Crisis at Low Earth Orbit

The historic all-cosmonaut spacewalk had just completed. The crew of the international space station was reconfiguring its systems for routine flight. They felt the customary ignition of the thruster engines to correct for changes in the station’s low Earth orbit during the eight-hour spacewalk. This time, they felt the engines ignite two more times in just six minutes. The scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and operators at US Space Force’s Space Operations Center at Vandenburg, were reporting orbital changes for thousands of space objects. Some changes were causing orbital intersections threatening both objects involved. For the space station, such a collision would result in loss of lives. Whatever this problem was, it established a Crisis at Low Earth Orbit. Time was scarce as NASA and the USSF began emergency coordination with its top technologists to find the problem and save the space station and its crew. They looked to Dr. Doug Dugan to lead the isolation and repair efforts quickly. Dugan had exceptional expertise in all the systems and agencies involved in this crisis. He had solved major defense system problems before; could he solve this Crisis at Low Earth Orbit in time?