Dragon Rider
This is another Astro Boy pastiche in an original setting with mostly original characters.
Astro Boy (aka Tetsuwan Atom) is the creation of Osmau Tezuka.
Important Characters introduced in previous stories:
Atom: You know, Tetsuwan Atomu, Astro Boy, or just Astro.
Ken'ichi Yamamoto: Atom's foster father. He's a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of NY's Brooklyn Campus in their robotics lab.
Sachiko Yamamoto: Atom's foster mother and wife of Ken'ichi Yamamoto.
Dr. Albert Tenamann: Atom's father and creator. He is now living in Japan with his son Adam and his mother. Albert left the US after retiring from the top secret research lab located under the American Museum of Natural History, shortly after creating Atom while working on a secret government contract to create robotic soldiers. Atom chose to remain in the US.
Adam Tenamann: Son of Dr. Tenamann who was critically injured in a traffic accident while his father was working on the robot soldier project. While Adam lay in a coma for months, from which it was thought he might never recover, Dr. Tenamann created Atom in his image with all of his memories downloaded into a computer from Adam's brain.
Simon Green: The director of the museum complex research facility.
Robert Levinson: Head of the computer lab in the research facility. Robert is a general nerd/geek engineer type that maintains the research facilities computer equipment, and has built many special devices for government projects.
I.S.A.A.C. or Isaac: A computer program daemon that serves as an intelligent AI interface for all of the computers in the museum complex. Isaac was created by Robert Levinson, though he's modified his own programming and spread himself world wide across the Internet.
Cora Smith: Atom's female friend at school. Cora is the only person outside of Atom's immediate 'family' that knows he's a robot. Atom saved Cora's life when he caught her in mid air after she fell off the roof of her apartment building. ("Atom and Cora")
Notes:
Part of this story takes place on the international space station. I've studied NASA documents and videos so I could describe the details of the space station as accurately as possible, but I've also changed some details around to fit my story requirements. What I describe as happening may not be entirely possible. We authors call this 'poetic license'. Deal with it!
Acknowledgements:
National Aeronautics and Space Administration: For their excellent on-line info on the ISS and mission profiles.
SpaceX Corporation: For their Falcon-9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft, from which this story gets its title.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Hurricane Center: For information on tropical cyclone storms. You guys make living in Florida much safer!
Dr. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground dot com / tropical: I love your blog, especially when there is a threat out in the Atlantic looking me 'eye to eye'!
Chapter 1
"Big Ivan", Earth Orbit, several hundred miles above Siberia, 1993
The Soyuz spacecraft took up position a safe distance from the derelict satellite, but close enough to allow the two cosmonauts to easily drift over under the power of their EVA backpacks.
"There he is Comrades," Gleb Gurin, pilot of the Soyuz spacecraft said. "The hulking giant that we have been assigned to put to rest. Isn't he impressive?"
Big Ivan was a relic of the cold war. It had been silent now for years after its electronics had been fried by a huge solar flare during the peak of the last sunspot cycle. The dead juggernaut had been a test platform for a nuclear weapons launcher as well as a spy satellite. It had been equipped with a dozen dummy test missiles, each powered by a hypergolic solid fuel rocket engine and equipped with a small dummy warhead. During testing, six of the missiles were fired at targets in Siberia to judge the accuracy of such a system. The results were inconclusive, and immediately after the first tests came the fall of the Soviet Union and the virtual end of the cold war. Big Ivan became redundant, and was forgotten, at least until the agreement with the United States and other countries for building the International Space Station. Now the very existence of Big Ivan was an embarrassment for Mother Russia, and it had to be disposed of. The monster was too big to de-orbit: large chunks of the military satellite would survive re-entry and there was no guarantee as to where they would land. The only safe thing to do was to disassemble as much of it in space as possible and push the rest into a higher orbit where it could safely hide out of the way of the new space station.
"So now we get to clean up the mess that our former Soviet leaders created?" Dimitry sighed.
Zakhar shrugged his shoulders. "That's why we get paid the big roubles, comrade."
The two cosmonauts, Dmitry Aristov and Zakhar Vlacic donned their EVA backpacks and left the safety of the spacecraft. Gleb Gunin, the Soyuz pilot, released the docking clamps and the rocket booster they had ferried up to orbit drifted free. Since Big Ivan's on board rocket booster was no longer functional it had been necessary to bring up an external one to lift the big satellite into a higher and more stable orbit. The cosmonauts carried along a tool kit and some test instruments they'd need to carry out their assignment. Their first item of business was to attach the rocket booster to Big Ivan's bottom half. They removed the dozen or so bolts holding the existing rocket engine nozzle to make room for attaching the booster, which was designed to bolt in place of the part they'd just removed. This part of the operation went smoothly, guaranteeing that at the very least, Big Ivan could be lifted up and out of the way. They next had to disassemble and remove the remaining test missiles.
Dmitry removed the bolts holding the hatch cover in place. As proof that Murphy's Law works just as well in space, though the Russian's refer to it as "the Law of Meanness," the final bolt refused to budge.
"Chyort voz'mi!" Dmitry cursed under his breath.
Zakhar applied a longer handle to the wrench, gave it a big shove, and the bolt broke free.
Once inside the Satellite, the two spacemen began to disassemble the six remaining missiles. They removed the dummy warheads first and then detached the engine body from the lower nozzle and tail fin assembly. Again the screws on the final two units were frozen and neither man could remove the final screw on the nosecone or tail assemblies.
"They won't fit in the Soyuz cargo bay this way!", Dmitry groaned.
"Da, we'll have to leave these two in place", Zakhar agreed. "Let's work on the engine now, we don't have much time left before our oxygen is used up".
Dmitry connected the portable control unit to Big Ivan's computer bus. He switched it on and went through the diagnostic menus. Unfortunately Ivan's electronics were too badly fried for him to read any of the sensors.
"There's no way to get a reading on how much rocket fuel is left in the tanks. The engine ignition circuits are not working anyway. If we leave it as is, I think the worst case will be a very slow leak over a long time," he guessed. (In actuality Big Ivan's tanks of highly volatile hypergolic liquid fuel were a bit more than half full. The big satellite was a potential bomb.)
Zakhar agreed. "That's my take on it too. Anyway we don't have enough time to safely drain the tanks without the risk of an explosion. Let's tell Korolyov we've done what we can and have them command the booster to change Big Ivan's orbit."
Aristov and Vlacic extracted themselves from the inside of Big Ivan. They attached the parts they had removed to the tether line and signaled to Gleb Gunin in the ship to pull them back in. Once inside the Soyuz craft with everything stowed in place, the cosmonauts closed the hatches. Gunin backed the spacecraft further away from Ivan and radioed the RKA center in Korolyov that they were ready to fire the booster.
The commands to raise Big Ivan into a higher orbit were radioed up from the RKA control center. The three cosmonauts watched as the rocket engines they had just bolted onto the satellite fired and as Ivan slowly gained momentum and disappeared from view.
In the control room back in Korolyov the mission controllers watched a count up display keeping track of the length of the burn. They calculated that a burn of four minutes and twenty-seven seconds would be required to achieve the desired orbit. So far it had been going smoothly, the sensors in the attached booster were returning a condition green.
Sergei Ostapyuk, the mission command chewed on the end of his pencil.
"Three minutes, eight seconds", he mouthed to himself looking at the clock. The radar readings showed that Ivan was now high enough but still in an elliptical orbit. Every second more that the rocket fired would raise the perigee of Ivan's orbit until they had achieved the desired circular path. At T + three minutes and forty-five seconds the pressure in the rocket's main chamber started to fluctuate.
"Nyet! Not now!" Ostapyuk cried.
Seven seconds later the engine shut down.
Ostapyuk looked at the radar readings and the computer printouts. It could have been worse.
At its closest point of approach to the International Space Station's orbit, even with the station at its lowest assigned orbit of two hundred five miles up, Ivan would be far enough away to be invisible except with some optical aid, and then only on the sunlit side of the earth. The other side of Ivan's orbit would carry it close to where the Chinese were placing some of their spy satellites, but looking down in the other direction. They might get away with it. Big Ivan should remain in the new orbit long enough for the current administration to ignore. It would be someone else's problem much later.
Pyongyang, North Korea, June 1st Present year
Kim Jong-un was NOT in a good mood.
"The damn Chinese had just launched another satellite to spy on me," he muttered to himself.
The newly placed object passed over North Korea several times a day and would afford the Chinese a good view of his missile emplacements and nuclear enrichment facilities. He couldn't believe that the Chinese government was cooperating with the devils in the United States and Russia.
He picked up his phone and contacted the idiots in the KSA. He couldn't understand why his hand picked leaders of his Korean Space Agency couldn't figure out how to get a simple satellite into a desired orbit. Even the Chinese had figured it out!
The KSA launches had of course been thinly disguised missile tests masquerading as legitimate space exploration or communication satellite missions. The world hadn't been fooled. Nor had the world been impressed. None of the space launches had achieved what the Koreans had wanted.
Kim Jong-un yelled over the phone demanding that they get another satellite up to shadow the Chinese one. He had to show those dammed fools in Beijing that they could not mess with him and get away with it. His ranting on the phone made him sound like another madman some seventy years earlier in Berlin.
International Space Station, Cupola
Astronaut Sally Furth stood in the Cupola and gazed out the many view ports at the blue and green world below her. She could spend all day here with a camera and notepad, except that she had her official assignments to take care of.
Sally's parents had named her after now former astronaut Sally Ride, the youngest woman ever to go to space. Ride had been Furth's childhood hero as well. The saddest day of her life was when Ride had succumbed to cancer the previous year, before Furth had ever been in space. She was thrilled to be following in her hero's footsteps.
As she looked out the view ports, Sally could see the coast of Africa just coming into view. She noticed that the tropical wave that had come off the coast on the last orbit now looked a bit more impressive. It had emerged from the landmass in just the worst place and was drifting in just the worst possible direction. It was the first of many waves that would be created by the interaction between the landmass of Africa and the trade winds of the Atlantic.
"That thing is going to get a name before the week is out," she thought to herself.
Today was the first day of the Atlantic Hurricane season and the first name on the year's list of Hurricanes was Adam.
Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan
The last two attempts at launching the Progress spacecraft had failed, and almost ended with disaster. Several of the engines on the Soyuz launch vehicle had shut down just before the hold down clamps would have been released when the countdown reached zero. They had been able to stand down the launch before the rocket had left the pad, otherwise it would probably have had to have been self destructed before it had gotten too far, or it might have even fell back to earth and exploded.
Launch director Korotayev had reviewed the analysis of the postmortem for the last two failed attempts. He felt certain that his engineers had solved the problem. Again the countdown started. At T-4 seconds the engines ignited and built up thrust. At T-2 seconds the on board computers indicated an over temp condition in two of the outboard booster's engines. The system was again able to stand down before launch. That was it. Korotayev knew what he had to do. He reported his sorry recommendation to the RKA director.
The launch vehicle for the manned Soyuz spacecraft was almost identical to the one for the Progress rockets. This was the second time in recent memory that a supply chain in the rocket engine manufacture had produced some defective parts. The head of the RKA had no choice but to order the immediate dismantlement and inspection of all the Soyuz rocket engines. He couldn't take any chances of a failure on a manned launch. At least the timing wasn't the worst. Crew rotation on the ISS wasn't due for a few weeks, and there were two Soyuz spacecraft docked with the International Space Station to evacuate the crew in an emergency. In addition the ISS was currently well stocked and SpaceX had a Dragon resupply mission almost ready to go. They'd have time to find the problem and fix it.
David A. Boody Middle School, Brooklyn
Atom's science class was abuzz with excitement. They had been studying all about the science being done aboard the International Space Station, and now they had just been told they were going to participate in a video conference with the astronauts on board the station in two days. It was going to be the perfect end to the semester. Cora was especially ecstatic. She knew Sally Furth's bio by heart, and couldn't wait to talk with her.
"That's what I'm going to do when I graduate college," she bragged, "I'm becoming an astronaut!"
Atom looked at the poster of Furth hanging on the wall of their science class room with dreamy eyes. Cora caught a glance of his face and stepped between him and the poster.
"What are YOU looking at?" she demanded with a jealous tone in her voice.
Atom looked up at Cora. "Just admiring a brave woman," he said.
"Well she's MY hero!" Cora replied.
Atom looked a little miffed. Cora quickly changed gears and added, "But so are YOU!"
She gave a quick glance around the room to make sure no one was looking before planting a big kiss on Atoms lips. Atom's face turned a bright red. At that instant Mike Finkle walked over. Atom gave him a look that could melt steel. Mike backed off, but not before he had opened his trap.
"So what are you two love birds going on about?"
Cora slapped him on the face. "Didn't you learn your lesson yet, Dufus?"
Atom sneered at him and asked, "Say Mike, how would you like to wake up on top of the Brooklyn Union Gas tower?"
"You wouldn't dare!" Mike stammered.
"Try me!" Atom answered.
"You know Cora," Atom said after Mike had walked away with his tail between his legs, "I'd sure like to go into space too. Maybe we could become astronauts together?"
Cora whispered in his ear, "Yeah you'd really make a perfect astronaut, you wouldn't even need a spacesuit or rocket pack!" she laughed.
Atom looked to see that no one was in earshot. Cora was the only student in the school that knew of Atom's identity as a super robot after he'd caught her in mid air when she fell off the roof of her apartment building. Mike suspected something, but he couldn't prove anything.
"Not really. My jets are air breathing, they don't work in space. I'd still need one of those 'buck rogers' packs to maneuver around just like any body else."
"So you're not really perfect, are you?" she giggled at him.