Pillar to the Sky (30 page)

The Spinners

The actual load-bearing capacity of the first strand was little more than several hundred kilograms, but it was a start. The next step was to use that first thread as a guide wire, with additional threads to be woven around it in nearly the identical manner as in the nineteenth century when a first guide wire would be suspended between the two towers of a suspension bridge, then additional wires spun around it. With the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, eight to ten strands a day woven onto the first cable was considered magnificent progress. But at that long-ago rate of ten miles a day, and fifty strands to be woven around the first in some places, it would take only about four hundred years to complete the Pillar.

For the Pillar, the weaving would start at both ends. For the spinners working at the top of the tower, it would be easier in a sense, because at geosynch they would be working essentially in zero gravity, and as they descended and gravity gradually increased, it would help propel them. For the upper end the cable still had to be lofted into place by rockets at the usual cost of nearly a quarter of a million dollars a kilo. But after several such launches, with the Pillar “beefed up” enough to handle heavier loads, spinners sent up from the ground could operate along half a dozen sections at the same time.

So it would be a slow and expensive start, but then after a year the pace would increase dramatically.

No matter what advances there were in hybrid engine designs, from jet to “scramjet” or “ramjet” and then to rocket in the final step through the atmosphere, carrying payloads all the way to the precious “high ground” of geosynch orbit was expensive business. To put several astronauts up there cost nearly the same amount of energy as nudging them a bit farther to orbit around the moon. And once up there working, if one of them had a craving for a pizza, cost on the ground would still be ten to fifteen bucks but delivery (without tip) was still around a quarter of a million dollars.

The ground launched spinner was built around a slender tube, made of nano-filament, that encased the tower to guide the spinner on its ascent. Energy for lift provided initially by a jet engine pack would loft it the first 50,000 feet; the jet pack would be ejected, recovered, and used again. After that a rocket pack would take over. Maximum gain at the start would be two hundred miles, at which point the end of the wire being spun on would be sealed tight against the main tower and the lift unit separated to reenter the atmosphere, and recycled for another lift up. As quickly as it was detached, another unit would begin to ascend, weaving another strand on. The strengthening of the cable within the atmosphere and eventually for its first thousand miles out was absolutely crucial. It was where there was maximum compression stress from the load above as well as horizontal stresses due to weather; it was also the primary impact zone for orbital debris.

Once the support wires were built up, some of the cables sent aloft would be of a slightly different molecular structure, not anywhere near as strong in terms of bearing loads, but designed to be highly conductive for electrical flow; thus the later spinners would have electric motors and actually be driven by power “piped” into the tower.

The spinners labored day after day. There were the usual glitches. The third launch from the ground jammed at just under 100,000 feet and finally had to be blown clear, an extremely tense moment: they were all fearful that blowing off the load might damage the tower or set up a harmonic wave, but it broke clean away and the remaining wire was even recovered for later use.

Fuchida’s firm, which had an exclusivity agreement with Franklin for the next ten years, was now charging just over two dollars a foot for two-millimeter nanotubing. The rule of mass production, as with all products, held sway, and by contract he was allowed to add 20 percent to operating cost, but by totaling up the number of strands for a viable tower 23,000 miles, the numbers did rapidly add up. There had been a surge of investors clamoring to get in on Pillar Inc. in the days after the successful linkup, but as the months passed without even any remote talk of the first commercial payload that would actually begin to generate income, interest had waned. In a world of computerized instant trading with fortunes made or lost in a matter of minutes, investments for the long term without payback for ten years or more were hard to find.

This was not like Franklin’s earlier schemes that had made him famous, with a half dozen investors each throwing in ten thousand and then cashing out a few years later with a million or more, or the later ones when backers with a million to invest suddenly had twenty times that three years later. Now he was scrounging for billions with no promise other than the charisma of his past record as a promise that in the end all would win.

And then at last Franklin dropped the bomb publicly. He had, of course, referred to this first strand as the “construction tower” and said that another, stronger one would be built, but he was vague about whether the construction tower itself, once “beefed up,” would have commercial use.

Eva and Gary had been in on the debate regarding the reality of their designs long before the failed launch of the first test ship; they knew the inherent long-term flaws of using a strand, but the cost of developing “ribbons” and lifting their far heavier load to geosynch without a construction strand in place would exceed anything Franklin could ever hope to raise in terms of backing.

Research and development on the ribbon concept had moved ahead dramatically and in secret even while preparations were being made for the launching of the first “strand,” and even now while it was being strengthened, and that research had changed the entire paradigm of how Franklin and his team saw the real future of this project.

Of course, Gary, Eva, and the team working with them were the ones who had come up with the ribbon concept years earlier, but Franklin had sworn them to secrecy, preferring to keep public attention and investor interest focused on what was already in place. Eva and Gary had learned a lot about the difference between working at Goddard and being part of a private venture, otherwise they would have felt no constraints about publishing their revised concepts, even repudiating the original design of the tower, given the technological advances that had been made since the mass production of carbon nanotubing had begun. But they knew, even if Franklin had not extracted a promise from them, that publicizing their misgivings would destroy the program; thus their work was kept at a level of secrecy equal to that of a highest-classified military program. Even as Fuchida was turning out strands, he was now secretly manufacturing their first reels of ribbon as well.

It was Jason Fitzhugh who had come up with the right analogy. When the Roeblings, father and son, had designed the Brooklyn Bridge, mass-produced steel was still a dream. But even before the first tower of that bridge had been set in place, Bessemer’s new process of blast furnacing was soon turning out high-grade steel at a fraction of the cost. The Roeblings were already committed to using old-fashioned iron for the bridge’s cables and thus stayed with that material. A hundred and fifty years later that bridge carried tens of thousands of automobiles daily and no one thought twice about it, even though nearly every bridge built afterward had steel cables of far better strength.

Franklin had not left Kiribati since the tower linkup: things were still hot with Senator Proxley, who was demanding another grandstand public hearing and even claimed now that by building the first strand, Pillar Inc. had become a monopoly that had to be broken up. But the winds were beginning to shift back in the States. Private firms were now routinely offering suborbital launches, and thousands of passengers, all of them voters, proudly wore on their lapels the “astronaut” wings given to them after their flights. They had actually become something of a status symbol. America was becoming pro-space again.

A private venture firm had even gotten within a hairsbreadth of a manned flight to the moon, but the first stage had detonated seconds after liftoff. Fortunately this system was similar to
Apollo
, with the built-in safety feature of a rocket-powered escape tower that pulled the capsule with its two passengers free of the explosion.

And there had been disasters as well. So far fifteen had died trying to reach the heavens. Two of the Brit’s competitors were out of business after their spacecraft broke up in flight.

Although no one ever said it directly, it was clear that rocket-powered space flight would always be much too risky for high-volume commercial use at even one-tenth of 1 percent the level of daily jet travel around the world.

But rather than decreasing, there was actually a resurgence in public interest in space. Going into space, for the younger generation, was the new extreme sport that made base jumping in “flying squirrel” suits look tame. Extremely high-altitude jumps from balloons were now “in” as well, and fascination with the potentials of the tower was growing.

The unmanned work of NASA, especially its Mars landings, had created intense enthusiasm and received much support. There had even been a slight increase in NASA’s budget, but it was human exploration that held and would always hold the key to public and therefore taxpayer interest. And with that, the promise of the Pillar was stirring public interest.

*   *   *

Where once there had been negative press about Franklin’s Folly, now there was growing fascination in the Pillar, with hundreds of blogs and discussion sites dedicated to it. The comparisons had been made so often that they had become the standard retorts to critics: Where would aviation be today if after the first plane crash all flying had been stopped in order to investigate? Thousands had died and thousands had been injured in the first generations of flight up until World War II while simply learning how to get off the ground for a few seconds, or during high-speed, instrument-based cross-country flights at night in heavy weather. Hardly anyone thought twice about the reality and sacrifice behind their getting into a hollow tube with wings and jets strapped to it, leaving New York, and seven hours later waking up in London, a journey that took weeks and was fraught with such perils as collisions with icebergs only a hundred years earlier. The same thing was true today as we reached for the stars within our lifetimes, the arguments ran, provided we had the guts to do it, and this resonated especially with a younger generation around the world eager for challenge and adventure.

It was Victoria, of that same generation, who convinced Franklin that he should put up multiple Web sites dedicated to different niche audiences—not with the usual boring stuff like some photos and videos, but with active daily videoconferences with team members, discussions of future plans (only the “unclassified” ones, of course), and live cameras feeds of the spinners at work. The spinners were actually rotating around the Pillar at more than one revolution a second as they built up the cable’s diameter, but someone with a bit of computer savvy figured out how to snap an image every second from the precise same spot and thus stream it as a live video. The spinners were even on the social networks with their own names, putting out bulletins about their progress, and a couple of full-time staffers handled the uplink traffic, answering serious questions as if they themselves were the spinners, or cooking up witty replies that at times went viral.

The names of the spinners were inspired by a popular computer-generated cartoon of a few years earlier about two robots who fall in love and in the process save humanity and restore earth’s environment. The firm that created the cartoon was more than eager to join in the fun, allowing use of the names of the two smitten robots, one of which was given to a spinner working from the top of the Pillar downward, the other to a spinner below that was working its way upward; longing to one day meet in the middle. Their ongoing romance was a hit; and the parent company who created the cartoon was soon turning out short “outtakes,” as had been run during the film credits at the end of the movie, of the antics and interplay of the two spinners and other characters. It had definitely gone viral, a hit with schoolkids around the world.

Other Web sites went up, for elementary, middle, and high school and high-tech college-level conversations and information. Victoria’s fiancé, Jason, had pushed as well for a site dedicated to the history of technological innovations that had transformed how humanity lived; it was a proactive measure to mollify a significant technophobic minority. A critic of NASA long ago had made the slashing comment that the agency had taken the most exciting adventure in the history of humanity, the Apollo program, and made it almost boring and routine. Victoria, Jason, and others of their generation who were computer and social network savvy were making sure that would not happen again. There was even rumor that in a year Proxley would face stiff opposition from a very pro-space opponent. Perhaps the tide was indeed turning after a long moribund period in which the heavens were calling but no one felt like making the investment to answer the call.

But what was increasingly the hot topic was Franklin’s remarks that the ultimate intent of the Pillar was not just inexpensive transportation to space but the piping down of limitless energy from solar arrays deployed around it. It could mean an end to the dependence on fossil fuels, even fission power, thus in fairly short order slamming on a brake against global warming.

The weight load for such a power system, though, was magnitudes higher than what the tower could bear … and thus the ribbon was the ultimate answer: stitching layers of ribbon side by side and atop each other could build the tower out to any strength load desired, and it was ultimately why the construction tower was already obsolete as soon as it went up. But to say as much to the world and investors would have ended the project on the same day.

“In for a penny, in for quite a few pounds more,” was Franklin’s favorite line … in private, of course.

It was the problem that consumed Gary and Eva now that the tower was up, with the spinners reinforcing it day by day so that it could eventually withstand the stress of carrying a viable load of ribbon clear out to geosynch. Franklin slipped out word of a meeting for his “inner circle”—Gary, Eva, Fuchida, and a few others—to discuss the next step.