Blue Hope: (Book 2) (Red Hope) Read online

  An enthusiastic roar of applause rose up and then quieted down.

  “They have instructed me to tell you that their names are Adam, Sally, and Tucker. They’re going to talk with you about their upcoming mission to the Moon and then you can ask questions, okay?”

  Adam reached down to the floor and picked up a huge display model of the Saturn V rocket.

  “Can any of you guess where the three of us will be sitting when this rocket launches?”

  “At the bottom!” yelled a student in the front row.

  “Not exactly,” Adam laughed. “We’d probably get our toes burnt if we did that.”

  “At the top!” yelled half the audience.

  “That’s right,” Adam said.

  He pointed to cone shape at the very top, known as the Command Module.

  “We’ll be at the very top. We’re essentially sitting on top of the biggest rocket ever successfully flown. If you laid it down on its side, it would be longer than a football field.”

  A chorus of Whoa’s! rang out from the crowd.

  “And on the bottom are five engines. Each one is twelve feet wide and each one pushes with over one and a half million pounds of thrust.”

  Another chorus of Whoa’s!

  Adam handed the model to Sally and she continued the presentation.

  “After we take off, this first stage at the bottom will push us until we’re moving at six thousand miles per hour. But then it runs out of fuel, so we get rid of it.”

  She pulled the first stage off the bottom.

  “It falls down into the ocean. Then the second stage rockets turn on and keep pushing us, even faster until we reach fifteen thousand miles per hour. But eventually that one runs out of fuel too, so we have to get rid of that second stage, too.”

  Sally removed the second stage.

  “Now the third-stage does a bit more. It pushes us all the way into orbit around the Earth, going roughly twenty five thousand miles per hour. It stops for a while and then it pushes again, sending us out of Earth orbit and on a trajectory to the Moon. Then we get rid of that stage, too.”

  Sally removed it and handed the rest of the rocket to Tucker.

  “Hi, kids,” Tucker said, running his hand through his crew cut. “The rest of what you see keeps flying toward the Moon. Hidden inside the section that we’re dragging behind us is the Lunar Module. That’s another spacecraft – it’s the one that will actually land on the Moon.”

  “What about the funnel-shaped one at the front?” asked a little girl in front.

  “That cone on the nose is where we spend most of the trip and it never lands on the Moon. In fact, it has a long piece on the back that acts like a supply closet and it has a rocket motor, too. That part is called the Service Module. That whole package, the Command Module and the Service Module will orbit the Moon, but not land on the Moon. It doubles as our return ship back to Earth.”

  A collective “Oh…” rang out from the crowd.

  “Between the Earth and the Moon, we have to do a crazy maneuver. We’ll spin the front of the ship around, the part that has us inside of it, and we’ll dock it with the Lunar Module that we’ve been dragging behind us. Once we get into the Moon’s orbit, Sally and Adam will climb into the Lunar Module and push away.”

  Tucker demonstrated the Lunar Module breaking free from the Command Module.

  “I’ll stay in the Command Module and orbit the Moon. The Lunar Module will go land on the Moon. When they’re done, the top half of the Lunar Module will light a rocket motor and leap off the Moon. It will re-dock with my part of the ship orbiting the Moon. We’ll kick off the Lunar Module and then the three of us will return to the Earth in the Command Module, dragging the Service Module behind us.”

  “Will you be scared?” asked a boy in the middle of the crowd.

  Adam looked at the other two astronauts. He leaned toward the microphone.

  “We’ll probably be too busy to be scared, but sure, we might have butterflies in our stomachs.”

  The next thirty minutes consisted of the common questions. How do you pee in space? How do you sleep in space?

  “Uncomfortably,” was the usual answer.

  The principal stood up. “Let’s give them all a round of applause.” The astronauts were surprised at how loud elementary kids could be.

  The Lunar crew spent ten minutes signing autographs and then headed back to the training facility.

  Within weeks, the simulators were up and running. Each morning, the three astronauts would jog for three miles along the beaches of Santa Cruz, seeing the occasional whale off in the distance and soaking up the morning breeze.

  After breakfast, a large SUV would appear at the beach house and pick up the three astronauts. They would travel to the Watsonville training facility and spend the first half of the morning reviewing operating manuals for the legacy systems on the Saturn V. After lunch, they would be in the simulators until well after dinnertime. It was a madhouse operation as they would occasionally have to pause as systems were installed or replaced.

  Adam was worried about one thing in particular. This mission had two goals. Primarily, they were to mix up as much Blue Hope medicine as possible in the low gravity of the Moon. Their secondary mission was to investigate the Martian laboratory.

  Adam’s strong point was math and engineering. He’d never been a PhD level at chemistry, knowing just enough to get through the engineering curriculum. He was worried about the mixing of the chemicals to make Blue Hope.

  Fortunately, his worries were about to be eliminated.

  CHAPTER 75

  NASA West Coast Training Facility

  Watsonville, California

  The three astronauts shuffled into a small conference room, accompanied by Chris Tankovitch — he’d come out to check up on the training schedule. On the table was an electronic box the size of a microwave. It was made from stainless steel and had a touch-screen. On the top of the machine were three small pipes protruding upward.

  A man wearing a pin-striped suit and greased hair stood behind the device. He shook the hand of each astronaut and invited them to sit down.

  “Good morning, everybody,” he said, smiling broadly at them. Unlike the astronauts, he continued standing.

  “My name is Matthew Kohler. I’m a chemist at the Teraxo Chemical Corporation. We produce a lot of generic antibiotics and some limited-run pharmaceuticals. You’ve probably never heard of us, but you’ve definitely used our products if you’ve ever bought generic amoxicillin or doxycycline. We were contracted by NASA to build the machine you’ll be using on the Moon to produce the anti-TRK1 enzyme inhibitor.”

  The astronauts furrowed their brows in slight confusion. The chemist saw this and interrupted himself. “That’s the technical name for Blue Hope, the anti-cancer drug.”

  The astronauts nodded their heads.

  “I’m here,” he continued, “to show you how to use this machine. It will be installed in the Lunar Module. We’ve tried to make it as simple as possible for you. It involves three chemicals, the first is tetraoxy…” he trailed off as he looked at the eyes of his audience glaze over.

  “Yes, well, to simplify, we’ve labeled them Bottles A, B and C. That’s all there is. You just mix these three chemicals together in a very low-gravity environment and after an hour, our prediction models show that it will start to give off a turquoise glow. That means the mix is complete.”

  “How do we install the bottles?” Adam asked.

  “Good question,” said the chemist, pointing at Adam. “Why don’t you come up here with me?”

  Adam pushed his chair back and walked around the table.

  “Okay, Adam, now imagine you are in the cramped Lunar Module and you’re about to put the chemicals in this machine.”

  “What do we call the machine?”

  The chemist laughed to himself.

  “It’s technically called the ELGRAMIX which stands for Enhanced Low Gravity Mixer, but in the lab we’ve
been calling it the Hope-A-Matic.”

  Everybody in the room laughed.

  “Stand right behind it,” the chemist instructed.

  Adam moved into position behind it. The chemist gave him a three-liter sized bottle with a lot of writing on it, but the most prominent mark was a big letter “A”.

  “Turn it upside down and just poke it onto that pipe.”

  “So it’s like an office water bottle?” Adam asked.

  “Exactly.”

  The chemist handed Adam two more bottles, marked B and C. Adam repeated the process of bottle A and poked the bottles down onto the pipes that stuck out of the roof of the machine.

  “Now all you do is push the Start button.”

  “Really?” Adam asked.

  “We’ve been working 24/7 for a month to make this user interface simple.”

  “Even a caveman could do it,” Adam suggested.

  “You bet,” the chemist grinned.

  Adam reached over and pushed the Start button.

  Air was injected into each of the bottles, causing the contents to be pumped into the little pipe. Three of the walls of the machine were made of glass and lit up from the inside. The NASA crew saw the liquids going into a complicated mixer.

  “Keep in mind,” the chemist said. “If you were in the Moon’s gravitational field right now, in about an hour, this liquid would start glowing turquoise.”

  “Which means it’s done?” asked Sally.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “That seems almost too easy,” Tucker said.

  “Well,” the chemist trailed off. “There is one catch.”

  “Hah! There’s always a catch,” Chris said, breaking his mute appearance in the room.

  The chemist reached under the table and brought up a very fancy stainless steel cooler roughly two feet long on each side. It had a top half and a bottom half with large clamps on each side.

  “We worked with a company that makes cryogenic insulation systems to build this. This cooler is very simple, yet very effective. It is pressure sealed and the Blue Hope ingredients must be kept in here during the trip to the Moon.”

  “How does it stay cool for that long?” Sally asked.

  “We looked at a lot of ways to tie it into the existing Saturn V electrical system, but we couldn’t find a lightweight reliable solution on such a short time frame. So the cooler uses a grid of dry ice cubes. The clamshell top of the cooler is sealed with high-pressure tape. That, in addition to the clamps, keeps anything inside from getting outside.”

  Sally looked very concerned.

  “Won’t that emit carbon dioxide?”

  “No, not a significant amount,” the chemist explained. “The shell has a two-inch vacuum between the inside and the outside walls. If you don’t open it, the dry ice will stay there for two weeks — more than enough time for you to get to the Moon. Once you mix the chemicals, you won’t need any special temperatures other than room temperature. At that point, just throw the cooler out onto the Moon’s surface ASAP. You don’t want a source of CO2 contaminating your life-support systems.”

  “I produce CO2,” Tucker laughed. “Will you throw me out?”

  “Of course not,” Sally said sarcastically. “You’ll be orbiting the Moon in the Command Service Module.”

  Adam turned toward the chemist. “What if the cubes melt on the way there and the bottles get warm?”

  The chemist frowned.

  “They won’t melt much — they’ll sublimate”

  Adam rolled his eyes. “You know what I mean.”

  “I know, it’s just semantics, but the conversion from dry ice to CO2 gas during your short trip will be very low. I suppose if you opened it up and left it open, the cubes would sublimate completely in about a day or so. And the Blue Hope chemicals would be ruined, depending on how warm they got.”

  Tucker nodded his head up and down.

  “I think we’ve got it. Land on the Moon, break open the cooler, install the bottles, run the Hope-A-Matic and then get rid of the cooler.”

  The chemist could see the worry in the astronauts’ eyes about the cooler.

  “Look, don’t worry about the cooler. It’s a fool-proof system. It’s clamped together and can withstand a lot of pressure. NASA has spent over three million dollars on this cooler alone. You worry about flying the rocket.”

  The chemist leaned in, as if sharing a secret. “Rumor has it that NASA has already licensed the cooler design to BigIceCoolers — you know, they make the expensive coolers for campers?”

  The crew smirked at such an odd disclosure.

  “I have one last question,” Adam said. “Can we leave the Hope-A-Matic running in the Lunar Module while we explore the surface?”

  “Yes,” the chemist confirmed. “Once the liquids are pulled into the machine, the unit becomes a self-enclosed system, complete with temperature regulation.”

  Chris stood up and the three astronauts followed.

  “Thank you, Matthew,” Chris said, shaking the chemist’s hand.

  “My pleasure. I’m on my way to Florida to install this very unit in the Saturn V.”

  They exited the room and walked down the hallway, back toward the training hanger. Midway down the long beige corridor, Chris got a phone call and pointed at the astronauts to wait for him.

  Chris had an animated conversation with somebody, but the astronauts weren’t close enough to eavesdrop. When he hung up, Chris turned to the crew.

  “Do you want to go see something amazing?”

  CHAPTER 76

  Redstone Test Center

  Huntsville, Alabama

  A private jet landed on the runway in Huntsville and taxied over to a waiting limousine. Three astronauts and Chris Tankovitch walked down the stairway and onto the tarmac, quickly ducking into the limousine. The long black vehicle took off and exited the airport property. Ten minutes later they found themselves cruising through the front gates of the legendary rocket test center.

  They kept driving until they came to a large earthen bunker. In the middle was a beefy concrete installation with an F-1 rocket motor mounted in a huge metal skeleton structure — the rocket pointed downward. On the roof of the structure were two giant spheres, one filled with kerosene and the other filled with liquid oxygen. These were the two components necessary to fuel the F-1 engines.

  The three astronauts exited the limo and walked down into a building with thick concrete walls and thick greenish windows.

  They stepped into a control room. One entire wall was lined with computer monitors. Another wall was lined with old-fashioned so-called “steam gages” that had the black printing on the white background and a physical pointer that moved back and forth.

  Several men were sitting at the tables. A handful of small green-tinted windows lined the leftmost wall — a direct view of the F-1 engine test stand, albeit they were at least three hundred feet away.

  Chris spoke to the room manager who was running around checking the steam gages. He wore a white button-down shirt with a black tie. He was at least 70 years old, but ran around like his younger brethren.

  Chris came back to the astronauts.

  “All right, crew. The man you see running around is Norman Rogers. He used to work at Rocketdyne and helped with the design of the F-1 engines. He’s one of the experts that we’ve called back out of retirement.”

  Norman was full of energy, almost hopping with hyperactivity. He walked over to the astronauts.

  “Hello, y’all. Thank you for coming here. If all goes well, you’ll see the test of the fifth and final F-1 engine.”

  “We’re ready!” yelled a man from behind Norman.

  “Excuse me, we’re about to test,” Norman said. “Oh, you’ll need these…”

  Norman handed out earplugs to the astronauts.

  “But we’re inside a bunker,” Adam said.

  Norman laughed.

  “Believe me, you’ll want them.”

  They inserted the
earplugs and walked over to the green blast-proof windows.

  The engineers behind the group began calling out sequences.

  “Area is clear.”

  A minute passed.

  “Water on!”

  Water started spraying into the pit below the engine.

  “Pumps starting!”

  “Ignition in five, four, three, two, one!”

  The astronauts were not ready for the sound.— the BOOM that rocked the building and never stopped. It nauseated the astronauts. At first the underside of the test stand looked like it was on fire. Then they saw the rocket plume suck all of the nearby smoke into the exhaust cave beneath the test stand. Massive jets of smoke and steam came roaring out of an exit pipe far to the side of the test stand.

  The engine roar became a cracka-cracka-cracka, pounding on the chests of the viewers. It was almost hard to breathe from the pressure waves hitting them. Two monitors fell off the wall in the control room. The people living in nearby Huntsville took notice as their windows rattled.

  One minute in and the crew found it hard to concentrate.

  An engineer ran up and grabbed Norman, frantically pointing at a flashing red light on the wall. Norman jogged over and quickly took off his glasses to look at the warning readout flickering red. Then he ran back to the window. In the distance, Norman could see a small flame shooting out of a pipe up above the engine.

  Norman sprinted across the room and pushed a large red button on the wall. The roaring came to a quick stop as the engine stopped. He ran back to the window. Norman turned around to face his engineering staff.

  “Turn on fire suppression in area three!”

  The safety engineer pushed a button on his console. Norman turned back to the window. He looked out and saw a mist enveloping the top half of the engine.

  “Wowee, wow, that was close!” Norman said with a frown.

  “How bad is it?” Chris asked.