Moon For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  “We hire the best person for each position.”

  “And 84% of the time, the person you deem best is a man,” Amber says. “Doesn't that say something about your perceptions?”

  “A. I don't hire everyone, and B. you do realize that we don't get 50% of our applications from women, right? More men major in engineering. I don't know the figure off the top of my head, but I'll bet you that roughly 84% of our applications come from men.”

  “Maybe that's because women don't major in something when they expect to be discriminated against when they apply to jobs.”

  “Wait, so do you think that if there was no discrimination in the workforce, no boys club, then engineering programs would be 50-50 male-female?”

  “You'd still have to get over the gender roles that are forced on us basically from birth.”

  “Okay, let's get rid of that too, suppose we raise kids in gender-neutral worlds, encourage them equally, you think then we'd have a 50-50 male-female split in every major and every job?”

  “More or less, yeah.”

  “So you see any job that's majority male as being evidence of bias and discrimination?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Amber replies.

  “Then what about jobs that are female dominated? Is that evidence of the matriarchy?”

  “You mean like how men don't want to be nurses or dental hygeniests because of the jokes that will be made about them?”

  “How about speech and language pathologists?”

  “What about them?”

  “Well, you see 80% of aerospace engineers being male as proof of the patriarchy. But speech and language pathologists are 95% female. That's not a job like fashion designer or nurse. Are men discouraged from being SLPs because that's women's work? Is there some stereotype about SLPs I'm not aware of. Until I was in college, I had no idea that SLPs were mostly female, so I don't think it's some gender role or a conspiracy by women. So what explains that 95-5 split?”

  “I don't know, what do you think explains the split?”

  “The genders aren't identical. Men and women tend to be interested in subjects to different degrees. Men like engineering. Women like working with children or directly helping people. So when I hear that engineering is a boy's club, all I think is that it's a boy's club because it was mostly boys that showed up. You don't hear a lot of complaining that dental hygienics is a women's world that's not welcoming to men.”

  “Because that's a job that's seen as women's work that men don't want to do.”

  “Okay, fine, but again, I'll go back to SLPs, that's not some crappy job we make the women do. I haven't heard any complaints that SLP college programs discriminate against men, but they're more gender-biased than any other degree, even more so than women's studies.”

  “Who's your friend?” Brittany Hammersmith asks, slightly out of breath, having rushed to interrupt this interview.

  “I'm from Playboy. Miss-”

  “Excuse us,” Hammersmith grabs K and leads him away from the playmate. “Did you set up this interview?”

  “No...”

  “Do you actually know she's from Playboy?”

  “No...”

  “Did it occur to you that she might be undercover, trying to get you to incriminate yourself?”

  “Not until just now,” K replies.

  “You're being sued for sexual harassment and you're doing docking sex jokes to a woman that's recording you. How do you know she's not just doing recon work for the lawsuit?”

  “I don't,” K says. “What should I do?”

  “Just don't say anything interesting,” Hammersmith says. K rejoins Miss October.

  “The mass of the total payload for this first Eagle Heavy comes to 44 tonnes, still well under the 50 tonne payload it's currently rated for. You taking notes?” K asks.

  “Sure.”

  “We expect the payload rating to eventually rise up to at least 55 tonnes in its current configuration before moving to a new upper stage that will boost the payload even further.

  Typically when a new rocket is launched the first few times, they don't put the full payload mass atop it, since the payload numbers are merely theoretical and subject to all kinds of variables. Rocket engines might underperform. The rocket might be less controllable than expected, resulting in a sub-optimal trajectory. If any slight problem arises while you are trying to loft the maximum payload, then you don't make orbit and the payload is lost. If however you have a comfortable margin, then the vehicle can overcome serious problems and still make orbit. We're starting a space station, so we have a small service module, 9 tonnes, the six-way docking node is 6 tonnes, and the 20 tonne BA330 inflatable habitat provides 330 cubic meters of living space. The remaining 9 tonnes come in the form of supplies such as food, water, oxygen, and of course, a space toilet.

  A man-day worth of oxygen, water, and food is about 5 kilograms. So 9 tonnes of food, air, and water would be about 1800 man-days of supplies. NASA puts the figure for a man-day of supplies at .84 kg of oxygen, .62 kg of food, and 3.52 kg of water. We take a more cautious approach and make a man-day equal to 1 kg of oxygen, 1 kg of food, and 4 kg of water, coming to a total of 6 kg. The BA330 will launch with 1500 kg of oxygen, 1200 kg of food, and 4800 kg of water. I figure you would rather have a more comfortable margin of oxygen than of food and water, since you can live for days and weeks without food or water, especially if you recycle urine, but for only a few minutes without oxygen, and an oxygen leak is possible, while a food leak is not very likely. You getting all this?”

  “Fascinating,” she says sarcastically.

  “Well I need to go through here, this is a secure area, I hope you got all you need,” K says as he abruptly leaves her behind and enters a secure area.

  “Where's Miss October?” Seth asks as K heads back to his office. “Did you scare her off?” Seth asks.

  “Tell me things about the F-35,” K says as he reaches Seth's desk.

  “What?”

  “The F-35, I told you to become an expert in it, now I want to know things. So what's the deal, what you got for me?”

  “Right,” Seth says with a blank look on his face.

  “Okay, good work,” K says and continues into his office, looking out his window.

  “I'll give you my favorite fact,” Seth says, following K and reading notes of a tablet. “It's called the F-35 Lightning, but they don't allow it to fly within 25 miles of actual lightning, because they're afraid a lightning strike would ignite the oxygen supply.”

  “That's ironic.”

  “Is that what irony is?” Seth asks. K doesn't respond. “They limit it to 4 Gs because they're afraid the frame will break. It's not allowed over 600 knots, so no going super sonic, because they're afraid the stealthy skin will be damaged.”

  “Is that all you got, I already know all this,” K says, picking up binoculars and searching the parking lot more thoroughly.

  “Is she in the parking lot?” Seth asks.

  “What?”

  “Blonde October,” Seth replies.

  “No,” K replies. “You got anything more for me?”

  “Do you know about the Starfighter?” Seth asks.

  “The F-104?” K asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “I know of it,” K says.

  “The deal of the century?” Seth asks.

  “Go on.”

  “In the '50s, NATO was re-arming after World War II, and wanted to pick a new fighter plane. So there was a huge competition to be selected for this big contract to re-arm West Germany and Japan, but also the Netherlands, Norway, Italy, Greece, Denmark, Belgium, Canada, Spain, basically the NATO countries that don't produce their own planes. The other planes in the competition were the the F-8 Crusader, the F-105 Thunderchief, the Saab Draken, the F-102, the F-106, the SR-177, the English Electric Lightning, the Grumman F11F, something called the N-156, and the. . . Dass. . . Ass-assault Mirage?”

&nb
sp; “That's Dassault, it's French.”

  “So Ass-assault isn't far off,” Seth says.

  “And the N-156 became the Northrop F-5, which is the fighter version of the T-38, which is still used as a trainer and I own two...well one of. But continue.”

  “So basically all these countries are trying out the different planes, taking them on test-drives, and then deciding together which plane to pick. They ended up picking the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. More than 2,500 F-104s were exported, and this all happened after the US Air Force was looking to move away from the F-104. It was the deal of the century, made Lockheed a lot of money,” Seth says.

  “Is that it?” K asks.

  “Well, after Watergate there was a big investigation into Nixon and during this they uncovered some things. Turns out that Lockheed bribed foreign governments to pick their plane. The West German Minister of Defence took more than ten million dollars from Lockheed to pick the F-104. Prince something from the Netherlands took at least a million. They were bribing people all over the place. They were also bribing people to pick the Ell-One-Zero-One-One.”

  “Ell-Ten-Eleven,” K corrects, referring to the L-1011.

  “Whatever,” Seth continues, “they bribed the Italians to buy the C-130. They were even caught paying off a Saudi arms dealer over a hundred million dollars for who knows what. It was a huge scandal that pissed off not only other plane makers, but foreign governments. This then led to congress passing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, because apparently it was perfectly legal to bribe foreigners before this.”

  “You know what the Germans called the F-104?” Kingsley asks.

  “What?”

  “The Widowmaker,” K replies.

  “Why?”

  “It crashed a lot,” K says.

  “Oh, that makes sense,” Seth says. “I read that more than half of the F-104s sold to West Germany were lost in crashes, not shot down, but accidents.”

  “Well of course they weren't shot down,” K adds. “Who would have done the shooting?”

  “I don't know, Germany is in like every war aren't they?”

  “Why did so many crash?” K asks.

  “I could look it up on Wikipedia.”

  “I've got a better idea. How about you see if any of the guys who worked on the design of the F-104 are still alive, and if so, get me in touch with them.”

  “Those guys are all dead,” Seth says, “that thing was designed in the '50s!”

  “And if you were 25 at the time, that was sixty some years ago, you could be 85 or so,” K says.

  “Exactly, they're all dead.”

  “You realize people live past 85 right?” Kingsley asks.

  “But they are senile.”

  “Right.”

  “I found one more thing you might find interesting.”

  “What?” K asks.

  “In Australia, they were getting ready to decide what plane to buy, and a guy from that French company-”

  “Dassault,” K says.

  “Yeah, that, this guy moved to Australia and was going to live there for like five years to be the leader of the butt-sex company's team pitching their plane to Australia. So they were going to be doing reports and studies and showing the cost of the plane, the capabilities, pitching to politicians and military people. He said this was a five year commitment. And when he landed in Sydney, he got in a cab, and on the way to his hotel, on day one of his five years of pitching the ass-assault company's plane, he heard on the radio that the Australian whatever Air Force had picked the F-35. Like they just skipped the bidding process and for some reason the top guys decided to go ahead and buy the Lockheed plane even though it would be like a decade at least before the planes would even come out, so it's not like they were under a deadline. So pretty clearly, at least according to the Dassault guy, sounds like the Australian politicians or whoever makes that decision was bought off.

  “You mean the F-104,” K says. “This was back in the day.”

  “No, F-35. This happened like ten years ago. So it seems to me that in about twenty years it's going to come out that, oh yeah, these guys were bribed. Sounds just like the F-104 thing. There's stuff about it in the German press, there were all these allegations for years, but they couldn't prove anything. This certainly doesn't pass the smell test. I mean, the guy is getting ready to do the proposal and then they pick without even bothering to hear it. Remind you of anything?”

  Chapter 5

  “If this thing blows up, SpacEx is done,” Travis says ominously, standing next to Kingsley in the Horizontal Assembly Building, the hangar not far from the launch pad where SpacEx rockets are put together before being rolled out to the pad and raised to vertical. The first ever Eagle Heavy is coming together in front of their eyes. The payload is hidden behind the fairing, and already mated to the Eagle Upper Stage which would place the station into orbit using it's single vacuum-version of the Arthur engine. At the moment the engineers and technicians are connecting the EUS to the central Eagle 9 core. Once that was done, they would mount the two Eagle 9 boosters to the core.

  “Don't be so dramatic,” K replies.

  “It's true,” Travis reiterates. “You think Justin Timberlake and Robert Downey Jr. are going to watch this thing blow up and then get on the next one?”

  “They won't be getting on the Heavy,” K says dismissively.

  “Like that matters to them.”

  “Bob, the Bigs, how's it going,” K says, as he and Travis walk around the rocket assembly area and find Bob Bigelow staring into space, daydreaming, eyes fixated on the blank white payload fairing obscuring Guinevere.

  “Bob?” K asks, as he stands next to Bigelow without him noticing. “I was like this the first time an Eagle 9 launched,” K adds. “Eagle 1 was just a tiny thing, but that first 9, the first time I saw it in here, getting ready to go into space for real, I was, let's just say I almost cried. Almost. I didn't, but if I weren't so awesome, I would have.”

  “I just hope she works,” Bob says quietly.

  “Oh come on,” Kingsley says, “worst case scenario, the rocket blows up, you launch another one.”

  “Wouldn't the worst case scenario be inflating her and then having it blow-out like a bad tire, killing two celebrities and me?” Travis asks.

  “Come on man,” K replies, “that's his baby.”

  “Sorry.”

  The next day the first Eagle Heavy was rolled out to the pad, raised to vertical and prepared to launch. Kingsley takes a break from Launch Control to head to rooftop VIP viewing area. Hammersmith is trying to entertain most of SpacEx's investors: the Kokes, Peter Wilke, Charles Harding, as well as several potential millionaire customers who might want to stay in the Excalibur. Bob Bigelow is there too, sitting away from the billionaires, again daydreaming.

  “Kingsley!” both Koke brothers demand his presence as soon as he arrives on the roof. The brothers assault Kingsley with questions without giving him a chance to reply.

  “Where's the money from Bigelow for launching this for them?”

  “It's not in the books, when are they paying?”

  “You're not giving launches away for free again are you?”

  “We're not giving the launch away,” K replies. “We're launching our own space station.”

  “What do you mean?” Bill Koke asks.

  “I bought the BA330, that belongs to us.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because we need a space station,” K replies.

  “That's not what he meant,” Bob Koke replies.

  “I meant, why on Earth would you buy the modules instead of just taking over that company?”

  “You're keeping them in business. We could have bought the company, finished the modules, declared bankruptcy, closed it, written off the assets, would have gotten a nice tax write-off out of it.”

  “So when you were asking why they aren't paying, you already knew all ab
out this whole situation,” K says. “See, I care about the workers. You guys would have just screwed over every employee they have. Thrown them on the street with no severance after you got what you wanted out of them.”

  “We could have eliminated a competitor and gotten something we want out of it at the same time.”

  “Bigelow's not a competitor,” K replies. “And you do realize that Mr. Bigelow is right over there right? So when you say things like, we're gonna screw-over all his employees and turn that company into a tax write-off, you're talking about his baby.”

  “Like we care.”

  K walks away, going to sit by Bob Bigelow.

  “You don't need to stand up for me,” Bob says. “I know business is a cutthroat world.”

  “I'm just really pissed off by these capitalist pigs that worship the free-market but then they go try to rig the game to eliminate their competition,” K replies. “They're not very sporting.”

  “Where did you get the money anyway?” Bob asks.

  “Don't worry about it,” K replies.

  “See that makes me worry about it,” Bob replies. “I'm going to need the next payment soon.”

  Media coverage of the launch is intense. Several documentary crews covered the launch and every aspect of it. News people all over the world were poised to report on the launch of the largest payload into Earth orbit since the last Saturn V put Skylab into orbit.

  That's a bit of a deceiving fact. The Space Shuttle payload was around 25 tonnes, well less than the 50+ of the Eagle Heavy, however that payload figure doesn't include the mass of the orbiter itself. The orbiters weighed around 78 tonnes. So all told, at the end of a shuttle launch there was 100+ tonnes of stuff in orbit. But you can't just leave the shuttle in orbit, so the mass of the orbiter itself isn't counted in the payload figures. The same goes for the Russian shuttle, Buran, which flew only once. So if you do look only at payload, no shuttle launch can approach the 44 tonnes that Eagle Heavy 1 would try to put into orbit.