Comet! (an Ell Donsaii story #5 ) (26 page)

Ell frowned, “Urgent orders from NASA
itself
? Not the commercial space launch industry?”

“Well, yeah. All t
he
launch
vendors are clamoring for ports. But NASA itself has specified a set of ports for
ILX
as being
extremely
high priority and demanded that we fill those first before addressing any of
the other vendor requests. They have some project that they feel is extremely urgent.”

Ell raised her eyebrows, “What is it?”

“They’re not telling us.”

“Hmmm,
” Ell shrugged,
“
OK. Can you tell me a little about your plans for avoiding
port
weaponizing and terrorism?”

“Well right now we’re planning that the ports be
lease
only
. We can enforce
that
b
y building the ‘far’ port that’
s powered by a fuel cell so that the tiny ports that supply the fuel cell get their hydrogen and oxygen from
our
tanks. If we don’t like what they’re doing we cut off the fuel cell and the port dies.”

Ell nodded. “And how do you know if they’re doing something you don’t like?”

“We’re putting a tiny
GPS
chip in them so we know if they’re moving too fast or going
to locations that
they weren’t purchased for.
Tiny microphones embedded in the ports are listened to by one of the
AIs
, checking
for
terrorist
keywords. The computer can cut the fuel cell off to a level where the port closes but isn’t destroyed until a human can decide whether to destroy
a
port for good. The ports have tiny
ports
embedded in them that can
be used to
spectrographically sample the material being transferred through the port to be sure it matches the purpose the ports were
leased
for.”

Ell’s eyebrows lifted, “Those sound pretty good. Are
n’t
you concerned that it’ll get difficult to manage when there are millions of ports out there?”

Vivian quirked a lip ruefully, “Yeah, we’re worried. Fortunately the profit margin
over non portal technologies
should be large enough to allow us to compete successfully even with th
os
e add ons
and
the
computer maintenance costs
. We’re more worried about government regulation and unauthorized copies of the ports. The good news on that front is that we hired some pretty smart fellows to try to reverse engineer
the
ports and they haven’t been successful. Apparently the Dexin is just as frustrating as it’s supposed to be.”

“Cool! What about your finances…”

The meeting went on for a
while longer
, Ell pleased that their “burn rate” for the initial cash infusion she’d provided looked reasonable
to her
.
She mused that she really didn’t have the kind of business education that would let her judge it
very
well. Perhaps she needed to hire some expertise in money management?

While Ell was waiting to meet with the ET Resources group
Allan spoke in her ear, “I have identified three small rocky planets around Tau Ceti. Two are
significantly closer to the star than
the “habitable zone” where water should be liquid.
Best estimates
would be
that they will be
much
too hot for life
,
at least
as we know it.
There is a large gap, perhaps with asteroids then a third planet.
The
third
is at the very outer edge
of the habitable zone and is
smaller
than Mars.
It is likely that most water there will be ice but that some may be liquid.
It appears white in the telescope, compatible with its being mostly ice.
”

“Great! Plot the rocket’s trajectory to intersect
that third
planet.”

A few of the ET Resource folks had arrived when
Roger came in
to whisper
, “Hey, it turns out that if you wrap titanium mesh around your finger, kind of like a Faraday cage, that it doesn’t hurt so much to stick your finger through a port!”

Ell’s eyes widened, “You’re still experimenting on your poor finger?”

Roger shrugged, “No one else has volunteered to let me use
their
finger. Dr. Bynewicz is submitting an amendment to her protocol to let her try sending mice through
ports
in
titanium mesh cages.

“
I’ve also got a theory that if your nerves pass through the port quickly they aren’t depolarized as much.” He tilted his head, “Well depolarization is kind of a binary event, either it happens or it doesn’t. But my theory is that if the port is passing down the axon of the nerve slowly
,
the nerve can have multiple depolarization events. Where
as,
if the port passes quickly, the neuron
may
only
be able
respond with a single depolarization event
?
” He lifted an eyebrow, “It sure hurts a lot
more
if I slide my pinky in slowly than if I shove it in and jerk it out quickly anyway.”

Ell laughed, “You’re nuts…but I like you that way. You think we’ll actually be able to send a person through a port
someday
?”

Roger shrugged, “I’m thinking yes. But I don’t think it’s going to be something
anyone wants
to do
very often
.”

Braun stuck his head in the door, “You ready to meet?”

“Sure.”

Ben came in with him, and
poured
a handful of pebbles
out
on the table. Ell
raised an eyebrow and
leaned forward to look at them
.

Braun said, “These
are ‘prospecting samples’ from
our first ‘metal rich’ asteroid
, 2019 UB40. It’s
one of the ‘A
ten
’
group of near earth asteroids.
2021 MG12, the one
that we prospected first
,
actually
turned out to be a ‘carbonaceous’ type,
mostly
containing
materials that are easier to get here on earth. As
we hoped
2019
is
metal. M
ostly iron and nickel but the samples also have a lot of cobalt, indium and palladium. Not as much platinum as we had hoped but enough that the platinum alone will bring us a profit based on our expected costs.”

Ell continued eagerly running her finger through the samples, turning some over, “How are you planning to
reduce it down to fragment sizes
you can send back
through a port
?”

“Hah! Watch this.”

The big screen in the conference room lit up and showed an irregular body floating in front of a starfield. Ben said, “We’re videoing with good old ‘Buzz
,
’ the same rocket we landed on 2021 MG12.
”

Suddenly a burst of material sprayed out from the side of the asteroid. Ben said, “
There! W
e just hit it with a five kilogram rocket traveling at 22 kilometers per second. That delivered the
kinetic
energy of about
290
kilograms of
TNT
.
Quite a bit
of the material will be completely ejected from the asteroid but
some
of it will be recaptured by its gravity eventually
becoming
a loose rubble coating, Then we hope to scoop it up and feed it into a crusher
. W
e’re planning to
use
Amelia to
launch
the crusher
to orbit in
the next couple of weeks
and
then
s
end
it
on it
s way
to the asteroid
under its own power
.
We’ve already got several more impactor
rocket
s on their way
to 2019
to create more rubble.”

“Hmmm, remember that PHMSA has put a moratorium on Portal Tech’s sales of ports and in fact we’re using the ports we’ve got to fuel the rockets we’re still running under the concept that the rocket is one of our
‘
facilities
’
and that therefore the ‘trans-dimensional pipeline’ as PHMSA is calling them are pipes that are entirely within our own facility and therefore not subject to their regulation.”

“Uh, yeah. Is that a problem with what we’re doing?”

“I hope not. But I’d like to suggest that you don’t talk it up. It isn’t a secret but we don’t want to broadcast it either. Also, I suspect that you are just firing an entire rocket at the asteroid since the engines etcetera are pretty cheap?”

Braun shrugged, “Yeah.”

“You might want to convert it into a reusable rocket
that sends the five kilogram impactor into the asteroid but actually returns the motors and ports to you. Just in case we have trouble getting more ports at some point in the future due to PHMSA reinterpretation.

Ben frowned, “I’m sure we can do it, it’ll just take some thought.

“How are you
going to scoop
the rubble
up?

“
It’s more of a problem than you’d think. You can’t ‘suck’
it
u
p when they’re in a vacuum. The fragments
won’t ‘fall’
very well
in micro gravity. If you try to actually ‘scoop’ them with a shovel you can knock them
up and away. Then
they take
a long time
to land again.
But
, a
lmost every fragment you see there,” he waved at the pebbles on the table, “have some iron in them. So
we
actually
hope to
pull
them
in
with a kind of magnetic ‘
anteater’s
tongue’ that will
pull them in
to be rubbed off into
the
crusher
. The crusher
will convert them into pebbles small enough to ‘port’ back here
.
A magnetic conveyor belt will scrape them into the port
to come
back home.
”

“
You’ve reminded
me, other than launching your crusher
,
are we getting any use out of our modified Lear Jet?”

“Yup.” Braun grinned.
“Ol’ Amelia’s been making about
3
flights a week.
About
a quarter
are
unmanned to launch commercial satellites.
The other
three quarters
are manned
. Some are
the
NASA training missions that you lined up for us. The others are
to ‘repair’ existing satellites. Turns out that ‘repair’ mostly means refilling propellant tanks for military satellites, upgrading computer hardware and replacing batteries that aren’t holding their charge anymore. We’re actually converting another Lear Jet right now
.
P
artly because we’ve got a backlog of missions and partly because we’d like to have a ‘rescue’ vehicle
available
if something goes wrong
on a manned mission
.”

“Great! Are we profitable yet then?”

“Well, buying another Lear Jet and modifying it
,
plus big bucks spent on making our first
robotic
‘miner’ means that capital outlays are outstripping income. If we amortize our capital expenses we’re doing great
...
but we
really
have
no idea how long our capital
equipment is actually going to last.”

Ell crossed her eyes and laughed, “You guys are starting to sound like real businessmen
. What happened to
the geeks we originally hired
?
!”