The Glass Lady by Douglas Savage

Author:Douglas Savage
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781589798465
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing

10

“What about a magnetic wake? Why is that serious, as problems go?”

“The best we had hoped for, Colonel, was a simple mechanical failure with LACE.” Admiral Hauch’s large frame was rumpled and exhausted. Behind him, the clock on the wall of the basement bunker read 53 minutes past noon Washington time. Beside it, a second clock face read 02:53. Beneath that clock hung the words “MISSION ELAPSED TIME, SHUTTLE.”

“A breakdown in LACE’s flux generator is leaking a wake of magnetic energy.” The Admiral slouched in his high-backed chair. He fumbled with his thick fingers and looked at his sweating hands instead of at the ten grim faces around the large table set upon the glass floor. “Any other problem with LACE would have meant that we only had to bring her down at a reasonable opportunity—hopefully before she takes a pot shot at Endeavor, or God forbid at Soyuz. But magnetic problems mean that now we are on a deadline, an absolute deadline. General Gordon, you should take it from here . . .”

The General from the Air Force and commander of the new U.S. Air Force Space Command from Colorado Springs nodded from across the table.

“Admiral, a magnetic disturbance inside LACE means that the bird is greatly susceptible to external magnetic influences. Any sudden magnetic disturbance in space could trigger another round of stray firings of the laser . . .”

“Can these magnetic disturbances be predicted—disturbances from space, I mean?”

“Not from space, no, Colonel . . . But from Earth, yes, and predicted to the second.”

“From Earth, General?”

“Yes. Michael, what do you have?”

“General.” A tall engineer in civilian clothes took over. Group Captain Michael Dzurovcin looked tired from his dawn flight to Washington from the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory at Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts. “We can predict a serious—very serious—magnetic perturbance when the vehicles cross the SAA . . .”

“The SAA?”

“Yes. The South Atlantic Anomaly—a huge area due east of South America which is the center of gigantic magnetic storms. At Endeavor’s present altitude, the SAA stretches from Uruguay in South America all the way across the Atlantic to Cape Town, South Africa. And it’s a thousand nautical miles wide, from latitude 30 degrees South down to 48 degrees South. It was the South Atlantic Anomaly which caused one of the early failures on the Hubble Space Telescope. By June 1990, after only five weeks in space, NASA figured out that the Anomaly’s intense radiation interference was actually destroying computer memory on board the telescope. Memory bits which were supposed to be off were switched on, and on-bits were switched off by the radiation fields . . .

“When LACE rides into that area, it will be like she hit a wall—a wall of magnetic interference. Our guess is that when LACE enters the region, no ship close to her will come out of it.”

“When does LACE cross this area of the South Atlantic?”

“Our vehicles, and Soyuz, squarely enter the SAA for the first time during Shuttle’s sixth revolution at mission elapsed time of 8 hours and 16 minutes.

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