Origin

Reid Malenfant:

As soon as Malenfant had landed the T-38 and gotten out of his flight suit, here was Frank Paulis, running across the tarmac in the harsh Pacific sunlight, round and fat, his bald head gleaming with sweat.

Paulis enclosed Malenfant’s hand in two soft, moist palms. ‘I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you at last. It’s a great honour to have you here.’

Malenfant extracted his hand warily. Paulis looked thirty-five, maybe a little older. His eyes shone with what Malenfant had come to recognize as hero worship.

That was why he was here at Vandenberg, after all: to scatter a little Stardust on the overworked, underpaid legions of engineers and designers who were labouring to construct his Big Dumb Booster for him. But he hadn’t expected it of a hard-headed entrepreneur type like Frank Paulis.

They clambered into an open-top car, Paulis and Malenfant side by side in the back. An aide, a trim young woman Paulis called Xenia, climbed into the driver’s seat and cut in the SmartDrive. The car pulled smoothly away from the short airstrip.

They drove briskly along the empty roads here at the fringe of Vandenberg ASFB. To either side of the car there were low green shrubs speckled with bright yellow flowers. They were heading west, away from the sun and towards the ocean, and towards the launch facility.

Paulis immediately began to chatter about the work they were doing here, and his own involvement. ‘I want you to meet my engine man, an old buzzard called George Hench, from out of the Air & Space Force. Of course he still calls it just the Air Force. He started working on missile programmes back in the 1950s …’

Malenfant sat back in the warm sunlight and listened to Paulis with half an ear. It was a skill he’d developed since the world’s fascinated gaze had settled on him. Everybody seemed a lot more concerned to tell him what they felt and believed, rather than listen to whatever he had to say. It was as if they all needed to pour a little bit of their souls into the cranium of the man who was going to the Red Moon on their behalf.

Whatever. So long as they did their work.

They rose a slight incline and headed along a rise. Now Malenfant could see the ocean for the first time since landing. This was the Pacific coast of California, some hundred miles north of Los Angeles. The ocean was a heaving grey mass, its big waves growling. The ground was hilly, with crags and valleys along the waterline and low mountains in the background.

The area struck him as oddly beautiful. It wasn’t Big Sur, but it was a lot prettier than Canaveral.

But the big Red Moon hung in the sky above the ocean, its parched desert face turned to the Earth, and its deep crimson colour made the water look red as blood, unnatural.

The coastline here had not been spared by the Tide; shore communities like Surf had been comprehensively obliterated. But little harm had come to this Air & Space Force base, a few miles inland. Canaveral, on the other hand, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, had been severely damaged by the Tide. So Vandenberg had been the default choice to construct the launch facilities for Malenfant’s unlikely steed.

The car slowed to a halt. They were in the foothills of the Casmalia Hills here. From this elevated vantage Malenfant could see a sweep of lowland speckled with concrete splashes linked by roadways: launch pads, many of them decommissioned.

Beyond that he made out blocky white structures. That was the Shuttle facility itself, the relic of grandiose 1970s Air Force dreams of pilots in space. The launch pad itself looked much like its siblings on the Atlantic coast: a gaunt service structure set over a vast flame pit, with gaping vents to deflect the smoke and flame of launch. The gantry was accompanied to either side by two large structures, boxy, white, open, both marked boldly with the USASF and NASA logos. The shelters were mounted on rails and could be moved in to enclose and protect the gantry itself.

It was nothing like Cape Canaveral. The place had the air of a construction site. There were trailers scattered over the desert, some sprouting antennae and telecommunications feeds. There weren’t even any fuel tanks, just fleets of trailers, frost gleaming on their flanks. Engineers, most of them young, moved to and fro, their voices small in the desert’s expanse, their hard hats gleaming like insect carapaces. There was an air of improvisation, of invention and urgency, about this pad being reborn after two decades under wraps.

‘This has been a major launch centre since 1958,’ Paulis said, sounding as proud as if he’d built the place himself. ‘Many of them polar launches. Good site for safety: if you go south of here, the next landmass you hit is Antarctica … Slick-six – sorry, SLC-6 – is the southernmost launch facility here. It was originally built back in the 1960s to launch a spy-in-the-sky space station for the Air Force, which never flew. Then they modified it for the Air Force Shuttle programme. But Shuttle never flew from here either, and after Challenger the facility was left dormant.’

‘I guess it took a lot of un-mothballing,’ Malenfant said.

‘You got that right.’

And now, right at the heart of the rust-grey industrial-looking equipment of the Shuttle facility, he made out a slim spire, brilliant white, nestling against its gantry as if for protection.

It looked something like the lower half of a Space Shuttle – two solid rocket boosters strapped to a fat, rust-brown external fuel tank but there was no moth-shaped Shuttle orbiter clinging to the tank. Instead the tank was topped by a blunt-nosed payload cover almost as fat and wide as the tank itself. The stack vented vapour, and Malenfant could see ice glimmer on its unpainted flanks; evidently the engineers were running a fuelling test.

Malenfant felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

It was he who had produced the first back-of-the-envelope sketch of a Big Dumb Booster like this, sketches to show how Shuttle technology could be warped and mutated to manufacture a heavy-lift launcher, a remote descendant of the Saturn V, for this one-shot project. With Nemoto’s backers in place he had led the way in fleshing out the design, based on ancient, never-funded studies from the 1970s and 1980s. He had overseen the computer-graphic simulations, the models. His fingerprints were all over the whole damn project.

But it was not until now, this oddly mundane moment here on this hillside, in a cheap car with jabbering Paulis and taciturn Xenia, that he had actually set eyes on his BDB: his Big Dumb Booster, the spaceship whose destiny would shape the rest of this life, one way or the other.

But it was Paulis who had got the thing built.

Even after Malenfant had been given presidential approval, such strict limits had been placed on budget and schedule that the NASA brass had soon realized they would need input from the private sector. They had turned to Boeing, their long-term partners in running the Shuttle, but Paulis had been quick to thrust himself forward. Frank J. Paulis had made his fortune from scratch; unusually for his generation he had made most of it from heavy engineering, specifically aerospace. He had made promises of impressive funding and the use of his design, manufacture and test facilities around the country – in return for a senior management position on the BDB project.

NASA had predictably rebuffed him. Paulis had handed over his money and facilities anyhow.

But after a couple of months, when the first calamities had predictably hit the project and the schedule had begun to fall apart before it had properly started, NASA, under pressure from the White House, had turned to Paulis.

Paulis’s first public act, in front of the cameras, had been to gather an immense heap of NASA documentation before the launch pad. ‘This ain’t Canaveral, and this is not the Shuttle programme,’ he’d told his bemused workers. ‘We can’t afford to get tied up in a NASA paper trail. I invest the responsibility for quality in you, each and every one of you. I trust you to do your jobs. All I ask is that you do it right.’ And he set the documentation heap alight with a flame-thrower.

There were some, raised all their careers in NASA’s necessarily safety-obsessed bureaucracy, who couldn’t hack it; Paulis had had a twenty per cent drop-out. But the rest had cheered him to the Pacific clouds.

After that, Paulis had proven himself something of a genius in raising public interest in the project. A goodly chunk of the booster when it lifted from its pad would be paid for by public subscriptions, raised every which way from Boy Scout lemonade stalls to major corporate sponsors; in fact when it finally took off the BDB’s hide would be plastered with sponsors’ logos. But Malenfant couldn’t care less about that, as long as it did ultimately take off, with him aboard.

Paulis, remarkably, was still talking, a good five minutes since Malenfant had last spoken.

‘… The stack is over three hundred feet tall. You have a boat-tail of four Space Shuttle main engines here, attached to the bottom of a modified Shuttle external tank, so the lower stage is powered by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. You’ll immediately see one benefit over the standard Shuttle design, which is in-line propulsion; we have a much more robust stack here. The upper stage is built on one Shuttle main engine. Our performance to low Earth orbit –’

Malenfant touched his shoulder. ‘Frank. I do know what we’re building here.’

‘… Yes.’ Nervously, Paulis dug out a handkerchief and wiped sweat from his neck. ‘I apologize.’

‘Don’t apologize.’

‘It’s just that I’m a little over-awed.’

‘Don’t be.’ Malenfant was still studying the somewhat squat lines of the booster stack. ‘Although I feel a little awe myself. I’ve come a long way from the first rocket I ever built.’

At age seventeen, Malenfant was already building and flying model airplanes. With some high-school friends he started out trying to make a liquid-fuelled rocket, like the BDB, but failed spectacularly, and so they switched to solid fuels. They bought some gunpowder and packed it inside a cardboard tube, hoping it would burn rather than explode. ‘We propped it against a rock, stuck on some fins, and used a soda straw packed with powder for a fuse. We spent longer painting the damn thing than constructing it. I lit the fuse at a crouch and then ran for cover. The rocket went up fifty feet, whistling. Then it exploded with a bang –’

Paulis said, reverent, ‘And Emma was watching from her bedroom window, right? But she was just seven years old.’

Malenfant was aware that the girl driver, Xenia, was watching him with a hooded, judgmental gaze.

Weeks back, in the course of his campaign to build support, he’d told the story of the toy rocket to one of his PR flacks, and she had added a few homely touches – of course Emma hadn’t been watching; though she had been a neighbour at that time, at seven years old she had much more important things to do – and since then the damn anecdote had been copied around the planet.