John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

“Hey, now there is an idea!” Tom got quiet for a second and zoned out in thought. The other two men had worked with him long enough to know that they shouldn’t interrupt his process, because he usually came up with something brilliant when he did that. They sat patiently, quietly, and drank their beers. Alan had had to refill his because Traci was busy on the other side of the restaurant, but he made sure she was not looking his direction when he did.

“Let’s see…” Tom began to mutter to himself. “The C3 for that orbit’s… right… the I-S-P for that engine is four hundred-eighty seconds as near as makes no difference… and the asymptotic velocity would be… yep!”

“What?” Roger asked.

“Why orbit Mars? It’s a waste of mass to put the braking engine on there. Let’s do a super quick fly-by. Hell, we could even crash into it if we want to. Take data right up to the end although you wouldn’t have time to send back the data if you impact the planet, hmmm, better fly-by. If the problem is that the entire planet is changing then we should be able to see the phenomenon wherever we look, so orbiting isn’t really needed. Yep, fly-by sounds right,” he concluded.

“And with the right engines and the right trajectory — I want to check my thinking on my computer later, but — I think we could get a spacecraft large enough to do the job there in four or five months travel time — maybe.”

“Can you get me those calculations soon?” Roger asked.

“What’s the hurry, Rog?” Alan cocked his head to the left and looked in his beer glass.

“Well, first, if it’s aliens we shouldn’t just sit around and let them continue on with whatever it is they’re doing.” Roger sipped his beer and wiped his mouth. “Second, I’m headed back up to Chantilly next week for a meeting with the Director of AS and T at — you know. And I thought I could give him a white paper with the reasoning, strawman, mission architecture, and possible data product description. We should put a short bit in there about CONOPS also. Alan, I’d need you to write up the part on the command and data handling. Figure out how we’d get the data back from Mars.” Roger tapped a box on the rough strawman drawing on the napkin in front of him marked C DH. “And the telecom — both spacecraft and ground stations.”

“No problem. We’ll probably need a big aperture and a TWeeTA or two. Deep Space Network would be nice, but I’ll shoot for some thirty-meter dishes groundside. Who’s doing the power generation, conditioning, and distribution systems?”

“I guess I’ll handle as much of the nuts and bolts as I can manage over the weekend. I’m thinking we might be able to grab a spacecraft bus that is already being built for another program. Tom, could you work out the trajectories and such? Figure out what motors and what requirements for the ACS and RCS to hold us on target within say a tenth of a microradian right up until we hit the Martian closest approach point?” Roger asked.

“Yeah, sounds like fun. Assume a Delta IV or Atlas V, right?”

“Yeah, or whatever it takes. Just remember that time is of the essence and we want off-the-shelf stuff. I’ll copy and paste standard spacecraft fairing and attachment stuff out of one of our previous mission white papers. We should be able to put together a pretty good mission architecture concept.” Roger rubbed his chin wondering if he had forgotten anything.

“What about the cost and schedule?” Tom asked.

“Oh, yeah, we’ll need that too, I expect. I’ll do a ROM and a schedule. Hey, you know what, I think I still have that Microsoft Project task and work breakdown structure we did on that last mission. I could change it pretty easy to have a pretty good ROM and schedule for this concept. Let’s see, is there anything else?”

“Hey, Rog.” Alan rubbed his chin.

“Yeah?”

“What about security?”

“Oh, yeah, we best not forget security.” Roger nodded. “Let’s treat everything we write up in the white world as though we’re thinking about an idea for a NASA space probe mission. After all, it’s always worked in the past. Anything related to the actual mission and components from previous programs, I’ll add in at the SCIF at work and take care of the classification then. Let’s treat the real idea from now on as if it were classified at special levels, because if you-know-who buys into this you know that it will become that way. And I don’t want to have to do a bunch of back briefings and security stuff later.”

“Uh,” Tom looked around the room wide-eyed. “Then I guess we shouldn’t talk about it here anymore?”

“You’re probably right,” Alan said.

“Can we meet at my office for lunch tomorrow, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to see where we are with this?”

“Fine by me,” Alan said.

“Hey, we can pull Project up on the big projection screen in the conference room and y’all can help fix that WBS and schedule up.”

“Suits.” Tom scribbled a few more notes on his napkins.

“Make sure those napkins are unclassified, Tom.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Dr. Ronrico “Ronny” Guerrero, the Director of Advanced Science and Technology of the National Reconnaissance Office, listened patiently to the update briefing on one of his many programs. The briefing was business as usual. The scientist in front of the room was smart, precise and had done his homework. What would have been extremely exciting discussions about space-based sparse array antennas now seemed sort of, mundane, because the DAS T had recently been given another task with a short turn around, which was way more exciting — and frightening at the same time. He was preoccupied. However, Ronny was the ultimate in professionalism and would get the job done — all of his jobs done — to the utmost of his abilities. It was the only way that he knew to do business. It was the only way he could do business. Otherwise he would have never made it to where he currently was. And still be alive.

At fourteen he had been a peasant boy in Cuba and was tired of that life and that place. He had actually lived in a cardboard-and-corrugated-tin house and his living standards were nonexistent. One day after his mother passed away — who knew, she might have lived with better healthcare — Ronny walked out to the ocean and swam north, hoping to cross the ninety miles of water to the United States. He swam and swam. He swam, floated, and swam again for two days and nights until he could go no further. Ronny could still remember, floating on his back and looking at the night sky, how he thought it would be better to die free in the ocean than as an oppressed peasant. He had done the right thing even if he drowned or was eaten by a shark. The next day — sunburned beyond belief, dehydrated and half dead — he thought he was delirious when he saw land in front of him. He was — it wasn’t land at all. Ronny had been lucky that a charter fishing boat out of Key West spotted him. The odds of that having occurred were ridiculous but he was rescued. God had been with him and Ronny would always thank Him for that.

With a second lease on life, Ronny worked hard to become an American and become accepted by his American peers. A Cuban-American family in Miami took him in and put him into a parochial school where he immediately showed that there was a fine mind in that peasant brain. On his twenty-second birthday — naturalized as an American citizen and with a bachelor’s degree in physics — he joined the Air Force. Those years developed a mindset that soon led him into reconnaissance and flight technologies. He enjoyed it and was good at it and used the opportunity to study graduate level physics at the University of the Air Force. Ronny moved up in the Air Force and by the time he was thirty earned a tour at the then totally “black” organization now known as NRO. While at NRO he completed his doctorate in physics at Virginia Tech.