V
On June 18, six days after the missing experiment had been noticed by NASA, a very exclusive meeting was held in the Flight Operations Conference Room at Johnson Space Center. Present were NASA Director Clarence Patterson, Joe Dykes and Charles Castor, as well as the Chief of Engineering at JSC, Natividad “Zeke” Maldenado, and Dr. Thelma Richards, Chief of Astrophysics at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where much of the telemetry and data gathering for NASA missions was done.
Zeke Maldenado had earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Houston, and had been at JSC since his undergraduate days. He had worked for Clarence Patterson during the Apollo program, when Patterson was director of Design Engineering. Maldenado had worked hard, gradually climbing the career ladder toward engineering management, and he knew more about spacecraft propulsion and airframe design than Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, could have dreamed of in his day. At the moment, his cultured Tejano accent and reassuring tone was helping to calm the tension in Patterson’s face. Patterson knew him and his family well, had worked long hours during grueling times with the man, and he trusted him.
Thelma Richards was another long-time friend. Tall for a woman, she had always reminded Patterson of a schoolteacher. Her no-nonsense gray eyes, wire-framed glasses, and eternal pageboy haircut might have something to do with it, he thought, smiling to himself in spite of his troubles.
Richards had been a mission analyst during the Viking missions to Mars, and had gotten to know Patterson during the initial mission planning meetings in Houston, back in the early seventies. They, too, had worked shoulder-to-shoulder, through many long nights. They had even been intimate for a few months, but their shared dreams and consuming fascination with spaceflight and discovery had bound their souls together in a way that somehow made sex between them distracting and uninteresting. They had remained close friends over the years, even after marrying other people. They enjoyed their occasional get-togethers at agency functions and planning meetings, and still had frequent telephone conversations.
Because her section at JPL was a locus of flight operations for so many Defense Department and civilian missions, Richards had solid contacts throughout the space sciences community, from the military to academia. She had developed most of the exobiology test protocols for deep space and planetary missions, and had earned her stripes the hard way, by genius of mind and an unrelenting hard-headedness that would brook no bureaucratic BS if it stood between her and what she wanted to accomplish.
Something of a hippie and activist in her younger days, and contemptuous of authority and politics, she was still a bit amazed, after all the intervening years, to know that she had made a lot of friends during her career, and that she, herself, had become a scientific authority and political power of national significance.
Patterson liked and trusted these people. They were his old teammates, people he knew he could depend on to give him good advice, and to keep it among themselves.
“How do you suppose it evaded radar detection?” Richards asked Maldenado. “We couldn’t track it as it boosted into higher orbit, and we can’t find it now.”
“State-of-the-art stealth technology,” answered Maldenado. “It was meant to be undetectable.” He leaned forward in his chair, forearms on the table, fingers laced together, and surveyed the ring of worried faces.
“Best guess scenario,” he said, “three hours after the package was released by Columbia, the container module separated. The gas bottles and accouterments, supposedly the workings of a hydrogen torch and kiln, actually comprised an engine. Same for the rest of it. The test equipment listed in the package nomenclature is probably navigational stuff and controls. The main body of the device was inside a contamination-proof housing, and engineering only has the visual record of the outer casing to go by. The plans we have are of the Stanford experiment, which may have no resemblance whatever to the package we lofted.
“The Air Force Space Command imaged the orbital-transition burn, three hours and eighteen minutes after deployment into LEO, and assumed that it was a part of our planned activity. The Air Force thought that the burn was just an attitude-correction maneuver within the planned orbit, and didn’t pay any attention to it. Why should they? It was a NASA launch, not an incoming, hostile missile . . . right?
“They didn’t track anything in a tangential path, just the container parts, as they swung along in the original, twenty-eight-degree track. Incidentally, those parts were lined with aluminum foil to give them a higher-than-normal radar albedo, just to keep the Air Force thinking that it was where it was supposed to be, until final maneuvers were accomplished.
“Anyway, we enhanced the image of the engine flare. The computed trajectory of the burn path could possibly put it in a geostationary orbit, but exactly where is hard to tell. It was headed out, though. We know the bird’s mass and the duration of the burn, but we don’t know what the fuel or oxidizer was, or the thrust of the engine. Spectral analysis of the engine flare gives a strong hydrogen line, but it could be pure Hydrogen and LOX [liquid oxygen], or something like Aerozine 50 with a Nitro-Tet oxidizer, even kerosene and peroxide. Projecting where it ended up depends a great deal on knowing the energy of the burn, and we don’t. From the size and spectral temperature of the flare, though, it looks like it had more than enough energy for geosynchronous insertion. It may even be headed for Jupiter, for all we know. If it boosted to a higher transfer orbit, nobody saw an apogee burn that would have parked it in a station-keeping orbit. It just disappeared.
“So that’s about the size of it. Unless the bird emits radiant energy of some sort—RF, microwave or something—we are going to have a hard time finding it.”
“There’s no chance of the orbit decaying, and it falling back to Earth? You’re certain about that, Zeke?” asked Patterson.
Richards answered, “Not unless it makes a U-turn, Butch, and we know it hasn’t yet. If it fired retros, it would eventually decay and fall back, but the chances of it surviving reentry are slim to none. What would be the point, anyway? Why go geostationary, twenty-two thousand miles out, only to drop out later. It wouldn’t make any sense.”
“What does?” remarked Dykes, absently contemplating the paperclip he turned round and round in his fingers.
“Well, at least this means that it is not a reentry vehicle for a weapon,” said Patterson, his worried frown visibly relaxing. “It’s certainly not big enough to be a missile launch platform, and geostationary orbit rather limits its potential applications to communications or surveillance, wouldn’t you say, Joe?”
“Yes,” Dykes answered with a sigh, tossing the paperclip on the table and leaning back in his chair with fingers laced across his stomach, “and I haven’t breathed this easy in days. I think that, at worst, someone has hoodwinked us out of a free satellite-insertion job. A few million bucks in lost revenue is nothing to what this could have cost the agency in appropriations cuts, and loss of agency and personal prestige, not to mention the potential harm to the population, if it had been a weapon. If it is some sort of propaganda hoax, we can always deny that we helped to put it up, even if they claim we did. In fact, I suggest that we do deny it, emphatically. I don’t like lying, but it wouldn’t do anyone any good now, to admit to such a thing. If we did admit to it, we as individuals might eventually live it down, but it would do irreparable harm to this agency.”
“A lot of other countries have launch capability,” Castor interjected. “Even the Russian satellite countries. There’s no way to prove that one of the European countries didn’t do it, and I vote we play it that way. If some terrorist faction in the Middle East wanted to put one up, there isn’t anything to stop them from buying a ride on an Ariane or Soyuz booster.”
“That’s true,” Patterson said, gazing at the tabletop reflectively, “so why use NASA?”
“Good question,” Castor responded. “It must mean that it’s a U.S.-based group that did it. Someone without access to other countries’ spaceflight communities. Perhaps it’s as simple as someone who just wanted to get an experiment into space, but couldn’t afford the freight. We’re looking into past applications for experiment transport—you know, university science projects, small business research initiatives we’ve sponsored, that sort of thing. We get a thousand applications for every one that we accept. It seems like a stretch, but weirder things have happened.”
Richards commented, “Whatever the case, I have an idea we’ll know something before too long. Whether it’s an experiment, a comm satellite or just some sort of thumbing-us-off gesture, in order to be useful, it has to do something. When it does, we’ll know what it’s all about.”
“Still no idea how they did it, Joe?” Patterson addressed Dykes.
“Not yet. Whoever they were, they knew our launch make-ready procedures, and our launch schedule, including particulars about our cargo. It had to be planned meticulously, months in advance, and skillfully carried out. We’re checking employees, both those currently employed, and those who were dismissed ‘for cause’ as far back as two years. It’s difficult, when you can’t say why you want the information, especially with contract personnel.”
“The Stanford group is particularly sensitive,” said Castor. “You can imagine what would happen with something like this if it leaked at a university. They had the best opportunity, based on knowledge of payload specifics, but as far as we can tell, none of them have had any in-depth experience with the workings inside Kennedy Space Center, or with NASA in general. Everything—individual backgrounds, politics, work history—they all check out. Too obvious anyway.”
Dykes observed thoughtfully, “Somebody currently working within the agency may have helped the perpetrators, but it would still be possible for someone on the outside, if they knew our operation well enough, and if there was enough money involved to buy information from a loose-lipped employee. Hell, it’s even possible that an employee in Inspection or Packing gave out enough information to do the job over a few beers, and doesn’t even realize it.”
“We had better devise new security procedures for launch,” said Patterson. “I would rather we did it than some heavy-handed zealots from the military and the National Security Agency.”
“Amen!” said Dykes.