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CHAPTER 19

Boca Chica, Texas

Friday

3:30 p.m. Central Time


“…nine, eight, seven, six, five, go for main engines, two, ignition…”

Marcus watched eagerly as the new reusable single-stage suborbital rocket lurched upward from the launch complex he had built right next to SpaceX over the past decade. The internal ignition sparkers fired inside the four maneuverable exhaust nozzles, igniting the mixture of Rocket Propellant 1 (RP1) and Liquid Oxygen (LOX) in the modernized reignitable version of the Russian Energia–built RD-171M engine. The rocket flared with bold bright-orange fire and white steam exhaust, blasting sound waves that shook Marcus Dorman’s chest even though he was five kilometers away from the launch pad observing from just outside the launch control building. The awesome power of the rocket motors caused his teeth to vibrate against one another almost painfully to the point that he either had to bite down or hold his mouth open.

Dorman Space Unlimited was one of the latest multibillionaire-driven space ventures. Having your own space company and way to space had become a rite of passage for the mega rich. Dorman wasn’t going to be left out. His rocket, at least the one anybody knew about, was a single-stage fly-back booster with a smaller six-person reentry vehicle that looked like a miniature space shuttle, though more like a smaller version of the X-37B spaceplane on top. In fact, the design almost appeared as if Dorman had somehow gotten the blueprints of the X-37B and scaled them down to meet his design needs.

The booster was mostly based on the Russian Zenit-3SL first stage with a modified engine so that it could be reignited for booster landing. Marcus had specific reasons for using the Zenit-3SL design that had been used a couple decades prior in the SeaLaunch venture that had gone bankrupt. Marcus had stepped in at just the right moment and bought up as much of the intellectual property as he could get his hands on.

The crew vehicle, called the Dorman Defender, used a combination of modern carbon nanotube–reinforced ceramics and a sleek glide-body shape for reentry, much like the X-37 again. The crew cabin was large enough for a pilot and copilot, much like the space shuttle cockpit but more modern with six seats behind them in three rows of two. The crew vehicle itself, once orbital in future flights, would use retro thrusters to slow and deorbit, reenter the atmosphere, then glide to a safe speed to an altitude of about ten kilometers where it would then pop the rear cowling, which covered a pusher propeller. Once the vehicle was slowed to prop speed, the wings extended farther out to make it more like a short takeoff and landing vehicle. The sleek little spaceplane could actually land in less than four hundred meters and could take off under its own power in less than that. While it couldn’t return to space without the booster, it could fly as long as it had kerosene or RP1 in the tanks. It also had a ballistic recovery chute system that could be released in the event of catastrophic systems failures.

This was the first horizontal landing spacecraft that actually was powered and had options after reentry about where it would land. The fly-back booster part of the rocket copied the Blue Origin approach and used chutes to slow itself and then it fired the boosters just before landing to bring it down safely. There had long been rumors that there was bad blood between Dorman and Bezos for using very similar software and control system designs. There was even rumor that Dorman had either hacked into the Blue Origin facility, paid off some employees, or did a black bag job and stole them. There was never proof and Dorman didn’t care.

Rumors never bothered him and he figured Bezos was too busy to worry with it also. The actual fact was, of course, he’d stolen plans from every single one of his billionaire competitors and even managed to get his hands on classified design information for the X-37. It didn’t hurt having the most wanted hacker in the world at his disposal. Again, nobody had ever proven a thing and all the right people had been paid off or dealt with in some manner. Nobody ever would prove a thing. SpaceX was always giving him property boundary hassles and Marcus often had his employees encroach the boundaries just to piss them off. Marcus wasn’t thinking about any of those things today.

Today was the first fully manned suborbital flight of the Defender. In order to maintain privacy for his crew and passengers, DSU had a strict blackout policy for the occupants. If you wanted to fly in space and let everyone on the internet see it, well, the Dorman Defender wasn’t your ride. Marcus was looking toward a bigger market than “space tourism.” He was looking at using space as a pathway to destinations hard to reach terrestrially.

The Dorman Defender was to be the means to other ends. The public and marketing argument was that he’d chosen that name because his main public relations and marketing pitch was that nobody was truly developing a mechanism to save people around the planet during emergencies rapidly—not even the Space Forces of the world could do that. He was taking that mission on himself, hence, the Dorman Defender. His publicly defined plan was to build a vehicle that could take off and land on unimproved surfaces such as fields and roads, bringing emergency response supplies to anywhere on the planet in less than an hour. He hoped to push that to thirty minutes or less, like pizza delivery.

“Look at that baby go!” Marcus said excitedly with two big thumbs-up—giving the documentary cameras a quick soundbite for social media advertisements. He shielded the sun with his left hand and pointed to the sky. Of course, his contact lenses would tint and attenuate the sun as much as they needed to but old habits died hard.

“Sir, they have it on the live feed inside if you want to watch it now,” Grayson Devaney, the public relations face of Dorman Space Unlimited, told him. She was wearing the space company’s uniform: an all-sky-blue, form-fitting jumpsuit with Star Trek-like red-and-gold accent lines across the zipped-up front, cuffs, and waist. The Defender patch on the right arm was reminiscent of the space shuttle mission patches of a long-gone era. Dorman had paid top dollar to a designer and a marketing team to pull nostalgic well-known space and science fiction accents into the uniform design. He felt that he’d gotten his money’s worth.

“Ms. Devaney, please lead the way,” he said.

“Right this way, sir.”

Devaney led Marcus into the main Launch and Mission Control Center to a VIP viewing room overlooking the floor. As he entered, several people stood and cleared a path for him to take the front row seat in the center. An elderly man held out a hand as he passed by and Marcus stopped only briefly to shake it.

“Senator Green, nice of you to join us today,” Marcus said. “Quite the launch, hey?”

“Nice, Mr. Dorman,” Senator Green replied. “Brilliant. And am I to understand it is going to land in Switzerland?”

“Yes, the booster will land here. But we have another one at the spaceport we have assembled near the northeastern border of Switzerland. The ship can be reconditioned and launched from there. It could just fly back under its own power but would have to stop and refuel many, many times, or we could ship it back. I, personally, like the idea of launching it back, which is what we plan to do soon,” Dorman replied to the senator.

“How long will it take to replenish it and relaunch it?” another VIP asked. Marcus didn’t recognize the woman until his contact lenses did a facial recognition and then a badge barcode scan and told him she was sent from the Texas governor’s office.

“Well, we hope to get to days. Right now, probably a month,” Dorman said.

“…booster recovery system has been deployed and we are T-minus two minutes from booster reignition…” was announced over the intercom system.

“What a show!” Dorman exclaimed.

The launch had been fairly straightforward. The clock hit zero and the RD-171M kicked in, pushing them to about two-and-three-quarters gee. They hit Max-Q about seventy seconds in and there was some shaking and bouncing then. After that it was smooth until main engine cutoff and stage separation. The Dorman Defender spaceplane was released and had risen to an apogee of nearly nine hundred and sixty kilometers. There had been almost ten minutes of microgravity before falling back into thick enough atmosphere for deceleration to begin. The command crew and three passengers were all doing fine.

Exactly thirty-three minutes and fifty-one seconds had passed since the ignition clock had hit zero and the mission clock had started counting up. Reentry had gone smoothly and the little spaceplane was performing as planned.

“She’s handling magnificently, Control,” Captain Jebidiah Reynolds said over the flight channel as he manned the controls of the Dorman Defender. At the moment he was thoroughly enjoying how it handled—not unlike the single-engine trainer plane he’d spent hundreds of hours in. “Glide-phase wing extension setting one activated.”

Jeb knew that all the telemetry data was getting to the Swiss ground station but he enjoyed following the flight procedures as he had trained. There were manual switches that would enable the wing extensions and flap settings but at the moment the spaceplane was set on software control mode. So, truly, Jeb was only manning the stick and rudder. The spaceplane was fly-by-wire, which meant that he actually could let the software handle the stick and rudder too. But Jebidiah preferred to fly the little spaceplane himself.

“Airspeed dropping through Mach one point zero nine, point zero eight, point zero seven…” he read until the aerodynamics of the spaceplane could no longer push the atmosphere boundary layers out of its way.

BOOM!!

“We are now subsonic and continuing on glidepath,” he reported.

Jebidiah continued along flying the prepared flight path as planned and following procedures for the next several minutes. Europe was filling the viewports beneath him as their altitude dropped to that of a typical commercial airliner. A minute or so later the propeller cowling was retracted as they dropped below five kilometers above ground level. The spaceplane was beginning to sound more like a small airplane with the rushing wind against the hull.

“Expanding wings to full.” Jebidiah tapped a few controls on the glass cockpit. “Switching over to full manual controls. Pusher-prop startup in three, two, one.”

The airplane engine roared to life behind them. Jeb could feel when the blades of the prop caught the air and added thrust. The spaceplane turned glider was now a powered airplane. He adjusted the throttle on the touchpad in front of him and made a note that the temperature, oil pressure, fuel level, and prop speed were all right where they needed be. Flying the little plane was an absolute joy.

“Hey, there are the Alps way off to south!” The flight engineer in the number three seat pointed out the mountains to the passenger beside him and the two behind him.

“How can you tell? It is too dark!” one of the passengers asked.

“Well, if you look closely, you can see the Gornergrat Bahn, the highest open airway train in Europe running along the ridge. See the lights?” the flight engineer continued.

“Aha. I do see,” the passenger behind him said.

“Switzerland Dorman Spaceport, this is the Dorman Defender vectoring in for a landing, over?” Captain Reynolds radioed to the ground control as they approached.

“Copy you, Defender. We show everything is A-okay and your path is spot on. Continue to follow your planned vector path and we’ll see you in about five minutes. Be advised that we are having about twelve knot crosswinds from the east and visibility conditions are clear. Over.”

“Roger that, SDS. Dorman Defender is entering final approach.” Jeb watched as the blue runway lights lit up down below and just to the north as he turned from the Base Leg path onto final approach.

Landing had been smooth as could be. Jeb was proud of that. He waited for everyone to disembark from the plane before he did his postflight checklist and shut everything down. The flight engineer had already made a once-around the spaceplane twice. The flight had inflicted no apparent exterior damage to the plane. As far as he could tell, if he wanted to, he could get in that plane and take off and fly to wherever his fuel would take him.

Jebidiah casually made his way down the steps of the plane until his feet felt the hangar concrete floor. That was the first time anyone had made a flight like that in history, but there was little fanfare. Anonymity of the flight crew and passengers was something Dorman was pushing. He wasn’t interested in the history books. He was interested in a capability that had never existed before.

So, there was no press during boarding and deboarding. There were good reasons for this policy, he was sure. Jeb did his best to act as if he were paying little attention to the limousine surrounded by very big men in black suits that awaited one of the passengers. The man had remained completely quiet throughout the flight and walked immediately off the spaceplane to his entourage and then was in the car and gone. Jeb never knew who the man had been and was paid well enough not to ask. He did have some thoughts, though, that whoever that man was, Dorman was going to be asking for a favor from him at some point along the way. Jeb had known Marcus long enough to be aware that every single thing the man did was through intense forethought and calculation.

Thousands of miles away, Marcus Dorman stood at the landing platform, watching the sun starting to sink behind his very successful rocket booster. Marcus found just the right spot to stand so that the reddening sunlight was scattered just across the DSU logo on the rocket body side facing south. The logo was painted on with retroreflective red, white, and blue paint that scattered the sunlight in different ways with even the tiniest movement of one’s position. He bobbed his head back and forth sideways subtly and enjoyed the array of colors as he did so.

Looking up at it, he realized that the booster body cylinder was taller than you’d think when you got close enough to it to really tell. He was just outside the radius where the landing thrust exhaust had not burned into the concrete pad and just inside the yellow painted warning circle. The white painted metallic landing struts, three of them, extended out from the base of the rocket and held it firmly in place like the rockets of science fiction from the previous century.

But there was no ladder extending from within from which some swashbuckling hero would emerge. In fact, he thought, with the spaceplane missing from the top, it had a lonely and almost disturbingly incomplete look about it. He turned to the east to look out across the beach at the ocean. Blue and green algae-topped waves gently broke against the shore with almost no spray. There had been no weather and the ocean was fairly calm. It had been a great day to launch a rocket. He turned to look in the distance to what he guessed was in the direction of Switzerland. He allowed himself, for a brief moment only, to revel in his immediate successes. He was proud of his idea. This rocket system could deliver people almost anywhere on the planet in a very short notice. He had all sorts of ideas for it and how it would fit into his larger plans, but there were still a lot of pieces that had to fall into place before those ideas came to fruition. He was confident that they would come to pass, though. He was very confident.

It will be orbital, he thought. But not yet…not yet. His moment was interrupted when his contact lenses alerted him that he had an incoming encrypted message. Using his mind-machine interface, he opened the file and read it.


M,

Amazing adventure my friend. Safely, here in Switzerland. My family has arranged further travel modalities. As far as our quid pro quo goes, I have been assured that the concrete has cured, the engine installed, and we will deliver our part of the deal when it is needed. Will be in touch once the other pieces fall into place. Thank you.

R


Marcus mentally typed out a response.


R,

Glad you made it safely. Welcome to Switzerland, the land of no extradition from the United States and the European Union. Enjoy your freedom.

M


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