Pillar to the Sky

by William R. Forstchen

  The control room on the floating platform, positioned a mile south of the island of Aranuka, was minuscule compared to the once sprawling complex at Houston where hundreds of tech heads and engineers had monitored the Apollo launches. The team numbered fewer than fifty at that moment. If all the dreams came true, it would one day house more than a thousand monitoring the daily operations of the Pillar and its construction.

  Victoria looked back at her father, who was seated near Franklin: his gaze still fixed on his monitor, he did not even look up while applause and self-congratulatory backslapping resounded in the room.

  It had been a tense five days. Not since the days of the old Gemini Program, when Gemini 7 and then Gemini 6 had been launched within a few days of each other to achieve the first “rendezvous” in space, had there been such a launch. It had actually required two launches. First up was the precious payload of “wire,” 40,000 miles of it. And now the manned crew of three to oversee that deployment, two men and one woman, in the first private venture—or, for that matter, any venture—to geosynch orbit.

  If all went precisely to plan, they would just spend the next two weeks relaxing inside their “Spam-in-a-can” capsule, monitoring the reels as they deployed the wire down to the earth’s surface. The design was simple and yet stunning, actually drawing upon the early attempts at laying a 3,000-mile-long transoceanic cable 160 years earlier. The wire was wound on to two drums. The “counterweight wire” would climb up out of geosynch, extending outward 13,000 miles to act as the weight balance. The second drum which the manned capsule was docked to would actually remain at geosynch, its end attached to a “descent thruster,” which, starting with a low thrust burn, would begin to pull 23,000 miles of wire off the second drum, guiding it down to the platform at Kiribati.

  Eva, Gary, and the entire team had been worn to exhaustion working out this plan. The one ascending, to act as a counterweight, was not so crucial. If jammed, they would just leave it in place for the time being and worry about it later.

  The trick, the real trick—what the entire operation now hinged on—was anchoring the first wire in place. They would have only one shot at it; it had to go flawlessly. Thus Gary’s proposal that the deployment drum be kept at geosynch, with the astronaut crew just a few meters away, while a thruster pack, with the end of the wire attached to it, did the descent, the drum unrolling the wire out at two hundred kilometers per hour.

  There were hundreds of questions to be answered, calculations to be made, the matter of how to counteract the torque of the drum spinning out wire, and the incredibly complex problem of actually guiding the wire down to a fixed point on earth. Eva’s analogy that it was like trying to toss out a thread so that the end would go perfectly through the eye of a needle 23,000 miles away was apt.

  For the entire operation, this was the crucial moment. In private Franklin had made it clear to his inner circle that, just like the high-risk Curiosity mission to Mars, they had one chance and one chance only to get it right and, like Curiosity, must do so with technologies never actually tested in space before. If the descent thruster system didn’t work, if the drum deploying the wire down jammed up, if the tensile strength of this first wire was exceeded—a hundred other ifs—they were finished. Opponents were just praying for a screwup to jump on, and his network of investors had been stretched to the limit and would fall away if this one failed.

  To the public Franklin still spoke with great enthusiasm, as any leader should and must at such times. He asked them to try to imagine Eisenhower, on the day before the invasion to Normandy, telling the troops they stood a 50 percent chance of failure and they would all die, or the very real number predicted by some that Armstrong and Aldrin had only an even chance of actually landing on the moon and returning safely to earth. It was known by some, but at such moments belief in victory had to transcend fears or no dream would ever be achieved.

  On a very personal level, the frightening part that had everyone on edge was that if there were problems with the drum and extra-vehicular activity was required to get it functioning or perhaps to untangle a snag, they would be working with a wire strand two millimeters in diameter, all but invisible. If it even brushed against their EVA space suits, it could slice them open like a hot knife through butter. Of course, there were emergency backups: for example, one astronaut would do the repair work while a second hovered back by their primary vehicle, and each would carry an emergency patch kit to slap over a tear in a space suit. The real nightmare was a break in a cable that somehow looped around the manned unit. It would cut through the titanium body, and if it sliced into the service module aft that held their oxygen and fuel, there would not even be a whisper of a chance of getting home. And it would be one hell of an explosion.

  It was the riskiest manned mission ever attempted.

  The other completely untested unit was the descent thruster, which took up over a third of the weight of the entire vehicle lofted to geosynch orbit. The end of the first spool of wire was already attached to it. The two tons of the descent thrust was mostly fuel. The orbital dynamics were insanely complex, but if all went according to plan, 220 hours after deployment the thruster would enter the upper atmosphere. That would indeed be the hairy part, as Franklin put it.

  The last 100,000 feet would be the toughest. There had been talk of a high-flying aircraft snagging it, bringing the entire unit down, and releasing it above the anchor point, or even somehow transferring it to some kind of helicopter with a vast bay aft of its rotors that would drag it down to the platform. It was Gary who vetoed all of it, saying that if they could trust the thruster to bring the wire in 99.9 percent of the way, then they shouldn’t make things more complex but should trust it for the last twenty miles. Besides, to try to snag an out-of-control thruster and wire would be a suicidal gesture. The thruster had to bring the wire in.

  The world was startled by the realization of what this plan really meant. Nearly everyone assumed that Franklin’s Folly would be built from the ground up—that first a huge tower, kilometers high, would be constructed and a cable anchored to it would be carried aloft into space, then other rockets would carry it farther.

  Absurd. Better to use gravity itself to build the Pillar from the top down. Start at geosynch, then simply lower the cable, though the word “simply” was very much an exaggeration.

  The crew set up basic housekeeping, prepping up so that at any moment one of them could go EVA. Then with the entire team in space and on earth taking a collective deep breath, Franklin ordered for the deployment to begin.

  The drum carrying the wire up beyond geosynch began its ascent, while at the exact same instant the thruster, with the wire from the second drum attached, fired up for a short burst of six seconds, and the wire attached to it started to play out—silently, of course, in the vacuum of space. It was soon unspooling at the full speed of almost two hundred kilometers of wire an hour, following a complex trajectory downward, with timed stops of the thruster to allow a certain amount of slack to spin out from the drum, the slack providing reserve time if a snag should develop; the snag would then be untangled before too much tension built up on the wire. In fact, the wire was nearly a thousand miles longer than necessary, to provide for that slack; it could be taken in later once the end was firmly anchored to the ground.

  The calculation of this had been a magnificent venture into the unknown that had given Gary and Eva many a sleepless night. The influence of solar wind on the strand, or a collision with debris, a functional satellite, or even an untrackable meteor the size of a pebble, could end it all. Once locked in place, perhaps better calculations could be made, but at this stage the variables changed second by second as the wire spun out and down. And the tough one: the tug thruster, as it was now being called. When it fired up, it was indeed towing a wire thousands of miles long, but the longer the cable, the more time it would take until the tensile stress reached the deployment reels. If that stress was too great, it would pull the entire unit ou
t of position; if there was not enough, the wire spinning off the reels would just float and coil, and if it ever wrapped around the manned module or the deployment unit itself, it would probably destroy it.

  Those on the ground, even when ordered in a four-hour rotation to sleep, could barely rest, the tension was so high. Franklin looked as if he had aged ten years in the last two weeks, and of the members of the ever-present media—many of whom were cheering the team on in the tradition of Walter Cronkite and CBS—more than a few were the kind who just waited for a disaster to occur so they could breathlessly report the end to this project, with plenty of “investigations” to follow.

  For nearly two hundred hours, all went flawlessly. The counterweight drum rolled out nearly 16,000 of its intended 17,000 miles before jamming. But that was more than sufficient for the present. Everything was riding on the next twenty-four hours as the thruster, zeroing in on its anchor point, would do the final burns that would drop it into the atmosphere and guide it to the platform off of Aranuka and thus lock the first thread in place. The game was at its most complex moment, guiding descent, but the closer to earth, the stronger the gravitational pull, so at times it had to fire extended counterburns to keep velocity down.

  With twenty-one hours to go, the reason for investing billions in putting three astronauts up to geosynch finally arrived. The drum began to jam up, a nearly invisible strand of wire overlapping, tangling on the drum, and in under a minute it had stopped unwinding. Fortunately the clutch design prevented an instantaneous stoppage, which would have snapped the wire, though it did “backspin” onto the drum for several hundred revolutions. Only human hands could sort out the tangle, and in less than ninety minutes, when by the immutable laws of orbital mechanics the thruster had to fire up again if they were to drop straight in on the platform at Kiribati, rather than come smashing down somewhere in the Pacific or even Brazil.

  As Selena Singh was opening the airlock, she paused for a few seconds.

  If I have but one more flight in life, this is it, she thought. Far, far below was earth, its face fully illuminated by the sun behind her shoulder, the glorious blue-green sphere … and her first thought was that they needed to send up someone like Ray Bradbury or Richard Bach to really tell the rest of humanity of the beauty and wonder of it all.

  The mission was indeed forgotten for a brief moment as she took in the glorious splendor of it all, the brilliant sphere that contained the entire world she knew; to its right, beginning to rise, a quarter moon, the reflected light so brilliant she immediately snapped down her polarized filter, regretting she had to; she had so dreamed of just seeing a sea of stars.

  The mission. Focus on the mission. You can take a few minutes to play tourist after it’s over.

  She had one of the new, smaller thruster packs on her back; there was no way they could have fitted the full-size units carried on board the old shuttles and the space station. Besides, they were docked to the deployment reel platform, and she elected to use the handholds to pull herself over while telling her backup, Kevin Malady, to fire up the high-intensity lights. Someone had come up with the simple idea of actually putting a dab of reflective paint on the wire at one-meter intervals. That caused intense debate, as it was calculated to add over two hundred kilos to the total weight, and there was speculation on whether the paint would even adhere in the vacuum of space or else flake off, perhaps jamming up the whole works.

  In the wonderful days of NASA such things would have been tested and retested before ever being used. But not now, not on this project, for which Singh was being paid half a million a year for this moment—to risk her life—and to dedicate an entire flight just to testing dabs of paint would delay everything yet again and cost millions.

  Singh knew her heart and breathing rates were being monitored, as they should be for all EVAs, and it annoyed her. As she approached the reel, of course she was scared. It looked as if the paint had flecked off as predicted. Wherever the hell the cable was, it was hard to discern.

  She flipped up her polarizing sun shield and now she could see it, the brilliant sunlight glinting off the cable.

  “I can see it!” she exclaimed. “Up here in this sunlight I can actually see the wire. It is like a string of diamonds!”

  She looked to her left. The string of diamonds, as she had called it, snaked off, down toward earth. There was no tension to it; it was loose, slack, like a rope drifting on a slow-moving river.

  “MB One, Kiribati, we have initiated renewed thrust. That line will begin to tense out in under thirty minutes.”

  “Kiribati, Singh. You must have it cleared before then.”

  She switched on the high-intensity lights mounted to her helmet and could easily see the problem: the overlay in the wire on the reel, which threatened to snag when renewed tension snaked up the line from the thruster unit now closing in on the earth’s surface.

  It meant going inside the open pod bay of the deployment unit, being careful not to brush against the diamond-like wire, and then, by hand, gently move the wire, which was nearly wrapped around the guide spindle. It reminded her, of all things, of a tangled reel of fishing line when she was a little girl, crying while her brother was reeling in a big catch, and how her loving father untangled the mess and then showed her how to cast her line back out without it tangling.

  She braced herself with her right hand on a handhold built into the spindle deployment unit, careful not to let her legs touch the lose wire coiling about.

  “Singh, Kiribati. Thruster has fired again; watch your time.”

  The spindle guide was the first thing she had to focus on. It had jammed in place, and she caught glimpses of the wire: it had slackened for an instant, then coiled around the spindle guide, triggering the drum to stop deployment; but while slowing down the wire had “back tangled” exactly the way it would on a fishing reel.

  “Kiribati, Singh. We have a back snag on the drum; you should be able to see it with my helmet camera. I will clear the spindle first, then manually work the snag off the drum.”

  Ever so gingerly she took hold of the wire. Her gloves, which cost over a million dollars a pair, were coated with the same material as the wire; otherwise they would be sliced open as she carefully worked the tangle clear. It was a simple enough operation, only taking several minutes. The billion dollars spent to put her there had just paid off. If they had gone with the original idea of actually lowering the drum, without manned back up it would have been the end of the entire program.

  The next step was to clear the back tangle. Using a computer control strapped to her forearm, she activated the reverse on the drum. The back snag started to play out, and she gingerly took hold of the wire, guiding it out, pulling it clear, and letting it drift out behind her. Checking the chronometer in her heads-up display, she could see that time was running short; but the back tangle was just about cleared and in two minutes the drum would start spinning again, feeding out more line as the thruster, 22,000 miles below, continued its descent.

  It was finally cleared, and with a sigh she carefully backed away from inside the drum.

  “Kiribati, Singh. We’re cleared.”

  “Singh. Exceptional work!” It was Franklin rather than Mission Control.

  She could actually see the wire going tense, the reel beginning to rotate, within seconds spinning up to a blur, the spindle that guided the wire deployment effortlessly moving back and forth the same way spindles had moved in spinning mills two hundred years ago.

  “Kiribati, Singh. All is nominal. Returning to MB One.”

  “Singh, Kiribati. Incredible work. You earned your pay today.”

  But as she let go of the handhold to reach out to the capsule, the movement caused a slight torque effect, making her feet rise up. It was one thing to practice on the ground, or even in a water tank to simulate weightlessness, but out here there was no volume and mass of water to prevent her feet from rising.

  Singh’s left foot brushed against the wire
behind her, which was again spinning out at over one hundred miles an hour. All the talk about a red-hot knife slicing though butter was true. Carbon-60 nanotubing in a two-millimeter strand was far more dangerous than a string of razor blades unreeling at the same speed. In less than a second the wire had sliced through Singh’s boot, tissue, tendons, and bones, entirely severing three toes and finishing the job by cutting clean through the sole of the boot.

  Kevin Malady, her backup for the EVA, reacted before Singh could even cry out. He saw the toe of her boot being sliced off, the surreal pattern made by liquid, blood, spilling into the vacuum and near-absolute-zero temperature of space. Pushing off the side of MB One, he grabbed hold of her within seconds, making sure his own legs cleared the wire spinning out.

  The radio chatter now was overwhelming, between Singh’s gasp of pain, the call from Kiribati asking what happened, and the doctor monitoring her vitals in the control room shouting that something had gone wrong.

  Kevin already had the emergency patch out and was pulling off the cover that exposed the adhesive surface. It was awkward: the patch had been designed to be used when an astronaut lost fingers or sliced open his or her space suit … but not this.

  While holding Singh with one arm, he opened the packet containing the patch and slapped it over the cut-open boot. It would not be the wound that killed her in the next thirty seconds; it would be depressurization as a result of the hole in her suit. As the suit decompressed, it would not be like all the ridiculous movies of decades past in which bodies exploded. Hopefully the pressure cuffs positioned above the knees and elbows would activate, but even then, exposed to space, she could lose her leg from the knee down. If the cuff didn’t fully activate, she would just simply depressurize, the last breath of air sucked out of her lungs. They had been trained in such an event to keep exhaling, otherwise the imbalance of external and internal pressure would actually cause their lungs to fatally rupture even if they could be hauled back into a pressurized environment.