Sky Masters

With the NASA shuttles grounded indefinitely following the Challenger disaster in 1986, expendable boosters were quickly back in vogue. While NASA was refurbishing old Titan ICBM rockets for satellite booster duty and bringing back the Delta line of heavy boosters, in 1988 Jon Masters, now the twenty-eight-year-old chairman of the board and new president of Sky Sciences, soon renamed Sky Masters, Inc., announced that he had developed a new low-cost space booster that was small and easy to transport and operate. Called SCARAB (Small Containerized Air Relocatable Alert Booster), it was a ground-launched rocket that could be hauled aboard a Boeing 747 or military cargo plane, set up, and launched from almost anywhere in a matter of days or even hours. SCARAB restored NASA and the military’s ability to launch satellites into Earth orbit on short notice.

His next project was a booster system similar to SCARAB but even more flexible and responsive. Although SCARAB could place a two-thousand-pound payload into low Earth orbit from almost anywhere on Earth, it still needed a runway for the two cargo aircraft that carried the rocket and the ground-launch equipment, an extensive ground-support contingent, and at least fifteen hours’ worth of work to erect the launch structures and get the rocket ready to fly. In several practice tests, Masters needed no more than thirty hours from initial notification and delivery of the payload to T minus zero. But he wanted to do better.

That was when ALARM was bom. ALARM was merely a SCARAB booster downsized to fit in a transport plane and fitted with wings. It used the launch aircraft as its first-stage booster, and it used lift from its scissor-action wings to help increase the efficiency of the smaller first- and second-stage boosters. Two ALARM boosters could be standing by on board the carrier aircraft; they would only need to bring the payloads on board and take off. With aerial refueling, the ALARM carrier aircraft could stay aloft for days, traversing the country or even partly around the world, ready to launch the boosters.

Masters had developed several different payloads for his small air-launched boosters. Along with the communications satellites, he had developed a small satellite that could take composite radar, infrared, and telescopic visual “photos” of the Earth, and the resulting image was dozens of times more detailed than standard visual photos. The images could be digitized and transmitted to terminals all over the world via his small communications satellites, giving commanders real-time reconnaissance and intelligence information. Combined with powerful computers, users from the Pentagon or White House to individual aircrew members on board strike aircraft could conduct their own sophisticated photo intelligence, plan and replan missions, and assess bomb damage almost instantaneously.

With several different payloads on board, the flexibility of the ALARM system was unparalleled. A communications- satellite launch could immediately change to a satellite-retrieval mission or a reconnaissance-satellite mission, or even a strike mission. A single ALARM carrier aircraft could become as important a national asset as Cape Canaveral.

“Fifteen minutes to launch window one,” Masters’ launch control officer, Helen Kaddiri, announced. Kaddiri was the chief of Masters’ operations staff and the senior launch- control officer, in charge of monitoring all flight systems throughout each mission. In her early forties, exotically attractive, she’d been bom and raised in Calcutta. She and her parents immigrated to the United States when she was twelve and she changed her name from Helenika to Helen. She was a completely career-minded scientist who sometimes found it very frustrating working for someone like Jon Masters.

She regarded Masters warily with her dark, beautiful, almond-shaped eyes as he studied the command console. Masters was so relaxed and laid-back that all the uptight techno-types he worked with, especially those developing new space technologies, got really rankled — herself included. Maybe it was because Masters seemed to treat everyone and everything the same… like work was one big beach party.

The government officials they dealt with almost always shuddered when working with Masters. Even socializing with him was a strain. Kaddiri thought that every time they got a new government contract was a matter of luck. If it weren’t for his genius…

“Fourteen minutes to launch window one,” she said.

“Thanks, Helen,” Jon replied. He pushed his baseball cap up higher on his forehead, which made him look even younger — like “Beaver” Cleaver. “Let’s get Roosevelt-One in position and ready.”

Kaddiri grimaced at another of Masters’ quirks — he named his boosters, not just numbered them. He usually named them after American presidents or Hollywood actors or actresses. Helen thought that if Jon had a dog, he would probably number it instead.