DePresti put his cellphone down and made a landline call to the Aerospace lead, located at a hangar at the neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The other man should have been in the room with him but had been pushed to an overflow location due to higher-priority VIPs. “Are you watching this?” he asked.
“You bet I am,” the other man said. “It’s one hell of a launch.”
He smiled. “Any concerns?”
“No, everything looks okay from here,” the Aerospace man said. “We’ll continue to monitor that string on stage 2.”
“Thanks,” DePresti said. He ended the call.
The rocket was completely out of view of the windows, so he tracked its progress on the webcast and via a live trajectory feed on his computer. Thankfully, using his four monitors, he could keep track of the sensors he was worried about on one while watching it ascend on another.
Most of the team was still taking it all in. Col Hawke and a few OuterTek executives were in the process of making plans for a post-launch party. Other side conversations popped up around him, but he kept his focus on his console.
For the most part, their jobs were done. The rocket did all of the work. The team remained in case of an anomaly to the launch system.
A few minutes later, the side cores shut off and separated using small quantities of explosives. They started their trajectory back to a pair of landing sites located at the far south end of the geographic cape.
The center core continued on with the second stage and payload on top of it.
DePresti started cycling through the different video feeds available at his workstation. There was a view of the bottom of the rocket, showing the curvature of the Earth as it ascended. Another one showed the payload inside of its fairing, and yet another displayed the interior second-stage LOx tank, the blue-purple liquid pulsing in a mesmerizing fashion.
He made another call back to the Aerospace lead. Everything was still good, the engineer insisted. No concerns about the payload or launch vehicle. Everything was proceeding as planned.
DePresti let out a sigh of relief, releasing all of the pent-up pressure built up inside of him. All of the hard work that he had put in was finally paying off.
The Shrike Heavy was well past max-q, the point of maximum aerodynamic pressure on the launch vehicle, and had passed the Karman line into outer space.
The next step was stage separation. The main booster separated from the second stage and began its oath to an autonomous landing barge located out in the middle of the South Atlantic.
A few minutes after that, the ground team prepared to jettison the fairing that encapsulated the payload, the two halves of which would then float down using parachutes to be captured by specially equipped ships downrange near the barge. After that, the payload would be exposed to the cold vacuum of space.
Everything was still going according to plan.
DePresti noticed something odd at about twenty seconds before that event. His mission clock, which had been counting forward from T-0, was now counting backward.
He wiggled his computer mouse to see if his terminal had frozen or locked up. Nope, everything was fine. DePresti’s eyes shot up to the graph showing the sensor data that he and his team were concerned about.
They were all normal except for one, a thermistor string along the raceway. It had been showing normal temperatures but was now displaying readings that were out-of-family.
DePresti quickly switched to the anomaly net. “GMIM here, seeing some weird data,” he said, then let the button go.
As he got a muffled response from one of the OuterTek engineers, a gasp went up from around the room.
Up on the screen, on the left side, the presenter had just announced that the fairings had been jettisoned. However, the live feed from within the encapsulated stack showed a dark fairing still attached to the second stage.
DePresti’s mouth hung open in shock. A million possibilities, all negative, went through his mind. Had the video frozen? They’d had issues on the static fire with helium purges messing with the cameras, perhaps that had happened again.
He deftly hit a few shortcuts on the keyboard to pull up a different video feed.
It wasn’t a video problem. The second stage LOx tank still pulsed in a mesmerizing fashion.
“What the hell,” he said under his breath.
The woman on the screen above him was just as shocked as he was.
“Cut that feed out,” one of the OuterTek executives yelled.
“Anomaly team to the net,” Col Hawke ordered. “Figure out what the fuck is going on.”
DePresti switched his headset over to the government-only anomaly voice net as the webcast team pulled all of the video feeds down, including on his monitor.
“Everything looks normal,” a senior Aerospace engineer told Hawke. “Not sure why the video isn’t matching the sensor feed.”
DePresti watched Hawke look up at the OuterTek launch crew, all of whom had calmed down from the initial shock, then back to his PC. “They’re not worried here.”
