The Next Continent (17 page)

Ryuichi was beside himself with excitement. Reika goggled at him. Sohya tried to keep a straight face. “Reika, I think he's gotten the better of you. He's right, you know. Patent the technology and give it away. In the long run, you're sure to do better.”

“Well, perhaps…”

Ryuichi stamped the floor triumphantly. Reika was appalled.

“Ready for ignition!” one of the technicians called out. “Please move to the observation bunker. You'll be able to see our one-gun salute from there.”

“Right. I almost forgot!” Ryuichi said.

Everyone left the firing facility and walked the hundred meters to the observation bunker. The bunker was filled with telemetry equipment. Sheltered by its embankments, the firing facility was visible through thick layers of Plexiglas. Members of the test team began calling out data from the readouts.

“H
₂
temperature and pressure, nominal.”

“LOX vaporizer pressure steady. Opening valves one through eight. Injection system looks good.”

Shinji spoke quickly, flushed with excitement. “The actual vehicle will use an SRB to boost TROPHY to its initial operating envelope. Today we're using a turbine to push a supersonic stream of oxygen into the combustion chamber while we monitor the operation of the rocket.”

Shinji was not responsible for the rocket subsystem itself and was not involved in monitoring the telemetry console. Still, he stared through the window with as much intensity as if his entire concept depended on today's test.

“Five…four…three…two…one…ignition start. One…two…”

The firing facility seemed to radiate light. A tongue of blue-white flame shot out of the building and hit the deflector. The edges of the flame quickly stabilized, becoming sharply defined.

The fire was supersonic now, hurling itself against the deflector with staggering power. In an instant, a cloud of white steam shot hundreds of meters into the cloudless sky.

The observation bunker was submerged in a roar so loud it seemed to be coming from the bowels of the earth. Ryuichi and Shinji stood with foreheads pressed against the vibrations of the heavy observation window, eyes on the flame. Sohya and Reika looked back and forth between the two men and the exhaust flinging hundreds of tons of pressure against the deflector.

The test was over quickly. The technician kept calling the count. After thirty seconds he ordered engine shutdown.

As the flame was extinguished, a cheer went up in the bunker. Ryuichi turned to Reika and yelled excitedly, “Now what do you think? Will you help her fly?”

“Yes, let's do it. I'm just glad it didn't blow up.”

“Of course it didn't!” Ryuichi shouted. He grabbed her hands and pumped them up and down, shouting “thank you” over and over as Reika looked at him awkwardly.

Sohya was grinning when Reika freed herself from Ryuichi's grip and walked over to him, hands fluttering. She sighed. “Why are men always acting like children? He's just like the chairman.”

“I'm no different,” said Sohya. “I'd say Shinji's the same too.”

“Well, it would be nice if you could contain yourselves.” She looked at him with embarrassment.

He nodded sympathetically. “Look, don't worry about it. This project won't succeed if we don't start trusting each other. If it's all right with you, I'd like us to deal with each other openly.”

“All right, but don't get carried away. I don't think we can afford to be overly familiar, given our respective positions.”

“That works for me.” Sohya's eyes twinkled as he nodded. Reika suddenly seemed overcome with fatigue. She looked at him and said, “Well, we've found a way to get to the moon. Now everything is up to Gotoba Engineering.”

“You're in good hands,” said Sohya. He had a brief vision of the men and women who had faced and overcome almost impossible obstacles. “We're all kids at heart too.”

[3]

GOTOBA ENGINEERING'S DESIGN
lab, in Shinjuku. This was the room that had spawned the plans for a bewildering array of specialized structures for extreme environments. A project screen came down from the ceiling. Sando, the head of Gotoba's Technology Development Division rose from his seat, shook his head, and smiled.

“No, we didn't generate the basic concept. That came from ELE.”

Sohya was astonished. “You came up with the base concept?”

Tae smiled. “If we don't tell you what kind of base we want, how will you know what to build?” She was back in her “uniform” and seated with Sohya, Reika, and Iwaki in scattered chairs around Sando.

“So we decided how big the base should be,” she said crisply. “That told us what kind of building material we'd need. The kind of building material told us where to build the base. We're leaving the details to your company.”

“Oh.” Sohya nodded, still mystified. Sando picked up the thread.

“ELE's design request included a basic concept. A crew of ten will occupy the base for the first year. This detail tells us two things. The base will be larger than Kunlun, and it will be permanent. This tells us the method of construction we'll be using: cast concrete.”

“Is that the only option?” asked Sohya.

“We could go with metal alloy structures similar to what the Chinese have. We could use inflatable structures, even a volcanic cave. Alloy structures would mean bringing everything up the gravity well from Earth. Very expensive. The flexible elements on inflatable structures tend to deteriorate in the constant sunlight. Caves offer limited space and flexibility for expansion. So the alternatives have their disadvantages.”

“Interesting,” Reika muttered. She was taking notes with her wearcom, as if this were the first she'd heard on the subject.

“Concrete, on the other hand, has more than enough strength and toughness to withstand vacuum conditions. And only concrete can be produced on-site. This is a huge advantage. It's the ideal material for a base that will initially accommodate ten and ultimately fifty people. Aomine, what would you need to make cement for concrete?”

Sohya answered without hesitation. “For Portland cement: clay, limestone, and gypsum. For calcium aluminate cement, we'd need limestone and bauxite.”

Sando nodded. “We can produce calcium aluminate cement relatively easily with moon rock, which is mostly anorthite. If we heat anorthite to around fourteen hundred degrees, the constituents we don't need for cement production will melt out. Further heating should yield something close to aluminate clinker. We should be able to produce it in a solar furnace. There are two other things we need to produce concrete: aggregate and water.”

Sando lifted his teacup and sloshed the contents back and forth. “Here's the problem. There's none of this on the moon.”

“Well, of course,” said Reika. “It's nothing but a huge desert.”

“Not quite.” Sando shook his head. “True, there's no water on the surface. The moon is very dry, with almost no hydrogen in its composition. This is a consequence of the moon's formation. The giant impact theory posits that the moon was created around four and a half billion years ago after a collision between the primitive earth and a planet-size body. A large amount of the earth's mantle was melted and blown into space, where it coalesced as the moon. The heat of collision drove off most of the lighter elements in the mantle, including hydrogen.”

“Then how do you propose to make concrete?”

“With water from somewhere else.” Sando narrowed his eyes mischievously and chuckled. “Comets. A comet's core is like a slushy snowball. It contains large amounts of water. What do you suppose happens when a comet strikes the moon?”

“It blows apart and evaporates, I guess,” said Reika.

“Right—if it hits where the surface receives sunlight. In twenty-four hours or so, the water molecules are broken apart and scattered by photons coming from the sun. But if the comet strikes where the sun can't reach, ice might accumulate on the surface.”

“On the moon's far side then. Water could stay frozen there.” As soon as she spoke, Reika realized her mistake. “But the moon revolves with the earth around the sun, so sunlight would reach wherever a comet would hit.”

“Actually, no. The earth is covered with ice at the poles, where the sun is extremely weak. Sunlight is also limited at the moon's poles. Furthermore, the moon's axis is nowhere near as inclined as Earth's—it's tilted off the vertical by only one and a half degrees or so. Sunlight has never penetrated some of the craters at the moon's poles. If a lump of ice fell into a zone of eternal shadow—”

“But has that happened?”

“There's no reason to think it hasn't. We're talking about a several-billion year time span. Logically, there must have been such impacts. Since the temperature in these permanent shadow zones is 220 degrees below freezing, there could even be large amounts of accumulated ice.”

“Fascinating,” said Reika.

“Do we have confirmation of that?” Sohya's tone was challenging and skeptical. Reika was unused to arguing on scientific grounds and was easily convinced by “expert” opinion. Not Sohya; he was trained to accept logical arguments only when buttressed with facts.

Sando returned his gaze with a half-amused, half-frustrated expression, and shook his head. “Allow me to rephrase your question. What would we need to confirm it?”

“And…?”

“This goes back to NASA's Clementine lunar orbiter and radar data indicating the possible presence of ice at the moon's south pole. In 1998, the neutron spectrometer aboard NASA's Lunar Prospector also indicated the presence of polar hydrogen. At the conclusion of the mission, the orbiter was deliberately crashed into a crater near the south pole. NASA hoped the impact would raise a plume of water vapor that could be observed from Earth, but the experiment failed. No such plume was observed.

“Subsequent missions by the U.S. and Japan have also suggested the presence of ice, at least based on radar and laser data. So is this confirmed then? Strictly speaking, no. There are other ways to check for ice, including evaluation of near-infrared absorption spectra, X-ray diffraction imaging, construction of phase diagrams, and so on. Still, at some point you have to draw a line and say you've got enough data. Of course, the only way to be really certain is to bring back a sample.”

His specialty was construction engineering, but Sando was a veteran scientist, thoroughly familiar with a broad range of disciplines. His explanation was beyond Sohya's ability to challenge, much less Reika's. Sohya conceded the point. “All right, understood. In other words, we can't start till we've confirmed the presence of ice.”

“Yes. We need to put a probe on the surface. But for the moment, let's assume the ice is there. Two thousand square kilometers are in perpetual shadow at the south pole, with what some say is as much as six billion tons of ice. That's several times more water than you'd find in a large reservoir and certainly all the water we need to make our concrete. All this is in the proposal we received from ELE.” He looked at Tae.

“The proposal was that detailed?” Reika looked confused.

“Hardly,” said Tae. “After all, it came from ELE's planning division. I mean, even I can understand it. The difficult part will be figuring out how to do it.”

“Out of the loop?” Sohya asked Reika coolly.

Reika looked down, flushed with embarrassment. “Only a few people at ELE besides the chairman were copied on the plan. All I had were the topline numbers.”

Iwaki, sitting toward the back, grunted. Sohya looked round and caught a warning glance. If Tae was privy to things even Reika didn't know, then close liaison with her was even more important than they'd thought. But for a girl of junior high school age to be let in on the most confidential aspects of the plan also had its risks. Iwaki seemed to be indicating caution on both counts.

Reika regained her composure. “So Gotoba Engineering has a detailed plan?”

“Yes,” answered Sando. “The rest of this presentation is about why you were right to choose us. Given the long time frame, we propose dividing the work into three phases. Phase One will use unmanned equipment to prepare the site for the arrival of humans.” Sando called up a project flowchart on the room's wallmounted display.

“To start, we'll launch a probe as soon as possible within the next four years. The probe will determine where we build. The site must be adjacent to a zone of permanent shadow with
in situ
ice, but the site itself must be in sunlight. Without sunlight we can't generate power. There must be easy access to anorthite for cement production. By the time the site is selected, we'll have developed temporary habitats to support manned construction work. These units will probably be similar to the modules used at Kunlun Base. Phase One will consist of site selection, dispatch of habitats sufficient for a crew of ten, and development of specialized engineering equipment. This phase will last for six years, until 2031.”

A bar extended across the top of the screen as far as the six-year mark. Another bar now appeared below and extended past Phase One with what looked like ten times the number of milestones and processes.

“Phase Two: construction. The base will be progressively expanded, prioritizing elements needed to support a human presence: first a landing facility, then power generation, oxygen production, water supply, a concrete production plant, transport facility, and an operations center, in that order. Only after this infrastructure is in place will we be able to start building concrete structures, and only then will we be in a position to send up large amounts of engineering equipment. This phase will probably be the most demanding and challenging.

“The first task will be to prepare the site and build the landing facility for spacecraft arrivals. The exhaust from the landers will throw up a lot of regolith that will contaminate anything nearby. Next comes placement of solar power panels and laying of superconducting cables. Electric bulldozers and scrapers powered by these cables will collect regolith and ice, which will be transported by skid loaders. Concrete will be produced using a solar furnace, a roller mill, and a rotary kiln. A large amount of energy will be needed to melt the ice, so most of it will be crushed and mixed directly with the cement or aggregate. The concrete will be poured into carbon fiber–reinforced forms to make precast blocks. The blocks will be prestressed and cured for several days in a solar furnace, then transported to the site with a forklift or skip loader, where they will be assembled into structures. Then they'll be bonded to each other using a liquid water sprinkler, much the way the Inuit build their igloos. This is also how early Antarctic bases were created. Given the constant low temperature, an ice shield guarantees an airtight seal. It will also be an effective cosmic ray barrier.”