SpaceCorp (15 page)

December 2070

Engineering bay overlooking giant algae farm, Vandenberg

“We assemble big chunks of the farm tanks on Earth and haul them up to space via shuttles,” Mack said. “Monica is supervising their assembly up there right now. When the tanks are done, the station will resemble a giant washer with one side designed to take in solar energy. That side is made of clear polycarbonate but with UV filters to keep from sterilizing the algae stock. The sides and bottom are nanocellulose. And of course lots of bulkheads—everything is partitioned against impact ruptures. The disk will only be about twenty meters thick at first. Once it’s assembled we’ll add the next layer, the harvesting and manufacturing layer which is about 50 meters thick. That layer is where we collect the nanocellulose made for us by the algae. The nanocellulose is just stored for now, but in a few weeks equipment will be flown up that forms it into hollow honeycomb bricks, a couple of meters long and a meter across. Those bricks will become the rest of the space station. From that point on, the rest of the assembly is done
in situ
—no more assembled superstructure being ferried up by the shuttles.”

“Impressive,” Jason said.

“More than impressive,” Mack said. “It’s the first of its kind. With this construction technique we can go to the stars... someday.”

“How will you grow algae between stars? Don’t you need sunlight?”

“We have two options for that. We can use the reactor to produce our own sunlight, or we can spike the algae bath with sugar.”

“You’ve thought of everything.”

Mack laughed. “Not everything, not by a long shot. I lie awake nights worrying about what we haven’t thought of. In the space business, all accidents are ancestored by stupidity
.
”

This time Jason laughed. “I’m starting to wish I had a nickel for every time I heard that.”

Mack shrugged, “It’s our culture. Anyway, the four spokes go in after that, connecting the disk to the central hub where the NTRs—the nuclear thermal rockets—go. With the NTRs we can get juice and with juice we can control the tank environment enough to start adding water and algae stock. While it’s growing, we continue with other construction.”

“It’s hard to imagine one company being big enough to do all this,” Jason said. “What have you got... a dozen conventional space stations?”

“This will bring us back up to sixteen not counting the
Pelican
,” Mack said.

“Sixteen space stations must cost a fortune. How do you make payroll?”

“We don’t,” Mack said, “though it’s hard to say precisely when that transition took place. You could say it started back in the early days of Silicon Valley when the really cool companies wanted to entice their people to stay on the job as many hours as possible each day. Back then you could go to these spectacular cafeterias and get breakfast, lunch, and dinner—all free. You could even bring your family. And it worked. People stayed on the job twelve, sometimes sixteen hours a day. More things got added—they called them perks back then—gyms, laundry, massages, showers, hair salons, day care,
in situ
medical/dental. They even had meditation rooms! Anything to keep you from going home and taking your mind off the job. A whole culture grew around this. Then when the global financial infrastructure started collapsing, most businesses couldn’t retain their employees without money. But
we
could. After all, there were no paying jobs available but people still needed to eat. We just needed to add some infrastructure to maintain the perks. Little villages cropped up around the corporation. Families moved in. Their kids needed schools, so schools became part of the corporate infrastructure—one of the more important ones too, by the way. The employees couldn’t buy food without money and the local farms couldn’t sell it to customers who were broke, so they were subsumed by the corporation. SpaceCorp stopped being a capitalist business and became more of a ‘will-work-for-food’ economy. You sign on to work and
in lieu
of a salary, you and your family are cared for.”

“But you guys still charge for your space station services,” Jason said. “Somebody has to be pocketing that money.”

“SpaceCorp banks it. It does not go into anyone’s pocket. From time to time we need to buy things—raw materials we can’t make. Uranium and other specialty metals that we can’t find in California. To be honest, we prefer barter. It’s cumbersome and we had to develop our own shipping companies to manage it. But at least we get something tangible and its value doesn’t evaporate overnight.”

“But that sounds more like communism than capitalism!”

“I suppose it is,” Mack said. “I also suppose it’s a good thing we have a new arch villain or folks like you would be trying to figure out how to eliminate us as a threat to democracy.”

“By new arch villain you mean radical Islam?”

“Sure, just like they see western culture as their arch villain. It’s kind of symbiotic, don’t you think?”

“Nah, I don’t buy it,” Jason said. “There’s got to be something besides free ice cream that keeps people working their butts off around here.”

“Actually, there is—it’s called The Dream,” Mack said. “Back when Silicon Valley was about billionaires, a peculiar thing happened. Back then our billionaires were a pretty shallow-minded bunch—kinda the way the billionaires from Wall Street still are. They made gobs of money and spent it on ways to make more money so they could buy even more exotic toys. Super yachts, French villas, trophy girlfriends, Ferraris—everything had to be the best, the most expensive. Even their fucking dogs had to be the best. That was how you showed off your entrepreneurial rank. But then for some of them, the novelty of exotic of toys wore off. They began to wonder about things like legacy—what they’d leave behind. For a while philanthropy was chic. But these guys didn’t get rich by being stupid and they quickly realized that the world could create new problems faster than their money could solve old ones. That’s when they started thinking about space. Initially they claimed it was to make more money—bullshit schemes like tourism or asteroid mining. But I think deep down inside, it was always the stars. And I’m not the only one who thinks that, by the way.”

“But there’s no money to be made in the stars!” Jason said.

“Give the man a prize! You don’t go to the stars to make money. You go to the stars for the fuck of it! Because you can. Because they’re there!”

“But most of us want something we can see now,” Jason said. “Or at least something our kids or our grandkids will be able to see.”

 “Your grandkids won’t get to the stars. Your grandkids’ grandkids might, but only if we work hard today to make it possible—
per aspera ad astra
.”

“Still don’t buy it,” Jason said. “Humans are by nature shortsighted.”

“So they are. Good thing we have a dying planet to motivate us.”

“Give me a break!”

“Nah, I’m serious man. Spaceship Earth is foundering, and we’re the only ones trying to make lifeboats. Our space stations collect the data the rest of the world ignores. There are things we know that we dare not tell the governments of the rest of the world. Third World countries are demanding their day in the sun. Their people want cars and electric power. They are no longer satisfied with depleting the world’s endangered species so they can have rhinoceros horn to elevate their libidos. Their hungry, greedy populations are wrecking the climate pumping the last of the fossil fuels out of the ground to fuel cars and power stations.”

“But they have their cars,” Jason said. “And they are starting to make renewable fuels… some of them. And their populations have stabilized even if it was because of famine and pestilence. They aren’t making it worse anymore.”

“No, but it doesn’t have to be made worse. It just has to be bad enough, and we passed the
bad enough
mark back around 2014.”

“You mean CO
₂
?” Jason asked.

“Yes, we hit 400 parts per million in 2014, and recently we passed the 800 mark. Each doubling of CO
₂
is good for 3°C in global warming. We used to think we needed 750 ppm to melt the ice caps. But they started melting at 380. 800 ppm is accelerating the melt rate. It won’t take thousands of years for a complete melting. Our models show a few hundred years. A complete melting of Greenland and Antarctica will result in a 70-meter rise in sea level from the 2010 datum.”

“But is that the world-destroying catastrophe you make it out to be?”

“Absolutely!” Mack said. “We’ve seen what happens when humans are forced to compete for dwindling resources. The coastal regions are an essential resource along with arable land. We have ten billion people in the world today who don’t want to share. If humanity is to survive, it will have to be somewhere besides Earth.”

“You guys sound like some kind of apocalyptic cult. You’re no different than Christian extremists telling everyone about the four horsemen or the rapture.”

Mack thought for a moment. “Probably some truth to that. We’re rationalists though. Christian extremists are wedded to their belief systems. They live by their faith no matter the absurd extremes that faith takes them to. We live by facts and logic. Only our facts and logic are fragile, ever giving way to new facts and new logic. Christians see that fragility as a betrayal of faith, a thought-crime. They work diligently to their god’s plan and they are baffled when it doesn’t make sense to them. You could say they believe more in their faith than in their god. We, on the other hand, work to our own plan, day-by-day, generation-by-generation. And when it stops making sense, we change it—no betrayal, no guilt. Oh, and in case you were worried, we’re not mystic spiritualist nutters gonna hop a ride on some passing comet. So you needn’t worry about cyanide in your grape juice at supper tonight.”

“I’m relieved to hear that... but I’m still making you taste my grape ju
ice before I drink it.”

“C’mon, let’s go see how your astronauts are coping with my training.”

Mack and Jason were about to leave when Mack’s phone signaled an urgent message. It was from the
Pelican
. Monica’s voice was a forced-flat monotone that sounded like it came from a robot.

“Logan, I need you up here.”

Two days later

Mess Hall, Quad I,
SCS Pelican

The main mess hall only seated 250 people. There were a few dozen cafeterias scattered around Quads II, III, and IV, so crewmembers wouldn’t have to waste time commuting to meals between their watches. The
Pelican
used a three-watch system borrowed from the merchant marine. It was easy to remember—handy with the continuous stream of transients coming and going. If you had the 4-8 watch you knew that you went on duty at 4 a.m. and 4 p.m. every day, and got off at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., respectively. Today every available seat in the main mess hall was filled plus another hundred standing around the edges. All the diners were also filled with crew who had come to hear Mack MacGregor speak on CCTV. The ones that couldn’t find a seat in the mess hall and diners tuned in on their communicators while they stayed at their jobs. No one slept even if it was their turn.

“When I was a boy,” Mack began, “I used to sit on the roof of my house and watch Eagle Vs launching from Vandenberg to build the initial fleet of space stations. Those were chemical rockets and they made spectacular streamers across the evening sky. But they weren’t very efficient. They hauled a hundred plus tonnes into LEO with a specific impulse—your gas mileage, so to speak—of only 250 seconds. Back then jet liners carrying the same payload thousands of kilometers around the world achieved a specific impulse of 6000 seconds. Can anyone tell me why jet liners were so much more efficient than rockets?”

“Most of their weight was supported on wings,” one voice said.

“They weren’t trying to reach escape velocity,” another voice volunteered.

“Good answers,” Mack said. “But the main reason was that they did not carry any oxidizer—they got all the oxygen they needed from the air. Specific impulse is, after all, based on the part of the fuel-oxidizer mix that you actually carry on board—if you collect oxidizer along the way it doesn’t count. And since specific impulse is defined as the number of seconds you can maintain a given amount of thrust from a given amount of go-juice, not having to carry LOX is a lot more efficient. So how did we take advantage of this?

“We stopped using chemical rockets,” a voice said.

“That’s right! We
changed
. We went back to using jets... at least to get our payload as high as we could—up to 20 kilometers. Then the suborbital shuttle lofted the payload pod up to 250 kilometers, but did it use chemical rockets like the old shuttles did?”

“No.”

“That’s right, we
changed
again. We switched to nuclear thermal rockets. Again
no
oxidizer. Squirt liquid hydrogen onto white hot 93 percent enriched bomb-grade U-235 fuel rod and believe me, you don’t need no stinkin’ oxidizer. That was a big change! The public—and that included a lot of SpaceCorp folks—was mighty skittish about lofting ‘nuclear bombs’ into space. But we made the change anyway. If we had failed to conquer nuclear thermal rocketry, man’s ventures into space would have been limited to orbits around the Earth and the occasional trip to the Moon. Mars would have been an economic pipe-dream. Who can tell me another change in our current space launch system?”

“We minimize the need for thermal protective layers by keeping the shuttle suborbital.”

“Very good!” Mack said. “You guys should consider working in space professionally.” There were scattered chuckles around the audience. The audience was loosening up. “If you keep the speed of the shuttle well below orbital speeds, you don’t have to worry about burning it up on reentry. We
changed
again. And yet again when we attached a small nuclear kick motor to the payload pod to circularize its orbit while it waits for the space-only shuttle to rendezvous with it and haul it to wherever it’s needed. There’s a pattern here, folks—let’s see if you’re picking up on it. Anybody?”