SpaceCorp (5 page)

“How do I increase the burn time?”

“You
don’t
. I already did. Now please get us to the nearest reentry point that will put us down next to a viable coast line. These pods are not well-armored against debris flurries.”

Back in Quad I

The power had cut out in the passageway leaving only the battery-powered emergency lights to light her way with their eerie glow. The hull lurched again. She shuddered to think of the stresses that must be going on at the interstice between Quads II and III.

“Monica, how are you doing?” Captain Hernandez asked over the comm link.

“I’m at eighty paces from the pod. I think I see the bulkhead in the distance. Hard to tell in this light.”

“Good! There should be a stairwell to the right when you get there. You should be able to make pretty good progress climbing the stairs in spite of the weight of your space suit—the gravity will let up as you get closer to Deck One. Try to hurry up. I’m not sure what will happen to the station when Quads II and III finally shear in half.”

“Okay, I’ll try to hurry. I’m guessing if II and III separate it won’t be pretty.” Monica was actually quite sure what would happen. The two halves of the station would become dynamically unstable and fly apart twisting as they went. She’d seen simulations in Mack’s lab.
Ah, the stairwell. Now I just need to hot foot it up five decks and everything will be fine.

Climbing under full g in a heavy space suit was not pleasant. In fact it was downright exhausting. She’d have to remind Hernandez of that if…
when
she made it to the pod. After two decks she was gasping for breath. Then she got the idea of manually enriching the O
₂
ratio in her breathing apparatus. Two decks later her breathing was almost normal.
Where have you been all my life, sweetie?

Deck Five was almost pitch black. The battery-powered evacuation lights were getting pretty low. She had to crane her neck back hard to get her helmet lights to illuminate the sign pointing to the evacuation pod bay.

Evacuation Bay –> 30 meters

Fuck!
Gotta hustle.
She could feel the hull creaking through her boots almost continuously now.
The station can’t hold together more than a few more minutes.
Monica tried to run, then settled for a fast shuffle.

At last the Pod Bay door—still open.

“I’m at the Pod Bay. Which one is yours?”

“Bay Four. Right hand side. Hurry. I’m opening the hatch. Look for my light.”

About twenty meters away, a small flashlight beam waved up and down.

“Got you.”

When she arrived at the hatch, Hernandez reached out over her shoulder and grabbed her suit’s carry strap. All space suits had ‘carry straps’ sewn across the back of the shoulders in case the astronaut inside needed a little ‘encouragement.’ Monica found herself unceremoniously dumped on the floor of the narrow aisle as Hernandez let her go and pulled the hatch shut.

“She’s in—punch it, Garza!” Hernandez yelled as she sprawled on top of Monica’s prone body.

The pod shot down the ejection chute and out into space lurching crazily to the left and right.
The great hull must be separating at last.
The
SSS
Werhner Von Braun
, oldest station in the SpaceCorp line, was tearing herself in two and anything that wanted to live had better be well away from the ferocious forces that began twisting and turning her two halves in ways she had never been designed for.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

Six months later, July 2070

SpaceCorp Headquarters, Vandenberg Space Complex

His roots were east of here, about 125 miles down the one-oh-wonderful. It was a nice ride on a chopper, especially on summer evenings. The setting sun caramelizing coastal cliffs and the cool salt air blowing through your hair were cathartic... until you got to Ventura. At Ventura, Highway 101 turned inland and anybody with a spare fuel chit felt compelled to clutter the road with whatever contraption he could find parts for.

Logan MacGregor, ‘Mack’ to anyone who knew him, had grown up in a fancy home high up on a parched ridgeline overlooking Agoura. ‘Fancy’ meant surrounded by acreage instead of neighbors. A century ago one of his ancestors had made a fortune building all the homes in the canyon below. The old goat had been shrewd, lots of three-car garages to park all the Bentley’s and Bimmers of writers and composers and lyricists who couldn’t quite afford Bel Air but might have afforded Encino if there’d been any room.

Mack had two vivid recollections growing up in that house. The first was a fire when he was four years old. It was a Saturday and he’d gotten up early to watch a special channel that had ancient cartoons with funny characters like a rabbit that walked on two legs and had a funny accent. The rabbit’s foil was a baldheaded hunter who had a double-barreled shotgun that never ran out of ammunition—he needed speech therapy. The images were flat, like puddles of different colored inks morphing around on a window pane. But they had an appeal to his four-year-old mind that was missing with the too-perfect, too-detailed 3D renderings used by modern videographers.

That morning the house was full of smoke and it burned his eyes. He went into the forbidden zone to wake his mother. She wanted to evacuate immediately. His father, who’d grown up here, tried to calm her. “We have tile roofs and stucco walls and the grounds are well-watered,” he’d said. “We are completely safe.” Then he turned to his young son and said, “Let’s go up to the widow’s walk and see how things are going.”

The distant fire was picking its way down the canyon whipped by the wind. Panicked quail and rabbits flushed from hiding, some quick enough to escape the flames, some not so quick. A deer and her fawn zigzagged before the flame front until they were blocked by the six-foot wrought iron fence on the northeast border of the property line. The doe jumped but the fawn was too small. He ran to the south along the outside of the fence following his mother who ran along the inside. Doe and fawn rejoined at the service road to the south of the property. They touched noses in recognition and then did that peculiar hopping gait deer use—‘stotting’ his father called it. The last he saw of them were two white rumps stotting across the lawns of the distant homes. He laughed. They reminded him of the rabbit dodging the bald man’s shotgun pellets.

The other memory was of his teenage years when he sat out on the roof on warm summer evenings to watch Eagle Vs launching from Vandenberg. There was a published schedule and hardly a week went by without a giant triple-cored Eagle rocket signing the California sky with its fiery ink. He wondered if SpaceCorp timed its launches for dusk just for the public relations effect. Each core was fitted with nine Valkyrie rocket engines putting out 650,000 newtons of thrust—a total of 27 rocket engines putting out 17.5 million newtons in all. They were too far away to hear, but when the wind was right you could smell combustion traces of kerosene and liquid oxygen the next morning.

Eagle Vs were the work horses of the space program from 2030 to 2055. They got the initial fleet of space stations into Low Earth Orbit or LEO—from where the atmosphere left off at 100 kilometer out to about 1000 kilometer where the inner Van Allen belt started. LEO was also where the bulk of the space debris was concentrated. But its close proximity to the Earth’s surface made it a high priced priority for the military and climate change markets. Eagles gave way to a new class of space shuttle in 2055 that was capable of lofting a respectable 150 metric tons to LEO. It was a complicated system consisting of a launch aircraft, a suborbital shuttle, a cargo pod, and a space-only shuttle. Its genius lay in of everything being reusable, rapid turn-around, and minimizing the need for heavy thermal protective shielding and bulky liquid oxidizer tanks. It had been his brainchild, the subject of his first PhD thesis, and the reason SpaceCorp hired the 18-year-old prodigy.

The launch aircraft was a giant stagger-wing jet that took off from 3-kilometer runways in the middle of the Mojave Desert located at the former Edwards AFB. SpaceCorp bought the place in 2035 figuring the runway complex at Rogers Dry Lake Bed would come in handy one day. It had seven runways from three to twelve kilometer, and being a desert, you couldn’t beat the weather. The launch aircraft mounted one giant turbofan engine on each of its four wings. Each engine was four meters in diameter and put out 650,000 newtons of thrust. Launch aircraft were pilotless, optimized to haul the suborbital shuttle and its cargo pod up to its launch altitude of twenty kilometer—usually somewhere over the Pacific. Once there the suborbital shuttle and its cargo/passenger pod separated from the launch aircraft. Its mission complete, the launch aircraft returned to base. It traveled too slowly to need thermal protection and its oxidizer came from the air.

The job of the suborbital shuttle—also pilotless—was to lift a detachable cargo pod up to an apogee of 250 kilometer. After the shuttle and cargo pod separated from the launch aircraft, the shuttle fired a pair of nuclear thermal rockets or NTRs each rated at 250,000 newtons. They used 93 percent enriched U-235 as fuel.

*   *   *

“Now see here, young man!” then chief engineer of SpaceCorp, Irwin Musk had said back in 2041 when Mack first interviewed at SpaceCorp. In 2030 Irwin had been lead designer of the
Von Braun
class space station. He was the closest thing SpaceCorp had to royalty. “Anything over 90 percent is considered bomb grade. Do you mean to tell us that SpaceCorp, whom the nation has entrusted its space effort, is going to fly a fleet of nuclear bombs? Your contraptions may fly in theory, but I doubt they’ll will fly in Washington.”

Mack, who had just turned eighteen, slouched quietly in his board room chair, elbows resting on the arms, fingers laced across his middle. His expression was flat as he stared unblinking at the chief engineer until the old gentleman had finished. Then he waited some more.

“Well? Have you thought of that? Hmm?”

“No, sir. It’s not my job to think of that. Washington is your problem. Laying in the required 93 percent uranium is also your problem. Providing SpaceCorp with a launch architecture that will sustain it from LEO to the Main Belt Asteroids is my problem. If you don’t do your job, I can’t do mine. And SpaceCorp’s so-called ‘Dream’ of one day becoming a spacefaring society will be bullshit.”

Now it was the chief engineer’s turn to pause, though he did not pause long. “Young man—”

“—Mack.”

“Eh?”

“My name is Mack, Doctor Logan if you prefer,” he said still slouching in his chair. “Please stop calling me ‘young man.’ I don’t like it.”

“Hm. Very well,
Doctor
Logan… I’m sure the recruiters filled your head with fairy tales about the Dream, but the reality the rest of live by is that SpaceCorp is a
satellite
company. We host the satellites the world desperately needs, but can’t because of space debris. SpaceCorp does that—because nobody else can. That’s reality, young…
Doctor
!”

“The recruiters did in fact fill my head with the Dream. They did not call it a fairy tale. But if, as you say, going to the stars really is a
fairy tale
, then we should stop wasting each other’s time.” With that, Mack rose from his chair and began walking to the door.

“What’s to stop us from building your launch system anyway? Say, with chemical rockets?”

Mack stopped and turned to face the chief engineer. “Two things: First, while America’s space infrastructure may be in tatters, I assure you her legal system is not. I’ll tie you up in patent infringement for decades. Second, since you claim to like reality, here’s some
engineering
reality for you. Your present rockets burn kerosene fuel and liquid oxygen giving them a specific impulse of 250 seconds at best. Switching to liquid hydrogen fuel could up that to 450 seconds. But NTRs work by allowing the nuclear core to become white hot inside a rocket motor, then spraying it with liquid hydrogen or LH
₂
propellant
—not fuel. The resultant heat expansion is directed out a nozzle to produce thrust. NTRs don’t need an oxidizer which gives you three benefits: a significant reduction in up-mass, a four-fold improvement in specific impulse—1050 seconds—that’s four times the gas mileage of kerosene combustion. And since there is no oxidizer, there is a huge safety improvement since with NTRs, there is no possibility of a chemical explosion from mishandling fuel and oxidizer. NTRs are much safer than chemical rockets.

“Now, do we have a deal or do I go home and help my father with his grape harvest? I’m particularly keen on this year’s crop—it will just be drinkable by the time I turn twenty-one.”

That exchange—nearly thirty years ago—was SpaceCorp’s first battle with the prodigious intellect, not to mention
cojones
, of Logan MacGregor. SpaceCorp’s chief engineer lost the argument that day and SpaceCorp inked the deal with Mack. Irwin continued to lose most arguments he had with Mack, so many that he took early retirement three years after Mack joining the firm. Mack was asked to take the job, but gave it up less than a year later. “I’m more architect than engineer.”

Irwin Musk, childless and a widower for twenty-three years—moved to a small farm in the coastal mountains above King City where he lived off the grid making small batches of wine only he would drink. Mack made annual pilgrimages to visit his old nemesis, always on his Harley and always with three bottles of his family’s wine—two to drink and one to leave. They would drink one while Mack filled him in on the progress SpaceCorp was making. Irwin was eager to hear the news of each new space station. He always had comments and advice to offer which Mack would dutifully write down. That usually finished off the first bottle of wine. Then Irwin would offer to uncork one of his own bottles. Mack would always ask what year it was. Irwin would answer, and Mack would always say, “Perhaps we should give it another year, maybe two.” And Irwin would then say, “Hmm, perhaps so... Well then, we need some more wine!” And Mack would graciously pull another bottle from his saddle bag.