Starfire (17 page)

“Good afternoon, Dr. Nukaga,” Brad said. “Thank you for seeing us so late in the afternoon.”

Nukaga had checked his e-mail on his desktop computer, removed his tablet computer from his backpack, and put it on its charging stand by the time Brad had finished speaking. He nodded, acknowledging the young man's gratitude, then sat back in his chair, tapping his fingertips together to keep himself in motion despite being seated. “You're welcome. Let's hear your ‘winner,' Mr. McLanahan.”

“Yes, sir,” Brad said. “I recently found out that Sky Masters Aerospace in Nevada has put out a request for proposals to universities and companies for a new generation of space projects. It seems that companies like Sky Masters have been working with the Phoenix administration, because the president just proposed the very same thing in his address from Armstrong Space Station. Sky Masters wants—”

“Did you say, the president addressed the nation
from the military space station
?” Nukaga asked incredulously. “He is up in orbit
right now
?”

“Yes, sir,” Brad replied. “He just concluded a press conference too. He was feeling pretty good, weightless and everything. I guess his Secret Service guy didn't do as well.”

“What in the world is a president of the United States doing on a
military space station
?” Nukaga remarked rather bitterly. “It seems extremely irresponsible to me. There are a thousand incidents that could happen and a hundred illnesses he could contract, some of which could affect his mind, and he is the commander in chief of a nuclear-armed military. It's madness.” He fell silent for a moment, then waved a hand, erasing the topic from his mind. “Please continue, Mr. McLanahan.”

“We are requesting computer-, mechanical-, and aerospace-engineering-lab space and resources for twelve weeks this summer for a project that hopefully can be put into orbit and tested before the end of the year,” Brad said. “We call it Project Starfire.”

Nukaga's eyebrows raised in amusement. “Your name, I assume, Mr. McLanahan?”

“It was mine, sir,” Lane Eagan said proudly.

“Of course, Mr. Eagan,” Nukaga said, hiding a slight smile behind two fingertips tapping against his lips. He had at first distrusted the young man—boy, really—because his parents both held multiple doctorates and were very wealthy, aggressive, hard-charging research scientists, and he believed Eagan's success was mostly due to his parents' strong, driving influence. But that definitely did not turn out to be the case. Although young Eagan slipped back easily into a teenager's persona now and then, he truly was a gifted young man who would no doubt hold his own collection of doctorates, exceeding his parents' impressive credentials, before long.

The professor erased all hint of a smile, turned stony once again, then said, “Indeed. So why don't you continue the presentation, Mr. Eagan?”

“Yes, sir,” Lane said without skipping a beat. Just like that, the teenager was gone, replaced by a serious young scientist-to-be. “As you well know, sir, the idea of generating power from the sun from a spacecraft in Earth orbit and transmitting the electricity to Earth has been proposed for many years, but we think we've overcome the technical hurdles and can design a commercially feasible space-based solar-power station.”

Nukaga looked at Casey and Jodie. “Since your team has Miss Huggins, I assume your spacecraft uses some sort of directed energy, such as microwaves,” he observed. “Miss Huggins?”

“Not exactly, sir,” Casey said. “Most research on the subject of space-based solar-power production used microwaves or lasers to transmit the solar-collected electricity to Earth. Lasers have some political roadblocks. Microwaves are very efficient and can transmit a lot of energy very quickly. But microwaves require a large nantenna, or transmitting antenna—as large as a square kilometer or more in area—and an even larger rectenna, or receiving antenna, perhaps ten times as large as the transmitting antenna. Our associates around the world and we here at Cal Poly have developed a maser: a microwave laser. We are able to wiggle and collimate a beam in the microwave spectrum so it's possible to squeeze a lot of energy into a smaller, more focused beam. It has some of the best characteristics of a microwave and a visible-light laser, using much smaller antennas, and is far more efficient. In addition, maser rectennas that transform the microwave energy into electricity are smaller, fairly portable, and can be set up almost anywhere.”

“Besides, sir, the main components and power-generation equipment are already up on Armstrong Space Station,” Brad said. Nukaga looked at Brad and narrowed his eyes disapprovingly at the interruption, but let him continue. “The Skybolt laser is a free-electron laser pumped by a klystron powered by a magnetohydrodynamic generator. We can introduce the microwave cavity into the laser itself, and use the collected electricity from Starfire to power the laser, so we don't have to use the MHD. We can even use Skybolt's aiming and control systems.”

“That monstrosity should have been removed from orbit years ago and allowed to burn up on reentry,” Nukaga said. He gave Brad another scowl, as if the space-based laser belonged to him. “Do you see any problems with shooting maser beams from space, Miss Huggins?” he asked.

“There are many potential political roadblocks, sir,” Casey replied. “The Space Preservation Treaty of 2006 seeks to eliminate all offensive space weapons. Specifically, it mentions directed-energy systems capable of producing greater than one megajoule of energy at a range of more than one hundred kilometers. The Skybolt laser on Armstrong Space Station has attacked targets in space, the atmosphere, and even on Earth, at ranges far greater than one hundred kilometers, with far more energy.” Nukaga wore a very sour expression—obviously he knew very well about what the space-based laser had done and was most displeased about it.

“After the reactivation of the Skybolt missile defense laser aboard Armstrong Space Station, as well as the deployment of Kingfisher space-based interceptors, the treaty was presented again and passed in the United Nations General Assembly in 2010,” Casey went on. “The Security Council sought to codify the treaty; the United States under the Gardner administration chose to abstain rather than veto it, and the treaty passed. Although it has not been ratified by the U.S. Senate, the United States has—at least up until now—chosen to abide by it. Therefore, if the maser-power transmission concept is seen by the United Nations as potentially a space weapon, it couldn't be used unless the United States simply ignored the treaty.”

“Which I sincerely hope is
not
done,” Nukaga added. “What other problems have you overcome in this project? Miss Cavendish, since you are the advanced-materials student, why don't you continue?” They all knew that Nukaga would never allow just one member of the team to give a presentation like this, so they all had to be equally familiar with the proposal and prepared to give it at any time.

“Yes, sir,” Jodie said. “The weight of standard silicon photovoltaic cells is simply a deal killer—it would take hundreds of shuttle-sized spacecraft, which we do not have except for some Russian spacecraft, which we probably couldn't use, or expendable heavy-lift launch vehicles to put enough photovoltaic panels on the spacecraft to make this work. But we and our partners have developed a solar-cell capture technology using multiwidth nanotubes applied to a flexible conducting substrate that could allow the construction of a mile-long photovoltaic cell for the same launch cost as a single furlable silicon solar cell designed to fit inside the shuttle, with several times the power-generation capacity.”

For the first time in the meeting, Nukaga momentarily stopped fidgeting, and the change was instantly noticed by all of the students, even young Lane. “Interesting,” the professor commented as he resumed his finger tapping. “An organic carbon nanotube that is more efficient than a silicon cell?”

“It's not a carbon nanotube, sir,” Jodie said. She smiled, leaned forward, then said in a low conspiratorial voice, “It's a multiwidth inorganic titanium dioxide nanotube-structured optical nantenna.”

Nukaga's eyebrows arched, just for a heartbeat, but to the students around him it felt as if a firecracker had gone off in the room. “Interesting,” he repeated, although all the students could detect a slightly breathless tone in his voice. “An optical nantenna.”

“Yes, sir,” Jodie said. “Using inorganic nanotubes, we've designed a way to convert sunlight into electricity at efficiencies thousands of times greater than silicon solar cells. Even better, the structures are hundreds of times lighter and stronger than silicon solar cells.”

He tried very hard to hide his surprise, but Toshuniko Nukaga was starting to look as if he might slip out of his chair. “Interesting,” he managed to repeat, but his finger tapping had completely ceased. “You have fabricated such a structure?”

“I haven't done it yet, sir,” Jodie said, “but I've spoken and corresponded with researchers in Cambridge and Palo Alto, and we could do it here, in our own labs, with the proper support. And, thanks to our team leader, Brad, we have access to researchers all over the world.”

“And what are the advantages of this inorganic nanotube structure, Mr. Kim?” Jerry seemed to have a little bit of trouble answering a question about an area of engineering with which he wasn't as familiar as some of the others, so Nukaga turned to Brad. “Perhaps you can assist Mr. Kim, Mr. McLanahan?”

“Energy production vastly greater than silicon solar cells, but with far less weight,” Brad replied. “Plus, the solar arrays fix themselves.”

“How do they do that?”

“Because the substrate upon which the nanotubes are built is not metal, but flexible sol-gel material that not only allows electrons to flow from the nanostructure to the collection system with greater efficiency, but acts as a shock absorber,” Brad said. “If the solar array is hit by orbital debris, the break is electrochemically reconnected, like damaged skin. It forms a kind of scar tissue, like human skin, which is not as photovoltaic as the original, but at least the array is still functional. Plus, the defensive lasers aboard Armstrong Space Station could be used to deflect debris that might seriously damage the nantennna arrays.”

“Defensive lasers? I hardly think so,” Nukaga remarked. “Continue.”

“The titanium-dioxide nanotubes are impervious to cosmic radiation and the solar wind, and the sol-gel substrate can handle large changes in temperature with only minimal and temporary changes in conductivity,” Brad said. “The structures we can put together can be enormous, perhaps stretching as far as several kilometers. This will allow us to eventually conduct several energy shots to different spots all around the globe in one orbit.”

Nukaga was obviously not impressed with Brad's response—it was a huge oversimplification of a very complicated process that the team needed to have nailed down before the university was asked to grant thousands or even millions of dollars to research. “And how would deployment of Starfire work?” Nukaga asked. He turned to Jerry. “Start us off, Mr. Kim.”

Jung-bae frowned as he collected his thoughts, but pressed ahead with only a short delay. “One of our imperatives in this project was a size limitation, sir,” Jerry said. “The S-19 Midnight spaceplane, our preferred delivery vehicle for the space-based components, can carry a payload of approximately nine thousand pounds in its cargo bay, with some rather small size dimensions. That was a problem at first. Even using expendable boosters along with the spaceplanes, it would take many years, perhaps even decades, to build Starfire.”

“And how did you solve this? Nine thousand pounds seems like a lot, but not when you have to build an entire expansive spacecraft from scratch.”

“It would not be from scratch, sir,” Jerry said. “Our proposal specifies the use of Armstrong Space Station, the International Space Station, or China's . . . China's . . .” Again he had trouble searching his memory.

Nukaga glanced at Brad, silently allowing him to assist. “China's Tiangong-2 space laboratory, sir,” he said.

“Why these spacecraft? Mr. Eagan?”

“Because except for Tiangong, the others are old and ready to be changed to unmanned platforms, sir,” Lane said. “Armstrong is almost thirty years old and ten years past its design service life. The ISS is twenty years old and approaching its design limit—it has been scheduled for deorbit in five years.”

“And Tiangong-2?”

“The Chinese are expected to launch Tiangong-3 in just a few weeks, sir,” Lane said. “We think they wouldn't mind letting their laboratory be used for this project. If Starfire works as planned, we'll be able to shoot electricity into the most remote regions of China—even to the top of the Himalayas!”

“What other problems lie ahead? Miss Cavendish?”

“It's a matter of getting the nantenna, capacitors, control equipment, microwave cavity, and maser-beam generators and associated equipment up to the station,” Jodie said. “We estimate that we can get all the panels up into orbit in just ten missions in the spaceplanes, or four if we use expendable rockets.”

“That seems extraordinary,” Nukaga remarked. “How did you estimate that, Miss Huggins?”

“That's based on Jodie's estimate of the thinness of the nantennas and the dimensions of an S-19 Midnight spaceplane's cargo bay, sir,” Casey replied. “We compute that one rolled-up nantenna array five hundred meters long and thirty meters wide can fit in the Midnight's cargo bay, well within weight limits because the nanotube structure will be so light. Our original design calls for a total of eight of these panels. We'd then need two more flights to bring up the extra equipment.”

“That seems unrealistically optimistic, Miss Huggins. Mr. McLanahan?”