World Engines: Destroyer

by Stephen Baxter

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

In the year 2570, a sleeper will wake....

In the mid-21st century, the Kernel, a strange object on a 500-year-orbit, is detected coming from high above the plane of the solar system. Could it be an alien artefact?

In the middle of climate-change crises, there is no mood for space-exploration stunts — but Reid Malenfant, elderly, once a shuttle pilot and frustrated would-be asteroid miner, decides to go take a look anyway. Nothing more is heard of him. But his ex-wife, Emma Stoney, sets up a trust fund to search for him the next time the Kernel returns....

By 2570 Earth is transformed. A mere billion people are supported by advanced technology on a world that is almost indistinguishable from the natural, with recovered forests, oceans, ice caps. It is not an age for expansion; there are only small science bases beyond the Earth. But this is a world you would want to live in: a Star Trek without the stars.

After 500 years the Kernel returns, and a descendant of Stoney, who Malenfant will call Emma II, mounts a mission to see what became of Malenfant. She finds him still alive, cryo-preserved....

His culture-shock encounter with a conservative future is entertaining....

But the Kernel itself turns out to be attached to a kind of wormhole, through which Malenfant and Emma II, exploring further, plummet back in time, across five billion years....

Release date: September 19, 2019

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 576

Sample

 

1

 

My name is Reid Malenfant.

You know me. Yeah, the guy who crashed the space shuttle. But, you know, I was only in the left-hand seat of that booster stage in the first place because I was always an incorrigible space cadet.

Now I want to talk about why I became a space cadet.

It started with a simple question:

Where is everybody?

As a kid I used to lie at night out on the lawn, soaking up dew and looking at the stars, trying to feel the Earth turning under me. It felt wonderful to be alive – hell, to be ten years old, anyhow.

But I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy.

As I lay there staring at the stars – the thousands I could pick out with my naked eyes, the billions that make up the great wash of our Galaxy, the uncounted trillions in the galaxies beyond – I just couldn’t believe, even then, that there was nobody out there looking back at me down here. Was it really possible that this was the only place where life had taken hold – that only here were there minds and eyes capable of looking out and wondering?

But if not, where are they? Why isn’t there evidence of extraterrestrial civilisation all around us?

As a kid on that lawn, I didn’t see them. I seemed to be surrounded by emptiness and silence.

Later, I looked this stuff up properly. Turns out this paradox was first stated clearly by a twentieth-century physicist called Enrico Fermi. And it struck me as a genuine mystery. The contradictions are basic. Life seems capable of emerging everywhere. Just one starfaring race could easily have covered the Galaxy by now. The whole thing seems inevitable – but it hasn’t happened.

Thinking about paradoxes is the way human understanding advances. I realised the Fermi paradox was telling me something very profound about the universe, and our place in it.

Or was.

Of course, everything is different now.

Turns out they were here all the time.

Or anyhow, their mighty Engines.

All the time—

I’m in a flat spin—

 

2

 

Can you hear me?

Flat spin. I’m in a flat spin—

Try to be calm. It’s over now.

Over? . . .

Do you know who you are?

My name is Reid Malenfant. You know me. And you know I’m an incorrigible space cadet. I – my name is . . . Where am I?

Don’t worry about that for now.

I bet I’m back in crew quarters at KSC, right? In my room. On the bed, under that big oil painting of Neil Armstrong shaking hands with Richard Nixon?

Don’t worry—

Where’s Michael? My son, Michael? Is he safe? Does he know where I am?

Michael can come to no harm.

What the hell does that mean? Look, he’s a grown man, but he lost his mother to a space accident aged ten, and now—

He is beyond harm. Believe me. You must concentrate on yourself.

Myself? So . . . the mission’s over, right? What, am I emerging from some kind of bender? You’re fifty-nine years old, Malenfant, you should know better than to compete with those millennial fighter jocks. Though generally the Jack Daniel’s leaves me able to see, at least.

That will come. The nanomeds—

Nanomeds? What about the bird, Constitution?

Constitution. Yes. The space shuttle booster stage you were flying, before . . . Good, Colonel Malenfant. It’s good that you’re remembering that much.

It is?

It has been quite a challenge for us, you know.

What has?

Your treatment.

What treatment?

One thing at a time. You know who you are. We have established that.

My name is Reid Malenfant. And I know how I got here.

You do?

In general terms. I – how’s my pilot?

Your pilot?

Nicola Mott. I was commander of the Constitution, she was the pilot. Two-person crew.

British.

Mott is British. Spring chicken at forty-nine years old, ten years younger than me, and sharp as a tack and very experienced. Listen, she was in NASA a decade before I finally got in, and the agency in the nineties was a tough place to progress if you weren’t American, male and a pilot. But Nicola had fixated on the first flights of the shuttle when she was seven, eight, and had wanted to fly in space ever since. So she did. She migrated to the US, worked at McDonnell-Douglas on space station engineering, got into NASA, worked Mission Control, finally made it into the astronaut pool . . . You know, we have this saying in NASA: you train the new guy to be your replacement. Well, Nicola is no novice, but some day soon she’s going to be my replacement . . .

Nicola.

How is she?

We can discuss that, Colonel Malenfant.

Just Malenfant. What do I call you?

Karla. Just Malenfant. Just Karla.

Karla . . .

Tell us how you got here.

You want the long story, or the short?

What, are you in a rush?

. . . Was that a joke? Karla, I think we’ll get along fine, you and me.

 

OK.

The life story.

I got here through aeroplanes, and war, and science fiction.

I was a little kid in the sixties, remember. You had Fireball XL5 on Saturday morning TV, and Star Trek in prime time, and I devoured Wells and Clarke and Heinlein and all those other guys.

And there was space, of course. I was seventeen when the shuttle first flew, Armstrong riding atop Constitution, John Young commanding the orbiter, Fred Haise the booster plane . . . So there was all that going on.

And meanwhile my daddy first took me flying when I was three – so he said, I don’t remember that far back. I grew up knowing he’d been an aviator, though. Flew in Korea. And his father had flown in the Second World War. Went up in a P-51 Mustang against German jet planes. Hell of a thing. As a veteran too.

So, eighteen years old, I made my first approach to NASA. I soon learned it was a long road ahead. Go to college, they said.

My mother helped me find the right courses at Columbia U, and then I got a job with Sperry Engineering, who had a lot of contacts with the space programme. I was building a career, a profile.

Then in the early eighties they announced the schedule for the Project Ares Mars mission, and I got all fired up again. Impatient, I guess. I tried NASA, again. Got nowhere.

So I took a gamble and went back to college. Well, four of the first dozen Moon walkers had been to MIT. I went to Princeton, this was around 1982, because I knew O’Neill was teaching there. The space colonies guy – the High Frontier? Wow, he opened up my eyes to what you could do in space, once it became economical to get there in the first place.

We must have watched Silent Running like fifty times.

I tried again for NASA. Bounced again. Turned out they wanted pilots more than dreamers at that stage.

So, I would have made my father and grandfather proud, I joined the USAF. Served my time at the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. This was around 1984; I was twenty-four years old. Turned out I was a half-decent flyer.

You became a military pilot.

Eventually served in the second Gulf War. But by then I was married, to Emma.

Emma Stoney.

Yeah. Emma Stoney. Always kept her own name, and damn right. She wasn’t your typical service wife of the time, and wouldn’t put up with the bum deal they got back then: low pay, moving the whole time, your husband overseas while you raise the kids in lousy military-base housing . . . We had grown up together, you know. Though she was ten years younger than me. We had met up again at a family wedding – her sister’s. And, after Michael was born, she turned out to be the first to join NASA, before me I mean.

She became a mission specialist.

Yeah. She always blamed me for inspiring her. I was that bit older. But I guess her strategy was smarter than mine. She went to college and took geology and climatology and planetary studies – not flying and engineering. NASA is full of pilots and engineers, but it turned out to be short of people who could understand planets and moons. All of which put her in prime position when the Phobos flight came up.

A flight planned to investigate the orbital anomalies.

Yeah . . . Phobos, moon of Mars, was acting very strangely. It was apparently being dragged down towards the planet, like Skylab, like a low-altitude space station. But Mars’s air was too thin for that, Phobos should have been too massive – if it was solid all the way through . . . There had been strange, contradictory observations for decades, and even more contradictory theories. Then in the late eighties they sent a space probe that proved the orbital decay was real, and Carl Sagan and other people started arguing for a dedicated crewed mission. And Emma got a seat, and she deserved it, by damn.

But by the time Emma left for Phobos you had become better known for your campaigns for private mining missions to the asteroids.

My campaigns? That’s what I did, buddy. I even established a start-up, Bootstrap, Inc. I guess I had a kind of revelation. About how we should be thinking about space. And I know precisely when.

Tell me.

It came in 2003.

Over Iraq.

 

I was never a combat pilot.

I was flying tankers in the sky – well, that turned out to be a good preparation for my later career flying shuttle boosters. The KC-135 Stratotanker had not dissimilar handling characteristics to the booster, as a matter of fact, another big, heavy aeroplane.

It was a hell of a theatre.

I remember Baghdad from the air. You have to understand this was a sprawling, modern city, like LA or Houston. Whole neighbourhoods going black as the power systems failed. The air defences like flashbulbs popping off, and tracer fire, and the searchlights probing the sky like something out of the Second World War. And the cruise missiles going in, and our planes whizzing low, their bombs going off with yellow flashes. In the sky, SAM missiles leaving grey scribbles in the air – and here and there you would see black smoke where somebody had got taken out. You know, nothing prepares you for the sudden understanding that somewhere out there is another human actively trying to kill you.

But we weren’t front line. We were tanker jocks. Our main job was support. We flew in fuel for depleted pilots. You know how we do what we do? A mid-air rendezvous with the fighter coming in behind and a little below, and we drop a boom which the fighter pilot latches on to, following our lights to keep position. ‘Leaded or unleaded today, buddy?’

But a subsidiary part of our function was spotting, as we flew around in the air over the combat zone, waiting for a customer.

And so I was a spotter when STS-445 was used to deliver a strike from orbit.

It was a DARPA experiment, really. Hell of a technical achievement. And hell of a sight, with a shuttle orbiter dropping down from space to drop a bunker-buster bomb slam on top of Saddam’s compound.

But I came out of that thinking, you know, there have to be better ways to use space hardware than this.

Not only that, if we ever do get out to the planets, the energy we will wield then, if used in war, could amount to a self-inflicted extinction event. Do the maths. We had to get out into space, but peacefully. Even if I wasn’t going myself.

So you quit the USAF—

And kick-started Bootstrap, Inc.

 

I had the vision and the engineering contacts.

And through the O’Neill people I met a guy called Frank J. Paulis. Younger than me, already an aerospace billionaire in his own right, but with dreams to do a lot more. He had plans he was pushing on NASA to send a mission to the solar focus, for instance, a point far out in space where gravity lensing would make it easier to pick up signals from aliens . . . He looked like John Belushi. You ever heard of him? Kind of dark, hulking. Acted like a Wall Street bruiser. But inside, he dreamed like Carl Sagan.

Paulis became the effective controller of Bootstrap, Inc., as well as the first big investor, with me as a kind of figurehead. And Paulis had great contacts of his own. He got in touch with Ann Reaves, the Shit Cola multi-billionaire. That was a time when the dot com boom was creating one super-rich baby boomer after another, but Reaves was one of the few who actually made stuff, as opposed to moving information around. And she had a dream of space. That was when we got to play with some serious money.

Well, we moved fast in those first few years, the first decade of the new century. The shuttles were flying almost weekly, we had people on the Moon and Mars – but O’Neill had always argued that it was going to be cheap access to space that transformed the fortunes of mankind. Because then you would have industrialisation and colonisation, and an expansive future off the planet. The space shuttle was a wonderful system, but it had never been cheap. And that was our angle.

So Paulis and I used Reaves’s seedcorn money to buy out an old Second World War airfield in the Mojave. Basically we were trying to build big, cheap, reusable boosters to undercut the shuttle. We even dredged the Atlantic for discarded engines from the Apollo-Saturn days, when they used to dump the burned-out rocket stages in the ocean. The engines were unusable, but a mine of parts and materials.

We had a long-term plan. An income stream from solar-power satellites by 2020, by 2050 a working economy in space, by 2100 a space economy exceeding Earth’s. And in the meantime, if the Earth needed space support, for example for big geoengineering climate-fix programmes, we would be in a position to offer it.

But in the short term we came up against bureaucratic snafus. NASA and the government were locked down by a cartel, a handful of suppliers, major corporations like Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and they opposed us even being given licences to test-fire. And then there were the various outer space treaties that made it legally problematic to so much as look at an asteroid or a chunk of Moon rock as usable real estate. Space was the common heritage of mankind, they called it.

Funny you should mention that phrase . . .

I mean, I had some sympathy for the position. But we were caught in a tangle between cynical corporate types and starry-eyed rock-huggers, it felt like. But we made progress, little by little, in those first years.

And then, in 2004, Emma went to Phobos.

 

Her loss on that mission affected you badly.

Didn’t it just. And Michael.

We were told about the loss, you know, by an astronaut who came to our home. He’d been assigned to interface with the family – a CACO they call it, Casualty Assistance Care Officer. NASA has an acronym for everything. Ours was an early Apollo Moonwalker, Joe Muldoon, who had worked with Emma. I was star-struck even while I was grieving.

We had a service back home, just the families. No body to bury, of course. They used a form of service appropriate if you are lost at sea. And then we had to go to Houston for a memorial there, and then Washington with the President and the families, and the astronauts flying the missing-man formation in their T-38 trainers. Just like they had for Armstrong, when he died on the Moon in ’69.

We kind of grew apart in the aftermath. Michael and I, I mean. Of course I always supported him. He went to college, got into business administration. He planned a career in coal mining – expanding business, smart move, it looked like.

I kept on working on the Bootstrap projects. But by then, you see, Emma, or her loss, or her magnificent quest, had changed my view on the public space programme. Or reinforced it. I figured I could maybe change things from within, rather than from without. And anyhow it would honour Emma’s memory.

Or maybe that’s just rationalisation. Michael once told me that when I lost his mother, I lost my ability to dream. Bootstrap was nothing but a dream, at that point. And all I wanted after Emma was to fly stuff. Maybe he was right.

Anyhow, that’s what I did. I distanced myself from Bootstrap and tried for NASA again. Won a place in the 2008 recruitment round. And so I ended up a glorified truck driver, flying Constitution . . . Where’s Nicola?

You asked that.

And you didn’t answer. What the hell’s going on here? I still can’t see, you know.

Try to stay calm.

Calm? I was in a flat spin . . . I remember, the sparklers, I tried the sparklers when we . . .

You’re remembering. Good. Take it in order, Malenfant. Just tell us about STS-719 as you experienced it. Tell us about your mission.

Is this a debrief?

You can call it that. In your own time, in your own words. You graduated from your training to join the booster pilot roster – you never flew all the way to orbit, did you? And so, in 2019, you were assigned to STS-719.

Tell me about the sparklers.

 

Yeah . . . Look, the sparklers are what we call the hydrogen burn igniters.

You got to imagine the space shuttle ready to launch on the pad, at Cape Canaveral. I take it you’ve seen it. You have the booster, an aerospace vehicle the size of a 747, with the orbiter, itself the size of a 707, piggybacking on its back. And the whole stack is tipped up vertically on Pad 39-A: two winged aircraft standing on their tails, mated belly to back, against the gantry.

Our booster for the flight was Constitution, BV-102, the oldest in the fleet save for a glide-test prototype. And the orbiter was Advance, OV-106. Imagine it. Imagine sitting in the cockpit of that booster, ready for a ride into space, in a plane with the performance characteristics of the X-15, an experimental hypersonic rocketplane, but bigger than any passenger jet in the world.

All the orbiters were named for exploration ships.

Damn right. And that particular name was apt. The first Advance had been used as a rescue ship, it went after the Franklin expedition in the Arctic. And our Advance was the orbiter that flew the mission that saved Skylab, and made the shuttle programme famous. I watched that as an eighteen-year-old. Now, over forty years later, here I was carrying that same bird to orbit.

You were saying about the sparklers. The hydrogen burn igniters – correct?

Yeah. I’m rambling.

It’s a little technical.

Look, the shuttle booster craft has twelve rocket engines, twelve big bells, and during the fuelling process a lot of stray hydrogen can get trapped up there. Inside the bells themselves, I mean. So, ten seconds before launch, we use the sparklers to burn off all that excess, so when start-up comes you get a nice smooth burn. The sparklers, you see, are mounted on the booster itself.

The sparkler system turned out to be significant in what followed.

Yeah. You could say that.

I remember that long ride up the gantry, Mott and myself bound for the booster, plus eight crew for the orbiter for that flight. We’re in our suits of armour: medical sensors, pressure suit. Ours, the booster guys’, are heavy-duty, Lockheed manufacture. Tan-coloured.

Man, that booster is a brute when you ride up close past it. A delta-wing aircraft with a span of nearly a hundred and fifty feet. Fifty yards! Always looked like the damn thing would never get off the ground. But you should have seen some of the other designs the engineers had cooked up en route to this configuration. Such as, an orbiter with solid rocket boosters strapped to its belly.

But our bird is a veteran, of many successful flights just like this one. And it is a fine day. No sign of trouble. The boil-off plumes, hydrogen and oxygen, rising up to a blue Florida sky, and the groans and hisses of the hulls of the tanks, and the choppers buzzing overhead . . . I always felt like I didn’t want to board the craft, to hide away from all this spectacle.

Anyhow, into the flight deck.

You understand the booster is like a regular aircraft but tipped up vertically, so we have to climb a little ladder up onto our cockpit in the nose, and then into our couches lying on our backs. We fix our harnesses and ankle restraints and helmets, and we get to work with the cue cards and checklists and the scrolling updates on the cabin screens. When the shuttle first flew, you know, the booster cabin had around two thousand switches, crusted in there like coral. But we know our way around, Nicola and me, both veterans of several flights.

T minus seven minutes. The access arm retracts with a thump, and we’re stuck up there. Save for about five abort options, that is. The excess fuel and oxygen is boiling off. We give our aerosurfaces a last work-out; you can hear the flaps creak.

T minus thirty-one seconds and the computers take over.

Ten seconds, the sparklers.

At six seconds there’s main engine start. And at that moment . . .

Yes?

There’s a bang.

I look at Nicola, and she’s looking back at me. To us it felt like a shove in the back. We look at our displays, and the imagery of the burn that has already started at the base of the craft: the vapour plumes, the shock diamonds. Everything looks nominal, and launch control have got nothing to say. We let it ride.

But you both felt it.

Yeah. I guess the whole stack did . . .

The event was not properly tracked in real time by the spacecraft’s systems, and the records show that afterwards it took some careful analysis to untangle what followed.

The records? Where is this? Where am I? When is this?

The event, Malenfant. Let’s stick to the event.

Yeah. But you know more than I do, right? So tell me.

Very well. At ignition, there had been a minor flaw with one of the booster’s engine pumps. It delivered, only momentarily, an excess of fuel to its combustion chamber, and so one engine ignited with an excess impulse. After that the engine, in fact all the engines and pumps, ran smoothly. That extra impulse was the ‘bang’ you felt. The impulse showed up on launch control’s monitors, but there was no immediate evidence of harm, and – in the seconds she had to make an engine shutdown go/no-go decision – the flight controller for the day decided to let the launch proceed.

But there was harm done, right? Evidence or not.

Indeed. The whole shuttle stack – shuddered. The system was stressed. And, in the nose of the booster, at that moment, another undetected fault was triggered. A strut sheared.

A strut?

Supporting an oxidiser tank that served the booster’s attitude rockets—

Known as the reaction control system. RCS.

Yes. When the strut sheared, that tank was no longer held firmly. Later in the flight the tank would come loose entirely, and collide with a propellant feed, which it broke. The hydrogen peroxide leaked slowly. But—

But there were consequences. We were going to need that RCS. One damn thing leads to another. Well, it all makes sense now.

Tell us how it happened, for you.

We soon forgot about that jolt.

All went well.

You know, it’s one hell of a ride. We clear the tower, and roll over, with that baby-bird orbiter still clinging to momma’s back. About a minute in we reach max q – maximum aerodynamic pressure, a combination of our increasing velocity and the thickness of the air, the maximum stress we’ll suffer. The engines throttle down. Through that we go supersonic, and the booster’s twelve big engines throttle back up to a hundred per cent, and the ride is as sweet as a nut.

Then comes separation.

Already we’re running out of fuel; we’re about to become a glider, and no more use to the Advance. Around two and a half minutes from the pad, around forty miles high and forty miles downrange, we separate – there are explosive bolts that make the whole stack shudder – and we release that baby bird. Staging, we call it.

Advance made it safely to orbit.

Yeah, and we knew that. We followed the telemetry as they went through their own stages. After four minutes, at sixty-two miles, they’re officially in space. Engine cut-off when they’re in orbit a hundred and fifteen miles high, and they burn their orbital manoeuvring system engines to circularise their orbit.

All of which was academic for you.

Yeah. Because suddenly we are in an off-nominal situation.

Which is NASA-ese for emergency.

 

Look, the staging comes at two hundred and thirty thousand feet, where there’s barely a trace of air, and we’re moving at Mach 12 – twelve times the speed of sound. Actually it’s a beautiful moment as we reach the top of our own trajectory, unpowered. Because we are in zero gravity ourselves, you see, falling, falling. Just a few seconds.

Then it’s back to work.

We had been a rocket ship for three minutes; now we will be a hypersonic glider for around ten minutes, and then ninety minutes as a subsonic aircraft to home. We have two air-breathing engines on board, but they are useless until we get down into the thicker air.

So you have to glide down.

Shedding that excess velocity on the way. Right. But for me this is the fun part. Look, we’re falling away from the orbiter, and I’m flying my ship. I have my RHC – rotational hand controller, my joystick. I use this now to go into a ninety-degree roll. The idea is we go through a series of what we call S-turns, big wide swooping manoeuvres taking us down through the thickening atmosphere, all the while losing energy to friction with the air. Every minute we should shed a thousand miles per hour of velocity, twenty thousand feet in altitude. You can feel it, when it works, a tough deceleration pushing us down into our couches, side by side.

As we are that high, at the edge of the air, when I pull on that stick the bird responds using both the RCS system – our little attitude rockets, like she was a spacecraft in vacuum – and also the aerosurfaces, like she’s a regular aircraft. You get a mix of responses as you fall, with the RCS dominating at first but having less and less effect, and the aerosurfaces picking it up later, as the air thickens. Until we get deep enough for the air-breathing engines to cut in.

That’s the theory.

Right. But now you tell me that all the time that damn RCS system, in the nose of the ship, had been leaking propellant.

At first all goes well. We’re down to a hundred and eighty thousand feet, cue another S-turn. A hundred and twelve thousand feet, we’re down to Mach 5, a mere five times the speed of sound. And that’s when the RCS system fails on me. Just like that. At the time I had no idea what happened.

Now I know.

Already we’re low enough for the thickening air to have a sensible effect, to push at us, but the RCS rockets still have a role to play. We wouldn’t have shut them down until we were down to forty-five thousand feet. But now we have lost them.

And as all this unravels I’m still taking her through the latest S-turn.

The systems overcompensate for the loss of RCS.

We go into a flat spin.

A flat spin?

When the bird is more or less level but is spinning about a vertical axis, through her centre of gravity. Like a toy plane mounted on a pin in its belly. Nothing I do stops it, the aerosurfaces are jamming and making it worse, and the RCS is out. We’re too deep in the air for those baby rockets to make any difference now anyhow.

The spin increases and we get this eyeballs-out acceleration, and I can feel myself heading towards a blackout. I can’t even see how Mott is, I can’t turn my head. We’re both yelling.

OK. I have seconds to figure it out. I have to stop the spin. We can’t eject until we’re steady.

But even then, even if we get out of the spin, I’m concerned about where the bird will come down.

She’s not designed to glide all the way home, remember. In the closing stages you put the booster into a pushdown – nose down towards the ground – so there’s a fast descent that forces air into the turbojets, the air-breathers, and you go into a controlled landing. She needs piloting home, and that controlled landing.

Because I can’t afford to let her crash.

This isn’t the Mojave, this isn’t Edwards Air Force Base where they flew the X-15s and you have nothing but sunshine and square miles of salt lake to come down on, as hard and as fast as you like. We are heading for a runway at the Kennedy Space Center, where we launched from. That’s the whole point of the shuttle system, so the booster can be refurbished and made ready for the next mission, within weeks, days even.

Even as we spin I can see the Space Coast, sixty or seventy miles of development, all those pads and rockets and facilities. I can see the Vehicle Assembly Building, a box you could put the Great Pyramid inside. Not to mention the glitter from car windshields, lines of them, tracing out the roads. We launch twenty times a year, but even so every single flight attracts the sightseers.

I can see the contrails of the NASA chase planes, and I see the choppers in the air, USAF birds with PJs on board, para-rescue jumpers, ready to come flying out to retrieve me wherever, however I come down. They’re here to save me after the crash.

But I can’t crash. Not here.

I have simple priorities. Get Nicola out of there. Get enough control of the ship to bring her down somewhere safe, away from the space centre, the freeways – the ocean as a last resort. Oh, and finally, save my own life.

But you can’t do any of that while the booster is in its flat spin.

I tried – I don’t remember clearly – I guess I tried everything I could think of, in the book and outside it, to stop that damn spin. Until I found something that worked.

The sparklers.

Right. Look, our main rocket engines aren’t designed to be restarted, not in flight. And we had no fuel left anyhow. Nothing in our big internal hydrogen tanks but vapour. But – I wondered if that vapour might be enough.

You see, I know I can blow the