Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (44 page)

V. R. Shannon sat down next to him and O’Malley said, “They’ll be stuffing flowers in rifle barrels soon. We’ll be seeing a whole second generation of peaceniks out there demanding that we get out of Iraq.”

Shannon surprised him. “And a damn good thing, too, Steve. You were right. We should have used shock and awe to subdue them, to make the entire Muslim world shiver with fear at what we might do next. Instead we have dozens of factions at war with each other, Syria and Iran helping out, al Qaeda gaining strength. We’ve made a colossal mistake, and we should get out and let them run themselves into the ground.”

“You serious, V. R.? I’ve never heard you talk like this before.”

“I can’t help it. The United States is willing to let one percent of the population fight its war, while we are going on the biggest prosperity binge in history. We are not going to get serious until the terrorists set off some nukes here, or London or Paris maybe, and even then, I don’t know if we have the will to fight the entire Muslim world. Because that is what it is going to take: fighting the entire Muslim world, way more than a billion people.”

O’Malley was distressed. “Jesus, V. R., you sound nuttier than I do! Don’t you think we can hound the terrorists out, deal with them in particular, cut them out of the body of Muslims just like you cut a cancer out of a human?”

“I wish I could think like that, Steve. But there’s no sign that the so-called nonviolent Muslim world has taken any steps to stop the fanatics.
They are passive about them, just like the majority of the Germans were passive about the Nazis.”

O’Malley interrupted him. “I know, when we fought World War II, we didn’t just concentrate on the Nazis, we had to fight the whole German people. But, my God, that meant fighting maybe eighty million people in one country. Here you are talking about fighting a billion and a half people, all over the world, lots of them citizens in the United States.”

“I know. But that is what it will take.”

O’Malley found himself in the unusual position of trying to get someone else to stop talking about the Muslim threat; usually people were trying to stop him. He turned to their mutual favorite, airplanes.

“Did you see where your buddy, Skip Holm, set a new closed-course record in his Mustang ‘Dago Red’? He turned 507 mph at Reno!”

V. R. said, “Yeah, that is really pushing it. He won the Unlimited Gold class, too. I don’t know how much more they can get out of a P-51. Looks like some time they will have to turn to scratch-built racers to set any new records.”

O’Malley glanced at his watch.

“Let’s get the news on and see how they did with the Wright Flyer reproduction.”

Shannon said, “Tell me about it, I haven’t been following it at all. I’m ashamed of myself.”

“Well, you know Ken Hyde, out in Virginia. Ken’s masterminded an exact reproduction of the original 1903 Wright Flyer, using original documents and reverse engineering to make it as accurate as possible. He even brought in our old buddy Scott Crossfield to supervise training pilots to fly it.”

Crossfield was a hero to Shannon and all his colleagues, for he was both a true gentleman and a brilliant pilot. The first man to break Mach 2, he was also a pioneer in hypersonic flight, spearheading the engineering and making the first flights of the North American X-15.

“That will give them a big advantage. They’ve been running a simulator to teach them how to use the Wright Flyer’s controls, and what to expect on the launch. The Wrights are probably looking down with amazement—they could have used some training themselves before the first flight.”

“Have they modified the reproduction in any way?”

“No, it is as original as they can make it. They were supposed to fly it at the exact same moment that Orville made the first flight, but the weather was too bad. I think their only concession is to let the test pilot wear a crash helmet.”

The CNN station came on the big television set that Bob Rodriquez, Sr., had made personally for Vance Shannon many years before. It was obviously rotten weather, far different than the cold day in 1903, when the Wrights found exactly the wind they wanted and needed.

It was anticlimactic. The reproduction Wright Flyer, estimated to have cost $1.2 million, moved down the track and lifted off about six inches from the ground, then dipped its left wing in a puddle of water and came to a stop.

“Those poor guys! All that effort and then the wind doesn’t cooperate.”

V. R. Shannon abruptly got up and left the room. The Wrights had ushered in the age of manned flight one hundred years before. In just a couple of years, he would have the opportunity to usher in the age of extended manned hypersonic flight, testing the Hypersonic Cruiser, and he still did not know if he would elect to try to do it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE PASSING PARADE
: Ambitious space program proposed by President Bush to return to moon, go on to explore Mars, no funds attached to proposal; evidence begins to accumulate that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction; mass sale of nuclear weapons information to North Korea, Iran, and Libya admitted by A. Q. Khan, who was founder of Pakistan’s nuclear program; President Aristide forced to resign and flee Haiti; Spain capitulates to al Qaeda terrorist attacks that killed about 200; NATO expands by admitting seven new countries, many former Soviet satellites, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia; Sharon becomes peacemaker, announces plan for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza Strip; Abu Ghraib prison scandal erupts; twenty-one-year civil war in Sudan purportedly ends, but war and genocide continue in Darfur; Iyad Allawai first interim Iraqi government leader; dispute erupts over rights of “enemy combatants” held at Guantanamo Bay; John Kerry “reports for duty” as Democratic candidate for presidency; hurricanes ravage Florida; Bush renominated at Republican convention; over 300 killed when Chechan terrorists take 1,200 hostage in Beslan, Russia; no weapons of mass destruction found according to final U.S. report on Iraq; Bush reelected President; Arab leader Yasir Arafat dies; Hamid Karzai inaugurated as first democratically elected President in Afghanistan; massive tsunami kills more than 200,000 in Asia; the United States leads way in immediate compassionate relief efforts.

June 21, 2004

Mojave Airport, California

I
still can’t believe it. Those guys in Rutan’s shop are fantastic. They pulled it off. Imagine, a civilian spacecraft actually going into space and coming back safely. I sort of wish we’d tried for that instead of screwing around with the always-evanescent Hypersonic Cruiser.”

Bob Rodriquez looked up with sad eyes.

“That’s a hell of a thing to say, Steve. Mike Melvill’s flight in
SpaceShipOne
is a tremendous achievement, but it has none of the complexity and none of the problems of manned hypersonic flight. You know that.”

At 6:45
A.M
. that morning,
SpaceShipOne
had lifted off the Mojave runway, nestled under the
White Knight
carrier aircraft. The
White Knight
had a totally different configuration than the
Proteus
aircraft, but was unmistakably a Burt Rutan product. About an hour later,
SpaceShipOne
was dropped. After a short glide to about forty-seven thousand feet, Melvill ignited the hybrid rocket motor and the gleaming white plane, almost toylike in appearance, streaked straight up. It reached the desired hundred-kilometer, sixty-two-mile altitude that qualified it as a flight into outer space, and then began its descent, with Rutan’s brilliant device, a movable tail section, positioned to slow it down. Once back in the atmosphere, the tail was moved back into place and Melvill made a smooth descent and landing at about 8:15
A.M
. to the delight of an awestruck crowd.

“I know but, just think, if we’d set our sights on the X Prize and beaten Rutan to the punch, we’d be ahead of the game right now, instead of slipping farther behind.”

The X Prize was a ten-million-dollar prize modeled on the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Orteig Prize of 1919, which Charles Lindbergh won with his nonstop solo flight to Paris from New York. Backed by the well-endowed Ansari family, the X Prize was intended to award teams who reach specific goals with the potential to benefit humanity. For this contest, the winning contestant must fly to space in a civilian-built spacecraft, return safely, and repeat the process within two weeks. The hope was that the X Prize would change the space industry just as the Orteig Prize had galvanized the aviation industry. There
were other competitors, but none with the genius and the financial backing of Rutan’s group.

O’Malley was nothing if not insensitive. No one knew better than Rodriquez that the schedule had slipped on the Hypersonic Cruiser, and he didn’t want to be reminded of it, not now and not by someone who wasn’t contributing much more than money to the effort. In his heart he was glad for Rutan and his team, and especially glad that Melvill had made the hazardous trip into space safely.

Safety was the heart of Rodriquez’s problem. He was building the Hypersonic Cruiser, and the chances were that his close friend, V. R. Shannon, would fly it. Unfortunately, the chances were also very good that something could go wrong, and V. R. would not survive. There would be no ejection at hypersonic speeds, and the craft was too small to have the luxury of an escape capsule.

Rodriquez was not sure he could take the triple disappointment of the failure of his great project, the culmination of his engineering career, and, most important of all, the death of his friend. Thinking about it robbed him of his usual normal composure even though he was absorbed in his work as before. He was just too conscious that every bit of progress moved him toward a life-defining moment that might be laden with tragedy.

“Steve, I’ve about decided to give up on the idea of manned hypersonic flight, at least for the first time. It will cost us some money, but I think I can make up the time we’d lose on the schedule.”

“That’s a change of tune, Bob. You’ve been adamant about manned flight being the way to go. What’s changing your mind? Boeing’s success with the X-43A?”

After an earlier failure, the Boeing X-43A had flown at 4,780 mph, about seven times the speed of sound.

“No, listen, that doesn’t bother me at all. Look at the complexity of what they are doing—they have a B-52 chase plane to carry it to altitude, and then a Pegasus rocket to accelerate it to scramjet speeds. Worse than that, they have a half-dozen bureaucracies overseeing what they are doing. I feel sorry for them.”

“Mach 7, that’s pretty good.”

“It’s a small, single-use vehicle! It gets to Mach 7 and then crashes into the ocean. What the hell good is that? What would Kelly Johnson have said about a program like that?”

“They are not shooting for a mission capable aircraft—”

“Well, we are, dammit.” Rodriquez rarely interrupted O’Malley—few people besides his wife Sally did—but this was too much. “I’ve got to tell you, Steve, you’ve got to find something to do. You’re getting fat, you come around and bitch, and you are not contributing much but your money to this program. It’s about time you got out and drummed us up some business like you did in the old days, when we were chasing F-16 subcontracts in Europe.”

O’Malley was stunned. His wife had said virtually the same thing to him that very morning. He stood up and walked into the tiny bathroom to gaze into the mirror over the sink.

“Good Lord. You are both right.”

He walked briskly past Rodriquez on his way out the door, saying only, “Thanks, Bob. I’ll be back, in shape and with some contracts. And something else. You tell V. R. Shannon that he’s got some competition now. I’m going to fly the Hypersonic Cruiser if he doesn’t want to. Or maybe even if he does.”

Rodriquez went back to his work, still angry with O’Malley for his chafing remarks. He meant no harm, but he should know better. And if anyone should be worried about delays in development, it was O’Malley. He had helped father the F-16 program that took perhaps six years to go from a proposal to entering service. And he had been a big backer of the F-22, which was proposed in 1986 and still hadn’t entered service. He had a lot of nerve to complain about “slow progress” on the Hypersonic Cruiser. But O’Malley never had been short on nerve.

September 14, 2004

Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama

V. R. S
HANNON
strolled the familiar Maxwell campus in the near-mandatory civilian blue blazer and gray flannel pants, remembering the happy days he’d spent there so long ago as a lieutenant in the Squadron Officers School, and later as a major in the Command and Staff College. It had not been easy at first in either school because he was both younger than his peers and had been promoted more swiftly,
neither fact designed to make him popular. Yet he had worked and played hard, and in both schools wound up at the top of his class.

Nominally he was there on an unofficial mission, helping prepare for the next Gathering of Eagles event. The program had started in 1982 when fifteen distinguished aviators related their experiences to students. The Eagles were selected from all nations and all eras, and included such giants as Jimmy Doolittle, Curtis E. LeMay, Joe Foss, Adolf Galland, Gabby Gabreski, and Paul Tibbetts. The program was held every year, and many of the Eagles returned time and again, enjoying the company of the young officers with whom they talked.

The group sponsoring this year’s event had invited V. R. down, ostensibly to discuss the possibility of including his grandfather, Vance Shannon, as an honorary Eagle. Shannon knew that this was just a cover, and that their real goal was to get his views—heretical from the Air Force’s standpoint—on the war in Iraq.

Colonel Joe Carr was waiting for him on the steps of Austin Hall, the historic building where so many great Air Force officers had studied. Carr was project officer for the next year’s Gathering of Eagles, and led him into his small, crowded office.