"You thought of all that while we were racing? No wonder you couldn't get over the tree. And those chain ring grinds are hell on your big chain ring by the way. I wish you would quit doing that, because I'm always the one who has to put the new one on." He paused for a second and shook his head. "You are focused, just not on riding," Jim said.
"I can't help it Jim. It was my fault that 'Becca got hurt. I can't put it out of my mind that I could've done something to prevent it."
"It was all our faults, Anson, not yours alone. You want to get it out of your mind for another hour? I know what'll do it." He looked down the trail and put the energy bar wrapper in his pocket. "Two laps the other way before it gets dark." He buckled his helmet and put his sunglasses back on.
"Fine with me. Double or nothing on the beer?"
He nodded and took off. He needed it this time. The other way means going up the "screaming downhill" at the end of each lap. Hills are my specialty. Going up them I mean. Going down them scares the living hell out of me.
We called it a draw. On the last lap we were dead even on the last "whoop" before the big uphill climb. Jim hit a rock just right and went over the handlebars. We were moving fast so I was worried that he was hurt. Jim rolled up on his feet laughing hard as he dusted himself off and wiped the blood from the big scrape on his left elbow.
"Cool!" he said.
"Kids!" I said.
We surveyed the damage to his bike and realized that his front rim was a wavy curve shape like a potato chip.
"Well, you really potato-chipped that one!" I told him. He popped the quick release skewer and took the wheel off the bike. Jim grabbed the wheel at the four and seven o'clock position and commenced to beating the thing against the ground. He rolled it around in his hands about ninety degrees and repeated the process. Finally, he held up a perfectly good wheel and then put it back on his bike.
The first time I saw that trick I thought, Now ain't that the damnedest thing! Since then, I've done it myself a million times. The problem is that the wheel, although back in round, is structurally very weak afterwards. Any good knock would potato-chip it again for sure. So we rode out two-up (again, for you civilians, that's side-by-side) talking about our next step for finding out what happened to 'Becca.
Monday I decided to go about reconstructing 'Becca's accident. That would be the only way to really see what happened. Nevertheless, it had to be done in a controlled manner this time. After a week or so of planning, we rented the huge vacuum chamber over at NASA MSFC. We hired a local alphabet soup contracting firm to help us set up the experiment. Finally, after weeks of trying to recreate the disaster, we did!
Apparently, some sort of chaotic resonance set up between all of the generators. This resonance field shielded the energy coupling system from allowing the energy to bleed off from the Casimir effect spheres. An analogy would be that we were filling up seven hundred little air tanks with a constant inflow of air at infinite pressure with no release valve. Once these tanks reached their stress limit, they exploded. From the sheer nature of the vacuum energy physics, these tanks had quite a large stress limit. I hadn't expected that.
In other words, the Clemons Dumbbells had a constant inflow of energy into them, but they couldn't dissipate that energy fast enough. Final result: they exploded. I calculated that a piece of material smaller than could be seen by the human eye exploded with as much force as an eighth of a stick of dynamite. DARPA gave us more money.
The only slight problem with the new DARPA money is that the program all of the sudden became deeply classified. Security was tightened up and we had to hire security guards to sit at the office around the clock. There were a lot of retroactive security issues that had to be dealt with. I had worked security programs before and had a Secret clearance. God knows how high Tabitha's clearance went. And Jim and 'Becca were cleared from previous programs as well. The others were put on temporary "need to know" company clearances, but they still were only privy to proprietary information. It didn't take but about two months for Al and Sara to be cleared at the Secret level also. Johnny presented documents as proof of his clearance that were passed on to the Defense Security Service. He was cleared at Secret.
For some reason Tabitha put me in for a Top Secret clearance and some other clearance that I had never heard of. She had explained that if things worked out we could find much, much more money in the "black projects." It all sounded cool with me.
After a bit of experimentation and analyses, we figured out just how lucky Rebecca had been. 'Becca was lucky that the thick vacuum glass, the plexiglass shield, a metal enclosure at head level, and the computer at body level were between her and the explosion.
Once we figured out how to recreate the accident we went about figuring out how to prevent it. That was hard. We determined that it was very easy to set up the chaotic resonant field and very hard to dampen it. One of the subcontractors had the idea of designing each individual collector in an orientation that would cancel out the effect of the next one. Then we could construct them in stable pairs. This worked. I put Sara to working with 'Becca on this. 'Becca still needed another hand. Her bronchitis was acting up and you could tell it was wearing her down.
Finally, we were back on track for building the warp drive experiment flight demonstrator. We left the setup in the NASA MSFC facility with hopes that we would soon be building a very big Casimir effect energy collector.
All of this time I had been giving Tabitha and Al the possible spacecraft requirements and general dimensions. The two of them began solid model simulations and finite element analysis of the concept vehicle. They also contracted out a lot of the work to some local shops.
The architecture of the spacecraft started out as empty boxes on the whiteboard with names of spacecraft components written in them. Then we expanded each box and filled it with larger boxes. It turns out that Tabitha is a super genius with systems integration and solid modeling for spacecraft design. Al is pretty sharp, himself. The two of them together were amazing and accomplished some of the best spacecraft engineering I had ever seen.
The problem wasn't the design or complexity, but the sheer size. The size of the damn thing kept growing. Sometime in November we decided that the only way to get the thing in orbit would be to either build it there or take it up on the Shuttle. Expendable Launch Vehicles (ELVs) were just not big enough. Tabitha called me after they figured this out.
"How much do you weigh?" she asked.
"Why?"
"So I can account for it in the mass budget for the mission."
"Hunh?" was the wittiest thing I could think of.
"Well, somebody has to deploy this damn thing. It ought to be the guy that invented it? Besides, there is budget now for a payload specialist." I could hear her smiling through the phone.
I tried and tried, I really came close, but in the end, I failed to shit a gold brick, which I said I would do if I ever made it to be an astronaut. It had never dawned on me that somebody might have to deploy this thing from the Space Shuttle. I always had envisioned some sort of ELV. To tell the truth, I expected to be about ninety by the time we ever figured out how to do the experiment, for sure not going on forty-two.
"What about you?" I asked Tabitha.
"Nope. I plan to be flying the Shuttle on NASA's dime," she said. You see, payload specialists aren't NASA employees and a company pays for their training and their ride. Taking me was a smart idea on Tabitha's behalf. Now both Tabitha and I could be there for the test.
"I love you!" I told her.
"I know." She laughed. Solo and Leia thoughts popped in my head. I'm sure she'd planned it that way.
We ended up hiring another subcontractor firm to help us with the spacecraft bus and the systems engineering and integration for the demonstrator. You would absolutely not believe the amount of paperwork required just to get something on board the Space Shuttle. It almost seemed like we would invent a better access to space vehicle before we had the dang thi
ng qualified to fly in the Shuttle. It might have been easier to wait for the second generation reusable launch vehicle (2nd Gen RLV) being constructed via the Shuttle Replacement Initiative. However, that thing was falling behind schedule and over budget. After all, Congress changes its mind on funding for that program on a daily basis. In addition, it would have to be tested for a few years before payloads were put on it. It just wouldn't be ready in time. So, Space Shuttle it had to be.
First, we had to demonstrate that we could completely control the warp field and the energy systems working as one system in the environment chamber at NASA MSFC. That was a scaled experiment. The fact that all of this was now classified slowed down some of the progress due to security, but it sped up the process due to processes that could be sidestepped. Then we constructed the full-scale experiment: not actually warping just powering up to the available power level in the chamber, then down. Even though the power level for the warp field was at fractions of that required to actually drive the warp for an object the size of a spacecraft, the stress on the field coils were still tremendous. We couldn't figure out how with modern materials to support such huge stresses as would be caused by a full-scale warp bubble. A full-up test on the ground was out of the question. Besides, the power supply wasn't complete yet.
Once as much of the full-up tests as possible were complete, we had to start integrating all of these components into a spacecraft. This part was complicated. Everything we used on the spacecraft had to have been spaceflight proven in some fashion or the other down to the last nut, washer, and bolt. This is where I relied on the experience of Huntsville, Alabama. There were a couple of local firms that could do this integration properly and at the right security levels. We ended up choosing the same company that built the lunar rovers forty years ago. The sheer size of this development project had grown to hundreds of people and millions of dollars. My program management skills were being pushed to their limits. I relied heavily on Tabitha.
By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, the scaled tests were almost complete. Rebecca was basically back to her old self again, although she was now four months behind on her black belt quest. The only scar that remained, after the laser treatments, was a hair-thin ring around her left ring finger. The engagement ring that Jim gave her on her birthday (October second), covered that up nicely.
Finally, Rebecca and Sara had started on the actual flight hardware pieces for the energy collector. This was going to take a while. It took them about a day to grow the prototype element, which was a ten-centimeter by ten-centimeter wafer with four hundred layers in it. Each layer is four thousandths of a centimeter thick. The final system will have to be a rectangular solid about three meters by three meters by nine meters. We chose these dimensions so it would fit in the Space Shuttle payload bay, which is about four meters by four meters by eighteen meters. Effectively we're building three cubes three meters on a side and connecting them linearly. At the rate it took us to actually build the microscopic prototype it would have taken about twenty two thousand years to make the three cubes.
'Becca and Sara hooked up with one of Sara's friends who works at a local printed circuit board company. They make tens of thousands of computer motherboards a day. By Christmas they had set up the first automated assembly line process to construct Clemons Dumbbell etched boards. The first few weeks were dismal failures and the assembly line was constantly shutting down or failing in some manner. Worst of all, 'Becca found that the quality of the products they had made didn't meet specs. She had to explain to them the severe catastrophic possibilities of Clemons Dumbbells not built to spec. She told then the horror story of having her finger blown off and embellished it very well. Years of being around a lying scoundrel like me paid off.
Sara worked that company over pretty good until they produced a line of to-spec products. They managed to get a final line output of about eighteen thousand boards a day with about five and a half of a percent quality control. This meant that we had to throw away about a thousand boards a day. That leaves us with seventeen thousand boards in a day. This meant that nearly a half a million boards are just thrown in the recycle bin. We all considered the problem, but just didn't have the manpower or the resources to worry with that little amount of quality control. Each board cost about a dollar to make. So the final cost of the cube would be about eight million dollars plus the half million plus that we have to throw away. It would've taken at least a half million dollars in man-hours to figure out how to reduce the quality error.
'Becca was about to make the wrong decision and spend some money to fix the problem. I would like to say that I caught the mistake. But it was Johnny that figured out that it would be better just to bite the bullet on this one. It was a good call. Johnny had spent all those years on construction jobs learning how best to use resources. It's easier for a contractor to throw away a half of a two-by-four that cost three dollars than it is to spend an hour of labor at ten dollars an hour trying to find a use for it.
Our biggest issue with the energy collection cubes, or ECCs, was safety. All of the bad boards have the potential of building up explosives energies. Sara figured out that a very high electric discharge through a board would basically weld the concentric spheres to each other and short out the circuit. This rendered the Clemons Dumbbells into a smoking pile. 'Becca pointed out to her the following very important information.
"Electrical Technicians Corollary Number One: Electronics runs on smoke. Once the smoke is removed from them, they will no longer function properly." Using this corollary, Sara could then conclude that the boards would no longer operate as an ECC subcomponent.
We thought there was an error in this corollary once when a recycle bin exploded and blew a hole in the storage room wall into the adjacent ladies room. The niece of the company president happened to be in there at the time. She was okay, but messy, wet, and scared and . . . no, wait a minute, she was really messy.
After investigating the accident (ha! pardon the pun) Sara and 'Becca found that that board hadn't been shorted out (Sara likes to say "electrocuted").
'Becca started in on the vice president of the company.
"You may be able to get away with a half million bad boards a year." She stopped and took a hit off of her albuterol inhaler. She caught her breath and continued, "But you can absolutely not get away with one single board not being shorted out! Ever!"
Had OSHA ever gotten wind of what we were doing, there would've been hell to pay. Fortunately, all of this effort operated under the DARPA money and everyone working on it was under at least a Secret clearance. The person who had made the mistake of not shorting out the board was fired, probably because of the company president's niece.
'Becca and Sara kept the ECC effort running smoothly from then on. We expected to have the ECCs delivered in a little less than a year and a half. Jim, Al, and I were working the spacecraft design while Tabitha and I were working the mission plan. The spacecraft was coming along pretty good. The problem was that we couldn't figure out how to put the warp field generator or WFG on top of the ECCs and it fit in the Space Shuttle payload bay.
"Then there is the problem with the bus, the C and DH systems, the ACS, and the comm systems. Where do they go?" Al was fairly frantic by now.
"What if we distribute all of that around the ECCs?" Jim said.
I put in my two cents. "I don't know about you guys but I think that would create a whole new research program for distributed spacecraft systems." I decided we needed an expert's opinion. "Tabitha! Hey, Tabitha, you got a sec?" I yelled down the hall.
She put her head in the door. "What's up!"
"We still can't figure out where to put all of the systems. I mean, we finished the WFG a month ago but have no idea how to attach it to the ECCs and get it in the Shuttle," Jim told her.
"Much less the other systems." Al added.
"So don't attach them," she replied and turned back toward her office. "Haven't you guys ever heard of EVAs? Sheesh. W
hat do y'all do in here all day anyway? Anson, you didn't think you were just going along for the ride did you?" She said this very sarcastically as she went back down the hall. We just looked at each other with our chins on the table.
"Okay, is it just me, or does everybody else feel really stupid about now?" Jim asked.
"Don't beat yourselves up. She practically built the last few modules of the ISS on extravehicular activities herself. It was very obvious to her what to do." I laughed. "Amazing," I added as I shook my head back and forth.
The main design problems were finally worked out. We would build the thing on orbit from three subsections. The subsections consisted of the warp field generator, the energy collection cubes, and the spacecraft bus. We bought a bus from one of the commercial spacecraft bus manufacturers and then tailored it to our specific needs. We decided to separate the three ECCs by one hundred twenty degrees and place the WFG in the center. The WFG would be encased in a cylindrical composite container about one meter in diameter and about three meters long. We then decided to suspend the ECCs from the WFG cylinder by support booms. Attached to one end of the WFG cylinder will be the spacecraft bus. The communications antenna attached to the outside of the bus will deploy to one meter in diameter once the spacecraft is powered up. The attitude control system (ACS) and the other science instruments all will be packaged in a cube-shaped container at the base of the rectangular-shaped bus. Two small spherical pressure tanks were added on each side of the science box to house the fuel and oxidizer for the ACS. Small arcjet thrusters were then placed all around the spacecraft. The final design was in three easy to snap together chunks.
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