SpaceCorp
Authors: Ejner Fulsang
| SpaceCorp |
| Number I of The Galactican series |
| Ejner Fulsang |
| Aarhus Publishing (2014) |
Lots of science fiction books tell about space-faring societies, but none of them explain how those societies got that way. Author Ejner Fulsang, having spent the last seven years at NASA, thinks he has a way and is prepared to enlighten us with his Galactican Series. Book 1, SpaceCorp, takes place in 2070 and is a hard science fiction technothriller that will take mankind from Low Earth Orbit to a permanent colony in Cislunar space. Subsequent books will take man to Mars and the Asteroids, through the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, and on to the nearby stars. But SpaceCorp is not your typical action & adventure space exploration story. Billions of years of adaptation to life on Earth have left mankind technically and biologically unsuited for life among the stars.
The first challenge is in establishing a permanent human presence in Low Earth Orbit. This is no mean task given the density of space junk—the Kessler Syndrome—that rendered conventional spacecraft uninsurable by 2028. Satellites were still desperately needed, but nobody could afford to fly equipment costing hundreds of millions of dollars when space junk could destroy it in less than a month. It took a visionary corporation like SpaceCorp to see the solution in the SSS Werhner Von Braun, vanguard of a fleet of giant space stations whose thick hulls defend their technology from debris while harboring permanent human crews to make the continuous repairs needed for survival.
But while chemical rockets built the Von Braun, they were not suitable for trips beyond the Moon. Manned exploration of the inner solar system would require nuclear thermal rockets. And trips to the outer solar system and beyond will require even more exotic technology. Robert L. Forward’s beamed core antimatter drive could theoretically get us to half the speed of light—Alpha Centauri in a decade—presuming we could develop and store antimatter for rocket fuel without blowing ourselves and our planet to bits. It might be simpler and safer to develop an Alcubierre warp drive. A warp drive would allow us to exceed the light speed barrier. At 10 c, a trip to Alpha Centauri would take less than a year depending on acceleration and deceleration times. (NASA implemented nuclear rockets in the 1970s and is studying antimatter and warp drives.)
Hardware is not the only challenge. Homo sapiens would need some genetic engineering to withstand the radiation of interplanetary and interstellar space. Such engineering would result in a new species unable to breed with its human forebears, but while Homo galacticus may be biologically do-able, would he be socially acceptable?
Dystopias are a popular source of guilty pleasure in the literature, but their social value only comes from showing us how today’s trends could lead our planet to dystopian ruin. SpaceCorp is neither shy nor apologetic in exposing the villains. Ignorance, overpopulation, tribalism, xenophobia, depleted resources, and rising sea levels combine to create social and political stresses no government can deal with. Few individuals are courageous enough to run for office in a world where assassinations are more cost-effective than attack ads. It is small wonder that the erudite citizens of SpaceCorp are motivated to abandon Earth in favor of colonization among the stars. But where people climb mountains not for profit, but because they are there, the same could be said of space exploration. Even if faraway planets were made of solid gold, you’d go out of business transporting it back to Earth. But in the Galactican Series, you will see how the people of SpaceCorp discover something far more valuable than gold. Something that can be harvested from distant planets without depleting them. Something that makes it worth a one-way trip.
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SpaceCorp
Copyright
© Ejner Fulsang, 2014
All rights reserved. No Part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to:
SAN: 8 5 0 – 3 0 5 2
Author’s photograph by Philip Hutcherson
Cover picture courtesy of NASA public domain images
ISBN (Amazon Kindle eBook): 978-0-9913243-0-9
F
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When I worked with Ejner Fulsang to propose a mission to explore the triple-asteroid system 2001 SN263, I was sure our spacecraft concept was at the cutting edge of imagination and innovation. Our team would put a scientific robot down on the surfaces of two mysterious, alien bodies, probing and investigating with a robot arm and high-resolution cameras—cutting-edge stuff, I thought! But that was before I entered the outrageous future described so vividly in these pages by Ejner in
SpaceCorp,
the first novel in his space settlement series.
Space stations—the kind of giant orbiting wheels imagined in the 1950s by Wernher von Braun—figure prominently in Ejner’s 21
st
Century space dystopia. Orbital outposts are close to my heart, too: I’ve had a hand in building one, the International Space Station (ISS). My astronaut crew hauled the U.S. Destiny laboratory to orbit and installed it at the ISS on shuttle mission STS-98, delivering the outpost’s research and operations center. Joining forces with the resident Expedition One crew, my Atlantis crewmates and I berthed the bus-sized Lab to the Station and locked it permanently into place forward of Node One, the U.S. Unity module. During a series of three spacewalks, EVA partner Bob Curbeam and I plugged in the Lab’s power cables, connected cooling lines, unveiled its Earth-viewing window, and mated the links to its computer network. We spent a week activating and outfitting Destiny, and it’s still the nerve center of the ISS today.
Since my return to Earth, one of my most satisfying experiences has been catching recurring glimpses of the International Space Station soaring above my hometown. (See
www.SpotTheStation.nasa.gov
) As I watch six astronauts and their home glide serenely, silently, across the heavens, I can’t help but remember the extraordinary experience of exploring the Station’s exterior, dancing along its handrails using just the tips of my fingers. I hung suspended in free fall, nothing between my spacesuit boots and the brilliant blue of the ocean, 220 miles below. The sky was an impenetrable black, but I wanted to get out there, to explore some more. Seeing the brilliant star of the ISS passing above tonight takes me back to the past, but also encourages me to think about our future, “out there.”
As it did in the successful feature film,
Gravity
, the orbital hazard from space debris plays a pivotal role in SpaceCorp. During my nearly 8 weeks in low-Earth orbit, I encountered this hazard first-hand; my shuttle orbiters were struck repeatedly by (blessedly) tiny pieces of man-made and natural debris. The natural micrometeoroid background comprises fragments of asteroids and comets, the product of collisions between these ancient objects and particles shed from comets as sublimating ices carry off dust and minute mineral grains.
The Space Age has added to the natural danger by leaving spent rocket boosters and derelict satellites in orbit. Propellant explosions and satellite collisions, though infrequent, have wrapped near-Earth space in a blanket of man-made debris, a veritable snowstorm of projectiles threatening operational satellites and piloted spacecraft. Some of the tiny craters my crew observed in our outer window panes were due to impacts from these orbital debris fragments; our shuttle fortunately avoided more serious damage. Another shuttle crew, STS-109, suffered a debris strike that just missed puncturing a vital coolant line in its payload-bay-door radiator. Warned by Mission Control of a threat from oncoming debris, shuttle crews routinely maneuver to shift their orbital path and skirt the debris trajectory.
The debris problem is worsening. Impacts to satellites (at least two have succumbed to space junk strikes) will generate further clouds of debris that will increase the hazard for the next two or three decades. A Chinese anti-satellite test in 2007, for example, shattered its FY-1C weather-sat target into more than 3000 fragments, doubling the impact risk to the International Space Station. Most responsible space-faring countries recognize the debris hazard and have taken steps to deorbit their defunct satellites and vent the fuel tanks of any expended rocket stages.
Mission Control routinely warns ISS crews of predicted close approaches from debris, in some cases maneuvering the Station to safety. If evasive action isn’t practical, the crew retreats to its lifeboat spacecraft, in case the ISS is struck. Hits are inevitable, from both natural and man-made debris. The U.S. laboratory Destiny, delivered by my shuttle crew, is armored with aluminum and Kevlar debris shields, designed to slow and break up projectiles and keep them from penetrating the pressure hull. Unfortunately, objects bigger than the size of a pea, striking at tens of thousands of miles per hour, can breach the module walls and create a life-threatening emergency for the crew. This is a future we’ll have to live with until all space-faring nations share responsibility for minimizing debris and ensuring the safety of astronaut crews. In Ejner’s story, certain state actors trigger a “Kessler syndrome” debris cascade, with deadly consequences for his protagonists in low Earth orbit.
Ejner’s space station tale envisions a day when hundreds are living in LEO, using their orbital stations as springboards to colonies on the planets. The ISS is indeed our launch pad for future exploration. It serves not only as a research lab into biomedicine, astrophysics, physics, chemistry, combustion, botany, and materials sciences, but as a technology testbed for the vehicles, power systems, habitats, life support machines, and spacesuits that will take us farther into the solar system. In the coming decade, samples of meteorites and their parent asteroids will be processed on the ISS into water, rocket propellant, structural metals, organic chemicals, and radiation shielding. By learning how we might turn asteroid and lunar materials into rocket fuel and construction materials, we will break the Earth-based space exploration model of the last half century, and set out on a path to the asteroids, the Moon, Phobos and Deimos, and finally Mars itself. Pioneering space will be this century’s most challenging, and most rewarding enterprise.
