Back to the Moon-ARC by Les Johnson, Travis S. Taylor Page B

The engineers tell me that the problem should be easily fixed, but I can’t say how the delay will impact our first commercial launch,” she said in response.
    “Ms. O’Conner!” shouted another reporter.
    And so it continues, thought Caroline to herself before pointing to the next anxious reporter. They really do seem like a pack of wolves circling the injured animal, waiting for the feast.…
       

Chapter 11
    “Go, baby, go!” was all Gesling could utter as he alternated looking out the window at the landscape of Earth receding below him and the LCD display that showed the status of Dreamscape ’s onboard systems. After fixing the faulty sensor on the fuel tank two days previously, the restarted countdown for the launch of Dreamscape had gone flawlessly. Now Gesling was nearing the point at which the scramjet first stage would separate from the vehicle and the powerful onboard rocket engines would fire, giving him the final acceleration needed to attain the seventeen thousand miles per hour required for orbit. Escape velocity was just one stage away.
    He felt his pulse quicken in anticipation of the stage separation, and he waited for the five small explosions that would soon sever the bolts holding the two parts of Dreamscape together. The explosive bolts had to fire within milliseconds of each other or the resulting unequal forces acting on the vehicle would tear it apart. Gesling knew the bolts had been tested, retested, and tested again, but that didn’t stop him from being anxious and replaying the catastrophic-failure simulation movies in his mind as the clock on the display counted down to zero.  
    “Just fly the plane,” he told himself. The foremost thing all pilots trained themselves to do was to learn to fly the plane no matter what the instruments were saying or whatever else was going on around them. Fly the plane. He gripped the controls and swallowed the lump in his throat, forcing it back into his stomach. The stage-separation icon flashed, and the Bitchin’ Betty chimed at him.
    “Prepare for stage separation in ten seconds. Nine, eight, seven…”
    He felt only a small bump, and then the green light indicating successful stage separation glimmered before him. Seconds later, the Dreamscape ’s rocket engines ignited, pushing Gesling back into his padded chair on the flight deck. The Dreamscape picked up speed.
    The first stage, now fully separated from the rocket-powered Dreamscape, began its glide back to the Nevada desert. Operated by onboard automatic pilot and with constant monitoring by engineers in the Space Excursions control room back at the launch site, the first stage was on target for a landing back at the location from which its voyage had begun. Onboard computers were sending a steady stream of telemetry back to the ground so the flight engineers could reconstruct all phases of its flight should the worst happen and the vehicle crash. Although the ship had black boxes on board, they were a redundant system at this stage. All operational data was immediately sent to the ground as long as the Dreamscape could get a communications link to a ground station or one of the orbital relay satellites that Childers owned time on. But once they were on the way to the Moon, the data rate would drop to the point that the black boxes would be the main system for flight-data storage and retrieval.
      
    On the ground, the Space Excursions computer was busy receiving, interpreting, and storing the data while Gary Childers was excitedly explaining each element of the flight, as it was happening, to his potential future investors—all of whom had decided to wait the extra two days it took to recover from the aborted launch and to this successful one. It was turning out to be worth their while.
    “As you can see, the Dreamscape is now under rocket power and accelerating as it approaches its three hundred kilometer orbital altitude. Once there, pilot Paul Gesling will shake her down during a