Breakwire by Terry Wilson (summer books .TXT) 📕

Cover: Computer generated view of Cape Canaveral from the Orbiter Simulator created by Martin Schweiger.

"You're all set? Need anything else?" the man in the earless bunny suit asks the astronaut in the bulky orange outfit.

"Send me up a drink," jokes forty-three year old Thomas Shinra with a wide grin, then pulls his own helmet over his head squeezing into the padding.

The Sprint Crew Ferry

is, along with the SpaceX Dragon

and Orion

CEV, one of the next generation of crew orbital spacecraft. After Shuttle Columbia

disintegrated over Dallas, Texas within sight of her control center in Houston and less than sixteen minutes away from a routine Florida landing, a whole bunch of people realized that wings don't belong on spacecraft, at least not in the deceptively graceful lines of the Columbia

and her sisters. Not only that, they reasoned, no orbital spacecraft could yet be made safe enough to forsake backup systems, spacesuits for emergencies, wilderness survival training, and physical fitness. There were still lingering doubts about suborbital spacecraft, as well. Two years after the first suborbital tourist accident killed four paying passengers and their pilot, the two nieces of one of them, Gibson Ochiru, jumped out of their father's light aircraft to their deaths, putting his name back in the news and causing even more flak for spaceflight safety, even though the Cessna Skyhawk

they jumped out of could never be mistaken for a spacecraft.

29 January 2013

Thomas turned his spacecraft keys in their various "ignitions". There was one for "Launch" which isolated certain critical functions in the launch vehicle when set to "Safe" and enabled a few when set to "Standby", enabling all the truly scary ones, such as the explosive bolts that held his Lilmax booster to the pad, when set to "Launch". Another such key was marked "PES" for Payload Escape Stage, a harmless sounding name for the ascent abort system. During a pause in the checklist, Thomas chuckles at the euphemism for "catastrophe", sliding his gloved thumb along the red edges of the cue cards he remembers are marked "Uncommanded Abort". You know, the abort that decides to happen on its own, like Soyuz

16A or Shuttle Challenger

STS-33.

Canadian Aerospace Society's charter goals include cheap access to-, my apologies, inexpensive

access to Low Energy Orbit (LEO) for both human beings and inanimate payloads. (Oh, I can hear the CELSS guys protesting already about their plants and animals being missed again.) Do cheap and safe agree in spaceflight? <I guess were about to find out,> thinks Thomas Shinru.

Her long blonde hair relaxes in a ponytail ending graciously in the small of her back, somewhat camouflaged against tan turtleneck sweater she wears, sleeves rolled up because Sprint Control Centre in Malton, Ontario isn't as cold on the inside as it is on the outside. Briefly, twenty-eight year old Lucy Graheme wonders if she's going to be able to get her puny hatchback out of the parking lot as she listens to the blobs of snowflakes smack against the windows beside her.

<Flight, Stove,> the little headphone squawks. "Stove" is the bizarre short name for the Service Module under the bullet-shaped Descent Module of the Sprint spacecraft. Canadian Aerospace liked finding alternatives to the acronyms, unless the acronyms sounded cool. On hearing that from the Executive Director, the programmers for the console software gleefully declared that they were the "Spacecraft-Human Interfaces Team" and almost got away with it.

Lucy, the Flight Director of the first Sprint launch, presses her talk key and says in her Australian soft-edged crispness, <Stove, Flight.>

<I've had an amber on the main thruster right hand,> he says slowly, <It's the ignition breakwire. Normally, the breakwire would alert us to a problem in the nozzle, a crack or delamination, something like that, but we're pretty sure that were looking at an out-of-tolerance resistor in the circuit.>

"Stove, have you ruled out the nozzle itself?" Lucy asks, a note of concern. Having a main thruster with real damage to it could be deadly.

<We're go on it, Flight,> he answers, <We're still working the issue, to rule out a temperature excursion last night. We're also looking at the ultrasonics again, but we are very sure we installed a good thruster. We'll get back to you once we've ruled out any damage from the cold.>

"Stove," Lucy sighs hesitantly, "Uh, okay. We got a bypass, right, if your resistor craps out, we can still light the thruster?"

<Yes, ma'am,> he confirms, <If we lose the breakwire circuit after launch, we still have an override and two good thrusters, once we rule out the frostbite.>

"Stove, thanks," she says. Then she remembers, "Stove, does Thomas see anything? Any messages on his console?"

<Only if he's enables them,> a pause as he checks, <and he hasn't. I wouldn't bother him about it.>

And so, up in the ship, the nervous feeling that Thomas Shinra is wringing his gloved fingers over, that there might be something wrong with his spacecraft, has no explanation. He thinks about calling Lucy, thinks about diving into the systems readouts. He decides it's just first flight jitters and does his best to ignore it and move on.

Underneath the Sprint is the latest and largest booster qualified by Ascent International, the frosty single module Lilmax

. Four engines quietly wait in the bottom. Since boarding his four seat spacecraft, the other three seats occupied by water ballast modules, Thomas has been running tests. All the messages have been perfectly normal: the lag on the cabin pressure responses to various life support commands, voltages on the batteries, both the four main banks and the two backup modules. The breakwire current on one of the main thrusters was low for a moment and came back, and the regulated power bus for guidance system three was a couple hundredths of a volt above normal. He didn't see anything dangerous at all. But then again, how can one man hope to comprehend more than three thousand readings as they scroll by his screen during the checks that make sure his spacecraft is perfect, or at least, good enough to make a flight without any nasty snags? The computers all agree that he's in a good ship as the countdown approaches the ignition autosequence. The only thing they have to complain about is the position of the launch key. He reaches for that, and with a sixth of a full turn between Standby and Launch, the computers report that they are now perfectly happy with his ship. Still that feeling nags.

Each of the four engines, and each of their three computers apiece, have only normal, pleasant things to say as they roar angrily to life four seconds before lift off. Excited, perhaps? A rocket still sounds like a rocket, especially big ones like this with the force of fifteen jumbo jet engines each. Like all of Ascent International's boosters, Lilmax is no slouch leaving the pad, racing into the sky in an urgent hurry to get its ascent over with, leaving a lingering cloud of steam and a transparent stream of black soot behind its brilliant yellow flames.

The ascent complete, the Sprint pulls away from the top stage of the Lilmax booster. Thomas fires the two main thrusters of the service module in the first orbit raise maneuver, watches and feels his craft wobble back and forth.

"Malton, Sprint, what the heck happened with the yaw during MT raise number one?" he asks nervously.

Lucy has no idea what he's talking about. She switches her loop mike to voice response, or VOX and asks nervously. "All, Flight, check your systems and start looking for cause. Dyna, Flight, can you confirm something happened with the yaw?"

<Flight, Dyna,> begins the response from the Flight Dynamics Officer, the counterpart of Houston's "FIDO", <We got a dynamically stable yaw oscillation, two degrees maximum amplitude and a period of about one second.>

"Copy," she says as she presses her air loop switch, "Sprint, Malton, we see it, Thomas, but we haven't got it nailed down yet. We'll get an answer as quick as we can."

<Flight, Poop, he's checking out the thrusters,> says the leader of the aforementioned Spacecraft/Human Interfaces Team.

"So," the slightly annoyed Lucy begins, "How do you get a 'dynamically stable' oscillation in space?" Generally speaking, such things were aerodynamic and in space, tend to be related to gravity gradients and solar pressures, which take much longer to affect spacecraft and do such things on the order of hours, not seconds. "Guidance, Flight."

<Flight, Guidance,> the nervous young lady responds, <Ma'am, all three went into high sample rate and response monitoring, the watchdogs kicked in as well. They had no effect. Flight, I don't think we're looking at a guidance problem.>

Lucy notes that she doesn't seem confident that it isn't her problem, but Lucy also grew up on Guidance. The responses she heard were exactly what she'd expect if the problem were somewhere else. Lucy can't think of where, but she notices that Stove, who's real name is Bill Puget, is frantically scrolling through his circuits.

<Uh,> the nervous Guidance officer moans, <Flight, Guidance, I'm getting indications that the thrust varied on the right hand main thruster early in the burn, it's a square wave thing, like the valve was switching between two positions.>

"Stove heard that, I hope," Lucy says.

Bill reaches for his loop switch, <Yes ma'am.> He calls up the breakwire current graph and gasps. <Flight, Stove,> he squeaks, <I'm getting a thermal response on that breakwire resistor, that is just too wierd. The thruster itself is good, let's just switch in the bypass before it causes any more trouble.>

Thomas sighs as he compares the breakwire currents of the two main thrusters.

"Malton, Sprint," he calls.

<Go ahead, Sprint,> he hears Lucy.

"We might have some sort of damage to the right main thruster, it looks to me like thermal response," Thomas explains, "As I recall, the throat is a carbon laminate, and if it's delaminated at some point in there, it could cause a step response from the breakwire current like were seeing."

<Bill has traced it to a resistor in the circuit, not the breakwire itself,> Lucy answers, <He's even checked the thrusters inspection records. As usual, it wasn't perfect first time out, but they did fix everything, and there was nothing wrong with the nozzle itself.>

"You're sure, Malton?" Thomas asks, "'Cus I'm a bit nervous going to bypass if we aren't a hundred percent sure it isn't the nozzle."

<Bill is absolutely sure it isn't the nozzle,> Lucy answers, <He even called up the ultrasonic image snapshots and has the close-out paperwork in a binder at his console. You're go to switch in bypass, but it is your decision.>

Thomas breathed a sigh of relief. "Thanks Lucy, going to bypass."

Before going home, Bill calls Yutran Aerospace, the maker of the thruster, gives him the make and serial number, as well as the name of the inspector on his test record, asks if he can get a hold of the ultrasonic inspector. The guy hasn't heard of him, so he's probably not a