On to the Asteroid

by Travis S. Taylor

  “That’s great news, but what about Carolyn? What do you know about her situation?”

  “Carolyn is still in surgery and we don’t know anything other than that she’s alive and in the operating room. No word yet on the shooter either. The news reports say that whoever did it covered their tracks really well. We’ll call back when we know something.”

  “Sounds good, out.” With that, Stetson again turned off the radio, not wanting the ground crew or anyone else to hear the private conversation between him and Paul. That just wouldn’t be right.

  CHAPTER 4

  Using the gift given to humanity by the twentieth-century Prometheuses who inhabited the Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories in the 1940s, the liquid hydrogen propellant flowed through the core of the nuclear thermal rocket engine, heating it to over twelve hundred degrees Celsius and giving the unmanned stage a kick as it then accelerated out of Earth orbit and into interplanetary space. There was no smoke, not just because there was no air, but because the heated hydrogen wasn’t combusting at all. It had merely been superheated in order to create an overpressure inside the rocket engine’s “combustion chamber” which wasn’t really a combustion chamber at all. And then the overpressured hydrogen gas was accelerated due to the laws of fluid flow and thermodynamics down a converging nozzle to a small opening that rocket scientists called the “throat” where it reached supersonic flow speeds. From there the gas continued to accelerate out a diverging nozzle into space. At no point was a detonation, deflagration, or combustion exothermic reaction required. The nuclear core was simply there to heat up a liquid and turn it into hot gas just as it would if it were in a power plant back on Earth. But instead of using the hot gas to turn a turbine and generate electricity, this reactor was heating propellant to provide propulsion at twice the efficiency of any conventional chemical rocket, including even the most efficient and effective combustion based rocket engines ever built before such as the Space Shuttle Main Engines and the F1s of the Saturn V era.

  No, this rocket wasn’t like most of its ancestors. Instead of heating and expelling fuel through burning, it was being heated to much higher temperatures by the energy released from the splitting of uranium atoms in the core of the ship’s engines. First conceived and tested by the United States in the 1960s, Nuclear Thermal Rockets required only half the fuel to get the same performance as chemical rockets. This was the breakthrough that was going to allow humans to make the journey to Mars affordably and the flight was scheduled to begin two years hence.

  Launched into space by NASA’s heavy lift rocket, the nuclear stage was designed to operate only once it was in space. The risks of using nuclear energy to launch rockets from the surface of the Earth was simply too great, or perceived to be, for anyone to suggest.

  The news that the engine had started was greeted by shouts and cheers of joy in Mission Control, still located at the Johnson Space Center in Texas. While it was greeted by cheers, they were mostly preceded by the sound of people breathing after holding their breath too long in the adjunct control center at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. It was there that the engine was designed and no group of people could be happier that it worked. They knew all that could go wrong, the things they’d tried to design to mitigate, and sometimes knowledge can cause one to be pessimistic. Pessimism, and its cousin, Murphy, of Murphy’s Law, were not around. The engines performed as designed and they worked flawlessly.

  “Hot damn!” Exclaimed the Marshall Chief Engineer, Paula Downey. Downey was a graduate of Stanford and had worked for NASA nearly all of her twenty-five-year career. She’d cut her teeth working on new space propulsion technologies back in the early 2000s and quickly proved to her peers and to senior management that she knew her engineering and was better than most at getting to the root cause of many engineering problems encountered in “rocket science.”

  Downey began walking around the room, shaking hands, slapping backs and even hugging some of the engineers in the room who’d worked on the nuclear rocket project for these last several years. This was one of the reasons she was not only respected, for her engineering talents, but actually liked by her peers. She was a people person and knew how to relate to the many personality types that made up the workforce of NASA. It didn’t hurt that, at age fifty, she was still a beautiful woman with a figure that turned heads when she walked through a room. Her black hair was salted with grey and no one really cared if that was its natural color. She was a pleasure to see, to talk to, and to work with.

  “Paula, I guess this means that we’re a go for Mars?” asked Dean Epperson, one of the systems engineers on the team.

  “Dean, I guess it does. If the habitat and the lander teams can meet their testing milestones like this team did, we’ll be launching to Mars in just under two years.”

  “I never thought I’d see the day,” he replied. “It seems like every time we think we’re going somewhere, the politicians or the bean counters pull the rug out from under us.”

  “Let’s hope that doesn’t happen this time,” she said with a false and overly emphasized frown. “There’s too much at stake. Now that the Europeans, the Japanese, and the Chinese have signed on, I don’t think that even the upcoming presidential election will be able to slow us down.”

  “Don’t say that! I was here when the shuttles stopped flying and the program to replace them was temporarily shut down. If you’d told me then that we’d be testing the systems to go to Mars, I’d think you were nuts. Never forget that we’re a political agency and all it’ll take to shut us down is one anti-space person in the White House.”

  “That’s a good point, but this time I think we’ll make the transition. We’ve got the support of both parties in the Senate—strong support, I might add. It helps when you have former astronauts in each party handing the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee back and forth every time the Senate changes hands. I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but I think we’ve got it covered.”

  “I guess you’re right. Good thing I’m a test engineer and not a manager. I don’t see how you can stand it,” Dean said, looking somewhat like a dog with his tail between his legs.

  “I know I’m right.” She smiled and replied, “That’s why I’m paid the big bucks.”

  CHAPTER 5

  It was difficult for CEO Anacleto Rosalez to contain his excitement. Rosalez, called AR by his family and close personal friends, watched the launch of the Ariane V rocket take his baby, the spacecraft and payload he’d been working on for almost a decade, into the clear blue sky from the Guiana Space Centre near Kourou, French Guiana. The Ariane, towering over one hundred fifty feet tall as it blasted into the sky using its cryogenic main engines and environmentally unfriendly solid-fuel rocket motors, was the workhorse rocket of the European Space Agency and the industries in Europe that needed access to space. Ariane had proven itself to be a very capable and reliable rocket, and its predominantly French operators had shown themselves to be equally reliable and, in this instance, discreet.

  Rosalez was CEO or on the board for multiple companies and his personal wealth was estimated at over five billion dollars, making him a rival of the wealthiest men in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Dubai. Today, he was enduring the heat in coastal French Guiana to see the launch into space of his latest project. A project that, if successful, would change forever the way Europe viewed itself as a world power, how people on Earth viewed the use of space, and how his investors would feel about their ten-year, high-risk investment paying off. The spacecraft on the rocket belonged to Asteroid Ores, Inc., and he was not only the company’s CEO, but also its number one shareholder.

  “Monsieur Rosalez, the controllers are telling me that the rocket is working perfectly and that we should be off and on our way within the hour,” said his personal assistant, Maurice Aubuchon. Maurice was very French, speaking in English only when the job required him to do so—as it did here when he was speaking with his boss. Rosalez, b
eing Spanish, spoke English as his second language. Which, unfortunately for both of them meant that they would have to communicate with each other speaking that language that most Europeans quite object to having become the world’s lingua franca—English. Despite their preferences for their respective native tongues, both spoke English rather well.

  “Maurice, can you believe we’re almost there? Once we get into space and on our way, it’ll only be another year before we start mining and selling almost ten thousand tons of platinum, let alone the literal mountains of other elements that’ll come back with it. Even with the inevitable drop in prices that’ll come with us flooding the market with the stuff, we’ll be able to return our investors’ money a thousand times.”

  That put a smile on the otherwise always-worried Maurice’s face.

  “You make it sound so easy. There’s a lot that has to happen between now and then before we can start building that platinum-fueled vacation villa in Hawaii. The spacecraft has to separate from the rocket and get itself out of Earth orbit, coast for nine months and then dock with asteroid 2018HM5. And that doesn’t even take into account the maneuvers required to stop the asteroid from spinning and getting its orbit changed to include the Moon at perihelion.”

  “Maurice, you worry too much. But then again, that’s why I hired you—to worry so I won’t have to. I’m sure you have things well under your control.” Rosalez smiled as he made the comment, quite sure that his assistant had matters as under control as was humanly possible and equally sure that Maurice didn’t believe that he did. Maurice was borderline obsessive compulsive and that was a trait that Rosalez needed in the person running the asteroid mining operation. It was rocket science, after all, and how anyone in the space business could survive without being or having access to someone with obsessive compulsive disorder was a mystery to him. Plus, it was just plain fun to tweak Maurice and make him nervous—something Rosalez did with alacrity.

  The rocket was now completely out of Rosalez’s sight and from what he knew of the mission profile, the spacecraft that would soon make him and his company a household name, was about to separate from the rocket and ignite its electric propulsion system so that it could reach the target asteroid on only one tank of fuel.

  As Rosalez gazed wistfully at the rocket plume that was now being dissipated by the winds blowing off the Atlantic Ocean, he noticed out of the corner of his eye that another of his staff was approaching, the only Brit on the team, Jonathan Price. Price was his attorney. Rosalez wouldn’t have ordinarily thought it important to have his personal attorney at the launch site, but this was a far from ordinary day.

  “Monsieur Rosalez, may I have a word with you?” Asked Price, like Maurice, he looked worried. For Price, this was unusual, though not unprecedented.

  “Certainly, Jonathan. Maurice and I were just enjoying the moment. Well, one of us was anyway,” Rosalez replied, hoping that he was overheard by Maurice. He noted that Maurice grunted quietly when he heard the remark, which means he had been overheard.

  “Monsieur Rosalez, now that the rocket is on its way, we need to come clean about what we’re doing.” Price was young and, according to conventional wisdom, might grow into a great attorney someday once he had some experience. Today, however, he sounded a lot like Rosalez’s assistant, Maurice. He wondered if they’d been talking among themselves and quickly dismissed the thought. It didn’t matter. This was not a new issue for Jonathan to raise; it was just an annoying one.

  “Yes, yes, I know. We need to tell the world about our company, the rocket launch and our plan to divert an asteroid so that we can mine it. You’ve been telling me that for years, Jonathan.”

  “Yes, Monsieur Rosalez, I have been saying for years that we need to make our plans public. We’ve followed every applicable law and made sure we’re not violating any space treaty, but nonetheless, we need to let the world know what we’ve done and what we’re about to do. We’re not only launching a rocket into space, but we’re launching a rocket that will alter the trajectory of an asteroid and place it on a near-Earth orbit. That might make a few people more than a little nervous, and if I didn’t know the people in this company and the lengths you’ve gone to make sure this all goes correctly, I would be nervous as well.”

  “Alright, alright already. We’ll issue the press release tonight after the spacecraft successfully starts its engines and is on its way to 2018HM5. I know you’ve already had a chance to review it; are there any last-minute changes we need to make?”

  “None. I’ve been reviewing it almost daily, hoping that you’d go public sooner and I wanted to make sure I was ready when you did. It’s good to go.”

  “I was rather hoping that we could dispense with the boring ‘2018HM5’ moniker and use the name I proposed to the International Astronomical Union. Have you heard from them?”

  “No. Not a word since we submitted the paperwork last March.”

  “No matter, get the press release ready to go and hit send at six o’clock this evening. That way we’ll inform the world of what we’re doing on the same day we launched and began escaping Earth orbit so no one will be able to stop us, especially those tree huggers in Brussels.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Price as he walked away from Rosalez and back toward the air-conditioned control room.

  Rosalez was sweating, yet he didn’t seem to notice it until now. The excitement of seeing the rocket launch and his dreams finally starting to be fulfilled had caused him to totally ignore his own physical discomfort. He resumed speaking, this time to himself, out loud, but without anyone else being close enough to overhear.

  “Sutter’s Mill. I really wanted to be able to call it Sutter’s Mill.” Rosalez was an American history buff. Because of this, he had long ago decided to call the asteroid they were going to mine Sutter’s Mill in honor of the discovery of gold in California’s Sierra Madre mountains near Sutter’s Mill that spawned the gold rush of the 1840s. He, too, dreamed of starting a gold rush of sorts—this time leading to the capability of humanity settling the solar system by tapping the nearly infinite resources of space beyond mother Earth. He’d dreamed of this since he was a kid and was now using his fortune to make it happen.

  Time until Asteroid 2018HM5 “Sutter’s Mill” reaches near Earth: 609 days.

  CHAPTER 6

  Paul Gesling and Bill Stetson were on their final approach to the Space Excursions Nevada spaceport three days after they departed from the Moon. Despite Gesling’s precarious mental state, being extremely preoccupied and worried about his wife’s health after being shot, the flight controllers allowed him to pilot the Dreamscape back to the ground from interplanetary space. Stetson, having trained for most of his career with NASA prior to joining Space Excursions, was on standby to take the stick and land the craft if he or anyone in the control room had been concerned about Gesling’s ability to perform the job. Truth be told, the ship’s autopilot could have controlled the landing without any human input. Machines may not yet have been intelligent, but they were certainly capable of doing jobs like this extremely well.

  The Dreamscape, a reusable winged spacecraft, was able to land at the Nevada facility with little fanfare. Landing and taking off, it resembled a conventional jet airplane. After attaining some altitude, the resemblance to a jet became vanishingly small as the ship’s hypersonic scramjet engines propelled it to several times the speed of sound and the aft rocket engine kicked in to give the ship the final acceleration it needed to attain Earth orbit. On this trip, the Dreamscape arrived on a trajectory from the Moon that shot it directly into the atmosphere, allowing it to use friction to slow down and bleed off energy rapidly. The thermal protection system on the bottom of the craft glowed brightly and created a shell of ionized particles around the vehicle that prevented conventional radio transmissions from working at this critical time. After reaching subsonic speeds, the Dreamscape again resembled an airplane as it made its final approach for landing.

  On schedule, and after the
transition to subsonic, the landing gear on the Dreamscape deployed. Despite his worry and concern for his wife, Paul Gesling was in his element as he controlled the ship in its final moments of flight. The blackness of space was behind them and the beautiful blue of the Earth’s atmosphere was ahead. Below was the eternal brown of the Nevada desert and to both Gesling and Stetson, under the circumstances, it was time to be home.

  Moments later the landing gear made contact with the runway and the Dreamscape was home.

  The irony of his and Stetson’s safe return from the Moon was not lost on Gesling as they rapidly worked through their checklists so they could soon disembark from the Dreamscape and get to the hospital. If anyone had asked who would be at greater risk of death at the beginning to the mission just barely a week before, who would have considered Carolyn to be the one at risk? Everyone thought Paul was the one who would be more likely to die. Everyone, except, of course, the shooter. Gesling had been wondering for days if the police had any leads or had perhaps already captured the shooter.

  The ground crew, led by Hami Kunda, met Stetson and Gesling as they opened the door and came down the stairs that had been rolled up to the front side door of the Dreamscape.

  “Hami, is there any news about my wife or Mr. Childers?” asked Paul as he rushed down the stairs and started walking toward the waiting SUV that he had been told would take him to the hospital to visit his wife for the first time since the shooting. Gesling knew that Hami had been at the scene of the shooting and was thankful that it was he who had been in the ground crew and designated to meet and take him to the airport.