Free Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 by Sky Masters (v1.1)

Department of Defense, which was why all the military
observers were on hand. Masters was to place four NIRTSats in a
four-hundred-mile-high polar orbit over the western Pacific to provide the Navy
and Air Force with specialized, dedicated voice, data, air-traffic control, and
video communications between ships, aircraft, and land-based controllers. With
the NIRTSat constellation in place, the Navy’s Seventh Fleet headquarters and
the Air Force’s Pacific Air Force headquarters could instantly talk with and
find the precise locations of every ship and aircraft on the network. Coupled
with the military’s Global Positioning System satellite navigation system,
NIRTSats would continually transmit flight or sailing data on each aircraft or
vessel to their respective headquarters, although the vessels might be far
outside radio range. The second ALARM booster carried another four NIRTSat
satellites and was aboard as a backup if the first launch failed.
                Jon Masters’ cocky attitude toward
this important launch made Colonel Foch very uncomfortable. But, he thought,
the little snot had every reason to feel cocky—in two years of testing and over
two dozen launches, not one ALARM booster had ever failed to do its thing, and
not one NIRTSat had ever failed to function. It was, Foch had to admit, quite a
testament to the genius of Jonathan Colin Masters. Worse, the bastard was so
young. Boy genius was an understatement.
                When Jon Masters was barely in grade
school in Manchester , New Hampshire , his first-grade teachers showed Jon’s parents a one-hundred-page
treatise on the feasibility of a manned lunar landing, written by a youngster
who had only learned to write a few months earlier. When asked about the essay,
Jon sat his parents down and explained all the problems inherent in launching a
rocket to the moon and returning it safely back to Earth—and the Apollo space
program had just gotten under way, with the first lunar landing still three
years away.
                It didn’t take Jon’s parents a blink
of an eye to figure out what to do next: he was enrolled in a private high
school, which he completed three years later at age ten. He enrolled at Dartmouth College and received a bachelor of science degree
in aeronautical engineering at age thirteen. After receiving a master’s degree
in mathematics from Dartmouth , he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and after a
tumultuous five years finally earned a doctorate in engineering at the age of
twenty.
                The first love of Masters’ life was
and always had been NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
and in 1981 he went to work for the space agency immediately after leaving MIT.
The Shuttle Transportation System, or STS, program was just heating up by then,
and Jon Masters was an integral part of the development of special applications
that could take advantage of this new flying workhorse. Almost every satellite
and delivery subsystem developed for the shuttle between 1982 and 1985 was at
least partially designed by Jonathan Masters.
                But, even as the shuttle
transportation system was gearing up for more launches per year and more ambitious
projects, including the space station, Jon Masters saw a weakness. It was an
obvious problem that was creeping into the successful STS program—the
spacecraft were accumulating a lot of miles, with even more miles slated for
them each year, and no more orbiters were being built. When the success of the
shuttle program became obvious, Masters thought, NASA should have had one new
orbiter per year rolling off the assembly lines, plus upgraded solid-rocket
boosters and avionics. But they had none.
                Jon Masters took an active interest
in the numerous small companies that built small space boosters for private and
commercial applications. In 1984, at age twenty-four, he resigned