March 12, 2035
Earth departure Minus Twenty-Four days
09:20 Universal Time
Spaceport America, New Mexico
For the first seven minutes it looked like a routine launch. The same type of commercial rocket booster that had carried all the components of the Arrow, its cargo, and the teams of technicians who assembled the spacecraft in orbit. Nine successful launches, without a mishap.
The booster lifted off the desert launch stand on a cloudless New Mexico winter night. Only a few hundred spectators braved the bone-chilling weather, far fewer than the thousands who had watched the earlier launches of Arrow’s components.
The blinding orange light of the rocket’s plume lit the landscape around the spaceport with an eerie, otherwordly glow. This was the last launch in the sequence before the highly anticipated launch of Arrow’s crew, in twenty-one days.
Carrying sixteen thousand pounds of hydrogen propellant for the spacecraft’s nuclear propulsion system, the booster left the launch stand majestically and began its eight-minute flight into orbit.
It was in the last few seconds of those critical eight minutes that the booster’s engines shut down prematurely, likely placing the rocket, and its cargo, into a useless orbit. The air in the spaceport’s compact control center suddenly turned a breathless blue as the mission controllers desperately sought to find out what had gone wrong.