Dr. Young shook her head. “Don’t know. We’ll have to take additional measurements. But if this trend continues the rate will increase as the station gets closer to Earth. As it falls deeper into the atmosphere, the air gets thicker, which means more atmospheric drag, and it will drop even faster. Depends on a lot of things, but from this drop rate I give it two, maybe three more days at the most before it hits.”
“Wow. That’s weird.” Handing the paper back to her, Chip mused aloud, “It’s not part of our tasking, but since they’ve been so anal about imaging the station I’d better send this on to JSPOC.”
Dr. Young pulled a flash drive from a pocket in her slacks. It had UNCLASSIFIED/FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY stamped on its side in small print. “Downloaded this after I printed out that graph. Thought you might need it.”
“Thanks. Is the drive clean?”
She nodded. “Scanned it before I used it.”
“Good.” Chip took the flash dive, wrote TS/SCI over its side with a felt-tip pen, then turned back to his console. Inserting the drive into the classified computer, he rapidly typed a header explaining the diagram, then shot it over to JWICS, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System of JSPOC.
“Hope you don’t need the drive anymore,” he said to Dr. Young. “You know that the second you brought it here into the vault it became classified at the SCI level. Now it’s here to stay.”
Dr. Young smiled at him. “That’s okay, Lieutenant. Like I said, I thought it was more important for you to have it. We can always buy more.”
JOINT SPACE OPERATIONS CENTER (JSPOC), VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, CALIFORNIA
“Admiral, could you take a look at this, sir? It just arrived from Maui over JWICS.”
Watch commander Rear Admiral Harrison looked up from his desk. The Joint Space Operations Center was the hub for space situational awareness, keeping track of over twenty-two thousand objects in Earth orbit, from items as small as two inches across to the massive International Space Station. JSPOC tracked objects ranging from the most highly classified spy satellites to pieces of space debris created by the occasional collisions between satellites.
Maui was one of the two unclassified sources that provided highly detailed visual imagery of the International Space Station, which the JSPOC now forwarded to PACOM for up-to-date targeting if the order was ever given to shoot down the station.
Stretching from the west coast of the U.S. to the west coast of India, and ranging from the Arctic to Antarctica, the United States Pacific Command was headquartered just outside of Honolulu. It was responsible for conducting military operations over an area of more than one hundred million square miles, nearly 52 percent of the Earth’s surface. PACOM’s Aegis antisatellite weapons were so accurate that individual modules of the ISS could be targeted separately to ensure that the entire station would fall harmlessly into the vast Pacific Ocean. The high-resolution imagery from Maui was the key to both choosing a spot to hit the station, as well as detecting if the ISS deviated from its prescribed orbit.
The core of the Space Operations Center was a large room, bustling with activity. Navy, Army, Air Force, and Marine personnel worked at their consoles side by side with a smattering of civilians. Sections of the room were partitioned off by blue cloth-covered foam rectangles with gleaming metal siding. Stenciled signs hung over each functional area, from J2: INTELLIGENCE, and J3: OPERATIONS to J6: COMMAND, CONTROL, COMMUNICATIONS, AND COMPUTER/CYBER.
Admiral Harrison was a compactly built officer with a graying crewcut and steely blue-gray eyes. The officers under him sometimes ran betting pools on when the Admiral would smile again. The Chief Master Sergeant standing before his desk was a new man, blond and youthful, but almost as stern as the Admiral himself. They got along well.
“What’ve you got, Chief? Any change in the imagery?”
“No, sir. But it’s bad news.”
The Admiral glanced at the red-bordered sheet that the young Chief slid across his desk. Marked TS/SCI on both the top and bottom of the sheet, instead of showing a highly detailed image of the International Space Station, it bore a single, decreasing line on a two-dimensional plot of altitude versus time.
Harrison frowned. “You’ve only plotted two points on this graph.”
“Yes, sir, but it clearly shows the station’s descending.”
“Two points don’t show a trend; this is a hiccup.” Harrison looked up, frowning at the younger man. “Any verification on this?”
“No, sir, not yet. The ISS is due to come in range of the Space Fence in fifteen minutes, and we’ll have more points for the graph, to see if this is real or just an artifact from the Maui site. We’ll also get dual confirmation at that time, as well as a rough estimate of a time and location of impact. Spacetrack sensors update every four hours and we’ll be able to verify it then as well, with the other sensors. MIT’s Haystack radar and our Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance telescopes will be able to provide more detail by its next orbit.”
“Okay,” said the Admiral. “Go ahead and shoot this stuff over to the Joint Staff as well as PACOM. But tell them we won’t have verifications for another quarter hour. Still, the JCS will want to forward this to the National Security Council as soon as possible, I imagine. And immediately after you send it, copy 14th Air Force as well as the other service space elements through JWICS’s special access channels as a heads-up; and inform NASA liaison. In the meantime, work on confirming the data. We’ve got to keep PACOM in the loop on this, real-time.”
“Yes, sir.” The Chief hesitated. “But what if the astronauts are still alive? Do you really think PACOM will shoot down the station, Admiral?”
“They will if given the order,” Harrison said. “Right now the President has a choice to either let a few astronauts die—if they’re even alive up there—or risk the lives of thousands, probably more, if the public learns that the ISS will crash and may hit them. But the Aegis cruisers won’t even be in position to take down the station for another three days or more, so it may turn out that the station crashes anyway.”
“Isn’t there anything else we can do?”
“Classify the orbital elements so the public won’t have access. That’ll keep it out of the unclassified Spacetrack.”
The Chief was silent for a moment. “Then we’ll have to take down the entire Spacetrack database, sir. We can’t just go in and remove or change the data, especially if the public has unfettered access.”
“Okay, then take down the whole damned Spacetrack website before the next sensor update, ASAP if not sooner. We can’t afford to let this go public.”
“But sir … that will take some time, and since the data is updated automatically, we may not be able to prevent the station’s orbital elements from being entered. It’d be like waving a red flag in front of a bull. The press is already looking for anything unusual happening with the space station, and this will only start more rumors flying.”
“Just do it!” Admiral Harrison snapped. “If the ISS is really coming down, we can’t afford to be feeding the media an update every four hours on how fast the station’s deorbiting. They’ll just bring in their own experts and start making forecasts of where and when it will hit, and that’ll stoke the flames even higher. And don’t give ’em any lame excuse, like the site’s down for maintenance. They’ll see right through that. Just take the damned thing off-line!”