Von Neumann’s War

Fisher was one of the men in the room who had been carefully chosen. In his early forties, he was from Denver and had been a rocket systems engineer his entire career with Lockheed Martin. Despite his “corporate button-down” looks, he was a noted outside-the-box thinker and damned fine engineer. One of the things Roger had heard about him that he liked was that Fisher was a “tinkerer” at home as well as at work. Get him in a lab and the suit came off, the well pressed lab-coat came on and he started making things. He was even a skilled machinist, having simply picked it up over the years. If anyone could figure out how to get three CBC tubes linked together with eight strap-ons, then boosting, it would be John Fisher.

“We’ll discuss that part of the mission more later in a breakout session, Dr. Fisher. If that is it, we’ll continue?”

“Sure.” Dr. Fisher sat back down, his forehead furrowed in thought.

“Let’s see, where was I?” Roger said as he turned back to the screen and read through the chart to himself. “Oh yeah, our launch window is approximately three weeks in duration over the last three weeks of August with at least a daily twenty-seven minute launch window. So, we’re bound to be able to hit one of them.” Roger clicked the slide laser pointer button and waved the laser spot over several different trajectory maps showing the different launch dates, times, and trip-times per trajectory. Twenty-one different trajectories curved out from an elliptical Earth orbit and curved directly into Mars’ heliocentric orbital path.

“Another thing to remember here, folks, is that launch is a whole heck of a lot more than just lift-off. I’ve taken the liberty to summarize these steps from the SMAD and various previous mission timelines. You’ll find the steps on the next page of the briefing. Launch team, I want you to start breaking them down and populating the steps with more detail.”

“Uh, Roger, I hate to interrupt again.” John Fisher stood up, again. “But four upper stages on a Delta IV Heavy hasn’t ever been done either. I mean, granted I work for LockMart and I know more about the Atlas systems, but they’re very similar. I just don’t know. And you’re showing one of the stages here consisting of three connected and even modified kick motors. How do you think we can pull that off in less than five months? I’m not even thinking design process, bad as that’s going to be, I’m thinking man hours here.”

“John, we’ll do it because we have to,” Roger replied seriously. “This isn’t something that we’re doing for fun or because of science that we can let overrun the budget and slip in schedule. There is literally something dramatically changing Mars and what if, just what if, Earth is next? I want to get that point across as sincerely as I possibly can. If this is the beginnings of an alien contact, onslaught, or whatever, we need to know and we need to know it as soon as humanly possible. Sooner.”

“We can do it, potentially, but only with dispersed production and every production facility on triple shift,” Fisher said, nodding in understanding. “These modifications alone might cost fifty to a hundred million dollars. Do we have that kind of budget?”

“Yes,” was all Roger said. Despite his little pep talk it was apparent that many of them hadn’t grasped the magnitude of the problem.

“Let me make this clear,” Roger said, taking a deep breath. “We have the budget. We have the backing. We have anything we want. Any facility, any person, any piece of equipment being produced for the United States government and probably anything being produced for anyone anywhere in the world. That being said, the first company that screws with this program since there’s so much money being thrown at it will get reamed a new one and probably broken. But we have the budget. We have any budget it takes to get this done. But we’re not funding a welfare program for rocket scientists. This is about using off-the-shelf components to get a mission completed to find out if there is a threat to the world. And we will do it and we will do it on time, budget be damned.”

He paused for a minute for the auditorium to settle, then he continued with the briefing.

“Okay, cruise phase of the mission begins once Percival is in a safe and stable configuration after the control maneuvers at the end of the launch sequence. The best we’ve come up with thus far for transit time from Earth to Mars is about four to five months — feel free to discuss with Dr. Powell transit time optimization if you wish. The cruise trajectory will deliver the spacecraft to Mars on a southern approach trajectory where we’ll begin taking reconnaissance data. In fact, our plan is to passively collect data for the entire trip. Who knows, it might be useful. We also suggest one active sensor, which we’ll discuss in a minute.