Getting the go-ahead to fabricate low-temperature bearings had proven easier than Ken had expected. After all, they were dealing with parts for landers, which meant all kinds of very technical FAA regulations. Quite honestly, he’d expected Reggie to balk hard, to say no way in hell was this project going through on his watch.
On the other hand, this was an emergency situation, and a lot of slack got cut when your back was against the wall. Although Ken had spent the Energy Wars stateside, overseeing maintenance operations at one or another airbase, he’d heard plenty of war stories from the guys who’d been in the sandbox. Guys who’d been downed in a hot landing zone and had to make emergency repairs with whatever they could cobble together — stuff that would put a plane out of spec if it had been done in a peacetime situation, let alone a civilian aircraft. But when the enemy was breathing down your neck, you did what it took to let you get back to friendly territory, and sorted things out afterward.
Up here the enemy wasn’t religious fanatics who believed God wanted them to kill infidels. The natural world could be far more relentless than any terrorist, and just as deadly. In normal times, specifications and procedures kept you safe. But in an emergency, blindly following procedures could become a case of following a rule straight over a cliff.
And Reggie was a combat veteran. He’d spent most of the Energy Wars flying off carriers, and he’d had all the training those guys got to prepare them for the possibility of being downed in enemy territory, of being captured and held prisoner, all things that required more than a cookbook approach.
Now that they were beginning the production process — he couldn’t really call it a line, because it was going to be a small-batch process — he needed to convince Bill Hearne down at Flight Ops to actually test their product. He’d been an astronaut for decades, plenty of time to grow set in his ways — but he was also the last commander of the Falcon, and keeping his crew alive until Nekrasov and the Baikal could rescue them had taken some incredible feats of improvisation.
As it turned out, Bill was already waiting for Ken when he arrived at Flight Ops. Yes, it had been a good idea to send all the documentation down for review ahead of time.
“You’ve got some pretty ambitious plans here, Ken. I know your guys do good work, but this isn’t exactly the thing you can spitball together with chewing gum and baling wire like we used to do the chiller in the milkhouse back on the farm. This stuff’s running a hell of a lot colder than any Freon setup.”
“True, but if we wait until we completely run out of spares, what do we do when half the lander fleet is grounded? We may not be making as many orbital runs to Luna Station these days, but we’re still making all those suborbital hops to the outlying settlements that don’t have their own greenhouse farms or manufacturing, or a whole laundry list of things that work a lot better at scale.”
When he got Bill’s agreement on that front, he pressed home his real ask. “So what we’ll do is set all the existing spare parts aside for the actual landers, and start testing the ones we’re manufacturing here on ground-based applications. Start with the stationary cryo-pumps. I know there are plenty around here. Then we start using them on the crawlers, since they have cryo-pumps in their fuel cell systems. If they hold up to those uses, we can start judiciously using them in the landers.”
“In which case I’ll have to find volunteers to test-fly every one that we put a non-standard low-temperature bearing in, before they can be re-certified for routine operations. Just like Slayton Field had to re-certify every goddamn lander after the cyber-attack.”
“Of course.” Ken had learned those requirements back when he was a second lieutenant overseeing maintenance back in his Air Force days. “Now we have a procedure to go by, and we can evaluate it as we proceed.”
Right now, even a small victory was a welcome one. And he had a bad feeling that the shortage of spare low-temperature bearings was just the first of many chokepoints that was coming down the pike.