America One 01 - America One by T. I. Wade

Author:T. I. Wade [Wade, T. I.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-fi, action-adventure, new president, space travel, fiction, America
Publisher: Triple T Productions INC.
Published: 2012-12-14T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

The second last Christmas for many.

Boy! Did the first beer taste good to Jonesy. It was getting dark outside; the day had been a long one with his first flight to the outer atmosphere and the long debriefing afterwards. He felt very good about his flying, he was back on top of his ability, and knew it. He went over the day’s proceedings in his mind.

After the flight, the shuttle was wheeled into Hangar Six for inspection. The pilots and passengers, who had been aboard, as well as Suzi and VIN, were asked to take part in the debriefing in Hangar One’s Ground Control; everyone met over a well-deserved lunch; then, for five hours, they went over every second of the flight.

“So, Herr Smidt, Mr. Nikolaevich, Ms. Grigorevna, do you think the computers can be accurately recalibrated with all the collected flight data?”

“Ja, to a point,” replied Herr Smidt, an older German scientist in charge of computing the shuttle systems. “We can reprogram up to the maximum altitude the shuttle achieved, no more. Then we can match the next re-entry of either shuttle with the exact altitude, position above earth, and re-entry speed. This new information will give the computers a more exact re-entry map and slope through the atmosphere. Of course we have to wait to compute data from higher altitudes, but as your flights get further away from the atmosphere, we can reprogram the computers in all the space craft. Once we have data from your first flight to the 22,500 mile altitude, the new information will aid us in recalibrating all future flights to that altitude.”

“Is there any reason why we cannot slow the craft down with one extra earth revolution and then have a lower altitude, speed, and glide slope? This would give us eleven minutes in the hot re-entry zone instead of the full eighteen minutes from a normal altitude high-speed re-entry. What is stopping us from doing that?” Ryan asked his team.

“Just speed,” Ms. Grigorevna replied; she also looked to be in her seventies. “Due to the small size of the shuttles, a single forward thruster would need to slow her from 25,000 knots to 14,500. This will take two hours, or two earth revolutions, and use up all remaining hydrogen fuel for re-entry.”

“A solution?” asked Ryan.

“We could add a larger thruster,” the scientist responded.

“Do we have room?” Ryan asked.

“We would need to redesign and build the nose cone of both shuttles, but I believe there is room,” Mr. Nikolaevich added.

“The reason is that with the low re-entry point this morning, seven complete minutes of heat on the heat-resistant tiles was reduced by lower speed and altitude; this decreases the chances of something going wrong by nearly 40 percent while the craft is totally helpless in space. I would like to see the report on blast damage from the bricks first, but I think that the useful life of the bricks themselves could be extended by the same amount. Remember, we only need

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.