Yuri Androv was one of the few Soviet test pilots who never reached the biology barrier. He was, in fact, the best.
He knew that his gift was one of the reasons he had been specially selected for this project. Another was experience. Over the years, he'd flown them all—the Tupolev Blackjack, the MiG 25 Foxbat, even the ultra-secret new MiG 31 Foxhound. But this hydrogen-fueled, scramjet-powered monster opened the door to another world. Above Mach 5, you were no longer merely supersonic, you were hypersonic—where no air-breathing vehicle had ever ventured.
Could it be done? He had to admit the technology was awesome—all the aerodynamic design by supercomputer, the new ceramic composites for the leading edges, the Mach 13 burst-tests in the hypersonic wind tunnel, the scramjet static-test power-ups at the aeropropulsion facility. . . .
This was supposedly just a space-research vehicle, for godsake. But it had twelve engines. And whereas the MiG 25, the USSR's fastest fighter-interceptor, topped out well under two thousand miles per hour, this space-age creation was capable, theoretically, of speeds almost ten times that.
The schedule agreed upon called for the certification of both the prototypes in their lower-speed, turboramjet mode, and then the commencement of hypersonic flight tests in the scramjet mode. That second phase wasn't supposed to begin for three months.
But now the project director had ordered the test program accelerated, demanding the hypersonic test flights begin immediately with the one prototype now certified—in ten days.
Maybe, just maybe, it could be done. Of course, everybody else would be sitting safely in Flight Control there in the East Quadrant when he kicked in the scramjets at sixty thousand feet. His ass would be the one in the cockpit.
This was the riskiest project of his life. Until the operational shakedown, nobody actually knew whether or not those damned scramjets would produce a standing shock wave in their combustion chamber, creating a supersonic "compressor" the way the supercomputer promised they would.
And what about somebody's brilliant idea of using the plane's liquid hydrogen fuel as coolant for the leading edges, to dissipate the intense heat of hypersonic flight? Had to do it, they claimed. Computer says there's no other way. But that was about as "brilliant" as filling your car radiator with frozen jet fuel! He'd be flying in a cocoon of liquid hydrogen . . . and, even scarier, he'd be doing it blind, with no windscreen. If he burned up he'd have to watch it on television.
He glanced back one last time at the white centrifuge, a fifty-foot propeller with the simulated cockpit on one blade and a counterbalancing weight on the other. The centrifuge itself was pure white enamel, spotless, just like the room. A little honest Russian dirt would actually have made him feel better. Riding in that "cockpit" was like being strapped inside a video game, all lights and nothing real.