I've been carrying this paper for 2 weeks. Dr. Reed, I need you to look at what we're looking at. Malcolm didn't move. Who sent you?
Marshall Space Flight Center in coordination with NASA headquarters and the Aremis program office. And why? He stopped himself. He knew why, but he needed a second. Dr.
Reed Rebecca Sloan said, and her voice dropped slightly, losing the official precision, becoming something more direct. I drove 3 hours from Huntsville, and I brought a security escort because what I'm about to show you cannot leave this conversation without clearance. We have a propulsion system for a lunar mission that is demonstrating an instability nobody on our team can account for. Two contractor teams have failed to isolate it. We have 18 days before the launch window closes.
3 weeks ago, someone on my team pulled your 2014 paper. She paused. It describes what we're seeing almost exactly. Malcolm looked at the tablet. Then he looked at Ava.
She was staring at him with an expression he had never seen on her face before. He looked back at Dr. Sloan. 18 days, he said. 17 and a half technically, as of this morning, across the road.
Brent Caldwell was standing at the edge of his lot. He'd been watching the whole thing. The men from inside his lobby had come out, too. They were all watching. Four men in polo shirts and pressed khakis standing across a two-lane Alabama road watching three government SUVs parked in front of Malcolm Reed's gravel lot garage.
Watching a woman in a NASA affiliated ID badge hand Malcolm Reed a secured tablet computer with the posture of someone who needed something badly and knew exactly who had it. Malcolm didn't look at them. He looked at the tablet. "Come inside," he said. Rebecca Sloan set up at the workbench.
Malcolm had cleared a section of it with two sweeps of his arm, setting aside the Henderson generator components with a care that was automatic, not dismissive, and she opened three windows of data on the tablet simultaneously. Propulsion telemetry, chamber pressure readings, thermal mapping of the cryogenic fuel delivery system. Malcolm stood looking at it with his arms crossed and said nothing for almost 4 minutes. Ava sat on a stool in the corner with her notebook open pencil in hand, watching everything. One of the men in dark jackets had positioned himself near the garage entrance, not blocking it.
Present. Walk me through what you've ruled out, Malcolm said. Rebecca pointed to the first data window. Structural resonance in the engine mount assembly ruled out after independent modal analysis. Turbo pump bearing degradation ruled out bearings were replaced and the signature recurred.
Software timing error in the control sequence ruled out by manual verification of the ignition controller code. Cryogenic propellant thermal state variance. We've logged its present, but two of our analysts say it's within acceptable parameters. What do your other analysts say? A small pause.
They're less certain. What does the instability look like? Pressure oscillation appears 11 seconds after each restart initiation grows not linearly. It accelerates. We've run 14 ground simulations.
In 11 of them, the oscillation grew to the point where automatic shutdown systems engaged. She tapped the screen. Three of them it damped out on its own. Nobody can tell me why those three behave differently. Did anything change between the stable runs and the unstable runs? ambient temperature, fuel load percentage, restart sequence timing was slightly different because the operators were human and the intervals weren't machine perfect.
Malcolm uncrossed his arms. His hand moved toward the screen and then stopped. "Old habit, you didn't touch secured hardware without being cleared." He looked at Rebecca. "May I?"
She nodded. He took the tablet. He began scrolling through the data, not browsing, reading his eyes, moving with the specific focus of someone who'd learned to find signals inside noise, the way other people find words inside static. Ava watched her father's face. She had seen him work on machines her whole life.
She knew what focused looked like on him, the slight tightening around his eyes, the particular stillness of his body when his mind was moving fast. He looked like that now, but there was something else underneath it. Something she didn't have a name for yet, like a door opening in a house she didn't know existed. After 6 minutes of silence, Malcolm set the tablet down. He picked up a pencil, the mechanical one clicking the lead out and wrote three numbers on the back of a clean shop invoice.
He handed it to Rebecca Sloan. Overlay the chamber pressure readings against turbo pump vibration frequency. Then add cryogenic feed temperature over that same timeline. Don't average the temperature. Use the raw sensor data from the line closest to the turbo pump inlet.
He tapped the three numbers. Look at the curves at those time markers. Rebecca looked at the numbers. Then at Malcolm, our analysis software. I know what the software did with it.
It classified the thermal signature as noise and filtered it. Don't let it pull the raw data and do it manually. She typed rapidly on the tablet sending a message Malcolm couldn't read. Then she looked up. Our engineering team is standing by.
This will take about 20 minutes. Take whatever time you need. Malcolm turned back to the workbench. He looked at the Henderson generator spread across the surface and almost despite himself picked up the caliper and continued his measurement. Rebecca watched him for a moment.
You're still going to work on that, she said. Mr. Henderson needs it back by Monday. There was a pause. A NASA propulsion crisis is on that tablet.
Malcolm looked up. Earl Henderson is 73 years old and he runs 60 acres of beef cattle by himself since his son moved to Atlanta. That generator is what keeps his pump system running for his water troughs. He went back to his measurement. They both need to get done.