Moonshot (Europa Reich Book 1) by James Philip

Moonshot (Europa Reich Book 1) by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-24T16:00:00+00:00


Friday 17th January, 1975

Chapter 16

Mission Control

Hans Kammler Manned Space Flight Centre

Kourou, German Guyana

The Deputy Führer, the Gauleiter of German Guyana and the Director of Project Vulkan took their seats in the conference room deep in the bowels of the Centre. They waited, unspeaking while the technicians completed the link up to the Fatherland, their eyes fixed on the big screen on the end wall.

Yesterday, the furious contretemps around the High Chair in Mission Control had started the moment the TV cameras had been switched off; up until then a global audience of over a billion viewers had witnessed twelve long – endless it seemed at the time - minutes of chaos, confusion and worst of all, indecision before Fritz Neumann had brusquely upbraided Siegfried Galland for failing to follow protocol in issuing advice to the crew of Vulkan 11 without either the Mission Controller or he, the Reichsführer in overall command being consulted.

Galland had dryly acknowledged: ‘I copy that Herr Neumann but we were about to run out of time…’

The rest of the exchange had been cut off.

This was fortunate because the Reserve Mission Commander’s subsequent comments were of a generally dismissive, not to say, scatological character upon the general theme of the Battle Theatre being full of ‘spineless fucking amateurs’ who were, patently, incapable of ‘finding their arses in the dark.’

Had the live pictures from Mission Control not already been interrupted – by a ‘technical problem’ – viewers might have also glimpsed Gauleiter Neumann’s security men denying Wernher von Braun access to the vast room, and knocking down a female software engineer who had attempted to speak to him as he was dragged away by heavily armed SS-men. Subsequently, viewers might have found the brawl that had broken out between, initially, several of the Gauleiter’s aides and a number of enraged mission specialists unenlightening but entertaining; and they would almost certainly have queried the wisdom of members of the Deputy Führer’s bodyguard believing, in any conceivable circumstances, that firing live rounds into the ceiling of one of the most ‘wired’ buildings on the planet was in any sense, wise or justified given that so far as anybody knew, nobody had actually threatened his person?

While this separate drama was unfolding on the ground the men on board Vulkan 11 had been fighting for their lives. In the seven minutes and thirty-one seconds of the second stage burn furious arguments had raged in the pit of the Battle Theatre as the Moon ship continued to accelerate, attempting to attain a velocity of just under twenty-four thousand kilometres-an-hour. It was almost immediately apparent that the Moon Rocket, its flight azimuth having strayed outside all previously specified mission parameters, that a decision had had to be made about whether LEO was: one, achievable; and two, if achieved, any or all of the planned ‘mission components’ remained viable.

In the end Willy Osterkamp had said: ‘We’ll go with throttle-up on stage three. What happens then,” he had drawled, laconically, “happens.”

By then, in the absence of



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