Space Station Down, page 13
“What is it, Scott?”
“Kimberly…” He sounded choked up. “I … I…”
Kimberly felt her face grow warm and started to speak, but she sensed a slight, sudden vibration in the ISS. She barely floated toward the JPM wall, drifting incredibly slowly, but moving nonetheless.
“Kimberly! What’s going on? You’re moving out of video range.”
That’s strange, Kimberly thought. She couldn’t feel any increase in air flow through the module, but if she was being carried along by moving air, then of course she wouldn’t feel any current. It would be like not being able to feel the presence of wind when you’re in a hot air balloon. She’d be carried along with the flow …
She heard a low thrum. She realized she wasn’t floating inside the module, but rather the JPM was moving, slowly rotating around.
In fact, it wasn’t just the JPM. The entire ISS was moving.
She twisted in the air and swam over to the laptop. Quickly she pulled up the graphical interface.
Her pulse thudding in her ears, Kimberly saw that the state for the helium pressure valve had just been switched from OFF to ON. The hypergolic propellants were pressurized and fueling the thrusters.
The ISS was rotating around, and in ten minutes when its engines were facing in the direction of motion, it would soon start its fall to Earth.
MAUI SPACE SURVEILLANCE SITE, MOUNT HALEAKALA, HAWAII
Second Lieutenant Chip Johnson struggled to stay awake in the small vault while sitting watch at the classified communications console. Three cans of Bang energy drink lay crumpled in the trash can at his feet, almost a thousand milligrams of caffeine. It was enough jolt to revive the dead, but his head kept lolling forward, a casualty of surfing Maui’s north shore earlier in the day.
The twenty-three-year-old Auburn engineer had been on active duty for only six months and considered himself lucky to have been assigned to the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Maui site, based in the small town of Kihei near AFRL’s Maui supercomputer.
But tonight, instead of being down at sea level, as the junior officer in the small military detachment overseeing the contractor staff that ran the seventy-five-ton Advanced Electro-Optical System telescope’s massive twelve-foot mirror, he’d been assigned the graveyard shift at the observatory atop Haleakala’s 10,033-foot peak.
Viewing operations didn’t normally demand the presence of military personnel; the private contractor personnel operating the Air Force’s space surveillance site handled the telescope and its equipment with professional competence. But with classified activities sucking up all the AEOS’s telescope time, the reason for Lieutenant Johnson’s presence was to ensure a continuous Title 10 chain-of-custody for the viewing data gathered by the state-of-the-art surveillance system.
When he’d first arrived at Maui six months earlier, with a newly minted bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, Johnson had thought he’d be performing cutting-edge research or solving some high-tech problem, such as working on the lasers or the deformable telescope mirror that took the twinkle out of the stars and gave the system as clear a view of the skies as a ’scope in orbital space. But he quickly discovered that the long-term, experienced contractor people did all the fun stuff like conducting research, and his role was to serve as oversight to whatever activities they were engaged in.
But for the past two days the facility had been tasked with a highly classified Title 10 Operations of War, and the Maui site needed an active duty Air Force officer to pass the telescope’s detailed viewing data through a classified link to Space Command’s JSPOC, the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base.
So now, Second Lieutenant Chip Johnson found himself not merely overseeing routine contractor operations, but being squarely in the middle of certifying tightly classified information from the AEOS’s twelve-foot, adaptive optics system that could reveal details on satellites down to a resolution of less than a foot. He wasn’t sure what the information was being used for, but it seemed strange to be observing the International Space Station every time it passed overhead. Rumors buzzing through the Haleakala facility claimed that the real target was some other satellite that would be observed at a later date, and what they were doing now was just some sort of exercise. In any case, Chip was excited to be finally at the center of the action, and not just sitting on the sidelines monitoring contractors.
So when his nodding head almost slumped onto the communications console, Chip reached for another can of Bang and prepared for another 300-milligram jolt to his nervous system.
“Lieutenant?”
Chip swiveled in his chair while still holding the unopened can. “Yeah?”
Standing at the door to the communications center was Dr. Young, a thin multiracial woman with pale freckles sprinkled across her face.
“Could you take a look at this?” she asked.
“Sure.” Chip turned back to his console. The data links were all working; there was no indication that the AEOS had taken in any information that he needed to pass on to JSPOC.
“What’s going on?” he asked, over his shoulder.
“I’m not sure,” Young replied. Frowning, she stepped up to the console, holding a thin sheet of paper. The comm center, barely big enough for two people, was electronically shielded as a Faraday cage so that its classified communications gear could not be tapped.
“There’s no change in the ISS imagery,” Dr. Young said, sounding slightly uncertain, puzzled. “Since we had time on our hands, we decided to use the overflow crew to calibrate the ISAL against the space station, instead of sitting around, doing nothing. And the ISAL discovered a change in its orbital elements.”
“Excuse me?”
“ISAL: the inverse synthetic aperture laser experiment we’re bringing online to image satellites in geosynchronous orbits.”
“Okay, go ahead.”
“The ISS uses solar panels similar to the communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit,” Dr. Young explained, “so by imaging the space station’s arrays with ISAL, we can compare that imagery to other satellite arrays located at GEO, twenty-two thousand miles higher up. That way we can take into account any difference in what we see at low Earth orbit, where the ISS is, and GEO satellites.”
Chip shrugged. “Sounds like a good use of the crew’s time. But what’s going on with ISAL?”
“Here. Look what happened when we tried to calibrate the laser with a distance measurement.” Dr. Young handed him the paper. Chip saw it was a computer-generated plot of altitude with respect to time. The line was nearly straight, showing a near-constant altitude of the ISS. At first there was a barely perceptible decrease, then suddenly, just a few minutes ago, the station’s altitude precipitously fell. Instead of its normal slow edging lower in altitude due to atmospheric drag, it looked to Chip as though the International Space Station was taking a nosedive, and rapidly falling to Earth.
Chip frowned. “The station’s altitude is decreasing. Is something wrong with the laser?”
Dr. Young shook her head. “Don’t know. We’ll have to take additional measurements. But if this trend continues the rate will increase as the station gets closer to Earth. As it falls deeper into the atmosphere, the air gets thicker, which means more atmospheric drag, and it will drop even faster. Depends on a lot of things, but from this drop rate I give it two, maybe three more days at the most before it hits.”
“Wow. That’s weird.” Handing the paper back to her, Chip mused aloud, “It’s not part of our tasking, but since they’ve been so anal about imaging the station I’d better send this on to JSPOC.”
Dr. Young pulled a flash drive from a pocket in her slacks. It had UNCLASSIFIED/FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY stamped on its side in small print. “Downloaded this after I printed out that graph. Thought you might need it.”
“Thanks. Is the drive clean?”
She nodded. “Scanned it before I used it.”
“Good.” Chip took the flash dive, wrote TS/SCI over its side with a felt-tip pen, then turned back to his console. Inserting the drive into the classified computer, he rapidly typed a header explaining the diagram, then shot it over to JWICS, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System of JSPOC.
“Hope you don’t need the drive anymore,” he said to Dr. Young. “You know that the second you brought it here into the vault it became classified at the SCI level. Now it’s here to stay.”
Dr. Young smiled at him. “That’s okay, Lieutenant. Like I said, I thought it was more important for you to have it. We can always buy more.”
JOINT SPACE OPERATIONS CENTER (JSPOC), VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, CALIFORNIA
“Admiral, could you take a look at this, sir? It just arrived from Maui over JWICS.”
Watch commander Rear Admiral Harrison looked up from his desk. The Joint Space Operations Center was the hub for space situational awareness, keeping track of over twenty-two thousand objects in Earth orbit, from items as small as two inches across to the massive International Space Station. JSPOC tracked objects ranging from the most highly classified spy satellites to pieces of space debris created by the occasional collisions between satellites.
Maui was one of the two unclassified sources that provided highly detailed visual imagery of the International Space Station, which the JSPOC now forwarded to PACOM for up-to-date targeting if the order was ever given to shoot down the station.
Stretching from the west coast of the U.S. to the west coast of India, and ranging from the Arctic to Antarctica, the United States Pacific Command was headquartered just outside of Honolulu. It was responsible for conducting military operations over an area of more than one hundred million square miles, nearly 52 percent of the Earth’s surface. PACOM’s Aegis antisatellite weapons were so accurate that individual modules of the ISS could be targeted separately to ensure that the entire station would fall harmlessly into the vast Pacific Ocean. The high-resolution imagery from Maui was the key to both choosing a spot to hit the station, as well as detecting if the ISS deviated from its prescribed orbit.
The core of the Space Operations Center was a large room, bustling with activity. Navy, Army, Air Force, and Marine personnel worked at their consoles side by side with a smattering of civilians. Sections of the room were partitioned off by blue cloth-covered foam rectangles with gleaming metal siding. Stenciled signs hung over each functional area, from J2: INTELLIGENCE, and J3: OPERATIONS to J6: COMMAND, CONTROL, COMMUNICATIONS, AND COMPUTER/CYBER.
Admiral Harrison was a compactly built officer with a graying crewcut and steely blue-gray eyes. The officers under him sometimes ran betting pools on when the Admiral would smile again. The Chief Master Sergeant standing before his desk was a new man, blond and youthful, but almost as stern as the Admiral himself. They got along well.
“What’ve you got, Chief? Any change in the imagery?”
“No, sir. But it’s bad news.”
The Admiral glanced at the red-bordered sheet that the young Chief slid across his desk. Marked TS/SCI on both the top and bottom of the sheet, instead of showing a highly detailed image of the International Space Station, it bore a single, decreasing line on a two-dimensional plot of altitude versus time.
Harrison frowned. “You’ve only plotted two points on this graph.”
“Yes, sir, but it clearly shows the station’s descending.”
“Two points don’t show a trend; this is a hiccup.” Harrison looked up, frowning at the younger man. “Any verification on this?”
“No, sir, not yet. The ISS is due to come in range of the Space Fence in fifteen minutes, and we’ll have more points for the graph, to see if this is real or just an artifact from the Maui site. We’ll also get dual confirmation at that time, as well as a rough estimate of a time and location of impact. Spacetrack sensors update every four hours and we’ll be able to verify it then as well, with the other sensors. MIT’s Haystack radar and our Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance telescopes will be able to provide more detail by its next orbit.”
“Okay,” said the Admiral. “Go ahead and shoot this stuff over to the Joint Staff as well as PACOM. But tell them we won’t have verifications for another quarter hour. Still, the JCS will want to forward this to the National Security Council as soon as possible, I imagine. And immediately after you send it, copy 14th Air Force as well as the other service space elements through JWICS’s special access channels as a heads-up; and inform NASA liaison. In the meantime, work on confirming the data. We’ve got to keep PACOM in the loop on this, real-time.”
“Yes, sir.” The Chief hesitated. “But what if the astronauts are still alive? Do you really think PACOM will shoot down the station, Admiral?”
“They will if given the order,” Harrison said. “Right now the President has a choice to either let a few astronauts die—if they’re even alive up there—or risk the lives of thousands, probably more, if the public learns that the ISS will crash and may hit them. But the Aegis cruisers won’t even be in position to take down the station for another three days or more, so it may turn out that the station crashes anyway.”
“Isn’t there anything else we can do?”
“Classify the orbital elements so the public won’t have access. That’ll keep it out of the unclassified Spacetrack.”
The Chief was silent for a moment. “Then we’ll have to take down the entire Spacetrack database, sir. We can’t just go in and remove or change the data, especially if the public has unfettered access.”
“Okay, then take down the whole damned Spacetrack website before the next sensor update, ASAP if not sooner. We can’t afford to let this go public.”
“But sir … that will take some time, and since the data is updated automatically, we may not be able to prevent the station’s orbital elements from being entered. It’d be like waving a red flag in front of a bull. The press is already looking for anything unusual happening with the space station, and this will only start more rumors flying.”
“Just do it!” Admiral Harrison snapped. “If the ISS is really coming down, we can’t afford to be feeding the media an update every four hours on how fast the station’s deorbiting. They’ll just bring in their own experts and start making forecasts of where and when it will hit, and that’ll stoke the flames even higher. And don’t give ’em any lame excuse, like the site’s down for maintenance. They’ll see right through that. Just take the damned thing off-line!”
“Yes, sir. Anything else, Admiral?”
“Yeah.” Harrison handed the sheet back. “Pray for a miracle to happen, Chief.”
JAPANESE MODULE (JPM)
“Kimberly!” Scott yelped, alarmed. “What’s going on?”
Kimberly ran her fingers over the laptop’s keyboard. “Something tells me we don’t have three days for the Dragon to get here. At the rate those yahoos are pushing the thrusters, the ISS is decelerating a lot faster than they threatened. Can you get CAPCOM to come up with an estimate of how long I have?”
The voice link bleeped, and suddenly it sounded as if the transmission was coming from a large room filled with people.
“Kimberly, CAPCOM.” Tarantino’s reedy voice. “We broke your link with Basher and now you’re broadcasting over the MCC. Do you read?”
“Rog.”
“ADCO reports you’re dropping in altitude, and TOPO estimates station at entry interface in less than seventy-two hours. Our liaison with JSPOC and 14th Air Force at Space Command confirms the orbital elements. Can you engage your fore thrusters to raise your altitude?”
Kimberly stared intently at the laptop’s display screen, her mind racing. At entry interface, she echoed: NASA gobbledygook for fully hitting the atmosphere, moments before impact.
She mentally raced through a dozen options, trying to find a way to stop the flow of hypergolic propellants and cut the aft thrusters, or at least rotate the ISS back 180 degrees so that the thrusters would then reverse the deorbit. But nothing worked; she was locked out and couldn’t access any of the controls.
Her jaw tightening, she replied, “Negative, CAPCOM. I need to regain control. I think they’ve locked me out of the system at the 1533 level. Scott said he’d have the Flight Director expedite a fix. How long will it take to get a software patch?”
“Stand by one.” The link to the mission control center fell silent for a moment. Then, “We’re working on it. You’ll have the patch within thirty-six hours—”
“Wrong answer!” Kimberly interrupted. “You’ve got to do better than that. Thirty-six hours will put the ISS too deep down in the atmosphere to recover. I’ll be pushing up against the entry interface. We wouldn’t have enough fuel on board to boost back up, even if we tapped the FGB reserve and the fuel on both Soyuzes.”
“That’s the best estimate I’m getting,” Tarantino said. “MCC’s thrown everybody on it. It’s our top priority—thirty-six hours.”
“What about those Pros from Dover that Scott was touting? They’re supposed to be software wizards!”
The link went quiet for a moment. “The pros from … where?”
“Dover. It’s an old expression for expert, outside consultants. NSA—the spooks!”
“Oh, right. Stand by one.” Silence. Then CAPCOM came back curtly. “Revised estimate is less than twelve hours. The patch will be transmitted over the Ka data link. We’ll alert you before it’s broadcasted, and will be continuously looped so we can be sure there’s been a valid transmission. Recommend you go ahead and set up an interface to accept the patch so you’ll be able to directly insert it into the 1553 system. You’ll need some kind of large storage capacity as it’s going to be a big one. Copy?”
“Copy,” said Kimberly. She left the laptop and pushed off for the crystal growth experiment table, intending to cannibalize its data acquisition system and connect it to the JPM data uplink so she could store the software patch when it came up from the ground. She felt grateful that the Air Force Academy experiment used solid-state storage instead of the older and cheaper rotating hard discs. The time difference in buffering alone would expedite the insertion of the software.
