Flight of the Phoenix

Year 05, the 30th of Lathius

Today would be a legendary day, though the launch vehicle did look much like it. Even Rockodyne industries that were producing the Thor launcher had lost count on how many they had delivered, about 20-30. But this Thor had no ordinary payload. Hidden behind its fairings far away from prying eyes, was test pilot Jebediah Kerman in the A-51C-X3.

Upon reaching its target altitude of 200 km, the fairings separated and the upper stage started its deorbit burn, not leaving space debris. “Jebediah here, I’m powering up auxiliary systems.” His voice was calm. “Roger Jeb, take your time,” Gene replied. The controls were in familiar places as he was using an Aries class capsule. Something that had not been used for a long time. “Reactor is running, deploying solar array.” and with that, the arms on the back of the craft extended and revealed a large solar array. It looked fragile and Jeb had to twist the arms axis to make sure they did not collide. “Arlan here, all systems are green, you can power on whenever you are ready.

All systems, engage…..

The first step was the gravitic displacement generator, it used the power so generously generated to zap the graviolum and create graviolium waves. “KSC, power is good, the generator is holding, flux is stable, switching on the drive.” With a nice hum, the displacement field engulfed the ship and Jeb pointed the ship prograde and engaged the drive. Within seconds he had boosted his orbit to 500 km. “Looking good KSC, circularizing, and taking readings.” Jeb spent one orbit checking the experiments and then plotted a rendez-vous with UKSS.

Once close to the station he powered down the experimental drive and deployed an ion engine that some idiot at KSC had mounted in reverse. Due to the unknown effects of the warp field, scientists relied on more conventional needs for close approach and docking. The whole test had taken less than two hours but was food for many days of data processing. Jeb approached the nadir port of UKSS and docked. “We were at least happy that the Kraken or other aliens did not show up during the tests,” Telo told him. “There is a rumor that they are monitoring the graviolum network for changes.” Jeb couldn’t care, he had found the snacks locker.

Bugfixes

Melly completed to inspection rounds of the craft and removed the folding mechanism and mounted the solar array directly on the craft itself. Charon 8 was getting filled up with all the spare parts and left overs. The phoenix was checked extensively for problems but apart from a little static charge, they could not find anything wrong with the spacecraft.

Serious delta-v

10 days later Jeb undocked, drifted away from the station, and powered up the systems for the second time. The test schedule now looked at a serious burn. He would burn to an altitude of the orbit of Minmus, then after 20 minutes burn retrograde and drop back to a lower orbit, spending the equivalent of 2100 m/s delta-v. Graviolum mass was down by 2%. “This was the breakthrough we have been looking for,” Jeb said to himself.

On apogee, Jeb made another 600 m/s “burn” to head back to UKSS. The whole mission took less than 4 hours but solidified the engineering principles behind the gravitic enging. Gene was glad he had only put 3 days of supplies on the craft or Jeb might have taken off to Wolf shipyard or who knows, Duna?

“KSC, UKSS is looking particularly beautiful today.” Jeb aligned his spacecraft and made a few minor corrections to line up his arrival. Once docked they would examine the contents of the data files and run more visual inspections of the craft.

If they could create a spaceship around this drive KSC would have access to some serious delta-v. Engineers went to the drawing boards and scientists were eager to get their hands on the data, Jeb was disappointed, very disappointed. Apparently, the station had run out of beer and the next crew rotation was a month away.