SpaceCorp (6 page)

This had remained their ritual until one day in the fall of 2064 when Mack pulled up on his Harley and Irwin did not come to the door to greet him. Mack found him lying peacefully in his bedroom, dead of no apparent cause. The coroner determined he had bled out through his stomach, a common cause of death among old people who lived in isolation with untreated ulcers.

“What about the body?” Mack had asked.

“I dunno… he got any next of kin?”

“Not really. His wife died some time ago. I don’t know where she’s interred.”

“Probably cremated and her ashes scattered someplace. Not much real estate for interment centers these days, even less for cemeteries.”

Mack had looked around Irwin’s land. There was maybe half a football field containing a modest house and a few buildings for viniculture and a barn for farm implements. The rest was about twenty acres, mostly grapes, a small truck garden, and a few chickens wandering around loose. In the distance a solitary oak tree that must have been 300 years old stood watch at the top of a knoll. “Okay if I put him up there?” Mack pointed. “You’ve got the death recorded.”

“Long as I don’t know about it.”

“Spose you could give me a hand while you do know about it… then you could go straight back to
not
knowing about it.” Mack shrugged and made a half smile through unparted lips.

The coroner was about forty years old, reasonably fit. He looked around as though someone might be watching.

“He was a good man,” Mack said.

“Do we need to mark the grave? That’d be suspicious.”

“The tree will be his marker. We’ll carve his particulars into the bark. Doesn’t actually have to say he’s buried there.”

And so Irwin Musk, SpaceCorp chief engineer and lead designer of SpaceCorp’s
Von Braun
class space station, was laid to rest.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, Mack’s nuclear powered shuttles lofted hundreds of payload pods up to their apogee pickup points with never a mishap. At apogee the shuttles would release their pods and tip over to glide back to Rogers Dry Lake on little stubby wings. Because they were suborbital, their reentry speeds were much slower than a vehicle returning from orbit, hence they had no need of heavy thermal protective tiles like the original shuttle did. That saved a lot of up-mass and weeks of maintenance. Suborbital shuttles could manage three launches per day with a night shift.

The crewless cargo/passenger pod was a long cylinder with a small thermal protective heat shield in front and an apogee kick motor mounted aft. Inside it could carry cargo or mount passenger seats for 10 to 100 passengers. Once the shuttle and pod reached apogee at 250 kilometer, the pod separated from its shuttle and fired its nuclear kick motor to circularize its trajectory into a stable circular orbit. Once it had achieved stable orbit at 250 kilometer, a space-only shuttle would rendezvous with the pod to take it to its final altitude and orbital inclination. The pod could stay in orbit indefinitely but most often it simply emptied its contents and returned to Earth for reuse.

The space-only shuttle was the king pin of the system. It was the only part of the system that was crewed and it never returned to Earth. Its role was to rendezvous with the pod and ferry it to whatever altitude and inclination were needed. It was nuclear powered and could carry a crew of ten although it could also be piloted by a single crewman. The extra crew was for infrequent EVA operations.  It had no need for wings or a thermal protective system. But it did have a need for a thick layer of ceramic armor to ward off the incessant swarms of space debris.

*   *   *

The initial fleet of Irwin Musk’s space stations consisted of six in polar orbits and four in equatorial orbits. Giant ring-like space stations, a kilometer in diameter and 250 meters thick, were the only way to survive the angry pecking of millions of bits of space debris traveling 25,000 kmph. Their outer hulls were made of large aluminum honeycomb bricks two meters long by a meter wide filled with fire-retardant, self-sealing foam. Built up in layers, the outer hull wall was six meters thick. Space debris could easily penetrate the thin aluminum shells but the sticky foam absorbed impacts from projectiles up to 10 cm in diameter.

The stations rotated about their central hubs at a stately 1.34 RPM for a full g of artificial gravity. Artificial gravity made it possible for crews to survive and thrive in a space environment without fear of bone loss, muscle deterioration, loss of immune system effectiveness, or vision impairment. The thick hulls offered a modicum of shielding against radiation. Crews stayed on the stations their whole careers most cases, working their way up one tier at a time. If you got passed over for a tier jump, a small percentage could remain aboard to provide continuity to the succeeding tier. But for most, a pass-over meant a one-way ticket to rejoin the ‘groundies.’ A few groundies found meaningful jobs in SpaceCorp, more than a few just drifted. And a few that most folks preferred not to talk about decided they’d done everything worth doing in life. Crewing on a space station was more of a calling than a job.

Today’s stations were constructed out of segments fashioned on the ground and hauled up to the
SCS Pelican
, the giant two kilometer construction space station where all other space stations were riveted together by robots. The
Pelican’s
orbit was designed for easy access to shuttles from Edwards. She flew at a relatively low 700 kilometer altitude—a balance between the need to facilitate frequent resupply missions to provide parts for space stations and the need for fuel for maintenance burns to keep her in orbit. Without the maintenance burns, the imperfect vacuum of low orbit would cause orbital decay and bring her down in a spectacular inferno.

The
Pelican
had been in space so long that her orbit was almost cleared of debris objects via impact absorption. Her outer hull looked like a patchwork quilt of aluminum sheeting held on by rivets and sealed with ‘space glue.’ As a result of all the repairs, her mass was estimated to be half again what it was when she was first built. Her eventual deorbit would be a non-trivial event that SpaceCorp preferred not to think about. Her interior was a 1200-meter construction yard where robots could bolt the hull segments together providing a modicum of shielding for human technicians who would then finish the interior. Last would come the instruments—the payloads that allowed people on Earth to talk to one another, to navigate their cars and planes and ships, to send video signals around the world, to monitor various Earth functions such as the shrinkage of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and the concomitant shrinkage of coast lines around the world. Climate data was critical to countries facing the double plague of rising populations and shrinking coastlines. But the highest paying customers were the military from governments around the world. They had all manner of strange devices that allowed them to spy on one another. They had listening devices that monitored the electromagnetic spectrum, passive imaging devices that worked in visual, infrared, and ultraviolet bands, and synthetic aperture radars that could see through clouds and to some extent trees and even part way into the ground itself. The military paid the most for its information because in a world of shrinking resources, knowledge was king and paranoia was a virtue.

Once a space station was completed, it could modify its inclination and altitude so as to assume the optimal orbit for its payload mix. This required a lot of LOX oxidizer and LH
₂
fuel that had to be hauled up in multiple missions from Earth. Changing from the
Pelican’s
timid 700-km altitude and equatorial orbit to a 750-km altitude and polar orbit took weeks. Huge ring-shaped space stations were analogous to the lumbering Spanish galleons that hauled gold from the New World. They were built to absorb punishment, not outrun it.

The permanent human crew was required to assess damage from debris strikes and design repairs for robots to emplace. Debris damage came with too high a degree of uncertainty to fully automate the space stations. This was one area where
in situ
human creativity truly paid for itself. The worse the debris concentration in a particular orbit, the higher the rates the customers had to pay. At least that was the routine until an old derelict Centaur upper stage crashed into the side of the
SSS Von Braun
. The
Von Braun
was the first of the ring-shaped space stations. She was hand-assembled by astronauts without benefit of the
Pelican’s
internal construction bay. The attrition suffered from all the exposure caused SpaceCorp to invest in the
Pelican
.

The
Von Braun
had a permanent crew of 737 astronauts who would have no doubt given their all to save their ship, but when over two metric tons of rocket stage crashes into your hull at combined speed of over 40,000 kmph, they never got the chance. The station main ring was sheared through in an instant. The momentum of the impact caused the ring to tip off its horizontal plane, but with the normal spin of 1.34 RPM, the entire superstructure became dynamically unstable and sheared the opposite side of the ring. The two halves rotated erratically spewing crew and stores into the surrounding space. One half deorbited almost immediately crashing into the mid-Atlantic. The other half deorbited a month later in bits and pieces across an elliptical fall zone that spread across Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and southern Iran. That it did some minimal amount of damage to Iran was a kind of ironic justice since it was their botched shoot-down of the Centaur that caused the disaster in the first place.

*   *   *

“You gonna stand there and stare at that door all day or go inside?”

“Oh, hi, Monica—holy shit! What happened to your eye?” There was a pronounced purple swelling over her right eye. Monica Carvalho was a muscular 170 cm who fought mixed martial arts in the 65-kg weight class. She told him it kept her body fit and her reflexes sharp. Whatever her reason, it had definitely slowed the pace of their relationship. It was hard to find the nerve to make physical advances on a woman who could beat you up. In the end it was she who had pulled him into bed. She liked it a little rougher than he was used to, but he figured that opened up some other interesting possibilities… if he could ever get up the nerve to try.

“Oh, yeah… Logan, meet my pet mouse,” Monica said gesturing to the large red welt under her right eye. Monica insisted on calling Logan by his given name, telling him ‘Mack’ sounded like the mating call of a hair-lipped duck. He thought her remark was funny but still answered to ‘Mack.’

“I didn’t know you had a bout last night—I would have been there.”

“This was just sparring. Probably shouldn’t have done that last night. Couldn’t get your plastic space station off my mind. Come on,” she said motioning toward the headquarters building, “let’s get this over with.”

“It’s not plastic—it’s nanocellulose.”

“A wooden space station—even better.”

“Yup, made with zillions of slimy green critters!”

The SpaceCorp headquarters building was a leftover from when the Air Force still owned the place. It was old with anachronistic fixtures. The old parade ground had morphed into a field for pickup games of soccer and baseball, but the flagpole triplet still flew a trio of flags. The American flag in the center was ratty but new enough to include a star each for Puerto Rico and Guam. It was flanked by a pair of SpaceCorp company flags—each proclaiming the company’s
Per Aspera Ad Astra
motto, ‘
Through hardships to the stars
.’ The joke around the company was that the real motto was
Pro Bono Ad Astra
reflecting the dwindling paychecks in the twenty years. Mack wasn’t so cynical. You did honest work, and in return you got three hots and a cot, and a free ride to the stars if not for yourself, then for some generation that would succeed you... someday. And while you were waiting for that ride, you could earn chits that could be spent in the company store or cashed in for camping vacations on the beach and used Harley Davidson parts.

Vandenberg Air Force Base, with its mission operations and launch infrastructure, had been one of SpaceCorp’s plum acquisitions when the Federal Government put NASA and the military space program on eBay to avoid Standard & Poor’s dropping the U.S. Government credit rating to a BBB. A year later, they lowered the rating anyway. That was thirty years ago. America’s finances had vacillated between BBB and BB for the last decade.

Inside the building were twin stair cases curving up opposite sides of a giant rounded foyer. Huge waste of space. Mack designed space stations for a living and the architectural esthetics of ground structures impressed him very little. Both stair cases led to the third floor main conference room—another waste. They could have taken an elevator down the hall but since they were empty-handed, they climbed. Along the way, Mack couldn’t help noticing the portrait gallery of former base commanders. SpaceCorp wasn’t being sentimental leaving them up—they just didn’t waste time on things that didn’t matter all that much. Mack thought it was funny how the uniform decorum had become less formal over the years. Fancy blue blouses and neckties from the early years had given way to camouflage fatigues and the occasional flight suit. Flight suits were always a sure sign of a fighter pilot. Bomber and cargo types leaned toward more sedate blues or fatigues. Fighter pilots always wanted you to know this job was just a temporary nuisance in their fighter pilot careers. At the third floor landing, Mack was trying hard not to breathe hard. Monica didn’t need to try.

Inside the conference room they were surprised to see the room was packed. “Hi, Hank. Are we late?” Mack asked.

Hank Larson, COO of SpaceCorp, walked up and shook Mack’s hand, then Monica’s. “You must be Monica. I’m Hank Larson, and no, you’re not late at all. I think everyone wanted a front row seat. First time anybody ever proposed a plastic space station before.”