Sky Masters

It was a strange sensation, a strange sight. The ALARM booster just seemed to shrink in size as it fell out of the launch chamber — it continued to fly directly underneath the open doors as if it were frozen in place. The doors stayed open long enough so that Jon could see the X-wing begin to move slightly to provide a bit of stability as it cruised along. The DC-lO’s tail heeled upward as the twenty-one-ton rocket dropped away — it would take a minute for the movable counterweight tank to rebalance the plane. The crew members in the cargo section held on firmly to handholds in the ceiling or bulkheads as their bodies were pressed to the floor.

“Rocket away, rocket away,” Helen called out. Immediately, the DC-10 began a 30-degree bank turn to the left, and Roosevelt-1 was lost from the bomb-bay camera. Helen switched to a wingtip camera to monitor the motor firing.

“We’re clear from booster’s flight path,” Kaddiri called out. “Coming up on first-stage ignition… ready, ready… now.”

Like a giant stick of chalk drawing a fat white-yellow line across the sky, the first-stage motor of the ALARM booster ignited, and the rocket leaped ahead of the DC-10 in a blur of motion. When the rocket was about a mile away, the X-wing scissored out until the wing was almost perpendicular to the rocket’s fuselage, and the ALARM booster reared its nose upward and began to climb. Nineteen seconds after launch, the booster was traveling almost twice the speed of sound and had recrossed its launch altitude as the wing generated lift. Seconds later, the rocket was lost from view, traveling too fast for the high-speed cameras to follow.

“T plus thirty seconds, Roosevelt-One on course, all systems normal, passing one-twenty-K altitude, velocity passing Mach three,” Kaddiri reported.

“Launch-chamber doors closed, chamber repressurized,” one of the techs reported. “Ready to reload.” They were in no hurry to load Roosevelt-Two into position on this mission, but Masters liked to practice rapid-fire procedures to demonstrate that a multiple ALARM launch within a single launch window was possible.

“T plus sixty seconds, fifteen seconds to first-stage bum- out,” Kaddiri reported. “Altitude one-eighty K, passing Mach six, pitch angle thirty degrees. All systems nominal.”

Using the scissor wings to augment the motor’s thrust with lift, the booster climbed quickly through the atmosphere. As the air started to thin and less lift was being generated by the wings, they scissored back closer and closer to the booster’s fuselage until, just before first-stage motor burnout, the wings were fully retracted back along the body of the rocket. Seventy-six seconds after ignition, the first- stage motor burned out and the rear half of the fifty-feet- long booster, carrying the rear tailplane and the scissor wings, separated from the rest of the booster. The rocket was at the very edge of space, nearly 250,000 feet above Earth. Nine seconds later, the second-stage motor ignited, sending the booster streaking into space.

The first-stage section began its controlled tumble to Earth, and four recovery parachutes opened at sixty thousand feet above ground. A specially equipped Air Force C-130 cargo plane would snag the parachute in midair and reel the first-stage booster in somewhere over the northern section of the White Sands Missile Test Range. This recovery procedure would allow them to use the ALARM booster system anywhere in the world without hazard to people on the ground, even near heavily populated areas. The second- and third-stage motor sections would re-enter the atmosphere from space and bum up.

“Good second-stage ignition,” Kaddiri reported. “Altitude passing three hundred forty K, velocity passing Mach eleven, on course.” She turned to Foch with a look of concern, then at Masters. “Second-stage nozzle reports a gim- bal-limit fault, Jon. It might have overcorrected for winds at altitude and sustained some damage.”

Masters had a stopwatch counting down to the second- stage burnout. “Forty seconds to second-stage burnout,” he muttered. “Is it still hitting*a stop? Is it correcting its course?”