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

from NASA and
accepted a seat on the board of directors of Sky Sciences, Inc., a small
Tennessee-based commercial space booster company that sometimes subcontracted
work for the fledgling Strategic Defense Intiative Organization, the federal
research and development team tasked with devising an intercontinental
ballistic missile defense system. Soon afterward he became vice president in
charge of research for the small company. Masters’ presence on the board gave
the company a shot of optimism—and a new line of credit—that allowed it to stay
fiscally afloat.
                With the NASA shuttles grounded
indefinitely following the Challenger disaster in 1986, expendable boosters were quickly back in vogue. While NASA
was refurbishing old Titan ICBM rockets for satellite booster duty and bringing
back the Delta line of heavy boosters, in 1988 Jon Masters, now the
twenty-eight-year-old chairman of the board and new president of Sky Sciences,
soon renamed Sky Masters, Inc., announced that he had developed a new low-cost
space booster that was small and easy to transport and operate. Called SCARAB (Small
Containerized Air Relocatable Alert Booster), it was a ground-launched rocket
that could be hauled aboard a Boeing 747 or military cargo plane, set up, and
launched from almost anywhere in a matter of days or even hours. SCARAB
restored NASA and the military’s ability to launch satellites into Earth orbit
on short notice.
                His next project was a booster
system similar to SCARAB but even more flexible and responsive. Although SCARAB
could place a two-thousand-pound payload into low Earth orbit from almost
anywhere on Earth, it still needed a runway for the two cargo aircraft that
carried the rocket and the ground-launch equipment, an extensive ground-support
contingent, and at least fifteen hours’ worth of work to erect the launch
structures and get the rocket ready to fly. In several practice tests, Masters
needed no more than thirty hours from initial notification and delivery of the
payload to T minus zero. But he wanted to do better.
                That was when ALARM was bom. ALARM
was merely a SCARAB booster downsized to fit in a transport plane and fitted
with wings. It used the launch aircraft as its first-stage booster, and it used
lift from its scissor-action wings to help increase the efficiency of the
smaller first- and second-stage boosters. Two ALARM boosters could be standing
by on board the carrier aircraft; they would only need to bring the payloads on
board and take off. With aerial refueling, the ALARM carrier aircraft could
stay aloft for days, traversing the country or even partly around the world, ready
to launch the boosters.
                Masters had developed several
different payloads for his small air-launched boosters. Along with the
communications satellites, he had developed a small satellite that could take
composite radar, infrared, and telescopic visual “photos” of the Earth, and the
resulting image was dozens of times more detailed than standard visual photos.
The images could be digitized and transmitted to terminals all over the world
via his small communications satellites, giving commanders real-time
reconnaissance and intelligence information. Combined with powerful computers,
users from the Pentagon or White House to individual aircrew members on board
strike aircraft could conduct their own sophisticated photo intelligence, plan
and replan missions, and assess bomb damage almost instantaneously.
                With several different payloads on
board, the flexibility of the ALARM system was unparalleled. A communications-
satellite launch could immediately change to a satellite-retrieval mission or a
reconnaissance-satellite mission, or even a strike mission. A single ALARM
carrier aircraft could become as important a national asset as Cape Canaveral .
                “Fifteen minutes to launch window
one,”