Eagle Station

A long, hanging screen cut off their view of half of the clean room. Jason Richter and Hunter Noble waited for them near the end of the screen. Richter was Sky Masters’ CEO and chief inventor. Besides being a brilliant cybernetic engineer in his own right, he was also a remarkably gifted high-technology project manager. Over the past few years, the steady stream of innovative aircraft, space construction robots, satellites, and other hardware pouring out of labs and factories under his guidance had made Sky Masters hugely profitable.

“Ready to see what we dug up for you from Hangar Five?” Boomer asked eagerly. Hangar Five was used to store Sky Masters’ experimental aircraft, space vehicles, and other pieces of advanced hardware that had never made it into large-scale production. Helen Kaddiri, the company’s president and chairman, sometimes cynically referred to the hangar as “Never-Never Land” or “the Warehouse of Expensive Dreams.” Boomer and Richter, on the other hand, saw it as a place of as-yet-unrealized potential. Maybe the prototypes stored in Hangar Five hadn’t found a market yet — but they all represented revolutionary design concepts and technologies that might someday prove invaluable.

Brad smiled at his friend’s obvious enthusiasm. This level of excitement was almost always reserved for machines that had the potential to explode in new and interesting ways. “Sure, Boomer. Go ahead and spring your big reveal.”

“As you wish.” Boomer turned toward a Sky Masters technician waiting by a set of wall panel controls. “Hey, Sarah, you can pull the curtain now.”

The tech flipped a switch. Overhead, an electric motor kicked in. Slowly, the screen rolled back — revealing a forty-foot-long white cylinder resting horizontally on what looked like glorified helicopter landing skids. It was ten feet in diameter. At one end of the cylinder, a truncated cone cap ended in a docking port and hatch. A large rocket nozzle surrounded by gold-colored spherical fuel tanks was fitted to the other end. Four smaller thruster motor assemblies, two on each flank, were mounted along the cylinder’s longitudinal axis. On one side, below the thrusters, a wide, curved hatch opened into the interior.

They stared at it in silence for a few moments. “Okay, what the hell is that?” Brad asked at last. “A giant beer can for really out-of-control office parties?”

“Not a bad thought, but no,” Boomer said, clearly amused. He gestured grandly. “Behold the next big thing in lunar lander designs… the XEUS, pronounced like ‘Zeus’ with an ‘X.’”

Nadia frowned. “It looks more like a rocket’s upper stage turned on its side,” she said critically.

“Well spotted, Major,” Jason Richter said. “Xeus stands for eXperimental Enhanced Upper Stage. It is basically a Centaur stage from the Atlas V rocket converted into a revolutionary lander. That big motor at the back is an Aerojet Rocketdyne RL-10 cryogenic main engine burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. And those Katana side thrusters you see give it a vertical landing and vertical takeoff capability. Overall, we think it should be able to ferry around five tons of payload, either personnel or cargo or a combination of the two, down to the lunar surface and back up into orbit.”

Brad moved closer to the cylindrical spacecraft. He glanced back at Richter. “Is this one of your designs?”

The other man shook his head. “I wish I could claim the credit, because it’s a really cool concept… but no, this isn’t one of mine. Xeus was originally developed by one of our competitors, another innovative private aerospace company called Masten Space Systems — working in tandem with Lockheed Martin and Boeing’s United Launch Alliance.” He shrugged. “But they shelved the program about five years ago. And since Sky Masters is always on the prowl for nifty technology, we moved in and picked up both this prototype and the rights for a song.”

“It sure doesn’t look like any other lunar lander prototype or mock-up I’ve ever seen,” Brad mused.

Richter nodded. “That’s because engineers are fundamentally conservative,” he said. “Nobody messes with success. So, since the Apollo LM worked beautifully, the holy writ has been that all future lunar landers should be scaled-up or scaled-down versions of that same machine.”

That certainly applied to China’s Chang’e landers, Brad realized. From the outside, they appeared to be almost exact replicas of the four-legged spacecraft that had carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and the other Apollo crews to the surface of the moon in 1969.

“But the Apollo LM was designed for a very specific purpose and for very specific missions,” Richter went on. “There are no real laws of physics or spacecraft design that say something like the Xeus here can’t handle the job of landing on a low-gravity, airless moon. In fact, my bet is this design will turn out to be significantly more cost-effective and efficient.”