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The Orbital ran through protocols, checking the decision tree for responses. As it did, it picked up another inbound threat.
Military engineers built the NFIRE satellite to do two things. The first was the difficult task of tracking intercontinental ballistic missiles. The second was even more complexshooting those missiles out of the sky.
The NFIRE orbited at an alt.i.tude of 240 miles. It targeted an ICBMs apex, typically about sixty miles above the Earth. The part of the NFIRE that actually shot down an ICBM was known as a kill vehicle, a small missile that got close to a target, then launched a high-speed spray of dense shrapnel. In basic terms, the kill vehicle was a high-tech, $560 million exoatmospheric hand grenade.
Certain senators, however, objected to putting a kill vehicle in the NFIRE. Such an act would open up a new arms race, they said. It would begin the weaponization of s.p.a.ce, and that was something the world could do without.
Defenders of the project said Congress was a bunch of myopic, tree-hugging hippies who deserved to die the radioactive death they would surely bring upon all freedom-loving Americans. The defenders said that only to themselves, of course. What they said publicly was that the kill vehicle had a range of only four miles, a minuscule distance compared to the vast ranges of s.p.a.ce, so the kill vehicle could really only be used to shoot down a rocket aimed directly at the NFIRE. It was strictly for self-defense, and how could that be a bad thing?
Congress didnt care. Senators insisted the kill vehicle would cross a line. So to secure funding, NASA and MDA (the Missile Defense Agency) had agreed to remove the kill vehicle and instead include a laser communications terminal, also known as an LCT.
The thing was, military engineers are pretty sharp cats, and they quietly figured out how to fit both the kill vehicle and the LCT into the NFIRE. So Congress, and the public, was told that the NFIRE did not include the kill vehicle.
That was the first lie.
The second lie was the four-mile killing range. Of the two whoppers, this might have been the big one because the NFIREs killing range was actually thousands of miles. Thanks to triangulation data piped up from NASA, the NFIRE could both target and hit the Orbital.
Exactly ten seconds after P. J. Lindeman released his ASM-157, the NFIRE launched its kill vehicle.
Primary threat: the missile launched from the Mach 10 jet. The Orbital tracked the missiles trajectory, then fired a supersonic stream of pellets made from an iridium alloy. The pellets spread out like a tight cloud, a cloud traveling at several thousand miles per hour. Air friction melted the pellets. By the time they intersected the missiles path, they were globs of dense, molten metal that tore through the ASM-157 like twelve-gauge shot through rice paper. The missile shattered into dozens of useless pieces.
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