The Subgenius Space Program's First Launch

by Boddhisatva Troutwaxer (tungtung@pacbell.net)

All right already, so "Bob's" calculations about the arrival date of the Xists have been proven inaccurate, and aside from the occassional Elvis like, tabloid filler, po-bucker type sighting, no-one has seen our High Epopt since his assassination in 1984. It just doesn't matter!! We're still fanatically devoted to His awesome slack filled words and plan on obeying his insane commands until the end. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. All the usual hogwash aside, why not entertain ourselves with a little project while we're waiting. After all, if we controlled Earth's high orbitals, they'd just have to give us just a little fucking respect!!

And the history books might read just a little like this:

Just after midnight on July 5th, 2002 a rented Boeing 767 took off from a private airfield in the Nevada desert. The aircraft barely got off the runway because a second airplane, one of Dobbsco's Lockheed F-104 Starfighters, was attached to its roof. However, once in the air the big Boeing jet responded nicely to senior pilot Gary G'broagfran's experienced touch and the two aircraft were soon cruising high above the desert.

"The idea was to use as little of the Starfighter's fuel as possible," flight engineer Dr. Howll explained later, "otherwise it never could have gotten up high enough. As you recall, NASA launched the X-15 from under the wing of a B-52, and of course we'd all seen the pictures of NASA's experiment with the Space Shuttle mounted atop a 747, so we decided to use the same technique. We also launched a second F-104 loaded with an extra 7,200 pounds of fuel, which we would later use for the highest mid-air refueling on record."

The second F-104, piloted by Lonesome Cowboy Dave, took off a few minutes later and joined the big Boeing jet and the smaller aircraft it carried. This second fighter jet had been stripped of all armament and modified to make it capable of refueling another aircraft in mid-air. The three planes climbed to the 767's maximum altitude of 43,000 feet and accelerated to well over five hundred miles an hour. At that point control was handed over from the air traffic controllers to Commander Chas Smith in mission control. "We wanted to have our bird over New York just as Wall Street opened, so timing was even more critical than usual during an orbital insertion. I gave the go-ahead at just after one in the morning, and Gary blew the explosive bolts that held the primary bird onto the 767. From there the two Starfighter's were on their own."

The primary bird was an old Lockheed F-104-G code named "Head Launcher," one of three purchased from what the Church would only describe as "A retired third world air force general" for less than a hundred thousand dollars apiece. It had been extensively worked over by Commander Smith and was repainted with the Dobbsco logo. The pilot, who had been picked from the ranks of all Church Members due mainly to her low weight and sharp reflexes was the now famous Nikkie Deathchick. "I was startled because the explosive bolts were louder than I expected, and I almost hit the tail of the 767, which we called 'Nine Iron.' Lonesome Cowboy Dave closed up on my left wing and we headed up to 85,000 feet, which was our go/no go point." Nikkie's bird would go much higher than that, but just getting the heavily loaded Starfighter up to that altitude required enormous amounts of fuel.

"I was scared out of my wits," Lonesome Cowboy Dave later said, "The Subgenius Space Program literally didn't have enought money left to buy pancakes, and I'd had to max out all my credit cards just to fill up our tanks with jet fuel!! We didn't tell Nikkie about any of that, 'cause she had enough on her shoulders already. Well, we were up in the air at 'bout mach 2.1, running full afterburner, and I got to give her all my gas, which scared the bejeesus outa me! Anyway, we managed to get the pole in the cone even though I was shaken' so hard you'd a thought I had palsy. I gave her all but about 500 pounds of fuel and landed as fast as I could. I made it to the runway alright, but after I touched down I noticed that all I had left was about two pounds of gas in the bottom of one drop tank. When I saw that, I wet my pants."

Up until then the height record for an F-104 was 117,000 feet, and that had only been accomplished by using a single solid fuel rocket attached to the back of the airplane. "We had to do much better than that," Chas Smith later said. "We knew that we would be able to get up to around 100,000 feet just with the jet engines, but any higher there's not enough oxygen to make a jet work very well, and not enough air pressure for wings to be really effective, so we cheated. We stripped the plane of all the combat electronics - you know, the radar and stuff, all the weaponry, and all the survival gear, which allowed us to more than double the F-104's rated payload capacity. This meant we were able to load the bird with ten thousand pounds of mission critical items, including a thousand pounds of liquid oxygen for the engines. In other words, that jet engine became a very weak liquid fueled rocket, which made it a very powerful jet engine indeed."

When the F-104 hit 100,000 feet - nearly twenty miles up - Nikkie started feeding oxygen into the fuel mix. Soon she had broken every speed record ever held by a jet propelled aircraft. "I turned on the oxygen system and stood the bird on its tail. With computer control we were actually able to use a much richer oxygen mix than one gets at sea level, so we generated enormous amounts of thrust. There was very little air resistance. Radar says I was doing over mach 4.0 when I fired the four solid fuel rockets Chas had installed in place of the drop tanks. At that point I was around 150,000 feet up. The solid fuel rockets accelerated me up to about mach 7.2. I wouldn't actually make it into space, but the satellite would. I turned things over to the inertial guidance system and at around forty four miles up the gyroscopes had turned the Starfighter into the correct position and we were ready for our third stage to launch." At the Starfighter's apogee Nikkie toggled the switch that had once lauched sidewinder missiles and the orbital insertion stage seperated from the airplane.

The orbital insertion stage was a stripped down liquid fuel rocket with no sensors or guidance system. The hull itself functioned as the antenna for a ground based remote control system running on one of Modemac's PCs. A network of home satellite dishes in the midwestern states tracked its location by means of the return from a NORAD radar installation highjacked by a Dobbs friendly group of phone phreaks. "The only reason it could make orbit was the fact Modemac's computer savvy allowed us to strip off everything but the engines and payload," Commander Smith later observed. "This allowed us to spend almost all the five thousand pounds of weight we had remaining on delta vee. The folks at NASA would tell you that you spend a thousand pounds of fuel for every pound you put into orbit, which would have meant that a four pound satellite was about the best we could have managed. However, we launched from over forty miles up and that allowed us to have a much better fuel/payload ratio. The exact weight of the first Dobbsco satellite is still classified, but you better believe that we orbited a hell of a lot more than four pounds."

The next problem was how Nikkie would get down. She was forty five miles up in a stripped Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, with less than 2000 pounds of fuel. The practical problems were numerous. First, the F-104 she was flying was only rated for mach 2.5. Her present speed of mach 7.2 was almost three times that. This was not a problem in the thin air at 200,000 feet, but it would be a major issue as she entered the thicker atmosphere at lower altitudes. Second, she was up high enough that re-entry heat would be a factor and there had been no weight allowance for a heat sheild. Third, she was in air that was much too thin for her to control the airplane by the usual method of running air past the control surfaces. "Naturally, this had been allowed for," Dr. Howll pointed out, "but ultimately we had to test our theories on the fly."

In place of now the useless ailerons, the gyroscope was once again used to control the plane's orientation. This time it kept the airplane at right angles to its direction of travel in order to maximise the miniscule air resistance against the Starfighter and slow it somewhat. When the skin of the airplane grew too hot, the gyroscope would turn the nose of the airplane to the wind and this allowed for some cooling. Then the process would be repeated. "In that first few minutes I lost ten miles of altitude, slowed to mach 5.5 and the outside skin of the airplane was heated to almost five hundred degrees," Nikkie reported. "At that time I turned the aircraft's nose to my direction of travel and deployed a drag chute from the rear of the airframe. There still wasn't much air, but it did slow me down some more, and when I finally let it go the airplane had cooled off and was moving at only mach 4.5." At this time she was nearly twenty five miles up and falling straight down. The gyroscope was employed once again, but this time it was used to turn the F-104 nose up. "I lit off the engine again and used the last three hundred pounds of oxygen to fuel a deceleration burn. The Starfighter is *not* made for this, and it damn near shook apart. I thought I'd had it. When the jet burned out I was moving at only mach 3.5, so I went nose down again and deployed the second chute. When I had slowed to mach 2.5 I knew I was going to survive, so I blew the chute and headed for a West Texas airfield we used."

A private plane flew her to New York, where she was met by a limosine which took her to Brushwood. There she was debriefed by the Church leaders and given a hero's welcome by the XXXXX-Day crowd of more than two hundred people.

The satellite did not make geosynchronous orbit, but at a hundred and thirty two miles up it completed one circuit of the earth in a little more than two hours. "The bird's antenna's were tuned mainly to the cellular bands," Modemac later told Wired magazine, "and of course we'd cracked the computers at every mobile phone company we could find. Some careful manuvering put the bird over New York just at the opening bell on Wall street, and the first item off the news ticker as the suits walked onto the trading floor read, 'Dobbsco satellite launch succeeds. Satellite and launch together for less than .5 million, most in reusable hardware. Dial 666 plus the area code and number for free long distance now.' and that message was repeated every time the satellite was overhead for the next three days."

The launch had succeeded and free long distance was provided, not just to New York, but to all the world's major financial centers; Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris, London, and to the major centers of computer commerce, such as California's Silicon Valley. "Maybe they were just grateful for the free phone calls," said Dobbsco financial genius Jesus Christ, "because when the IPO hit on July 7th, just two days after the bird went up, they bought almost one hundred billion dollars worth of Dobbsco Aerospace stock."

Six months later, on the same day as the past and present administrations of NASA went before a Senate Committee to "explain the Space Agencies incompotence and determine whether actions of a treasonous nature had taken place," Dobbsco Aerospace announced that it had purchased Caltech University and Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Two days later, they fired everyone who believed that Von Braun's theories had anything other than historical importance. A few years later The Church of the Subgenius controlled our planet's high orbitals, and from that position of power, they made sure nothing would ever be the same...

If any of you have any brilliant ideas or technical criticisms relating to this manuscript, please send them to tungtung@pacbell.net. I expect to make the occassional change to this page as people with greater technical virtuosity correct or inspire me. Please read all the links before sending me something. I would also welcome any related art (I can't draw for shit) and will give contributor's credits and link space to anyone who helps out with either technical stuff or pictures.

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