Pillar to the Sky (25 page)

Franklin, increasingly concerned about security, especially regarding the inner workings of how the wire would be managed in space, insisted that the launch take place here.
Why not test out our entire infrastructure at the same time?
was his argument to increasingly reluctant investors. Test the launch facility, their own rocket system, and beyond that, as all knew, directly along the equatorial line, which they had to do anyhow, rather than the high inclination of a launch from Russia or even from the Kennedy Center. Launching from the equator also meant a heavier payload, since the rotation of the earth imparted the most energy for any object going in an easterly direction.

Bringing it all together in this amount of time? Franklin could only shrug in private and whisper that there was never a problem that could not be solved on time if enough money was thrown at it. It had been done in the 1960s and, given fifty years of research and development after that, it could be done again … and he was about to prove it.

He had billions and a lifetime of prestige riding on this “throwing of money.”

“T-minus one minute and counting. All systems now on internal control, all command switched to onboard computers.”

Gary drew in his breath, his free hand reaching out to grasp Eva’s. He needed a cane now if standing or walking for any length of time. Their dreams of a lifetime were now riding on what would happen in the next few minutes.

The old drama, which triggered an adrenaline rush for any who believed in the dream of Apollo—for any who had ever witnessed a shuttle launch from up close and felt its power and thunder—was unfolding yet again before them. This would be the most powerful launch of a private venture vehicle ever attempted.

There were no formal viewing stands. The media simply had cameras deployed along the beach, although there was a cordoned off area where Franklin, the design team of the Brit and the American aircraft designer, key supporters (including now a few pro-space members of the House and Senate, with Mary Dennison leading that group), Gary, Eva, Victoria, and her boyfriend, Jason, stood silently, all with binoculars raised.

“Fifteen seconds and counting. All systems go, gantry rollback complete and clear. Ten, nine, eight … we have liquid engine start … six, five…”

A plume of smoke blew out sideways from the base of the rocket on the hastily built pad; odds were that liftoff with the blast from the solid boosters would shatter the pad, but a far more sturdy platform was already under construction a half mile away at the south end of the island.

“Two … one … ignition of solid boosters! We have liftoff!”

Gary drew in a deep breath, a gasp of surprise as the four solid boosters ignited and the nearly eight million pounds of rocket appeared to leap from the pad. From nearly four miles away he was startled that he could actually feel the heat radiating from the engines, the glare so bright that he had to squint as he followed it upward with his binoculars. The shock wave, traveling much faster through land and water, sent out a ripple across the surface of the ocean, and he could feel it in the soles of his feet—at least his left foot.

“All systems go, we are on proper trajectory, roll complete at twelve seconds for trajectory to orbit. One kilometer downrange, all systems nominal…”

He kept his binoculars focused on the rocket as it angled over, the sound of its thunderous ignition at last reaching them, washing over the gathering, the shock wave rippling the surface of the ocean between them and the island.

“We have…” There was a pause.

And in that instant it all just disappeared into an ever-increasing fireball. Gary let his binoculars drop. The fireball expanded outward, ever outward, the sound of the engines from the first seconds of launch drowning out the cries of shock, dismay, even fear. All had been warned that if the rocket detonated on the pad, they should start running to the other side of the island and find whatever shelter they could.

Eva screamed for Victoria to run, then Gary tried to pull them back.

“It was arcing away from us!” he shouted. “We’ll be OK.”

He looked over at Franklin and felt reassured in his thinking. The man just stood erect, unmoving, binoculars focused on the expanding fireball, though more than a few around him were beating a path to the west side of the island. The Brit and the American remained unflinchingly by his side.

The fireball reached its maximum; it appeared to actually touch the ocean’s surface, aboil now as debris rained down, water foaming. The third stage of the rocket, which had continued on up out of the explosion, was beginning to tumble, ground control hitting the auto-destruct so that it, too, blew apart, the sight of which made Franklin wince. The sound of the explosion now washed over them and was like the roar of a hurricane, which then gradually subsided into absolute silence.

Gary limped up to Franklin, who just remained silent. There was shouting now from the press corps, who were storming toward them, cameras raised, swooping in like buzzards eager for a feast, held back by a cordon of burly islanders, construction workers.

Gary stood in the circle of mourners and finally the Brit stirred.

“Bloody hell,” was all he could whisper. “There goes three billion.”

There would be plenty of time for the arguing, the blame casting, the postmortem that would finally reach the conclusion, revealed by one of the cameras positioned on the island that had survived the blast, that an oxygen fuel tank on the second stage ruptured at ignition, wisps of liquid oxy visible in the high-speed film pouring out from the side of the second stage until at twenty-six seconds it completely let go.

Franklin turned to head back to his helicopter, making only one comment to the press, that “stuff just happens when you fly rockets” (though he didn’t quite phrase it that way) and that work would resume the following morning.

Gary and Eva flew back in another chopper along with their daughter and Jason—there was no airsickness this time with Victoria; she was seasoned now—the four in mournful silence, her parents wondering if after all of this they would still be employed come tomorrow.

At the staff meeting that evening, when the first film from the cameras on the island was run for review and the liquid oxygen plume became clearly visible when the images were computer enhanced, along with telemetry of a pressure drop in the LOX fuel tank, the Brit calmly sat back and said it was his team’s fault and that they would take the bite for it.

“We move ahead, then,” Franklin announced calmly. “We must assume the wire in space and deployment reel works exactly as our computer simulators said they will. Step two, next launch in six months.”

He finished the last sentence looking over at the phlegmatic Englishman and his American partner. They looked at each other and nodded.

“What the hell,” the American said. “You guys remember what Chuck Yeager said after we lost
Challenger
? They had it pegged to a frozen O ring in little more than a month. He said, ‘Go back to flying and don’t launch if the temperature is below fifty,’ but no one listened and it took nearly three years to get back in space. We can’t afford that. My friend and I have agreed we’ll hock the rest of our holdings for this. The oxygen tank will be reviewed. I suspect that with the high temperature out there, 107 degrees at launch, either a pressure relief valve failed, cracking the tank, or the valve jammed open and the liquid oxygen just flooded out.”

He paused.

“It won’t happen again.”

“Thank God we are not dependent on Senator Proxley anymore,” Gary whispered, “or this thing would be over with.”

“They’ll find a way to tangle their fingers into us anyhow,” Eva said in reply, and as usual her prediction was correct.

*   *   *

The second launch took place six months and three days after the first. Though never proven conclusively, the assumption that a relief valve in the primary liquid oxygen fuel tank of the second stage did bear out in testing back in New Mexico, when a tank using the same valve developed a leak when temperatures went over 105 degrees and then hit a high level of vibration. Of course the old Russian design, with launches from Kazakhstan, had never encountered such temperature extremes prior to launch; usually it was the exact opposite.

This time they did achieve orbit, the heaviest payload ever lofted by a private venture firm: over fifty-two tons to low earth orbit, and from there over six tons to geosynch. Unfortunately, with this test the reel used to deploy over a thousand miles of “wire” and keep it stationary utterly failed after only seventy-eight miles had been taken out. Remote cameras showed the two-millimeter-wide thread had jammed the deployment, the jam occurring in the “shuttlecock,” which moved back and forth, like in the old spinning mills, guiding the thread through a narrow aperture as it came off its spool. Conclusion: an astronaut with the right tools could have cleared the jam in five minutes, though more than a few baleful eyes were turned toward Fuchida’s team, which had promised that a deployment drum and reel guide—also made of carbon-60 nanotubing—was simple and foolproof. It settled once and for all the question of attempting an unmanned deployment of the actual “first thread,” as it was being called.

This fateful decision, which would cost three billion more, was to send up a three-person team—which was inevitable anyhow once the first thread was actually deployed and the “spinning” process along the primary thread began.

Fuchida’s firm lost a nine-figure bonus because of this failure, and it was never discussed that several of the designers were unemployed a day later.

Both the Brit and his partner argued they should go as the first crew—they absolutely wanted to go—but there was no way in hell Franklin would ever risk that. Drawing from their increasing ranks of astronauts for their suborbital firm and their first test flights of low-earth-orbit manned flights, the two-man-and-one-woman crew—the woman had been the copilot on Victoria’s flight—was selected.

They would launch independently of the cargo vessel lofting up the “space station” and rendezvous with it at geosynch. Their capsule was increasingly referred to as “Spam in a can.” It was basically off-the-shelf, a throwback to the
Apollo
designs, but lacking most of the backups and redundancies that had come to be expected in this, the second decade of the twenty-first century and more than fifty years into manned space flight. Given that they would be in deep space for two weeks—far beyond the Van Allen belt, and thus exposed to significant solar radiation—the answer was to simply keep the spacecraft aligned with its reentry shield always pointed at the sun.

After the first wire was deployed, a very primitive crew base would be positioned at geosynch, another throwback to 1970s technology: a hollowed-out third stage from a rocket, almost identical to the
Skylab
of the post-Apollo days, which would be parked and then anchored to the “wire,” then occupied by subsequent crews after the first wire was in place. These crews would monitor the “spinners” that would build up the wire until eventually it could handle a useful load.

Once in place at geosynch, this primitive crew base would become the operational point as the “threads” of the first tower were spun out. As the tower was gradually “built up” with additional threads, it could be used to carry up the real payload—the still-under-development and testing of the ribbon design—at a fraction of the cost of sending the material up via rockets. This first “thread” was like the first wire across the East River, nearly 150 years ago, out of which the mighty cables of the Brooklyn Bridge were eventually put into place.

Franklin increasingly turned to young Jason Fitzhugh, the historian, to write his comments and counterarguments, drawing on the great technological advances of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with their risks.

“If men and women are willing to put their lives on the line for the greater good of all, then we should say Godspeed and go! Fear never held back Columbus, Magellan, Cook, or those who came to first settle America. Let that spirit flow in our veins yet again!” became a frequent closing line to his speeches.

So far the suborbital and test-orbital manned flights of the firm he was partnered with had a sterling safety record, though one flight had been a near disaster when a port-side wing did not lock back into place properly on descent. It was one hell of a piloting job bringing it in and
Enterprise One
was all but totaled on landing, but the six passengers and two pilots walked away from the wreck. The pilot on that flight, Miss Selena Singh, who had copiloted the flight the Morgans flew on, was now heading up the team that would be the first to go to geosynch.

Franklin’s publicity team was at last talking about the environmental aspects of the Pillar’s construction after he had adroitly lined up a few more patents on upgrades to solar panels that yielded a 40 percent increase in their energy output, and in high orbit attached to the tower would deliver a magnitude increase in energy that the same panel could achieve if put out in the Sahara. Popular Web sites and old-fashioned print media dedicated to science were soon awash with articles and debate about the prospects of harvesting not just gigawatts, but hundreds of gigawatts of electricity out in space and “piping” it down to earth via superconductivity cables and lasers.

Talk in the past had speculated about solar panel arrays larger than all of Manhattan and their potential, but the fundamental stop point was always the same. If the energy was beamed down to the surface as microwave, it would require hundreds of square miles of collection stations around the planet, and the potential impact to the upper atmosphere would only hasten global warming and heaven help any bird or plane that flew through the microwave beam. For the first time, a logical answer of harvesting limitless energy for earth—along with another “disruptive technology”—was offered: once solar panels in space had a means to transfer that electrical energy to earth, every coal-fired, oil-fired, and even fission energy plant on earth would soon be obsolete and shut down.