Operation Damocles Read Online Free PDF Page A

but their shared dreams and consuming fascination with spaceflight and discovery had bound their souls together in a way that somehow made sex between them distracting and uninteresting. They had remained close friends over the years, even after marrying other people. They enjoyed their occasional get-togethers at agency functions and planning meetings, and still had frequent telephone conversations.
    Because her section at JPL was a locus of flight operations for so many Defense Department and civilian missions, Richards had solid contacts throughout the space sciences community, from the military to academia. She had developed most of the exobiology test protocols for deep space and planetary missions, and had earned her stripes the hard way, by genius of mind and an unrelenting hard-headedness that would brook no bureaucratic BS if it stood between her and what she wanted to accomplish.
    Something of a hippie and activist in her younger days, and contemptuous of authority and politics, she was still a bit amazed, after all the intervening years, to know that she had made a lot of friends during her career, and that she, herself, had become a scientific authority and political power of national significance.
    Patterson liked and trusted these people. They were his old teammates, people he knew he could depend on to give him good advice, and to keep it among themselves.
    “How do you suppose it evaded radar detection?” Richards asked Maldenado. “We couldn’t track it as it boosted into higher orbit, and we can’t find it now.”
    “State-of-the-art stealth technology,” answered Maldenado. “It was meant to be undetectable.” He leaned forward in his chair, forearms on the table, fingers laced together, and surveyed the ring of worried faces.
    “Best guess scenario,” he said, “three hours after the package was released by Columbia, the container module separated. The gas bottles and accouterments, supposedly the workings of a hydrogen torch and kiln, actually comprised an engine. Same for the rest of it. The test equipment listed in the package nomenclature is probably navigational stuff and controls. The main body of the device was inside a contamination-proof housing, and engineering only has the visual record of the outer casing to go by. The plans we have are of the Stanford experiment, which may have no resemblance whatever to the package we lofted.
    “The Air Force Space Command imaged the orbital-transition burn, three hours and eighteen minutes after deployment into LEO, and assumed that it was a part of our planned activity. The Air Force thought that the burn was just an attitude-correction maneuver within the planned orbit, and didn’t pay any attention to it. Why should they? It was a NASA launch, not an incoming, hostile missile . . . right?
    “They didn’t track anything in a tangential path, just the container parts, as they swung along in the original, twenty-eight-degree track. Incidentally, those parts were lined with aluminum foil to give them a higher-than-normal radar albedo, just to keep the Air Force thinking that it was where it was supposed to be, until final maneuvers were accomplished.
    “Anyway, we enhanced the image of the engine flare. The computed trajectory of the burn path could possibly put it in a geostationary orbit, but exactly where is hard to tell. It was headed out, though. We know the bird’s mass and the duration of the burn, but we don’t know what the fuel or oxidizer was, or the thrust of the engine. Spectral analysis of the engine flare gives a strong hydrogen line, but it could be pure Hydrogen and LOX [liquid oxygen], or something like Aerozine 50 with a Nitro-Tet oxidizer, even kerosene and peroxide. Projecting where it ended up depends a great deal on knowing the energy of the burn, and we don’t. From the size and spectral temperature of the flare, though, it looks like it had more than enough energy for geosynchronous insertion. It may even be headed