“Webcast team is bugged out though,” another Space Force officer, this one physically located at the OuterTek plant in Hawthorne, reported. “They’re running scared around the control room.”
“What about the technical team?” DePresti asked.
“Same as y’all there, troubleshooting, but not worked up too much,” the other officer replied. “The telemetry is good, and there haven’t been any reported explosions picked up by OPIR.”
“My money is on a camera going out,” another Aerospace technical lead chimed in.
After a few minutes of technical discussion, one of the OuterTek engineers walked over to Hawke and DePresti. “We’re going to outbrief in thirty seconds,” she told the two military officers. “They finished their investigation.”
DePresti nodded and switched over to the contractor’s voice channel.
The OuterTek launch director polled his team for their findings shortly after.
Everything was nominal, save for a string of video cameras that had failed. The ones inside of the tanks had remained operational, as they hadn’t been put through a helium purge. The webcast was supposed to cut the feed when the cameras became unresponsive but instead hung with the last image received.
However, there would be no video for the rest of the launch.
“Just like an NRO launch,” Hawke grumbled, referring to the black-budget intelligence agency that developed, launched, and operated the nation’s spy satellites. They didn’t let either OuterTek or the American Rocket Alliance, the two main launch providers, show video on their webcasts after stage separation for national security purposes.
DePresti, along with everyone else in the firing room, breathed a sigh of relief. He tried texting his girlfriend again but didn’t get a response.
Half an hour later, the second stage made its first burn into a transfer orbit. An hour and fifteen minutes after that, the second burn was made, putting the rocket stage and payload on a hyperbolic orbit toward the system’s second planet.
Another round of cheers went through the room.
DePresti took an offered champagne flute, engraved with the OuterTek logo, with a smile. He sat back in his chair and took a sip as an OuterTek VP passed out mission patches. A wave of relief washed over him as the telemetry anomaly from earlier and the video feed cutout were the farthest thing from his mind.
It had been nothing short of a successful launch.
“Come on!” Grace Parkowski screamed as she slammed her fists into the steering wheel of her year-old Toyota Camry.
The traffic on CA-1 was bad, worse than anything she'd seen since moving across the country from her home city of Wilmington, Delaware to the South Bar area almost five years ago.
The twenty-six-year-old aerospace engineer had left the townhouse of Mike DePresti — her boyfriend of just over a year — in Redondo Beach at seven AM, the same time she did every day, to get to her job at the Aering Space Systems facility in El Segundo.
Normally, Parkowski wouldn’t have laid on her car horn in frustration. Her supervisor, Dr. Jacob Pham, was more than accommodating. It was fairly common for people to show up late due to the crazy Los Angeles traffic.
But today was not like any other day.
On this Friday morning in the middle of November, Parkowski would step, virtually of course, onto the surface of Venus.
She would be the lone operator of one of the two ACHILLES humanoid robots on the ILIAD mission that had launched four months ago from Florida. The robots had landed on Venus just twenty-one days ago and before going through their initialization and characterization phase. They were now ready for the operators — like Parkowski — to control them through a virtual reality interface.
Parkowski’s shift “on the sticks” in Aering parlance didn’t start until ten o’clock. But she had to run through the script with Dr. Pham before she could start her mission, and even getting herself into the VR gear was time-consuming. She had planned for an arrival time of eight o’clock, but the bumper-to-bumper status of Pacific Coast Highway had gotten in her way. In addition, she had stayed up late to watch an NFL game that went well into overtime, waking up a little later than she had planned, and in retrospect, the late night might not have been worth it.
Parkowski cursed and checked her makeup in the rearview mirror, then pulled her dirty-blonde ponytail slightly tighter.
She had worked on different projects since she had arrived in the Los Angeles area, but none of them were as cool as this one. Parkowski had dedicated the last year of her life to learning every inch of the ACHILLES robot, every piece of software and hardware, and all of the procedures needed to operate it. She had been practicing in the VR gear for a few weeks now, and could probably do it in her sleep, but was anxious to get her first mission underway.
