March 17, 2035
Earth Departure Minus Nineteen Days
16:35 Universal Time
Marshall Space Flight Center, Alabama
Rain was spattering against the windows of the ninth-floor conference room where the hastily picked board charged with reviewing the possible solutions to the problem presented by the wayward propellant stage was meeting. If they couldn’t find a way to get that errant stage into its proper orbit, where it could be mated to the waiting Arrow spacecraft, the Mars mission would not be able to start its journey on time.
And if the ship missed its narrow few-days-long launch window, the planets would not line up favorably for two more years. Arrow wouldn’t remain in its parking orbit for that length of time. Even with remote firings of its engines, the orbit would decay and ultimately the spacecraft would re-enter the atmosphere and plunge to a fiery demise.
And the entire Mars program would die with it.
Dr. Conley Fennell, small, dapper in a gray pinstripe suit, with thinning gray hair and a neat pencil-thin moustache, stood at the head of the long conference table, eying the men and women who had been named to find an answer to the problem.
“We can do this,” he said, in a reedy nasal voice. “The stage will remain in orbit for another two weeks—”
“In the wrong orbit,” said the bald, hard-faced engineer sitting halfway down the conference table. Like most of the men there, he was in rolled-up shirtsleeves.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Fennell snapped. He was wearing a vee-necked sweater beneath his suit jacket. A New Englander, Fennell could never accustom himself to the frigid air conditioning of the Huntsville center.
“Bickering isn’t going to get us anywhere,” said one of the three women at the table.
Fennell was the Marshall Center’s chief engineer, and NASA’s lead man in the program to remove debris from orbit. Known in the media as “NASA’s junk man,” Fennell was responsible for clearing orbital space of the dangerous pieces of spent rocket stages, fragments of broken spacecraft, inert equipment and other scraps of metal and plastic that infested orbital space, where they could shred working satellites and even endanger the space stations that housed dozens of men and women.
Pointing to the three-dimensional slide hovering in midair at the front of the room, Fennell said, “Look, the stage’s orbit isn’t that far from the orbit where the Arrow is parked.”
“But it’s losing velocity,” said another engineer. “It’ll decay and re-enter the atmosphere in a couple of weeks.”
“Which means we’ve got to grab it before then,” said Fennell. “That’s what the OTVs are for.”
“You don’t honestly think one of your OTVs can grapple a stage that size, do you?”
“I do,” Fennell said firmly. “One of our orbital transfer vehicles can reach the stage, dock with it, and push it to the orbit where the Arrow is waiting. We only need a delta v of a few hundred meters per second.”
One of the younger engineers, sitting near the end of the table, spoke up. “Okay, your chart shows the delta v budget and where your OTV is located relative to the stage. But what isn’t clear to me is the time factor. The OTV has to rendezvous with the stage, grab it—without damaging it—and move it to the orbit where it’s supposed to be. All within the next week to ten days.”
“We can do that,” Fennell insisted.
An engineer from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia asked, “We know where your OTV is now, but what’s it doing?”
“Currently,” Fennell replied, “it’s maneuvering a large debris object—a defunct Air Force satellite, actually—into a trajectory that will spin it down to re-entry. If we reprogram it now, it can release the satellite from its robotic arms into a fairly low-risk orbit and start boosting toward the stage. We’re running various trajectory options now.”
“You can do that autonomously? No crew involved?”
“Controllers on the ground operate the OTVs,” Fennell answered, as he clicked the remote in his hand and a new three-dimensional image appeared, showing an animated drawing of the OTV capturing the rogue stage.
“We can do this,” Fennell repeated. “And I don’t think we have any other choice.”
Lou Spearing, the Center’s deputy director, hung his head for a moment, as if in silent prayer. Then he looked at Fennell, smiled weakly, and said, “You’re right, Conley. We don’t have any other options. I say we go for it.”
Spearing looked up and down the table. The men and women seated there looked less than enthusiastic, but no voice was raised in objection. They were a conservative bunch, used to having plans they could review and assess for weeks before passing technical judgment, but in this case there was simply not enough time for that kind of thoughtful deliberation.
“Okay,” said Spearing. “Let’s get it done.”