Space For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  “Hi,” Travis says, reaching way over the table to shake Caroline's hand, and his mustard-colored tie falls into a half-empty appletini.

  “I sense I'm needed elsewhere,” Caroline says with a smile, leaving. Travis and Dexter sit down in the now empty booth.

  “Real smooth. You guys are the worst wingmen imaginable,” K says.

  “You gotta help us out man,” Dexter says, “be all like, oh hey ladies, these are my friends, they're astronauts. But no, you act like we're your douchey cousins or something.”

  “You just blew my shot with Caroline Junot,” K says seriously.

  “Who the fuck is that?” Dexter asks.

  “I'll give you a hint, she's from Monaco,” K adds.

  “I don't fucking know anybody from Monaco,” Dexter replies.

  “She's the Duchess of Monaco, she's like third in line to the throne,” K adds.

  “So? Monaco's tiny as shit,” Travis replies. “She's just a piece of ass, what's the big deal, there's plenty of other fish in the sea.”

  “Grace Kelly is her grandmother,” K says. “She's royalty in like four different ways. If you were to start the planet over and had to pick one woman to repopulate the species. You'd pick her.”

  “Her tits are too small, you kidding me?” Dexter asks.

  “They only appear small because they're juxtaposed against a room full of fake tits, trust me, those are like the crown jewels,” K replies.

  “Who is Grace Kelly?” Travis asks.

  “You don't know who Grace Kelly is?” K asks.

  “Sorry, we didn't learn about the royal families of European principalities in astronaut training,” Travis replies.

  “Okay, what if I told you that Amelia Earhart was her grandmother?” K asks.

  “Then I'd say don't let her drive,” Travis replies.

  “Let's get out of here, let's go like backstage or something,” Dexter adds. “You can get us in.”

  “How about you two go ahead and go backstage, I'll join you in a little while,” K replies.

  “Alright,” Dexter and Travis say. They quickly leave in a futile attempt to get backstage. K looks around the suite, searching for Caroline. He walks past Wilke's table and finds Hammersmith, sweating, still trying desperately to sell him.

  “Excuse me,” Hammersmith says, jumping up and grabbing Kingsley.

  “Come back here and close the deal,” Hammersmith says.

  “I've got a better idea,” K replies.

  “What?”

  “I'm gonna sell Radiohead. There's five of them right?”

  “You can't sell Radiohead seats on the first flights,” Hammersmith replies.

  “Why not?” K asks.

  “They're not that rich!” She replies.

  “Who said anything about them paying?” K replies. “I'll offer them a celebrity discount. Free rides, we just need some cool factor. You get them, and the non-famous billionaires will follow.”

  “Free rides? You're trying to book free rides? You're going to give me a brain aneurysm,” Hammersmith replies.

  “If you don't mind, I'm just gonna sit down and wait for Radiohead. If I get them, then Wilke will be all about it.” K takes a seat at the other end of Wilke's table, looking down at the light show of the concert. There are headphones laid out so you can listen to the band. Without the headphones, you wouldn't even know a rock concert was going on. K puts them on and zeroes in on the concert. He grabs one of a dozen pairs of binoculars and starts taking in the concert. Hammersmith taps on his shoulder, trying to bring him back in to the sales-pitch, but he brushes her off. K pulls a titanium cigarette case from the breast pocket of his suit that costs more than most people spend on their cars. He smoothly extracts a cigarette and lights it with a lighter made of real silver.

  “You can't smoke in here,” Hammersmith scolds him, he ignores her. She pulls on his headphones, telling him again, “you can't smoke in here.”

  “It's okay, it's not tobacco,” K replies.

  “You're gonna give me lung cancer,” Hammersmith says.

  “Actually this stuff prevents lung cancer,” K replies, putting his headphones back on. There's a tap on his shoulder, which he ignores. The tapping becomes more insistent. “What!?” K barks, looking over to Hammersmith, except she's not the one doing the tapping. It's Caroline the Duchess of Monaco.

  “You gonna Bogart that all night?” Caroline asks.

  “Sorry, I didn't realize we were in a stoner movie,” K replies. Caroline takes a seat on K's other side. K passes her the marijuana cigarette.

  “I can't bring mine through customs,” Caroline adds.

  “Don't you have diplomatic immunity?” K asks as she takes a puff.

  “They can't lock me up, but they can confiscate it,” Caroline replies as she passes it back. “So you're going to make Thom Yorke the first space tourist on a private space-flight.”

  “That's the plan,” K replies.

  “He'll never do it,” Caroline replies. “He won't even let you get a word in, he'll be too busy lecturing you about the carbon footprint of your private jet.”

  “Just watch, he's a futurist guy, he'll jump at the chance,” K replies. Kingsley and Caroline grow quiet as they pass top-quality weed back and forth and take in the Radiohead concert. Radiohead finishes their set with a rendition of “Karma Police.” Kingsley and Caroline remove their headphones and put down their binoculars.

  “So what are you doing here?” K asks Caroline.

  “Getting Thom to do a fundraiser,” Caroline replies.

  “How about a friendly wager?” K offers.

  “What'd you have in mind?” Caroline asks.

  “If I get Thom to sign up for a space-cation, then I'll let you drive my car,” K replies.

  “Like a test drive?”

  “No, back to my place, tonight,” K replies.

  “And if you don't get him?” Caroline asks with a smirk.

  “Then you just get a ride, but no driving,” K replies.

  “So either way, I'm going back to your place tonight, did I get that right?” Caroline asks.

  “Well, that's a given,” K replies.

  “That's some wager,” Caroline replies.

  “Hey, it's a pretty big deal, I don't let anyone drive that car.”

  “Let's just see how it goes rocket-boy,” Caroline replies as she walks to the door to meet Thom and the rest of the band. Caroline slips in like they're old friends. Kingsley admires her. She's a woman that can sit comfortably with rock stars, billionaires, kings, and presidents. Kingsley waits for an opening to talk to Thom, not wanting to appear anxious. He waits for the welcome to die down. Kingsley sees Thom walking toward the sushi girls. Now's his chance.

  “Get up, both of you,” Thom Yorke says to the fish plates. “It's degrading, don't do that to yourself.” The girls do their jobs, not speaking, not moving, ignoring him.

  “Hey Thom,” Kingsley says, grabbing a piece of yellowtail.

  “Kingsley,” Thom replies, “don't even say a word to me about your rocket thing. Your private jet pumps enough carbon into the atmosphere, now you gotta pollute the planet for rich people to go on vacation?”

  “Oh come on Thom, you could be the first space tourist to ride a commercial rocket. That's a first in the history of the world.”

  “With all the shit happening on this planet, there is no fucking way I'm going to endorse something so vain. Go work on feeding Africa or practical electric cars,” and with that Thom walks away, leaving Kingsley alone by the fish girls.

  “Your tour's carbon footprint is more than my space program's you wanker!”

  “You're not a very good salesman,” a little bird sings in K's ear.

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” K replies.

  “Don't call them tourists, nobody likes being a tourist,” Caroline whispers in his ear. K turns around, finding Caroline already walking away, arm around Thom Yorke, escorting him away and singing in his ear. The open back of her dress is
too much for him. He turns back to the sushi-models, the LA trash. He simply points at each one of them, then nods his head toward the door, telling them to come with him. They don't need any more instruction than that. They hop off their platters, put on robes and follow Kingsley outside. They leave the Staples Center, proceeding past the valet station.

  “Where are we going?” Spicy Tuna asks.

  “I can't valet park my car,” K replies. “Nobody knows how to drive it.”

  “Why?” Yellowtail asks.

  “Because it's one of a kind,” K replies. They walk several blocks, in not such a great neighborhood, until they find K's car. Although it was made at the Tezla factory, it's not really a Tezla car. Kingsley designed it himself. It's in the shape of a fighter-jet cockpit. A fuselage enclosed in a bubble canopy, with four wheels with independent suspensions jutting out from the corners of the streamlined canopy. It looks like an F-16 had sex with a Formula 1 car.

  “What is that?” Spicy Tuna asks.

  “It's one-of-a-kind. I call it the K-mobile.”

  “Is it like, Mercedes, BMW, what is it?” Spicy Tuna persists.

  “I designed it myself, it's not a brand,” K replies.

  “Is it safe?” Yellowtail asks. K stares at her through squinted eyes, pressing a button on his key ring. The clear canopy opens. The girls aren't quite sure how to get in. There's only one seat, and the cockpit is only wide enough to fit one person anyway. K climbs in, sitting back against the one seat. He slides the seat back, leaving room in front of him for the girls to sit, leaning against him. There is no steering wheel, rather there is a joystick on each armrest. K slides the sticks back, getting comfortable as the canopy closes around them. K leans both sticks to the left and the car drives straight to the left, going straight away from the curb and the small parking space. He presses both sticks forward and the car accelerates extremely quickly. The sushi girls gasp with excitement as they are pressed back against K.

  “Just wait,” K says. They come up to an on-ramp. As they start the sweeping turn at high-speed, the whole cockpit leans into the turn like a motorcycle. This movement catches the girls totally off guard. The K zooms out onto the highway and K weaves through traffic. The electric car makes almost no noise, only the sounds of the rubber on the road permeates the cockpit.

  “You know, when I make my space hotel, I'm gonna write the next Kama Sutra. Think of all the undiscovered positions that are possible with six axes of freedom.” Kingsley lays in bed, smoking weed with the fish girls laying on either side of him, exhausted. “Then after that, on the Moonbase, I'm going to write the low-gravity Kama Sutra. In a thousand years, nobody will remember Neil Armstrong or PalPay, but they'll still be using that low-gravity sex manual. That's what I'll be really famous for.”

  “Moonbase?” Yellowtail asks.

  “I'm planning a Moonbase, bet your ass,” Kingsley replies. “The real problem I need to solve is in lowering the cost per pound of getting to orbit. Everyone else is trying to squeeze the weight down, but that's just diminishing returns. The future won't be about making things lighter, it's about making the rockets reusable. That's how you'll get the cost per pound down.”

  “Why would weight matter in space?” Spicy Tuna asks.

  “Sorry, I should say mass,” K corrects himself.

  “What?” Yellowtail asks.

  “Space-travel is all about mass, because, you know F=ma,” K adds.

  “But why would it matter, in space everything's weightless.”

  “You know what, I didn't bring you here to teach you Newtonian physics,” K replies, “just get back to work down there.”

  Dexter Houston and Travis Clayton stand at the door to “Kingsley's Court,” the name of K's mansion. The sun has just barely come up.

  “Ring it again,” Dexter says. Travis hits the doorbell. “Did you hear anything? I didn't hear anything.”

  “Maybe it doesn't work,” Travis says. The door suddenly opens and K stands there with red eyes, having just been rudely awoken.

  “What do you want?” K asks.

  “You're flying us to the Cape today remember?” Travis says.

  “We can't leave until 10,” K replies, letting them in.

  “You have a private jet and a private runway,” Dexter replies.

  “It's not a private runway, there's eight of us that share it, and Travolta's a real bitch about noise,” K replies.

  “What happened to you last night?” Dexter asks. The sushi models emerge from another room, barely dressed.

  “There's cab fare on the counter,” K says to the girls.

  “So that answers that,” Travis replies. The three men proceed to a balcony. There's a hangar in the backyard like some people have a guesthouse or a second garage. A taxi-way connects the hangar to the runway which is a quarter of a mile away, not visible through the trees.

  “What are you doing here so early?” K asks as the three of them sit down. K's butler immediately brings out K's breakfast: bacon, eggs, pancakes, and a Bloody Mary. “You guys want anything?” K asks.

  “We ate McDonald's on the way here,” Travis says, leering at Dexter.

  “Why so damn early?” K asks.

  “We thought we were leaving at 8,” Travis replies.

  “A. we're not, like I said, Greased Lightning over there throws a hissy fit if there's noise between the tens, and B. it's like 7 right now, and C. who told you that?”

  “Hammercock said 8,” Dexter replies, “I'm surprised she's not here already scolding you for all the things.”

  “Well, I think I'll nap during the flight, if you two don't mind flying,” K says.

  “You're gonna let us fly the Bat-Plane?” Travis asks.

  “It doesn't have missiles or anything,” K replies, “I'm not Batman.”

  “Who does the maintenance on this thing?” Dexter Houston asks as the three men enter K's hangar.

  “I thought you guys were in charge of that,” K says. Dexter and Travis shoot him a worried look. “I'm kidding.”

  Kingsley has two planes in the hangar. One is a modified Beechcraft Starship, an eight passenger private jet. The standard Starship has two turboprop pusher engines, that is they are mounted at the rear of the plane rather than the front, and a unique layout with small canards at the front and a swept delta-wing at the rear of the fuselage which houses the engines. Rather than a vertical stabilizer, the Starship has two smaller vertical fins mounted at the ends of the swept delta wing. It's an interesting looking aircraft to be sure. The Starship was made under the Beechcraft banner but was designed with help from Burt Rutan's company Scaled Composites. By placing the engines at the rear, the turbulent air created by the props doesn't interfere with the wings or the fuselage, creating a much smoother ride. The canard/delta configuration makes the plane almost impossible to stall, as the front will stall before the rear. If you were to stall, rather than going nose up and losing more airspeed and thus losing control, the Starship will nose down in a stall, causing it to dive and pick up airspeed. The result is a plane that's quiet, smooth, and very stable. The problem was that the composites that enabled the design to work and be light-weight were also expensive and hard to mass produce, making it more expensive than more conventional planes of similar capability. Years later, Rutan would be the chief designer for Virgin Galactic, and personally designed SpaceShipOne, the first private vehicle to put a man in space.

  Kingsley had saved this Starship from an aircraft boneyard and had the turboprops replaced with jet engines. Basically it's the coolest private passenger jet that exists. Aside from the Starship, the other plane in the hangar is a T-38 Talon, a small fighter jet without weapons. The US Military and NASA use the small and inexpensive T-38 to train pilots on jets before putting them in more expensive military machines and spacecraft. Over a thousand of these two-seaters were built. If you've seen the movie Top Gun, then the T-38 would look familiar to you. The “Migs” in Top Gun were actually F-5s, which are just T-38s with weap
ons systems added. Kingsley bought this T-38 from NASA for $2 million. His only modification was to paint the SpacEx logo over the old NASA logo. He owns two of them. The other is at SpacEx's launch facility in Cape Canaveral.

  As the men approach the Starship, Kingsley hits a button on his keychain, and the door to the plane opens and unfolds a set of stairs. Kingsley climbs aboard first, heading into the back. “Wake me up when we get there,” K says as he disappears into the back of the cabin, putting on noise-canceling headphones and a mask, then reclining like you can only do on your own private jet.

  “Kingsley! Get your arse up!” Hammersmith shouts. K jerks awake, sitting upright. He looks around, finding that his plane is on the ground.

  “What!” K shouts, as he rubs his bloodshot eyes. “We haven't even left yet!”

  “We're already there,” Hammersmith replies.

  “Long night?” Hannah asks, walking along with Kingsley from the SpacEx hangar toward an electric shuttle bus.

  “When did you get here?” K asks as they board the shuttle.

  “I was on the plane,” Hannah replies, staying by his side. “I'm your personal assistant, I go where you go.”

  “Well, personally assist me with some kind of silence.”

  The SpacEx Launch Control Facility is located about ten miles from the launch pads at Cape Canaveral. The Cape is actually an Air Force Base, so locating the LCF inside the base would require any visitor or employee to enter Cape Canaveral Air Force Base, which takes more than a smile. The LCF has a control room with computer stations and large projection screens showing data and videos of the rockets. Behind the control room is a glass room overlooking the control stations where visitors or customers can oversee the launch. Launch Control is in charge of everything until the rocket gets to orbit. They run static engine tests, fill the tanks, test the electronics and avionics, and make sure that everything is working until launch. Once the rocket cuts-out in orbit, control is handed over to Mission Control. Since this is a private SpacEx mission, the rocket will be handed off to SpacEx's Mission Control at Corporate Headquarters in California. In the future, when SpacEx rockets might be delivering commercial satellites or supplies to the International Space Station, then the mission will be handed off to the customer.