11 To Be Coordinated
JPL, Pasadena · Tuesday, 18 September – Tuesday, 23 October 2029.
The question came down on Tuesday morning through the deputy director’s office, in a sentence somebody in Washington had spent a week making short: what would it take to put 1,000 kilograms near the object, and how quickly?
“Near,” Dana said.
“Within a few thousand kilometers.” The deputy director had it on his tablet and read it again as if it might have changed since breakfast. “Time of flight, launch dates. Ray Delgado’s people do the trajectories. You give them the object.”
“Which parts of it?”
“Whatever they ask for.” He heard how that sounded and didn’t fix it. “It’s a design study. They want options.”
Nobody needed a thousand kilograms of camera. She told him Delgado would have the ephemeris by Thursday.
The list came on the same thread an hour later, a PDF with no letterhead titled Ideas for an edge. Fourteen items, numbered, most of them a line. A review of Deep Space Network receiver logs for anything along the object’s line of sight. Time at Green Bank to listen, frequencies unspecified. A commercial imaging buy, from a company whose telescopes pointed at the ground. A radar campaign, from someone who had never taken the fourth power of a distance. Item nine was a records pull at Lawrence Livermore on its 1980s X-ray laser work, prompted by an unsolicited study from a contractor. She’d read about that program once, in a history of Star Wars that was mostly about budgets. She went on to the radar, which was wrong in a way she could do something about, and wrote the deputy director two sentences on why Goldstone would hear nothing from a two-kilometer target at one astronomical unit.
On the afternoon call a man from NASA headquarters walked the list in eleven minutes and only slowed down once.
“Where’s the Livermore one from?”
“There’s a cover page,” the deputy director said. “A company name. I looked it up and got a suite number in Reston.”
“Leave it on. It’s a records pull. It costs somebody a week in a basement.” He was already on ten. At the end he said, “Two for Dr. Okafor. How far is it today, in kilometers? And does it stay where it is?”
“About 155 million,” Dana said. “And yes. It loops around L5 once a year, and the center of the loop hasn’t moved since the crossing. Gravity-only orbit, good to a few tens of kilometers.”
“A few tens of kilometers.” She heard him write it down. “Thank you, Doctor.”
On Thursday she walked the ephemeris across the lab to Delgado herself, because she wanted to see who she was giving it to.
Cable had a retired astronaut on most nights who said “natural” with a confidence she’d have liked to borrow. On Tuesday the crawl under his segment had said China launched Shijian-29, a deep-space technology test, from Wenchang on Sunday, and then something about a hurricane in the Gulf.
Delgado’s group had two rooms on the second floor of the mission design building and a coffee maker that made decaf by his standing order. He was about sixty, gray at the temples and nowhere else, with a Cassini mug and four missions behind him. The second of them had come apart forty seconds after launch. He didn’t mention it. Someone in the hall did, on her way out, as if Dana should know who she was dealing with.
He had her file open before she sat down.
“First thing,” he said. “There’s no launch window.”
“It’s always sixty degrees back.”
“Always sixty degrees back. Any day you like, give or take the Moon.”
“They’re going to like that,” Dana said.
“How long?”
“One lap is fourteen months. C3 of about 2, and you get there doing 1.4 kilometers a second relative. If you want to stop, that’s your propellant.” He drank. “If you don’t want to stop, you don’t.”
“And faster?”
A long pause, in which he seemed to be doing the problem again rather than remembering it. “Faster costs C3. Five months if you throw hard, and then stopping costs everything in the tanks, so you bring a camera and not a ton. Or you don’t stop, and go by at a speed nobody would call arriving. I’ll give them three cases. They’ll want the fourth.”
She gave him the rest across the table, down to the fact that it was at rest relative to L5, which he already had from the ephemeris and let her say anyway.
“It weighs nothing,” he said.
“It weighs 1.7 × 10¹³ kilograms.”
“At three thousand kilometers it weighs nothing. I could fly a cubesat past it on a spreadsheet.” He scrolled. “Anything else out there?”
“There’s traffic.” She sent him the Goddard table. “None before September last year.”
“Do they go near it?”
“They come from it.”
“Mm.” He wrote that on the pad at his elbow, a word, not a number. “I’ll carry them as a hazard. Somebody will read it as a hazard.”
She checked every value she gave him before she sent the clean copy, the mass to its error bar and the ephemeris against her own fit from January. A number that went to Delgado went on from Delgado, and nobody past him would check it.
The questions came back the following Friday, the 28th, typed into the body of an email so that nobody had to attach anything. Delgado forwarded them to her with no comment and then called.
“They read the fourth case first,” he said.
She had it open. Five months, a hard C3, a flyby at 4.1 kilometers a second with no stop at the end. Underneath, the new questions. Could the flight time be shortened if the payload were reduced to 600 kilograms. Was the object’s position known well enough to target a pass at a specified distance, and to what accuracy. Would the object be expected to change position or attitude in response to an approaching spacecraft.
“The second one’s yours,” Delgado said.
“The second one’s easy. I can put it in a box a few tens of kilometers on a side for the day you want. Better if I get tracking from whatever they send.”
“Mm. And the third?”
She thought about the 5.81-hour cycle that had died in August, and the face that had held its attitude through thirteen weekly fits, and the small hot things that had started leaving it a fortnight after the cycle stopped.
“The third one I can answer with what it’s done,” she said. “Not with what it would do.”
“Write that.”
“They’ll hate it.”
“They’ll hate anything shorter, too.” A pause. “Put it in your words and send it to me. I’ll put it on top of mine so it gets read.”
She wrote it in four sentences. The first said what it had done since March 2028, and the last said there was no observation in hand that predicted how it would respond to anything, because nothing had ever approached it. She took out an adjective and sent it.
On the first Monday in October, Lookout came out of its bag.
It had been built as the flight spare for a solar wind mission and had sat in a high bay under a nitrogen purge since 2021, gold blanket and all, with its remove-before-flight tags still on. Two technicians cut the bag back while a quality engineer photographed every inch of it. The magnetometer boom was coming off. A camera pair and a thermal imager were going on, from two other programs that had been told to be patriotic about it.
“It looks younger than me,” Delgado said.
“January,” Dana said.
“January. The five-month case, with a solid motor strapped on to stop it, so June.” He counted on the side of his cup. “Fifteen weeks to launch. The one I lost had a better schedule than this.” A pause. “Didn’t help it.”
He was running Lookout. He’d said yes before anyone had finished asking, one of the technicians told her, and had then spent a day finding out what he’d said yes to. On the rendezvous he did his long silences in the meetings and let the younger people talk themselves into and out of things, and the things they talked themselves out of stayed out. She liked him.
She asked him for one thing: a hold point off the line from Earth, somewhere it could see the far side.
“Mm. Everything we’ve got looks at it from here.”
“That’s why.”
He pulled the approach geometry up on his tablet and swung the hold point out to the side, fifty thousand kilometers off, where the night side would show its edge. “You’ll owe me forty meters a second,” he said. “I’ll find them.”
The badge came on the 15th in an envelope from the State Department, a laminated card on a blue lanyard: UNITED STATES DELEGATION, her photograph from a 2019 JPL ID, and under her name SCIENCE LIAISON. The international consultation was in Vienna the second week of November. An agenda would follow. A briefing book would follow the agenda.
The deputy director walked her through it in his office with the door shut. She would sit behind the head of delegation, not beside. She would answer technical questions put to the United States, from the cleared slides, and refer anything else forward. She would not be the person who said “powered.”
“What if somebody else says it?”
“Then you’re a scientist and you have a view.” He thought about it. “From the slides.”
She asked who else was sending a scientist. He had a list of countries and no names.
Glen came by the next afternoon. He’d heard.
“Science liaison,” he said. “Is that above or below a branch lead?”
“It’s a lanyard, Glen.”
“Will anybody in Vienna be talking about publishing?”
“I’d guess everybody in Vienna will be talking about publishing.”
He went back to his held paper.
Ada’s message came in on a Friday night, the 19th, after eleven.
Ada: friend posted this. not saying I buy it
Something in the machines - Ruth Ackroyd
Every few months a platform puts out a takedown report and everyone claps. 4,000 accounts tied to this ministry, 11,000 to that one. I've spent two years running their own numbers back against the engagement they say they removed, and the totals don't close. Take out every network anyone has ever pinned on anyone and there's still boost left, on the same posts, and it isn't any state's. Nobody asks whose it is. I think it might be the recommender systems' own. Yes, I know how that sounds. Here are the tables. [link]
Ada: probably nothing. she is an actual statistician though. are we ok?
Dana clicked through. The link went to a blogging platform’s page saying the site was no longer available. She’d been in Delgado’s high bay since seven, and she had the Vienna agenda open in another window, nine pages, mostly coffee breaks.
We’re ok, she wrote. People write a lot of things right now. Get some sleep, Ada. I’ll call Sunday.
Ada sent a heart and nothing else.
The payload study came back on Tuesday the 23rd, sixty-one pages, with the distribution list longer than in September. Somebody had added the National Nuclear Security Administration, Office of Defense Programs, between Space Force and the State Department.
Delgado brought it to her office himself and sat down without being asked.
“Your mass is in it,” he said. “My trajectories. All three cases and the fourth.” He didn’t open it. “Page four.”
Page four sorted every option they’d sent up. The payload mass on every line was 1,000 kilograms.