AMERICA ONE (4 page)

Within weeks of the first private flight by the Englishman, he had purchased 500 acres of desert around an old, unused military air base. The old base was nothing more than old rusty buildings next to a long and cracked 10,000 foot runway which needed resurfacing.

He already had complete design plans for a new home, and soon after he purchased the property, an army of builders and steel hangar companies drove out with hundreds of large trucks carrying parts of aircraft hangars. They began to build a dozen large buildings, of which several were to be double-walled, and have sealed space-production interiors. They would cost $25 million apiece.

First, a three-story, 90-room top quality hotel for single people was built with 200 separate and private family bungalows on the grounds, with housing for a total of 600 people. He brought in acres of grass and trees, together with a water-from-air production plant the size of a small building which was pieced together after it was delivered. Kitchens, a restaurant and bar, a bowling alley, a 200-seat cinema for entertainment and a general store went up on one street, just to accommodate his employees.

Ryan also wanted complete privacy from the outside world and had a sewage plant and his own five-acre solar field installed to make the base totally sustainable, apart from food. After all, the desert was not the best place to start a farm, so sustenance would be brought in.

Within three months he had enticed several more experts from both the European Space Authority and NASA to join him. The European immigrants soon became U.S. citizens, just as his original team of Russians had done. Next he employed over two hundred young scientists he had known or met during his education.

Finally, he canvassed the country to find the best security guards he could to keep his new airfield private.

He applied for all the required legal permits from the federal government and State of Nevada to be a legitimate space exploration company. Local government officials arrived by the dozens and were impressed by what they saw. This kind of company was absolutely perfect for the state and it wasn’t long before he received permits to begin flight operations.

By the end of his fourth month he had spent a total of $500 million on the airfield alone. A lot of new machinery would go into the twelve hangars. Designed and manufactured during the last decade, it had already been ordered and would take a couple of weeks to be delivered from around the country.

Ryan was still unmarried, had no children and this part of life was not yet important to him. At 43, he calculated that he still had a decade or so before that area of his life would be as important to him as fulfilling his dreams.

Six months after he had purchased the land, it looked totally different than what he had originally surveyed.

Over the last three years, Ryan had paid well over $190 million to one U.S. company alone to manufacture 40 x 10 feet special aluminum panels, over 180 of them for some sort of mammoth building project. Most of his aircraft builders were already working ten-hour days, piecing together aluminum panels and sections of craft.

The last three important arrivals at the airfield were massive machines which shaped, heated, bonded, vacuum-sealed, and cooled many of these panels. The machines, each the size of a bungalow and each costing over five million dollars, were moved through the gaps left in the first two hangar walls; the walls were then sealed and teams of engineers and builders began to work on them.

Ryan and his team had studied all the possibilities of reaching space, and how other companies were attempting what he was about to do.

The British company did win the first leg of the race, and graciously accepted the $1 million first prize. But by this time, Astermine Co., Ryan’s newly named space company, already had a partially developed launch vehicle and a completed second release spacecraft, both of which would go into upper space orbit, 600 km above earth into the Exosphere. This was far higher than the lower space orbit area used by most craft like the International Space Station.

As with any flight project, all FAA rules and guidelines had to be strictly adhered to. Obtaining permits from one stage to the next occupied a great deal of time, and the production schedule was planned to coincide with pending FAA approvals.

Ryan’s design to use ion thruster space propulsion systems was created by Boris and the Russian scientists he had employed right at the beginning. Now older men in their fifties, these men had worked on this form of space propulsion for use in Russian space projects in the 1980s, long before NASA decided to follow this route.

An ion—an atom or molecule with an unequal number of electrons and protons—gives off electrical charge. The Russian-designed ion thrusters used beams of electrically charged ions to create thrust in deep space instead of using the liquid and solid fuel rockets used for propulsion by NASA.

Ryan learned from this experienced team that the method of accelerating the ions often varied, but all designs took advantage of the charge, or mass ratio of the ions. This ratio meant that relatively small potential differences could create very high exhaust velocities. This reduced the amount of reaction mass, or fuel required, and they could easily compute how much xenon gas reserves were needed aboard for any flight distance.

What really excited Ryan was that the ion-thruster motor was electrically based and the power supply was pretty simple; it was derived from an array of solar panels if the spacecraft flew within sight of the sun, or from a small nuclear reactor which could be built aboard the craft, and would have no limit to giving out energy as long as there was enough xenon gas in the tanks. Xenon gas was one of the fuels Ryan’s teams would produce for actual space travel.

He also learned that the main drawback of the reduced ion-thrust using solar panels was extremely low spacecraft acceleration, because the mass of current produced by electric power units was directly correlated to the amount of power given. This low thrust made ion thrusters, or drives as they were sometimes called, unsuited for launching spacecraft into orbit, but ideal for in-space propulsion applications.

Getting up there was entirely another matter, and this project was under development in Hangar Six. He planned each initial launch design with two motors. First, a hybrid rocket motor using solid and liquid rocket propulsion would get the first craft over the Kármán Line (60 miles) carrying a second vehicle in its cargo bay, the main space vehicle. Then, hydrogen fuelled rockets would take over for the next stage, with hydrogen-powered side-thrusters combined with rear thrusters for sideways and forward movement.

Each piece of his launch design would be reusable and the launch craft could bring the space vehicles back to earth if necessary. By using this system of three craft instead of the usual two, it saved him dozens of permits, especially on safety factors with no uncontrolled parts falling back to earth during launch.

Seven months after he first purchased the property the last pieces of the production puzzle were in place. The 300 scientists were now ready to go to work full time at their stations of expertise.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Ryan stated at the first active meeting of Astermine Co., “Our main direction with the three billion dollars I plan to spend on our first project is to return our first spacecraft to earth with a load of asteroid-mined materials, which will pay for the continuance of the main project. If we don’t achieve this, the money will end, the project will end, and I will be ridiculed for the rest of my life for wasting a substantial fortune.” There was much laughter.

“The British company will spend less than one billion dollars and will make money from taking happy people into space for a ride. The second company, Martin Brusk and Earth-Exit, will spend one and a half billion dollars and will make its money from supplying the International Space Station. Our company will make money bringing back valuable ores, minerals, and gas from space, a far more lucrative venture than the first two ideas.

“This is a secret project. You have all signed the company’s official confidentiality agreement in your employment contracts. If word gets out about our project, that person will be identified, and his life made miserable from then on. Please understand, we have a much shorter time span for production and implementation before other companies decide that our path is the more lucrative one, and they will quickly copy us. If we can avoid being copied or run out of business for twenty-four months, I will be happy knowing that at least we had a window for the whole company—you and I—to survive, to do a job we love, a job we are made for, and a job that will achieve what no man has done before. We are going to go where no man had dared to tread, to go where there is more treasure in a cubic mile of asteroid, than all the lost treasure lying on the seabed.” Again, there were excited comments, and several applauded.

“If one word of our project gets out to the media, the bonus of $50,000 each one of you will receive, once the first load of material arrives back on planet earth, will be forgotten.” Immediately there was a stunned reaction from many. None of the team had heard of this bonus, and suddenly many looked at those seated next to them, sizing them up to see if one of them would be the person who would cause them to forfeit the bonus.

“My team of math experts and I have come to an agreement that, if we can return with twenty tons of pure native platinum in its most valuable state—we could gross $960 million at $1,500 an ounce. Yes, it will decrease the value of the commodity around the world by about six percent, but the world needs platinum desperately, and one load every twenty-four months will not affect the value much more than ten percent.

“Together with native platinum comes its element buddies: iridium, rhodium, and several other chemical elements, which should be worth even more money; transporting these metals will also serve to decrease the incoming amounts of just one precious metal.”

“Sometime next year, I want our first cargo ready to be shipped back to earth; that gives us sixteen months to get there. Much of what we need to accomplish during this mission has already been designed and manufactured over the last decade by over 500 companies, none of which knows what my whole picture looks like.” There was much murmuring and nods of heads, as Ryan’s audience tried to absorb the abbreviated time frame he outlined for the team to prepare for space travel.

“Ladies and gentlemen, project security. As you know, we have our own security team of 72 former marines and Special Forces personnel under former Marine Lieutenant Joe Walls. This security team will guard the newly erected, eight-foot high heavy steel prison fence perimeter around our airfield 24/7. Nobody goes out, nobody comes in, and nobody communicates with anyone on the outside without my direct authority. Each of you has signed your life away for the next twenty-four months. One hundred and eighty of you have immediate families here on base. Please don’t forget, everything you need for a normal life—shops, entertainment, a small elementary school and a high school—are in the completion stages. Any young students ready to attend college or a university during the 24-month lock-down period will attend online campuses and study online. Any outside communications, apart from necessary education communication, is forbidden over the internet. All your cell phones have already been taken away.

“This means that apart from one channel for myself, there is no internet or cell phone communication inside our base. There will be no communications between you and your internal families, and anybody on the outside until we are in space. Even then, added security measures will come into force as needed. Remember, your jobs are at stake. With NASA limping along doing nothing, and the Russian Space Authority in turmoil, there isn’t much work out there for you. Your future, your advancing studies here, and your job survival depends on keeping our mouths, and our information highways secure.

“As you are aware, Security has a small containment building inside its headquarters. If anybody is caught giving out information, or breaking any important codes of conduct, they will be placed in this containment building with their families for as long as it is necessary. All of these measures are stipulated in your contracts which you have agreed to and signed, as have all management, administration and security personnel. Your “top-secret” commitment will be for a period of twenty-four months. Please remember that.

“In addition, all emergency mail will be scrutinized, in and out. All deliveries will be deposited in the warehouse between the first and second gates and thoroughly checked before allowed into the airfield. Please team, you are not in prison. We are going to work twelve-hour days, with two-team shifts, every twenty-four hours, five days a week for twenty-four months. You will receive a monthly living allocation for food and supplies; schooling and entertainment are free. At the end of 12 months, $300,000 plus any bonuses will be deposited into each listed bank account. Twelve months later the same amount including bonuses due to you will be paid again, which will make each of you a millionaire, before and after taxes. This is what you signed up for and what each of you accepted. Today, we are past the point of no return. Yesterday, we repeated the rules; only two people left, and that was before they knew anything important about the project.

“It is a hard world out there. Many of you are more fearful of losing your position here, than thinking of breaking your signed commitment. We are going to work hard and play hard. Any new ideas to make this a happier place will be gratefully accepted. My team of six mathematicians and economists has worked out the plan perfectly. There is more than enough cash in my accounts to get us through the first stage of twenty-four months, but there are boundaries I will not cross. I will invest ninety per cent of my total worth into this project, and no more. Once we hit that number, the base will be dismantled, the party is over, and we all go home. Does everyone understand?” Heads nodded in agreement.

After a few more minutes the meeting was over and the scientists went back to work. A second meeting of only the heads of departments was due to start as soon as coffee and snacks were consumed.