Pillar to the Sky (6 page)

Absurd, of course, with his thick glasses, but at times he would play along, hoping for a date, though most of the humanities majors would burn him off as yet another “science geek,” some even lecturing him on how it was technology that had messed up the world, that man should return to his natural state; then they would go looking for better hunting, like one of the ballplayers or even a history major. But at this moment, if looks could kill, he’d already be buried and forgotten.

“Let the debate begin,” Erich said with a smile, relighting his pipe and sitting back, opening his window, and gesturing for Gary to close the door. “You first, Mr. Morgan.” He extended a hand in a calming gesture to Eva, indicating that her turn would come.

Later, Gary would learn this was exactly how his mentor worked. He would take young interns coming out of top universities with some cutting-edge ideas, throw them into what his team called the “gladiator pit” to fight it out, and perhaps just perhaps a synthesis might emerge—though at times a blood feud could result when a cherished idea, especially a dissertation topic, was cut into bloody tatters. More than one intern had staggered out of the gladiator pit in tears, tossed their dissertations, and switched majors. It was heartless in a way, but also compassionate: better to lose it here as an intern rather than a few years down the road with the realization their theses were dead ends.

Gary cleared his throat nervously and took a long, deep sip of the still-hot coffee. The battle was on.

“Your article, ahhh, Miss Petrenko…” He trailed off, not sure of how to pronounce her last name.

“Eva is fine,” she said coldly.

“Ahh, yes, ‘Miss Eva’ would be easier for both of us,” Erich chuckled. “With your permission, of course.”

She nodded, saying nothing.

“Well, Mr. Morgan, she proposes this thing called a ‘space elevator.’”

“A tower—a space tower,” Eva cut in. “The idea was invented in Russia nearly a century ago, and some of our people take it seriously.”

“I regret to say it is the stuff of science fiction here,” Gary replied. “I did read Arthur C. Clarke’s novel
Fountains of Paradise
. Have you?”

“No, but I have heard of his work.”

“He postulated it would be two hundred years or more before the technology would be available.”

“‘Science fiction,’ you call it,” she retorted. “In the Ukraine we call it ‘fantastic science.’”

“Well, this is ‘fantastic science,’ then,” Gary replied, figuring he had won a point.

“So, Mr. Morgan,” Erich prompted. “Go ahead. Take it apart, tell me why this is so ‘fantastic’?”

Gary nodded, the glare in Eva’s eyes now giving him some strength. Any hope of winning a date with her was obviously dead, so what the hell?

He scanned the notes on his small computer screen for a moment, then stood up and went over to the whiteboard on the wall to the left of Erich’s desk.

“May I, sir?”

Erich nodded.

At the bottom Gary drew a curving line, wrote “earth” under the line, then near the top of the board sketched a curved dotted line.

“Geosynch orbit is the high ground,” Gary began. “That’s 22,236 miles above mean sea level. You understand miles versus kilometers?”

He looked back at Eva.

“The scientific community prefers metric,” she sniffed. “Someday the West, with its miles, or statute miles, or nautical miles, or whatever, will get a mission in trouble.”

Erich chuckled.

“Point to her,” he announced.

“Fine, then it’s…” He hesitated for a second, running the numbers through his head. “Geosynch orbit is 35,786 kilometers above mean sea level. Your article proposes the building of a tower with a height of over 35,000 kilometers? Then another 20,000 kilometers beyond that to provide a counterweight? Good heavens, the tallest building in the world is…”

“At this moment, a radio tower in Moscow at half a kilometer tall.”

Gary hated metric; to him it always made things sound bigger or faster than they really were.

“Just over sixteen hundred feet,” he retorted, “a little more than a quarter mile.”

“So?” Eva replied.

“You are proposing a tower that is something on the order of nearly a hundred thousand times taller?”

“Yes.”

Gary drew another line extending from the curving line representing the earth at the bottom of the board, up to the dotted line of geosynch at the top, and then put a question mark next to it.

Erich held up his hand.

“Perhaps I started this backward,” he announced. “Let us start with a positive rather than a negative. Eva”—he paused—“may I call you that?”

She gave him a winning smile and nodded.

“Of course, sir.”

“Explain to our doubting Thomas here the thesis.”

“Gladly, sir,” and she stood up, taking the blue marker from Gary, the flicker of a grin on her features as if saying,
Now I will cut you apart with this!

“The proposal—as I assume you know, Mr. Morgan, from reading the article—was first suggested by the Russian scientist Tsiolkovsky shortly after he worked out the orbital dynamics of placing a satellite into orbit. At that time, in 1905, rocket fuel of sufficient thrust to fit his dream of space flight had yet to be tested, let alone developed. That would not happen for another thirty years.

“From this evolved the idea of building a tower at the equator, clear out to what you call the high ground, geosynchronous orbit, that place above the earth where an orbiting satellite will take exactly one day to complete one revolution or orbit, and thus appear to remain stationary. It is indeed the ‘high ground,’ unlike low earth orbits, where a satellite passes swiftly overhead and requires dozens of ground tracking stations, and even at five hundred kilometers up, there is still enough atmospheric drag to eventually slow it down, causing it to plunge back to earth.”

There was no argument on that point, and Gary simply nodded in agreement.

“Tsiolkovsky realized that the higher the tower, several things begin to happen. The first, that gravity begins to drop off the farther you are from the center of the earth—that there is an inverse ratio between gravity and distance from the center of the earth’s core. Too many people foolishly assume that everything is weightless in space. Of course, it is not. The only thing that makes it appear that way is that in low-earth orbit you are traveling at nearly ten kilometers a second; you are actually falling around the curve of the earth.

“But the farther out one travels if ascending a tower, the lower apparent gravity will become, until at geosynch orbit the gravitational pull will appear to be near zero. Granted, the gravitation effect is there—again, at an inverse ratio to distance, which is why the moon stays in orbit and in turn its gravitational pull affects our tides.”

As she spoke, she started to write out the formula defining this on the whiteboard, forgetting her audience for a moment and making the notations in Russian.

“Second major point,” she continued as if delivering a classroom lecture, and she was so involved in what she was saying that she did not even look back to see if there were any questions. In spite of her antipathy for him, Gary could not help but feel admiration for her obvious brilliance as she jotted down various equations.

“The second point is the centrifugal force of the earth’s rotation: attaching the tower to the earth at the equator will help it to remain rigid, imparting at geosynch an orbital velocity as well that will appear to negate gravitation effect. Thus it will at least feel and act like zero gravity, as most mistakenly call that effect for any object in orbit.

“The tower would not actually end at geosynch but continue on for nearly another 20,000 kilometers, and would be anchored at the far end by a mass, depending upon the weight of the actual tower. So…”

To his amazement and Erich’s bemused chuckle she reached into the pocket of her slacks and pulled out a string; at one end was attached, of all things, what looked like a lipstick tube. Eva started to turn around, twirling the string, then holding it up over her head, letting it spin in circles, and then to her utter embarrassment, the lipstick container broke free and went flying across the room, nearly hitting Gary.

“Rather proves your third point, which I assume is angular momentum,” Erich said, laughing.

For the first time Eva’s icy exterior melted, her little demonstration of centrifugal force having gone awry, and she actually blushed, which softened Gary’s increasingly defensive response to this young woman with such a dynamic presence.

“Well, uh, sir, that is getting a bit ahead,” she said.

Erich smiled indulgently for her to continue.

“With the base of the tower attached to the surface of the earth at the equator and extending out past geosynch orbit, the rotation of the earth itself will provide centrifugal force to keep the tower rigid and erect, unlike a tower only half a kilometer high, which must rely solely on its foundation and massive steel frame to hold it up.

“And, yes, you just saw the third part—the beautiful part, in my eyes.” There was a growing enthusiasm in her voice. “The tower can also act as a catapult. How much fuel was required by your
Apollo
and
Saturn V
rockets to break free of the earth’s orbit and reach TLT, translunar trajectory?”

“Nearly eight million pounds of fuel burning at over 50,000 pounds of fuel a second.”

“The tower,” she continued, even more enthusiastically, “gives it to us for free, using the earth’s rotation as the source of energy. We could haul any size payload up to the top of the tower and, once released, the angular momentum atop the tower will be just like a catapult of old throwing a rock. The released object will then head off to wherever we desire, guided by the precise timing of when to release it and a small amount of fuel, a fraction of the amount currently needed to accelerate out of the earth’s gravitational field. This tower could send to the moon the equivalent of a hundred
Apollo
payloads if we desire, at a fraction of the cost. Using advance drive systems such as Plasma Ion, we could go to Mars in weeks rather than months or years at a cost of hundreds of billions. The cost of one trip to Mars as NASA is now thinking about, if invested into building this tower instead, would give us the path to Mars, with a true transportation system from earth to space thrown in for under the same cost.”

She paused.

“Or even beyond Mars. It will open space to limitless exploration, even colonization, of whatever we desire, at a fraction of the cost in energy.”

“How much would the energy cost to get the object from the ground station, attach it to the tower, and have it climb up to this magical release point?” Erich asked quietly.

Eva nodded and wrote down another formula.

“Even using an old-fashioned climber, with wheels attached to the tower or using a magnetic levitation rail, the energy cost will average out to about thirty rubles a kilo.”

“English, please,” Erich said. “And besides, the ruble is collapsing.”

She was a bit taken aback for a second, then answered, “About seven dollars per one of your pounds to geosynch.”

Gary could not help but snort in derision at that one.

“It currently costs somewhere around $100,000 a pound to loft an object by rocket to geosynch, and you are telling us this tower thing will cut that cost by over 99.99 percent.”

She nodded again, not thrown by his question or tone.

“The elevator car or capsule that hauls up the material to geosynch, as it descends, will actually generate electricity, its wheels now acting like a dynamo as gravity pulls it back toward the earth, accelerating as it gets closer. It can thus generate over 90 percent of the electricity it used while climbing up—even more if well designed.”

She put her whiteboard marker down.

“Besides moving large objects to geosynch either to place in orbit or catapult to the moon, Mars”—she paused—“or beyond, it would mean that the cost for the average person to go to geosynch, either to work, visit, or even live there permanently, would cost only a little more than a flight from Moscow to New York. It would open space for everyone, not just a select few cosmonauts.”

For the briefest of moments Gary did feel hooked in by it all; after all, that had been his childhood dream until the age of seven, when it was found that he had a rare form of astigmatism, which meant he could never become a pilot and venture toward the stars; years later, he would be unable to earn a license to fly even a Cessna or Piper a hundred miles solo.

“Think of what that could mean for millions: the elderly who gravity has bound to wheelchairs; paraplegics and others who would benefit from low-gravity environments while recovering from illnesses … It would not be a high-stress three- to five-g ride atop a dangerous rocket; it would be the same as taking an elevator—a very long elevator ride of several days, the cab designed for comfort, almost like a cruise ship. Think of their lives when free of the bonds of earth.”

She hesitated for a second; when she resumed speaking, there was emotion in her voice.

“My grandfather,” she paused, “lost both legs and a hand at Stalingrad. He was a Stormovik pilot.”

She paused again.

“He flew nearly two hundred missions, most of them dangerous ground support, before he was shot down. Think of what living in low or zero gravity would have meant for him. He was the one who inspired me to go into this field of study.”

That hit a nerve with Erich, a veteran of that war, and he nodded.

“Convey my respect and honor to him,” he said softly. “We were on the same side in that war, and I see him as a true and gallant comrade.”

“He died in a veterans’ hospital five years ago,” she whispered, voice filled with emotion, and Gary could see the subject was a sensitive one for her. “I would go with my grandmother every week to visit him. He used to say he looked forward to the day he would die and then could run again in heaven, and perhaps God would give him wings so he could fly again as well.”

She lowered her head for a moment, eyes damp, obviously struggling to control her emotions. Gary was silent; Erich looked up at her, his gaze distant, as if remembering his own sorrows from that time.