Sky Masters

“The edge of your envelope, Ralph,” Masters said. He got to his feet, walked a few steps aft, and patted the nose of a huge, torpedo-shaped object sitting on its launch rail. “You established your flight parameters based on data I provided, and you naturally made your parameters more restrictive. ALARM here knows its limits and it still says go. So we go.” “Doctor Masters, as the range safety officer I’m here to insure a safe launch for both the ground and the air crews. My parameters are established to—”

“Colonel Foch, if you want to abort the mission, say the word,” Masters said calmly, barely suppressing a casual burp. “The Navy doesn’t get their relay hookup satellites on the air until tomorrow, you can spend the night at the Blytheville, Arkansas, Holiday Inn again, and I can bill DARPA another one hundred thousand dollars for gas. It’s your decision.”

“I’m merely expressing my concern about the winds at altitude, Doctor Masters…”

“And I replied to your concerns,” Masters said with a smile. “My little baby here says it’s a go. Unless we fly somewhere else to launch, away from the jet stream…”

“DARPA is very specific about the launch area, Doctor. These satellites are important to the Navy. They want to monitor the booster’s progress throughout the flight. The launch must be over the White Sands range.”

“Fine. Then we continue to monitor the winds and let the computers do their jobs. If they can’t properly compensate without going outside the range, we turn around on the racetrack and try again. If we go outside the launch window, we abort. Fair enough?”

Foch could do nothing but nod in agreement. This launch was important to both the Navy and Air Force, and he wasn’t prepared to issue a launch abort unilaterally.

The object called ALARM that Masters so lovingly regarded was the Air Launched Alert Response Missile; there were two of the huge missiles on board the DC-10 that morning. ALARM was a four-stage space booster designed to place up to three-quarter-ton payloads in low-to-medium Earth orbit by launching the booster from the cargo hold of an aircraft — in effect, the DC-10 was the ALARM booster’s first stage, with the other three stages provided by powerful solid-fuel rockets on the missile itself.

The ALARM missile had a long, slender, one-piece wing that swiveled out from its stowed position along the missile’s fuselage after launch. The wing would supply lift and increase the effectiveness of the solid rocket motors while the booster was in the atmosphere, which greatly increased the power and payload capability of the booster. An ALARM booster could carry as much as fifteen hundred pounds in its ten-foot-long, forty-inch-diameter payload bay.

On today’s mission, each of Masters’ ALARM boosters carried four small two-hundred-pound communications satellites, which Jon Masters, in his own inimitable way, called NIRTSats — “Need It Right This Second” satellites. Unlike more conventional satellites, which weighed hundreds or even thousands of pounds, were placed in high geosynchronous orbits almost twenty-three thousand miles above the Equator, and could carry dozens of communications channels, NIRTSats were small, lightweight satellites which carried only a few communications channels and were placed in low, one-hundred-to-one-thousand-mile orbits. Unlike geosynchronous satellites, which orbited the Earth once per day and therefore appeared to be stationary over the Equator, NIRTSats orbited the Earth once every ninety to three hundred minutes, which meant that usually more than one satellite had to be launched to cover a particular area.

But a NIRTSat cost less than one-fiftieth the price of a full-sized satellite, and it cost less to insure and launch as well. Even with a constellation of four NIRTSats, a customer with a need for satellite communications could get it for less than one-third the price of buying “air time” on an existing satellite. A single ALARM booster launch, which cost only ten million dollars from start to finish, could give a customer instant global communications capability from anywhere in the world — and it took only a few days to get the system in place, instead of the months or even years it took for conventional launches. NIRTSats could be repositioned anywhere in orbit if requirements changed, and Masters had even devised a way to recover a NIRTSat intact and reuse it, which saved the customer even more money.