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It has been too long since Colonel ‘Hiccup’ Haddock was last at the controls of an F-15E Strike Eagle. Flying a tried and true fighter is a far more tranquil experience, compared to reining in and taming experimental contraptions that, despite copious amounts of computer modelling and simulations, still needed to be done in the skies. He occasionally missed the thrill and comradery of combat, but those feelings never linger for long. Flying combat missions was both better and worse than test piloting, the main difference being whether the machine trying to kill him was doing it by design or not.
As he cruised towards Kennedy Space Center, the once scorching Floridian sun began to set over the Western horizon, bathing its surroundings with orange light. To the East, the blackness of night crept in to envelop the rest of the dusk sky. This would have allowed his Eagle with its dark grey camouflage to meld almost seamlessly into its surroundings if it wasn’t for the steady red and green navigation lights on the wingtips and twin vertical stabilisers.
Like him, his mount was entering its third decade of service and there were signs of its age beginning to show. Paint had chipped off the control stick in his right hand as well as off both thrust levers on his left. Letters printed on frequently used buttons for his three LCD displays and keypad had worn out, but all still worked when sufficient force was applied. Edges of the straps that fastened him to the ACES II ejection seat had begun to fray. At least his seat cushion had been changed relatively recently.
Despite their combined age, Hiccup relished coasting through the darkening skies on large, swept back wings that hung over the jet’s sizable engine intakes. Those intakes fed a pair of F100 turbofan engines, together capable of producing nearly 50,000 pounds of thrust, enough to propel man and machine to two and a half times the speed of sound. Large elevators and ailerons responded to Hiccup’s every input like an extension of his own body. These features made the F-15 the superlative fighter for years after its introduction in the 1970s. Newly upgraded phased array radar as well as the latest variants of Sidewinder and AMRAAM missiles currently under the wings would ensure its deadliness for many years to come.
Hiccup knew he had arrived his patrol area as through the bubble canopy, he can now see Launch Pad 39B practically straddling the beach 20,000 feet below him. On it sat the fruit of his almost decade long labour, the next generation Space Shuttle. Even in the diminishing light, he could still make out the Shuttle’s slender white body, with short stubby wings at the midsection and ending in a pair of powerful rocket engines. Like its predecessor, the Shuttle is also connected to a streamlined orange fuel tank and two booster rockets for the launch.
Hiccup checked the pale green mission timer on the reflective glass of his heads-up display. The show is about to start. On que his radio crackled to life.
“One minute warning,” a calm voice reported.
Hiccup knows that by now, only a few clamps and umbilical cords remain connected the space ship to the launch pad. Despite the distance, he could feel nervous pangs start to surface within. He had come a long way from his inventions blowing up in his father’s garage, but the stakes now were much higher.
“Ten seconds.”
In his mind’s eye, he pictured the crew of the maiden flight, strapped to their seats within. They would be calm, having trained for years and most had been in space before. They would however be passengers for the first minutes of the flight as the shuttle would fly a pre-planned trajectory to space. Hiccup imagined himself in the pilot seat one day, or maybe the commander. Certainly possible if he could get the fact that he had a prosthetic foot, the result of the occupational hazards of a test pilot, waived.
“Eight seconds.”
Sparklers near the Shuttle’s engine nozzles ignite, burning off any undesired gasses in the area that could affect the initial burn of the rockets.
“Five seconds. Main engines start.”
The Shuttle’s twin engines ignited, yellow-blue jets of flame scorching the ground as shuttle crew and the engineers at mission control execute final checks of their parameters, ensuring they were performing within the specified tolerances. The booster rockets come to life as well and the launch pad is quickly covered in smoke.
“Two… One…”
The final clamps release and the Shuttle started ascending for the stars.
“Lift off! We have lift off of Space Shuttle Explorer departing on the hundred and thirty sixth shuttle mission, writing a new chapter in America’s and mankind’s exploration of the final frontier.”
The brightness of the combined rocket engines lit up the sky like a second sun even as the original descended beneath the horizon. Hiccup adjusted his jet to fly parallel to the coast, on the Western side, staying clear of the Shuttle at it rode a trail of fire off towards the East, taking advantage of the Earth’s rotation to escape its home planet’s gravity and escape into the weightlessness of space. His head and his plane’s sensors track the Shuttle as it accelerated towards the heavens. Looking at the bright light would wreck Hiccup’s night vision, but he doesn’t care. He wanted to see the launch through his own eyes. There will be time to adjust to the darkness again later.
“Tower has been cleared, switching over to Houston Mission Control.”
Hiccup could have been there at Houston right now, monitoring one of the many counsels in the large room dominated by the large wall monitors. However he wanted to be as close as possible to launch as possible and had called in favours to fly his current patrol. Hiccup may have had peers as a pilot or engineer, but no one displayed his acumen in both disciplines. And he, perhaps most of all, had paid more blood, sweat and tears than anyone else in the program, literally, and wanted to see the launch from a ring side seat. He taped his titanium prosthetic on the left rudder pedal in a nervous tic as the Shuttle climbed past his altitude, already traveling at three times the speed of sound and accelerating.
“Auto-guidance fault.”
The words hung over the radio waves with finality. Hiccup wasn’t sure if it was Houston or one of the shuttle crew who said it. There had been a bug in where guidance program that on rare occasions didn’t send accurate information to the flight computers. Repeated testing of the millions of lines of code had failed to root out the fault, and the launch date was fast approaching. A quick reset lasting about a minute would solve the problem. Surely, his superiors had said, they wouldn’t be so unlucky for the bug to emerge at the first few critical minutes of flight?
As the Chief Test Pilot, Hiccup had argued against that, saying during this phase, there simply wasn’t a minute to spare. An abort was a best case scenario; a worst case could be an unmitigated disaster culminating with destruction of the entire orbiter. Almost a trillion dollars in development cost, not to mention the lives of all on board, but the political pressure was too high, the launch date would not be delayed for a software fix. An acceptable and necessary risk to his superiors.
And so Hiccup worked with Fishlegs and his engineering team to develop a band-aid measure. A full authority override to take control from the autopilot and the activation of backup navigation system display for the pilots so they could manually guide the Shuttle on launch trajectory. Best of all it just amounted to a quick software patch that could be done in minutes. This too had been shot down. There was no time to properly test the patch, plus only the very best pilots could fly the launch trajectory by hand and again, there was no time to train them for it, they said.
Hiccup had to admit that those were, indeed, valid arguments. Fortunately the Mission Commander was both a sublime pilot and trusted him enough to upload the contraband software.
“Activating manual control, standby,” Astrid’s calm voice broke the silence.
Time passed slowly, the seconds ticked by liked hours as silence returned.
“I have control. Data feed is good. Mission is a go,” Astrid triumphantly reported. Hiccup didn’t bother suppressing the grin on his face. The warm feeling of validation for his hunch was only eclipsed by the pride he had for his wife.
“Roger that, commander. Your trajectory is good, proceed with booster separation as per schedule.” Hiccup thought he could pick out Fishleg’s cheers among to chorus of happy noises in the background as engineers expressed their relief. They would all have to answer for their actions later; fortunately forgiveness is easier sought after you’ve been proven right.
Explosive charges separated the booster rockets from the Shuttle, now flying at hypersonic speeds. They would float down on parachutes to be reused. Not as sexy as guiding themselves for a landing but more reliable and efficient. The empty fuel tank soon followed, burning up on re-entry from its higher altitude, leaving the shuttle to reach Earth’s escape velocity and achieving orbit.
“Computer is up, switching back to automatic,” Astrid reported. In her voice Hiccup was able to detect a tinge of exhaustion from the concentration of maintaining precise roll, pitch and yaw angles. His wife’s spacecraft was no longer visible even from his higher vantage point, having ascended into the stars.
“Glad that didn’t blow up in your face. Mom would have been pissed!” the person in the rear seat finally spoke up after minutes of silence. Hiccup looked into his rear view mirror to see blue eyes with a fringe of auburn hair escaping from the bottom the flight helmet and a cheeky grin. Zephyr Haddock put her DSLR camera away, she had taken to photography the same way Hiccup had taken to sketching in his youth.
“So what do you think?” he asked his teenage daughter.
“Hmm I think mom will be fine, things would have cooled by the time she gets back, but you’ll be subject to lots of yelling in the meantime,” Zephyr replied with inherited sarcasm.
“I meant about what you’ll be doing after you graduate,” replied Hiccup dryly.
“Well after tonight, I definitely want to go into space. I figure Navy since they produce the most sought after pilots,” she replied thoughtfully. Having inherited both Hiccup’s agile mind and Astrid’s focus, she would have no problem achieving the grades to get any initial assignment she desired.
Hiccup groaned. Not the Navy! Especially for an offspring of two high ranking Air Force officers. He did acknowledge that that was perhaps his daughter’s intention; General Stoick Haddock was Army after all.
“You sure you want to join the Navy with Haddock as a last name?” Hiccup teased.
“There are ways to change that,” Zephyr shot back.
Before Hiccup could come up with a sufficiently witty response the radio came to life again.
“Fury Two-One, snap zero-six-zero, twenty miles, angels five. Please identify,” a different voice belonging to the area defence officer came over the airwaves. Hiccup acknowledged the message internally sighed, there was always somebody violating the no-fly zone during launches. Probably a curious or oblivious civilian, but he had live missiles for a reason.
“Looks like we gotta work,” Hiccup said flatly and Zephyr felt the jet change direction.
She expected a maximum-G turn and steep dive to intercept the intruder, but instead her father banked gently and began a shallow dive. While the latter manoeuvre would only cost a minute or so of extra flight time and save a lot of fuel, the former was infinitely more fun. She looked up at Hiccup at the front, intending to shoot him a ‘what gives?’ look when she caught his green eyes staring back at her in the rear-view mirror.
“You ready, kid?” Hiccup anticipatorily asked.
Despite most of her father’s face being covered by the oxygen mask, she knew that his lopsided smile was hiding beneath. She secured her own mask, checked that her camera was properly stowed, made a final glance upwards towards the stars and grinned back.
“Hit it!”