The Next Continent (16 page)

“If that's what you want, you have my promise. I'm sure my bosses will agree. In fact, I'll make sure they do.”

Ryuichi was impressed. This young man had none of the cynicism so typical of others his age. They were on the same wavelength. Of course, Sohya's assurances didn't amount to a signature on a contract. But then again, his company wouldn't have sent him unless they trusted him to carry the ball. Ryuichi suddenly recalled that Gotoba's founder and president was a bit of an
enfant terrible
himself.

Reika had a different response, just as simple and straightforward. “If we're going to fund you, we expect a return on our investment. If this technology is going to change mankind's future, the demand will be enormous. As long as there's a possibility for that kind of return, ELE will commit to going the distance. Shall we discuss the allocation of profits?” Reika's fingertips floated over her wearcom.

I might have guessed,
thought Ryuichi.
ELE is the client, Gotoba is the contractor. Of course the client is going to talk about money, not about some dream.
Still, if both his visitors had been prepared to move ahead without even trying to negotiate, that would have been suspicious indeed. The fact that ELE's representative was a blinkered bean counter couldn't be helped. Later, however, Ryuichi would discover that his impression was off the mark.

“Let's count our chickens later. First you'd better take a look at TROPHY.”

“You already have a prototype?” Reika was astonished.

“If all we had to show you were blueprints, I wouldn't be making such a big deal out of it. Let's take a drive,” said Shinji. He stood up. He wore a different smile now, the smile of a man whose quest was about to be fulfilled.

TANEGASHIMA SPACE CENTER
sprawled across more than two thousand acres of developed and undeveloped land on the southern tip of the island. After driving several kilometers through a wild forest, they emerged onto a beach edged by the ultramarine waters of the Pacific. They left the car and walked toward a strange structure, about ten meters high and thirty meters deep. A huge metal shutter, closed now, was set into the front of the building facing south toward the ocean.

It seemed to be a conventional warehouse, but the sides and rear were enclosed by high earthen embankments, like gigantic levees. A telephone pole stood at each corner. Steel cables were strung between the poles, enclosing the top, sides, and rear of the structure. To the south, between building and ocean, was another embankment, faced with concrete and sloping gently upward. It almost seemed as if an aircraft coming out of the warehouse could use the ramp to quickly gain altitude. Sohya easily walked up it and stood at the top, looking out over the ocean. “Looks like the catapult on an aircraft carrier,” he called to Reika, who was standing at the bottom.

“I don't think catapults are this beat-up,” she replied.

“Beat-up?” said Sohya. Reika pointed at his feet. He looked down at a huge grayish pink blotch, roughly star-shaped, in the center of the ramp. The surface seemed to have been blasted off in some spots. Looking closer, he saw that the concrete was roughened by fused particles of aggregate, all flowing in one direction like stalactites in a limestone cave.
Like the side of a building after a fire,
thought Sohya. But this was very different from the usual fire damage. The fused particles seemed to be straining upward, as if intense fire had flowed up the sloping surface.

“This way!” Ryuichi called from the warehouse. Sohya ran down the embankment and joined him.

“What kind of place is this?” he asked.

“Our SRB-R firing facility,” said Ryuichi. “For testing solid boosters like the ones on the H-3C.”

“Oh, those cute crayon things on the side of the rocket,” said Sohya.

“You call several hundred tons of solid propellant ‘cute'?” said Ryuichi.

“Could we dispense with the word games?” said Reika, frowning. Sohya shrugged, then realized what Ryuichi had just said.

“When you say ‘test,' you mean you ignite those things right here?”

“That's exactly what we do,” answered Ryuichi. He motioned to the shutter, then the concrete ramp. “The booster fires horizontally toward the ocean. The flame deflector guides the exhaust toward the sky. The solid propellant is rubber based. Imagine burning eighty tons of tires in a minute and forty seconds. The smoke is unbelievable.”

“Do the boosters ever explode?” asked Reika.

“That's why we have embankments around the building. If there's an explosion, we at least want to funnel the blast wave up-ward. The steel cables are lightning rods. Fortunately we've never needed them so far.” Ryuichi looked in through the service door. “Today it just so happens we've got TROPHY set up for an ignition test. Officially, we're doing a conventional SRB test burn. Shinji, open the shutter.”

“Yes, sir.” The voice came from inside. As the huge door rose, sunlight advanced along the floor and up across the business end of a strange-looking device. It resembled a wind tunnel with an exhaust slit like the maw of a shark. Shinji strolled out from among the technicians busily swarming around the engine. He extended his palm toward the device.

“This is TROPHY-E103. Pretty simple, don't you think?”

Sohya and Reika walked deeper into the building and began inspecting the engine, which rested horizontally on its test stand. Pointing out to sea, the nozzle was a simple box shape, unlike the bell-shaped nozzles of conventional rocket engines. There was little if any constriction between the silver-gray nozzle and the next section, which continued the one-meter square profile for another four meters, except that its cross section expanded gently, making it fatter toward the end. The far end of this section seemed to be a wedge-shaped air intake that could be constricted with a simple vent. The only other visible mechanisms around the intake were a few pipes that apparently served as sensors and actuators.

Beyond and in line with this was a hulking, bewilderingly complicated mass of tubes and piping, several of which extended into the intake. The cluster of piping looked like some gigantic, metallic internal organ. Neither Sohya nor Reika knew what to make of it, but as they approached it, Shinji said, “Everything from there on back is just the supply module for this experiment. It's not part of the final build.”

“From where on back?” asked Sohya.

“From there. The square section is TROPHY itself.” Shinji pointed from the nozzle to the wedge-shaped intake. The entire device was only seven meters long. Clearly a simple design, even suspiciously simple. The thing certainly didn't look like some new technology that was poised to change the world.

“You look surprised,” Shinji said, as if he'd read their minds. He happily launched into his explanation. “This is TROPHY test engine three. As you can see, it's not a conventional engine. The lower section acts as a rocket engine, while the upper section is an air-breathing engine for use in the atmosphere.”

“Air-breathing? For space travel?” said Sohya.

“A launch vehicle operates in the atmosphere at first, of course. That's where TROPHY functions as a ramjet—technically, a ducted scramjet. Outside the atmosphere, it operates as a straightforward rocket engine. That's why we call it a transforming power source. Back at headquarters we were talking about fuel fractions, the percentage of a vehicle's gross weight accounted for by fuel. For a rocket, the fuel fraction is 80 percent, but you need more than two-thirds of that just to reach an altitude of fifty kilometers and a ground speed of 1.6 kilometers per second. All that fuel is consumed before you even leave the atmosphere. Cut the fuel requirement and you can carry more payload.

“We can't reduce the amount of hydrogen we carry, but the atmosphere has all the oxygen we need to get to space. By making use of this oxygen, TROPHY achieves an extremely high specific impulse.”

“I don't understand,” said Sohya.

“Okay. Roughly speaking, specific impulse is the number of pounds of thrust the engine can produce each second, per pound of fuel. The mass units drop out when we do the calculation, so we measure specific impulse in seconds. It's slightly complicated, but you can think of it as something like fuel efficiency. The practical limit for liquid-fueled rockets is a specific impulse of around 450 seconds. With TROPHY, we can get as much as four thousand seconds of specific impulse.”

Shinji looked at Reika and Sohya as if waiting for them to be impressed, but they just stared blankly. He looked slightly disappointed.

“Scientists have been trying to break five hundred seconds of specific impulse in a practical rocket engine for half a century. Everyone thought it was impossible.”

“That's quite an achievement.” Sohya nodded, but he didn't really grasp what Shinji was saying. Reika looked at Shinji doubtfully.

“If a simple engine like this can break such an impossible barrier, why has it taken so long for someone to do it?”

Shinji brightened. “The design is simple, sure. But only TGT can fabricate the components. The type of air-breathing engine I mentioned just now is called a ramjet. An engine like this, which is capable of burning fuel in a supersonic airflow, is a faster variation of a ramjet called a scramjet. You see, if the air coming through the intake is faster than the speed of sound, it's nearly impossible to keep your fuel burning as it feeds into the engine. The shock wave blows your burning fuel out like a candle. And at high speeds, air friction generates tremendous heat all over the surface of the rocket. Conventional materials can't stand up to it. What makes TROPHY possible is a certain material I've developed.”

Shinji placed his hand on the nozzle. Sohya suddenly realized that its outer surface was completely smooth, unlike the ribbed structure he recalled from other nozzles.

“This is it. We used a specialized cermet—a ceramic metal alloy. Metal is hard but not very heat resistant. Ceramics are brittle but stand up well to high temperatures. This material gives us the advantages of both. I discovered that cladding the engine with this cermet makes for efficient laminar flow control, and that gives you smooth fuel mixing and combustion in a supersonic airstream. So you can see why no one's succeeded in developing a practical scramjet till now. They didn't have this material.

“A scramjet's just the start. The alloy allowed us to make several revolutionary improvements. There's no need to wrap hydrogen cooling lines around the nozzle, for example. That makes manufacturing simpler, gives you a safer motor, and reduces weight all at once. The intake is simpler, lighter, and stronger. Our cermet will be used in the rocket fairing and body, so the vehicle itself will generate less drag when passing through the atmosphere—but we haven't built a test rocket yet.”

“Mr. Tai…?” Sohya tapped Shinji on the shoulder. TGT's research director's voice had grown feverish, as if he were addressing a huge crowd. “We'll leave the technical details to you. Just tell me, what kind of rocket will this engine power?”

“One the same size as the H-3C but with ten times more payload,” Shinji said casually. Sohya gasped.

“You mean instead of twenty-four tons, you'll be able to lift 240?”

“Yes. At half the cost.”

“Half…” Sohya was in shock.

“Structural strength and manufacturing tolerances will no longer be a major issue. Parts will be fewer and simpler. I'd guess a single rocket will have around three hundred thousand parts. That's a tenth of what's needed now.”

“That's…that's unbelievable.” Sohya was beginning to grasp the significance of this engine. He said to Reika, “Did you hear that? You're going to make a fortune with this thing.”

“I wonder.” She pressed her palms anxiously against her cheeks. “There's something important I have to ask. Have you patented any of this?”

Shinji looked deflated. “Not yet. If we drop the veil and apply now, the rest of the world will discover what we're onto. But if we keep quiet, someone might beat us to the punch. We figured we'd apply once we had a working prototype. It's a real dilemma.”

Ryuichi spoke up. “Let's do it now. It's time. With backing, we can make this happen. We don't have to keep it secret anymore. We should file defensive patents now to make sure no one gets the jump on us.”

“Good idea,” said Reika. “And you can start collecting patent royalties.”

“This isn't about money,” Ryuichi said. “Let's encourage everybody to use the technology free of charge. As long as they don't try to interfere with us, who cares who uses it?”

“Mr. Yaenami, you can't just give your technology away,” scolded Reika.

“Why
not
give it away? If TROPHY becomes the world standard, space development will explode. There'll be hundreds of launches a year. The space age will arrive—at last. TGT will be fine. No one knows more about TROPHY's core technologies than Shinji. He's a materials scientist. If someone tries to replicate the technology, we can easily stay a step or two ahead. We'll be first to reach the moon, and Mars, and Jupiter, with hardly a backward glance at NASA or Roskosmos. And we're just a private company. It doesn't get any better than that!”