“Fine, no problem,” Parkowski said as she painfully switched seats over to the driver’s side, her shoulder burning every step of the way. “Can I park in a visitor’s spot?”
“Sure, whatever.” The woman flipped her hair. “Just don’t be here.”
Parkowski nodded and turned the ignition. She had never driven a pickup truck before and now, with her bad shoulder, wasn’t a good time to learn. But it wasn’t as different from driving her little Camry as she had thought. She managed to back up out of the “4” spot, drive fifty feet closer to the small parking lot’s entrance, and park in one of the now-empty visitor spots.
Satisfied, the woman turned on her heel and went back inside.
Parkowski finally exhaled. That could have been a lot worse.
She grabbed her laptop and got back onto the OuterTek guest network after having momentarily lost connection. Parkowski opened up the web browser first. She was greeted with the OuterTek internal splash screen — the browser was smart enough to take her automatically there.
There was a username and password location on the top right of the screen. She inputted DePresti’s login information and was taken to a second screen showing his personalized homepage. Almost everything there had to do with the Shrike Heavy launch that took the ILIAD probe to Venus. It had been the twenty-first flight of the launch vehicle, so much of the data was abbreviated SH-21. The numbering and naming conventions took some getting used to, but Parkowski adapted quickly.
OuterTek used two main systems to track their software and hardware designs and data and to manage their agile approach to launch vehicle and satellite design.
The first was called Mosu, short for
The second was Sangam, a documentation tool from the developers of Mosu named after the Sanskrit word for a river confluence. All of the notes and evidence for engineering decisions were kept there. It was somewhat more locked down than Mosu, but DePresti’s account still had limited access to it. It also had an integrated calendar that linked to the Microsoft Office suite and directly hooked into the Mosu database.
Thankfully, there was a wealth of data available to her. As a part of their government contracts, OuterTek had to provide almost all of their data to their customers. Then, the Space Force performed a pedigree review of that data and looked for errors or gaps that could impede mission success.
Parkowski of course knew none of this until she met and started dating DePresti, and now she knew more than she ever wanted to know. She never thought she would use any of it until now.
The first thing that she looked for was any obvious links to the program Bronze Knot or its trigraph BKT.
She searched for “Bronze Knot” and “BKT” in the search bar, looking for any indication that OuterTek was involved with that special access program. And, she did find one, but just one — a BKT Read-In on an executive-level calendar. More interestingly enough, that call-in had people from the CIA on the invite — their email addresses linked back to the agency’s website.
The CIA again.
OuterTek was most definitely involved.
But why, she wondered, why would the launch company have to be read into a special access program protecting something about the ILIAD mission? They were just the ride to orbit, NASA took over once the probe separated from the second stage.
It probably had to do with the launch processing. Whatever was so special about the ILIAD probe or the ACHILLES robots that had to be protected at the highest levels, it was probably obvious to the OuterTek technicians and engineers installing the payload on the top of the payload attach fitting and then integrating the entire stack onto the rocket’s second stage. Those people — and their management over them — would have to be read in so they could protect that secret.
That was a good place to start — the second stage and the PAF (payload attach fitting). Those parts would have the most contact with the ILIAD payload and the most likely location to contain a link to Bronze Knot.
Parkowski dug into the engineering database in Mosu.
The second stage and PAF were both common between the Shrike Heavy and the Shrike 9 single-core rocket. They had been flying with small modifications for hundreds of flights over the last fifteen to twenty years. There were gigabytes and gigabytes of data for those two assembly-level parts of the launch vehicle.
She filtered out everything except the SH-21 data. Everything looked nominal.
The post-launch data analysis looked great. The second stage had nailed the orbit insertion for the transplanetary path that would take the ILIAD probe to Venus. The three first stages had all been recovered. Everything looked as good as it could get, at least to Parkowski’s level of understanding.
