Storming intrepid, p.1
Storming intrepid, page 1
For Paula,
who took my hand and walked beside me on
the
Long March (es)
Acknowledgments
There were a great many press officers within the armed forces, NASA, and the educational community who were most kind in providing me with data for this book. The existence of these professionals is a reflection that the free flow of information concerning American military and space affairs is a strength, rather than a weakness, of our society.
I would like to extend my appreciation to Neil and Judy Robinson, and to Don Davison and Lee Dean for their help when this manuscript was in its formative stages, and to Mike Reed and Margie Cruse for their efforts in bringing this project to fruition.
Craig Covault and Bruce Nordwall of Aviation Week were very generous with their time in fielding my questions, and I am grateful to them.
To my agent Jan Miller and my editor Jim Wade, I would like to say I was uncommonly fortunate to be in the hands of such superb professionals.
Tom Clancy and Stephen Coonts were very kind to extend their assistance, and it was most welcome.
A special note of thanks goes to Tom McElmurry, former deputy commander of the Air Force test pilot school and NASA veteran who helped manage the Skylab and space shuttle projects. Professor McElmurry was most gracious to provide a review of the manuscript. Any technical errors that remain are mine and mine alone.
Finally, for Mom, Dad, Sis, and Fannie Mae, thanks for your help, all along the way.
The Prelude
SOUTH PACIFIC
3n4' SOUTH, 117° 23 WEST
In the predawn twilight, the Marshal Nedelin was a ghostly, almost surreal image—as if it were a latter-day Flying Dutchman gliding across the sea.
Although it resembled a warship in many respects, the vessel carried no missiles or guns on its deck. Instead, it bristled with electronic gear of every size and description—dominated in particular by a large radome just forward of amidships. If required, computerized controls could keep the radome's dish antenna stable, even in heavy seas; but that was unimportant at the moment, for the Pacific Ocean was dead calm this November morning.
In spite of its vassal states and all its power and bluster, the Soviet Union possessed few genuine friends in the world— particularly in the region south of the Tropic of Capricorn. And without sympathetic governments, the Kremlin had few safe harbors where it could establish sensitive electronic outposts.
Because of this dearth of friendly real estate, the Nedelin, and a half-dozen ships like her, had been forged in the Black Sea shipyards of Nikolayev and dispatched across the high seas on electronic tracking missions vital to the Motheriand. They were
eminently capable of monitoring the outreaches of space, while remaining safe from intrusion and totally under control of their Soviet masters.
Below decks on this November morning, the Nedelin's computers rapidly plotted a trajectory. Then, at the proper moment, the radome's dish antenna pivoted and fired its monopulse radar skyward, probing for an ethereal object hurtling somewhere through the ionosphere. Back and forth the beam traveled, until a sailor was rewarded with a luminescent blip on his cathode-ray screen. The young man punched a button, and the ship's UHF radio immediately transmitted a facsimile of the image to a Molniya communications satellite, where a transponder bounced the signal to another antenna half a worid away.
KALININGRAD FLUE CONTROL CENTRE, SOYUZ SOVETSKIKH SOTSIALISTICHESKIKH REPUBLIK (CCCP)
**Sixty seconds to reentry fire, Comrade General!" barked the mission commander.
*'Very well," came General Shenko's soft reply.
Col. Oleg Malyshev, the mission commander, spun his chair back to the monitor, forcing himself to concentrate on this last, critical leg of the journey. He'd scarcely left his post for the past fifty-two hours, as the small army of paper tea containers surrounding his feet would attest. Yet in spite of his mounting fatigue, the tall, thin officer with blond hair and Slavic features was unwilling to delegate even minor tasks during this crucial phase of the enterprise.
Row upon row of monitors and their attending technicians radiated out from the huge Mercator world map projection on the forewall. Each person stared intently at his individual screen in the spacious Flite Control Centre, and in spite of the air conditioning that labored to keep the equipment cool, all were sweating like pigs—their rivulets of perspiration triggered by stress rather than heat.
Malyshev, who was unusually young to be a ftill colonel in the Soviet Aerospace Forces, couldn't worry about General
Shenko s nonchalant manner now. Nor could he worry about the other general—this one in a green serge uniform—watching attentively from the glassed-in observation deck. His only thoughts could be of his duty. "Thirty seconds," he said into his headset microphone, and added, "Commence final arming sequence on engines one and two."
THE MIKHAIL SUSLOV ALTITUDE: 163 MILES ABOVE THE SOUTH PACIFIC
Lt. Col. Dmitri Bulgarin popped up the arming circuit's safety cover and flipped the toggle switch from safe to arm, causing the nearby annunciator light to change from red to green.
"Fifteen seconds," crackled in his headset.
Although the entire reentry firing procedure could be done automatically, Bulgarin's stick-and-rudder nature refused to entrust this one vital function to the spacecraft's on-board computers. He was, after all, a pilot.
Bulgarin's copilot gazed through the windshield at the earth's horizon, which appeared above them and inverted. This was because the Suslov (named for the long-dead Politburo ideologue) was traveling upside down and backward—a seemingly unorthodox position for a winged object, but necessary for the retrofire braking action to take effect.
The word Fire! reverberated in his eardrums and Bulgarin mashed the trigger button, causing the TXimansky liquid-fuel engines to thunder to life—but in the vacuum of space the thunder was silent. It was only from the vibration and mounting g-forces that the two cosmonauts knew the ship's engines had responded.
SOUTH PACIFIC
14° 16' SOUTH, 119° 27' West
ALTITUDE: 61,000 FEET
"Spyglass, this is Rabbit's Nest. Target is coming up on your position now. Begin traverse at zero-one-seven degrees on my mark."
"Roger that, Rabbit," replied the chief master sergeant, as his pudgy hand gently rotated the focusing knob on his console.
The specially modified high-altitude Boeing 767 was cruising over the South Pacific preparing to do what it did best—take a very expensive picture. Its call sign, "Spyglass," was appropriate, for the 767 was a flying observatory designed to take pictures of man-made satellites in low earth orbit. Aboard the aircraft was an exotic reflecting telescope that could scan the heavens through a hole in the plane's humpback roof. The scope consisted of a networic of ultrathin flexible mirrors arrayed in a honeycomb fashion. These "rubber mirrors" could be bent and focused by computer to compensate for atmospheric distortion and produce images of astonishing clarity—so clear that one could read a license plate from a hundred miles away.
The position of Spyglass over the South Pacific had been determined by four NavStar global positioning satellites. From 22,300 miles above the earth, three of the satellites continually transmitted time and positioning data to the 767, where an onboard computer triangulated the information, then spat out the aircraft's exact coordinates and altitude. A fourth satellite acted as a double check to ensure the 767's internal clock was accurate. It was. So accurate, in fact, that the aircraft was directly beneath the Suslov's orbital path, which had long been tracked, computed, and plotted by the North American Aerospace Defense Command's Spacetrack radar/computer network. Spyglass was now in position to take its picmre.
"Mark," said Rabbit's Nest.
"Roger," replied Spyglass, and the chief flipped a switch to start the aircraft's digital video recorders.
"C'mon, sweetheart," coaxed the chief. "C'mon, be sweet, lift your skirt for me.'*
The neighboring technician looked askance. He had always
thought the chiefs near-sexual relationship with the equipment was a little bizarre, but thought it better not to say anything.
Despite the chiefs urging, the TV monitor remained blank except for the twilight sky. The Suslov spacecraft was traveling at 17,000 miles per hour, while the Spyglass airliner limped along at a meager 500 mph. That meant the 767 had only a tiny window of time to find the Russian orbiter. The seconds ticked by and the screen remained blank until, finally, the chief sighed and decided the Suslov wasn't coming to him. He was about to start a search pattern with the telescope when a delta-shaped object popped onto the screen.
"Awright!" he howled. **We nailed the little bastard." Giddy with his success, the chief quickly adjusted the dials for greater magnification. Then he leaned forward to inspect the Russian spacecraft pictured on the monitor. His concentration was so intense that, when the image erupted before his eyes, he involuntarily recoiled from the screen, and it took a few seconds for his mind to comprehend what his eyes had witnessed. Then it dawned on him. "Sweet Jesus!" he cried while keying his mi-crophdfte. "Rabbit, this is Spyglass! We got the target on screen and he's firing his retro rockets! I say again, target has initiated retrofire. Christ Almighty, what a picture!"
"We copy that. Spyglass," replied a dispassionate voice. "Put it through on RealTime."
"Roger, Rabbit," he said, while nodding to the neighboring technician, who threw the appropriate switches. Almost immediately the same image appeared on another screen at NORAD headquarters, deep inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado.
THE MIKHAIL SUSLOV ALTITUDE: 107 MILES COURSE: NORTH POSITION: CROSSING THE ANTARCTIC CIRCLE
Twenty-three years of iron discipline in the Soviet armed forces had prepared Dmitri Bulgarin for the next twenty minutes of his Ufe. He had to control the distilled fear and not let the image of his wife and daughter intrude on his thoughts. Their lives had been richer in many ways because he was a cosmonaut. But the state exacted a toll for the privileges it granted, and now the toll was due.
When the retrofire ceased, Bulgarin immediately pivoted the spacecraft into the correct reentry attitude of 32 degrees inclination. The Suslov was on a descent gradient toward the earth and would soon begin striking the first errant molecules of the lower ionosphere. Much like an airborne swan landing in the water, the Suslov would decelerate from a speed of almost 17,000 miles per hour to 1,500 mph in the space of twenty minutes. The resistance of the atmosphere, which provided the braking action for the winged spacecraft, also generated frightftil surface friction, heating the leading edges of the vehicle to temperatures of 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Small wonder that most meteorites were vaporized before they hit the earth's surface.
To keep it from being incinerated, the Soviet space shuttle, like its American counterpart, had been surfaced with heat-resistant silica tiles. Unlike the American shuttle, however, something had gone horrendously wrong during the reentry phase of the Suslov's predecessor, the Buran. While descending from its third voyage into outer space, the Buran had burned into a cinder.
Bulgarin was painfully aware of the previous shuttle's fate as he watched the surface-temperature gauge start to climb and felt the buffeting grow more intense. "Altitude eighty-three kilometers . . . eighty . . . seventy-eight ..." The strain in Bulgarin's voice became more pronounced and his radio transmission grew weaker as the Suslov plummeted into the "black hole" of reentry. The fireball enveloping the orbiter was
so intense that it stripped the electrons from the surrounding air molecules. As a result, for twelve minutes the spacecraft was covered in a sheath of ions that was impenetrable to radio waves.
As a reddish glow filled the windshield, Bulgarin tightened his grip around the control stick.
On its third voyage, the Buran shuttle had been incinerated during its descent through the "black hole."
The Suslov was now reentering the atmosphere from lis fourth journey into outer space.
KALININGRAD FLITE CONTROL CENTRE
As the spacecraft hurtled above the Indian Ocean, it was tracked by the massive phased-array radar complex on the banks of the Caspian Sea. The Flite Centre's computers digested the radar data and plotted the orbiter's F>ath on the large Mercator map projection, which now held everyone's attention. There was nothing the technicians could do but wait until the Suslov emerged from the radio blackout.
"Eight minutes of communications blackout remaining," announced Mission Commander Malyshev, to no one in particular.
The ground track of the Suslov advanced on the screen, and the tension in the spacious room became palpable.
"Seven minutes." Malyshev's voice was little more than a whimper now, and his throat felt like a dusty road. He started to reach for a nearby cup, but reconsidered. His system simply couldn't absorb another ounce of tea.
The hulking General Shenko took a very long drag on his Chesterfield cigarette and exhaled slowly. He loved the American tobacco more than he dared ever say.
Malyshev's sweat-drenched blond hair was now pasted to his temples. He murmured. "Five minutes."
There was a collective sigh from the technicians. The Buran— which means "snowstorm"—had disappeared with six minutes of blackout remaining. The Suslov had now passed beyond that threshold. Maybe the Buran tragedy had been a fluke after all. Maybe the Russian shuttle was truly a sound spacecraft. Maybe there was reason to hope.
"Four minutes."
Yes, maybe there was reason to hope. Even General Shenko's basset-hound face was showing a flicker of life.
On the plot board, the Suslov's ground track advanced again.
"Three minutes." Malyshev's voice had returned. It looked good now. Very good indeed.
"Commander!" It was the radar liaison officer over the intercom. "I have the Caspian radar station. They say the image is fading from their screen!"
There was stunned silence.
"Confirm that report!" barked Malyshev.
The radar officer held the headset tight against his ears, then slowly relaxed in his chair. "Caspian station confirms, and says the image fragmented before disappearing from their scope."
"Communications officer, try to contact them!" ordered Malyshev.
The young communications officer began murmuring into his microphone, trying unsuccessfully to mask his sobs. Colonel Bulgarin had been his friend. At Star City he was like everyone's favorite uncle—a person who always made you feel special. He followed his orders and signaled the Suslov, but he knew it was useless.
As the young officer's murmurs went on, a communal shock spread throughout the room. Every person felt his mission and sense of purpose had vanished along with the Suslov—cvtry person, that is, save for one.
"General Shenko, as a representative of the Committee for State Security I must ask you to accompany me." The voice was gentle. Almost benevolent.
General Shenko turned and confronted his counterpart in the green serge uniform of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopas-nosti. Shenko was grateful this one wasn't as arrogant as the garden variety Chekist.
"Very well," replied Shenko. He took his pack of Chesterfields ofi" the console and stuffed them into the breast pocket of his rumpled uniform, then turned to leave the Elite Centre. Over his shoulder he gave one last instruction. "Tell Baikonur not to waste a second," he said flatly.
Malyshev nodded as he watched the door close behind his general.
A final puff of Chesterfield smoke seemed to hang in the air.
BAIKONUR COSMODROME, TYURATAM, KAZAKHSTAN REPUBLIK, CCCP
The gargantuan doors of the shuttle hangar slowly rumbled open to reveal a duplicate of the Mikhail Suslov. The size, shape, and markings of the winged spacecraft appeared to be the same as the original shuttle, except for black, sootlike impressions along its side. Had the genuine Suslov survived, the reentry friction would have burned similar markings onto the white fuselage.
Ground technicians hurriedly hooked the nosewheel onto the tow tractor, and as soon as the doors cleared the wingspan, the duplicate began moving out onto the 5,000-meter runway built especially for shuttle landings.
The special tow tractor used only a fraction of its pulling horsepower, since the replica Suslov was fabricated from sheets of phenolic plastic laminated to a plywood frame. Its core was hollow except for some steel ingots loaded aboard to provide it some stability in heavy wind.
When the decoy reached the end of the tarmac, a ground crew detached the hitch and attached a deployed barking parachute to the tail section. A generator cart was wheeled underneath the craft and started, then a technician plugged the electric cable into a connector on the decoy's belly. The connector was hooked up to a network of heating coils imbedded in the plastic skin.
A covey of rescue and ground-service vehicles then drew up around the decoy as if the genuine Suslov had landed.
The ground crew chief surveyed the scene and was satisfied with himself that the exercise had gone a lot smoother—this time.
UNITED STATES SPACE COMMAND HEADQUARTERS, SPACE DEFENSE OPERATIONS CENTER, CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN, COLORADO
Gen. Rodger Whittenberg, Commander in Chief, United States Space Command, stared intently at the television monitor while the Suslov's reentry bum was replayed for the third time.
"Okay, that's enough," he told the airman, then turned to the colonel. "I want to see the digital pix from this tape as soon as they come out of the laser printer, and I want a Keyhole pass over Baikonur ASAP. We need to see how well that shuttle held up on reentry."
"Yessir," replied his intelligence chief. "We had a KH-12 slated for a pass over Krasnoyarsk to check on some new ABM construction, but that can wait. The Keyhole's flight path has already been altered, and she'll be coming over Baikonur in about forty minutes. We'll catch it in daylight on the first pass."
"Good . . . good." At least we don't have to worry about getting Keyhole pix these days, Whittenberg thought.
