager tagging along behind an older boy in a Saratoga surplus yard where Roberts loaded up his truck with sheet aluminum and -- found purely by luck -- the tip tank off an old Beechcraft. He looked at it and knew immediately that the front third would make an ideal nose cone for his rocket. Nearby, he heard two adolescents arguing.

"I told you it wouldn't go up." The boy's face held no trace of self-satisfaction. If anything, he looked angry that he had won their bet.

"Launch delays," the girl said, "are inevitable. Especially on the first manned flight of a spacecraft that's never even been test-launched before! Admit it, you never expected the STS to be built and there it is, ready to go!"

The duo rummaged through some bins. The boy looked to be about seventeen or eighteen, though his serious, steady gaze revealed a mind operating with a much older, almost anachronistic maturity. Ace's grandfather, who long ago regaled him with stories of travelling the Oregon Trail in a prairie schooner, had that look in his eyes. Roberts even had that look once, before it became a narrow peer from too many nights spent preparing reports, rewriting permit applications, and returning the stare of bemused visitors watching him build a rocket in his driveway.

The intense young man peaked out at six feet tall. He wore navy blue cargo pants with multiple pockets and a surplus Swiss Army leather cartridge belt on which every pouch was stuffed to overflowing with necessities. He kept his sandy hair trimmed short and functional and wore an olive drab baseball cap with military-style scrambled eggs on the brim and the appellation Space Cadet embroidered on the front. The young woman, only just beginning to achieve her teenage figure, stood a full foot shorter. Her long black hair lay braided and pinned into a tight bun a few degrees to the rear of her head's centerline. She wore a blue jumpsuit of her own making, a copy of what the shuttle pilots would wear on the upcoming flight of Columbia. She, too, sported a cartridge belt, draped bandolier-style across her chest. They could have been visiting spacefarers in some science-fiction adventure film, and both appeared to like the feeling.

"Look at this." The boy held up a canister of crackers. "Civil Defense, vintage Nineteen Sixty-Two. Bet they taste great." He put it down. "Anyway, I didn't say it would never fly, just that it would never meet the ridiculous promises they made. Two-week turnaround, launch-on-demand -- we saw what a joke that was, yesterday -- and especially the hundred-fifty-dollars-per-pound-to-orbit costs. They may charge customers that much, but the rest of the cost is subsidized by you-know-whom."

"They have to attract customers--"

"Hey, if they built something cheap and easy to mass-produce, you and I and a million others would be customers. They just wanted something that would look nifty and sluice tax doll--"

"You two kids talking about the Shuttle?"

They both turned toward Roberts to see a leathery man in his mid-fifties, dusty fedora perched way back on his head, gazing at them with intense interest. Draped over one arm was his last (he promised himself) purchase of the day: a surplus Air Force high altitude pressure suit, complete with a helmet, which he grasped under his other arm.

"Yes," the girl said brightly. "He thinks it's a flying pork barrel and I think it's the Mayflower of Space."

Ace smiled. "Could be both, you know."

"Could be the Titanic," the boy muttered. "It's irrelevant, anyway, since humanity will find other ways to get there."

She shrugged in agreement. "In fact, we're working on our ow--" An elbow to the ribs from her friend cut off her sentence, but not before the listener caught the gist.

"Is that so? We seem to be birds of a feather. My name's Roberts. My friends call me 'Ace.' So can you."

"Truman Roberts?"

Roberts grinned, threw the pressure suit and helmet into the cab of the truck, then turned to say, "Call me 'Ace.' I haven't used 'Truman' since Truman was president."

"I'm Paul Volnos. This is Tammy Reis" -- he hooked a thumb toward the runt, who could not have hit fifteen years, at least not very hard -- "and we'd love to see your rocketship."

Ace laughed out loud, tanned skin wrinkling around his eyes. "Didn't your folks teach you not to talk to strangers?"

The boy smiled. "You're no stranger to me. You invented the ocean-launched solid-rocket missile for the Navy and worked with Von Braun and Kraft Ehrike on the XSL-01 Moonship with aircraft re-entry concept back in the late Fifties. Then you went to work for--"

"That's okay, son, I know my own résumé."

Tammy's eyes widened. "What sort of rocket is it?"

Ace smiled. "One-man orbital intended to use three Aerobee Three-Fifties, two for the first stage, one for the second."

Paul performed swift mental calculations and said, "You won't make it. It wouldn't even lift the re-entry capsule."

"Who said anything about re-entry? It's intended to be a one-way trip to the Space Station, when it gets built. Two hundred-fifty pound payload, max."

Paul snorted. "They wouldn't let any of us onboard. We're just mere citizens. We just pay for it."

"I don't think they'd turn me away. They might send me home on the next shuttle, though."

"I'd like to see it!" Tammy said.

"No free peeks. If you come, you've got to do some work."

Tammy looked up at Paul with imploring eyes.

"You don't need my permission," he said.

She frowned. "I don't want your permission. I want you to come, too!"

He gazed at her with a big-brother glower. "I wouldn't let you run off alone. You're not big enough to cross the street by yourself." That earned him a quick jab in the solar plexus.

Ace smiled and clapped a grizzled hand on the boy's shoulder. "You're okay, kid. All right. Hop in your car and follow me up Bear Creek Road."

* * *

Paul maneuvered his AMC Pacer -- bought in extremely used condition more for price than because it looked like a futuristic bubble-car -- up the long driveway to Roberts's ten acre property. Tammy jumped out and ran to the garage as Roberts disappeared inside it, gazing with her eager eyes at a pack-rat paradise: two long work benches on either side of a central trailer rig supporting Ace's Space Age version of the Model T.

Two-thirds of the spacecraft extended beyond the confines of the garage, but was covered by a canopy consisting of geodesic triangles of aluminum framework and rainbow-colored sheets of parachute nylon. The central cylinder measured sixty feet long and three feet in diameter, flanked by two forty-foot tubes of the same diameter. Two of the Aerobee 350 engines lay in place in the boosters, their exhaust bells cocooned in blue shrink wrap. The third engine lay in parts on one bench and what was presumably the guidance system lay on the other bench in even smaller pieces. Beneath the benches were stacked frayed cardboard boxes and wooden liquor crates filled to overflowing with dusty, rusty, or grime-coated remnants of a fading technology that once had been the promise of every kid's future.

Paul still saw that future and brightened instantly upon entering the sacred temple. The engine captured his attention and he hovered over it, examining every bend of the plumbing that wrapped around the exhaust bell, serving the dual purpose of both cooling the bell and pre-heating the fuel and oxidizer.

"Wow!" Tammy said, her eyes wide. "It looks like a miniature Delta!" She ran a hand over the sleek aluminum cylinders.

Ace smiled at the two of them in perfect understanding. There was something about aluminum that fascinated him even more than cold steel. Aluminum was light, both in weight and in its silvery color. Soft and ductile, it could bend in his hands; yet it was also strong enough to stand the flaming violence of a launch into Space. It all depended on how it was created, how pure and consistent it was, how one handled it while shaping and forming it, how well one knew its properties and could predict its behavior.

Paul ran his fingers along the engine tubing, feeling the cool, smooth texture. Roberts saw that and said, "Whoa there, son. White gloves only on the engine. One greasy fingerprint could ruin it!"

"Sorry." The young man joined Ace in unloading the truck. "What can we do to help you?"

The old man lowered the tip tank to the driveway, then jumped down to assist Paul in placing it on a dolly. "You're doing it, boy. Things seem to be getting heavier every year."

* * *

That spring and summer, Paul and Tammy spent long days working with Ace on his rocket, scrounging at junkyards for bits and pieces required from steering controls, fuel piping, fins. Tammy hollered with joy when she discovered a scratch-free acrylic submarine porthole at a marine surplus store: it became the viewing port for the pilot, who would fly the rocket standing up. Some days they would return home dog-tired to the sound of worried and irritated parents. More than once, Ace had to placate the adults with a phone call or three.

Over the next few years Tammy earned her private pilot's certificate at the youngest age possible; Paul, at Ace's urging, entered his model rocket designs in state-wide contests and routinely won. He became bored with the accolades and impatient with the small stuff -- seven-foot tall rockets that regularly hit 50,000 foot altitude -- and threw his efforts into Ace's project. He learned first hand about liquid-fuel rockets, about phenomena of large spacecraft such as pogoing, wherein the thrust of a poorly designed rocket creates a devastating vibration that can tear the vehicle apart. Most important of all, though, were the values tacitly imparted to him by working with Ace. The old man never let any setback deter him. If a part would not fit or if something broke, he simply set about to fix the problem with a dogged, purposeful effort.

While Tammy began to spend more and more time at the airport, Paul learned more about the truth of backyard rocketry. He watched as Ace accumulated stack upon stack of forms, correspondence, and notices concerning his efforts.

"There's an old saying," he told Paul more than once. "When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the spacecraft, it's ready to launch."

"Why do they make it so hard to go into Space?"

Ace snorted out a good-humored laugh. "I could be generous and say it's that they want to ensure that everyone below us is absolutely safe from falling debris, but they don't slap the sort of regulations on aircraft that they do on spacecraft, and falling airplanes kill hundreds every year. With the exception of a few Russki cosmonauts, no one's ever been killed by spacecraft. Missiles, yes -- governments intend for people to be killed by missiles, and somehow that's all right -- but rocket flight's pretty damned safe. No..." he put the greasy rag down and leaned against the work bench. "I'd say -- and this comes from personal experience, mind you -- that NASA simply doesn't want to be shown up by anyone. The Shuttle's pretty impressive, but I could build a water-launched rocket using standard supertanker construction techniques and facilities that would carry thirty times what the shuttle carries to orbit at one seventieth the cost per pound. NASA looked at my design in the 'Sixties. They rejected it. Couldn't spread the work around to employ enough congressional districts to ensure funding, though they wouldn't admit that was the reason. It could be built in one dry dock by one shipbuilding company." For a moment, his gaze turned far from where they were, then he shook his head and concentrated once again on the matter at hand.

28 October, Year Two

Ace watched with immense pride Constitution's crawl toward Pad 39B, almost as if his own daughter were about to punch through the sky in that contraption. Then he thought of Paul, since Tammy and he were inseparable in the older man's mind, and was overcome by regret at the lost talent, the vision Paul had abandoned. He gazed at the shuttle and wondered why the boy could not have settled for half a dream instead of none.


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