Red Hope (8 page)

“Wow!”

“Yah, it was amazing. From then on, we battled with
the Russians for the next step which was putting somebody on the Moon. We did
that in the summer of 1969.”

“Do you remember that?” asked Cody.

Adam smiled.

“No, I wasn’t born yet unfortunately. I don’t know
what it’s like to watch somebody walking on the Moon. Anyhow, the Russians were
actually trying for the Moon too, but they never made it. So we won the Space
Race.”

Cody looked confused and asked, “So if the Space Race
is over, what was your long phone call about today? Mommy wouldn’t let us go
near your office.”

“Well, technically I haven’t decided what I’m going to
do. The next step for human explorers is to visit another planet. Like Mars.
And that’s what I might do. Maybe.”

Cody closed his eyes and said, “It sounds like you
better sleep on that decision.”

Adam laughed.

“Thanks, I think I will.”

Cody closed his eyes and hugged his stuffed dragon. He
drifted off to sleep. Adam was still very much awake and wandered back to his
own bed.

The next morning Adam and Connie took the kids to the
park to help his son ride his bike. Cody was only a few weeks away from getting
rid of his training wheels.  Then Adam chased Catie around the jungle gym. Cody
eventually came over to the jungle gym to join them.

Adam asked, “Would you guys mind if I took a trip to
Mars?”

“Would you bring me back some Space Ice Cream?” asked
the younger sibling Catie.

“I’ll bring back a crate of it for you,” answered
Adam.

“Then I guess it’s okay. Just take some Band-Aids in
case you get a booboo.”

Adam walked over to Connie who was sitting on the park
bench and leaned down to whisper in her ear. He casually recited a line from
his favorite Robert Frost poem.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. And sorry I
could not travel both…”

“And long you stood in the dog poop?” said Connie as
she pointed down to show him where his shoe had landed.

He laughed out loud, “Yah, yah, yadda, yadda, I took
the road less traveled by and it involved dog poop.”

She laughed loudly. He wiped his shoe off in the
grass.

When they got home from the park, Adam dug around in
his pocket for the small piece of paper that had Chris Tankovitch’s cell phone
number on it. He took a deep breath and dialed the number.

Chris answered with his Midwestern plain accent.

“Hey Adam. Talk to me. Do I have a mission captain?”

“Chris, let’s go make the Moon landing a footnote.”

“It’s 7:00am guys. Why aren’t you working your butts off?” commanded
Keller Murch to his team. They scattered like bugs to their desks.

The only reason this mission was going to happen on
time was due to Keller’s magic motors and the constant pressure he put on his
team. Any project can come together with the proper motivation. Keller wanted
on that first trip to Mars. He wanted on it badly. If they missed the short
launch window in the late summer and autumn, they would have to wait another 26
months to try again. The conversion of his motor technology from a hover ship
platform to a rocket ship was his number one priority in life right now.

Keller needed a manufacturing building much larger
than the one he had at the Murch Motors headquarters. At first he looked for
warehouse property near their existing facility in Silicon Valley. That area
proved to be prohibitively expensive. After a friend’s suggestion, he looked
just south of that area toward the farming region of Watsonville and found the
ideal location; right off the runway at the Watsonville Airport. It proved to
be ideal because it was within quick driving distance of his beach house in
Santa Cruz; much more convenient than making the trek to Murch Motors
headquarters up in Silicon Valley.

That part of the country also had a fairly huge pool
of engineering talent available due to the heavy defense contractor presence in
area. Many of them had been set adrift after the space shuttle cancellation. Keller
hired away dozens of defense workers to help build the space version of his rocket
engines as quickly as possible. The engineers jumped at the chance to live and
work by the ocean, even for lower salaries which is all he offered.

One large defense contractor nearby complained to the
government that Keller was poaching their key engineers. The government agreed
that he was poaching, but they felt the Mars trip was more important. Case
closed.

Keller was so engrossed in the hectic MM10 conversion
effort that all other tasks were secondary. At one point his home phone went
dead simply because he forgot to pay the bill. Keller knew how important these
motors were to the entire mission; he couldn’t be bothered by such pesky things
as bills.

With the MM10 motor, NASA had the rocket engine
technology they needed to get a crew of astronauts to Mars fast. All they
needed now was a design for the two Mars-bound modules and a plan to make it
happen in less than ten months.

Several contractors and government entities created
the Mars Exploration Board, or MEB. The whole purpose of the MEB was to
establish the goals, procedures and module layout for the mission.  Of course
Keller was the chairman; at least for a while. When the astronaut training got
serious, he would have to turn over operations to his trusted flight test
engineer Tommy. However, before that, Keller invited the contractors into the Mars
Exploration Board for their help in brainstorming. Regardless of their input,
Keller would have the last say in the design of the ship. He would constantly
threaten to withhold the MM10 motors if he didn’t get his way.

Weeks of meetings established the basic concept of how
this adventure would officially operate. The main launch platform wouldn’t be
Earth. Instead, it would be the International Space Station. Starting the
voyage so far out in space would minimize the impact of the fuel-hungry Earth-to-space
launch phase. Just getting away from the dense atmosphere of Earth gobbled up
valuable fuel.

This plan threw some flies into the ointment. Even
with the amazing lifting power of the Viper9 rocket, the Mars-bound ships would
be too heavily loaded with fuel and supplies to be launched from Earth up to
the orbiting International Space Station all at once.

Instead, all of the fuel and supplies would be sent up
ahead of time over the span of many months and many smaller launches. Unfortunately,
the International Space Station was cramped and couldn’t hold all the extra
supplies. A smaller storage capsule would be designed and permanently attached
to the Space Station to act as an orbiting storage closet.

Keller’s engineers came up with the detailed design of
the smaller storage capsule. They named it the Storage Wart because it looked
like a strange growth on the Space Station. The Science and Transport Modules,
to be shipped up later, would be called the Big Turtle and Little Turtle
respectively. The “Turtle” nickname came from their faceted outer shapes that
were covered with flat solar panels. They looked like huge shiny black turtle
shells.

Although Keller had very smart designers working for
him, their ultimate skills were not what he needed to produce the Turtles
quickly. As much as he hated to do it, Keller had to contact traditional
defense contractors who had experience in building lightweight robust
structures.

Some of the traditional airframe manufacturers had
small independent groups which could get things done much faster than their
traditional counterparts. It is well known that Lockheed Martin has the
Skunk Works group and Boeing has the Phantom Works group. Keller wasn’t just
after their ability to build complicated things quickly. He also needed to hire
the big guys because they knew how to fill out all of the government paperwork;
a critically important skill.

Fortunately he was able to team up with one of the small
autonomous teams from the enormous Mayal-Maddox defense contractor who got the
ball rolling on manufacturing both Little Turtle and Big Turtle. Without making
it publicly known, they opened a manufacturing facility along the runway at the
Watsonville Airport. The assumption was that it would make it easy to
incorporate the MM10 motors if they were next door neighbors. They humorously
called their secret operation The ManureWorks to reflect the aroma that
sometimes flooded the region when the wind blew in from the farm fields around
town.

While half of the ManureWorks team was working on the two
Turtles, the other half completed the Storage Wart section of the Space
Station; it was to be launched in early Spring. After just a few weeks, it
would be used to house the fuel, food and other supplies until the two Turtles
were lifted up into orbit.

Just prior to launching the Storage Wart up to the
Space Station, the president asked for a closed-door meeting with the lead
engineer on the design team.

The rather modest manager was excited to meet the
president.

“Hello Mr. President! It’s an honor to meet you. I
can’t tell you how excited I am for this whole project.”

The president gave his political uncommitted smile.

“I think we’re all excited for it. And by the way,
thank you for coming here today. This meeting is to discuss a small change
regarding the design of the so-called
Storage Wart
.”

“But we’re basically
done
. It’s almost ready to
be launched,” explained the engineer.

The president elaborated.

“Well, it should be a simple change. All that I need
you to do is add a storage box on the outside of the Storage Wart. Roughly four
feet wide by twelve feet long and maybe two feet deep. I have some blueprints
here from one of my Pentagon guys. Just give it a 28 Volt power source and my guys
will do the rest.”

The president handed a large envelope over to the engineer
who pulled out the blueprints and carefully unfolded them on the desk. He held
his head as if in pain while he looked over them. He looked up at the
president.

“You’re asking me to add a blank box that could
contain
anything
?”

“Yes, that is
one
way to look at it, but we’ll
let you know the exact weights and mass properties before launch.”

The president paused and then continued.

“Look, in order to get this entire mission funded so
quickly, we had to shift some budget away from military programs. The only
tradeoff the Pentagon asked for was
this container
. My Secretary of
Defense tells me that it’s just a small extension of our military preparedness.
That’s all. I mean, it could be a radar dish for all we know! In the grand
scheme of things, it’s a small detail, right?”

The lead engineer was exasperated.

“But Mr. President, this could add a month to the
build! This might cause everything to be late.”

“I know. However, this is a matter of national
security and I need you to do this. You love your country, right? Can you make
it happen?”

“Um, let me think about it and I’ll talk with the
team. I don’t think they’ll go for it. I’m sure Mr. Murch would be upset with
anything that may delay the launches.”

The president shook his hand and said, “Thank you for
your time today. Please rethink your position on this. I know you’ll do your
best.”

The meeting ended. The next day the lead engineer
received a phone call from the IRS about some questionable deductions he’d
included on his tax returns two years before. He was warned not to destroy any
tax records or paperwork; the IRS might have to investigate even
further
back, especially during the time he’d started a small business that eventually
failed. The agency was considering whether to ignore these issues or not. They
might act.
They might not
.

The lead engineer scheduled an emergency meeting with
Keller and convinced him that the added compartment was crucial and important
enough to delay the entire mission a few weeks. Keller agreed. The issue was
never discussed after that. The IRS never called the lead engineer again.

Production went surprisingly smooth aside from the
special presidential favor. The mating of the MM10 rocket motors went without a
hitch thanks to the design software they were using. Everything fit together
like puzzle pieces. Very large and expensive puzzle pieces.

On the Ides of March, the Storage Wart sat perched
atop a Viper9 heavy lift rocket. Just before sunset, it was launched up into
orbit and attached to the International Space Station. The Storage Wart was
ready to hold all of the fuel, food and oxygen that would ultimately be
transferred to the Turtles later on.

Throughout the months of March, April and May, supply
missions were being flown to the Space Station using the new Viper9 rockets
from Whittenberg SLS. Everything was being tucked away in the Storage Wart.

The large Science Module, also known as Big Turtle,
was mounted on a Viper9 Heavy Lifter rocket and sent up to the Space Station on
Memorial Day. Once it arrived, the laborious work of transferring supplies from
the Storage Wart to the Big Turtle commenced. Moving large heavy objects by
hand while floating in space turned out to be cumbersome, but the Space Station
staff completed the supply movement without much complaint.

The idea of establishing a long-term living outpost on
Mars had been scrapped by the Mars Exploration Board due to the inability to
keep it stocked with food and oxygen. The crew would have enough supplies to
last them about one month. After that, they would return home.

With the Turtles utilizing the MM10 rockets after
leaving planetary orbit, the trip there would take about 28 days and the trip
home would take about 31 days. The difference had to do with the changes in
orbit location between when they landed on Mars and when they left from Mars.

Long before any of the launches occurred, functional
mockups of the Science and Transport Modules were built and located in a large
warehouse next to the Murch Motors/ManureWorks factories. It would give the
astronauts a place to train and get used to the equipment.

At some point in time, a Russian Soyuz rocket would be
sent over to Florida and installed on a one-of-a-kind launch platform that would
only be used once. Since the Viper9 couldn’t yet launch people into space, that
task would be left up to the Soyuz rocket. For years it had proven to be a
reliable way to get crews up to the International Space Station.

Prior to the start of construction of the Turtles,
though, Chris faced the task of completing his team of astronauts. After more
extended interviews and searching he finally assembled a group of top notch
people. Keller got his wish to be onboard. The Russians got their wish too.