Pillar to the Sky

by William R. Forstchen

  Franklin held up his hand in a friendly calming gesture.

  “Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, we visit the governor of California, which is struggling with deficits, and I single that individual out because I’ve known him for decades, and though politically we might disagree on many an issue, there is one issue we have always seen eye to eye on, and that is space. He even picked up a mocking nickname because of his outspoken support of space exploration. Now, just imagine I first ask him if we could anchor an “energy spoke” to an offshore platform. And then just add that eventually it will deliver not just megawatts but gigawatts of clean, green electricity, making his state a net exporter of electricity … and he can tax it. Dare I suggest we have a governor, two senators, and about fifty members of Congress from the state of California supporting our Pillar and demanding that NASA gets in to lend a hand?”

  There was a moment of silence and then a chuckle and finally applause echoing in the room.

  “That, my friends, is why we need to build Pillar Two.”

  Franklin smiled at Victoria.

  “I am certain Miss Victoria—who will soon be Dr. Morgan, following in the tradition of her parents—could wax for hours about the various potentials, which, my friends, if your souls are only those of hard-nosed investors, will see profit in as well.”

  Victoria smiled, nodded in agreement, and—knowing she had successfully “sold the pitch”—returned to her seat.

  “We have eight more launches planned and paid for to haul additional wire up to geosynch, and that is with the built-in expectation of upwards of two failures at launch,” Franklin continued quickly, shifting back to the hard-core issue of the moment.

  “Two of the missions will be manned, perhaps a third if all the other launches go without a glitch. The next mission, which I pray there is no failure, will loft permanent living and work quarters and supplies to maintain a team of four men and women in geosynch for months. Their primary purpose is to oversee the spinning from the upper level and the deployment of empty reels and equipment up the length of cable beyond geosynch to act as an ever-increasing counter mass. We’re also sending up a manned ‘crawler’ that can go up and down the tower’s entire length for inspection and to clear a problem if a spinner jams.”

  Now there was a stir.

  “Then why the cost of sending a manned team up by rocket?” the investor asked.

  “It is one thing to send up a man or woman on a climb with just enough air and supplies to reach geosynch versus sending them up as a viable workforce. We will still need rockets for that for some time to come to get that tonnage aloft and, yes, at a thousand times the cost. If we have a glitch along the line, I want a manned crawler up there that can much more easily drop down to handle the problem, then return to the manned station or just come back down to earth. It is the economics of energy and time to deal with a problem, particularly in the upper section.”

  He looked about the room. There were no objections.

  “Eventually we can send people and supplies up by a crawler, but for now the additional expense of lofting one up is worth the insurance it provides. Eventually, if for no other purpose than to prove we can do it, we’ll send somebody up.”

  Again the touch of the showman there.

  “And on the day a human does the first ascent, the whole world will be watching.

  “But their real mission is to lay the groundwork for Pillar Two, the real Pillar to Heaven and what Miss Morgan has just outlined for you.”

  He paused and now actually smiled at his audience.

  “Until that pillar behind me can bear the weight, and we have our astronaut crews in place, and Dr. Fuchida starts mass-producing ribbon rather than single strands of thread, the first spools will go up by traditional rocket launch, but after that we are going to use that tower behind me to start hauling the material heavenward, at several tons every three days, to build the next tower. That is why I have put any thought of commercial launches on hold. Absolutely first priority of Pillar use must go to the construction of the second pillar.”

  He pointed back to the first wire again.

  “Without that in place, we are talking somewhere into the hundreds of billion dollars to make our dreams and our future come true of building the truly viable commercial Pillar for energy production and transportation to space. That is why I am asking you to stick with me in this decision.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “If not, vote to disband this effort for I see no other way than the path I, Miss Victoria, and the rest of our team have labored for years to create. You’ll still have Pillar One, you can earn back some of your investment, but it will never be commercially viable, and it will never fulfill the real goal of not just reaching space, but providing limitless energy and saving our planet from environmental disaster as well.

  “If there are no further questions, will someone move to put it to a vote?”

  He fell silent, his gaze sweeping his audience.

  The vote was unanimous to endorse the project, and before the last of those carrying a “blue pass” for access to Aranuka had left, Franklin had another fifty billion pledged. But even that was not enough. And when word hit the press a day later—leaked by someone who had signed the usual oaths of confidentiality but, once home, pulled out his stock from the venture before going to the press—the true uproar and accusations that the entire project was a fraud began. As for those who saw the potential for the ultimate “disruptive technology,” darker thoughts began to form as well.

  14

  In the following eight months, seven of the eight launches went without a hitch. Fortunately the one that did fail four minutes into flight, carried a cargo of wire and the first reels of ribbon but no personnel or crucial supplies. The two manned launches and the launch of the cramped and barely adequate workstation—simply a hollowed-out third stage unit not unlike the old Skylab of the 1970s—were flawless. After six months aloft the first crew rotated out to be replaced by the second team of four, commanded by Miss Selena Singh, now overall flight mission commander for the entire operation. In space, she readily pointed out, what others saw as a minor disability was not a problem at all.

  There was a coronal mass ejection, or CME, a fairly strong one at a G3 intensity that caused the atmosphere to expand for over a week. For whoever was tracking objects in orbit, it was their worst nightmare, because it meant a recalculation for every single object out there, right up to the massive space station and its orbital position. The teams at Kiribati, America, China, the European Space Agency, and Russia at least shared those calculations and doubled-checked each other’s efforts. The International Space Station had to shift several hundred meters to avoid an impact with a long-defunct American weather satellite from the 1970s, and there was a cold-sweat moment when a fragment of a satellite, destroyed by the Chinese some years ago in an antiballistic missile test, had shifted in its orbit and passed less than a dozen meters from the wire, with a velocity relative to the wire of over five miles per second, which would have been a killing blow.

  The Chinese offered some mild apologies while forging ahead with their own planned launch of a wire to be anchored in Indonesia.

  As for the reaction to Franklin’s announcement that the tower was not the real deal, but merely a means to loft up to the geosynch sufficient material to build the “real” tower, at first there was a massive outcry of fraud. The following day, stock in Pillar Inc. plummeted nearly 40 percent, but ironically there were not many sellers other than a few disgruntled individuals, and by the end of the first day of what some feared would be a panic—and Proxley predicted would spell the end of the venture—the stock started to climb back up again and stabilized by the end of the month.

  Gary found it fascinating that Franklin, who, of course, owned 51 percent of the shares and therefore held the controlling interest, seemed nonplussed when on paper he had lost over $20 billion in a single day.

  “Hey, it keeps capit
al gain taxes down for a while, and zero dividends for a long time to come as well” was his phlegmatic response.

  The spinners did their job well. Diameter up to three hundred miles was well over a centimeter, and in the atmosphere over three centimeters. What had been a nearly invisible thread was now a clearly visible presence, though it was a bit unnerving to sit and watch it, to see it ever so slightly shift, and turn in response to the dynamics of forces exerted far above, often thousands of miles away.

  On the ground, the maglev from the island of Tarawa down to Aranuka was progressing rapidly, a good 10 percent of the actual cost of all this so far, not counting the start-up of ribbon product and the launches. A second platform four miles to the east of Aranuka was now under way—the eventual anchor point for the “real” tower, as everyone now called it. The two-track maglev connecting to the airport and shipping terminal at Tarawa would at start-up be handling a thousand or more tons of equipment and hundreds of personnel a day; no one knew what it would do twenty years hence, but Franklin was building it with that exact purpose in mind, unlike the “first” pillar, which he had admitted was but temporary. Everything else being constructed had an air of permanence. His plans for the final “station” where cars would be loaded with supplies and passengers would board for their ascent to the heavens had the look of a massive Gothic cathedral resting on the northeast side of Aranuka with tracks then diverging out to the construction tower and the much-anticipated “ribbon pillar,” as it was increasingly called. By the time the “cars” actually reached the location where the permanent tower would be based, they would have accelerated up to over three hundred miles an hour, giving impetus to their ascent before it even started.

  Victoria’s doctoral dissertation, the design of the “wagon spoke” system of power distribution that would “pipe” energy to anywhere in the Pacific basin, was presenting something of a political and ethical problem. A dissertation was supposed to be open for public scrutiny, but at the same time some things that Victoria was proposing were so revolutionary that Franklin, when queried about her work, simply said that she was a part-time employee taking time off for her graduate work and she was entitled to speculate however she wished as long as it was within the parameters of real science and not science fiction. He put emphasis on the term “science fiction” as if to dismiss his young intern’s efforts, though Gary, Eva, and a select few knew he studied everything she wrote with keen interest, and it seemed as if new start-up companies were popping up out of nowhere and quietly applying for patents on some of the concepts she had mapped out. Victoria was winding up with some rather nice stock options in those companies.

  Franklin had even provided a small grant to Purdue to set up electric vehicle charging stations on campus. No one called it a coincidence that one was in the parking lot next to Victoria’s office on campus, causing more than a little jealousy over the fact that, though still a graduate student and the only grad student to own an electric car, she had a prime parking space only a few feet from the entryway to the electrical engineering building. Such small perks can fuel intense rivalries in graduate programs, especially when the wind chill was twenty below zero. It was obvious that Franklin, who had taken a liking to a gangly sixteen-year-old who had stood up to a U.S. senator, now saw her as the daughter he never had and was grooming her for crucial work ahead.

  “The game is to feed folks often but only a little bit at time,” Franklin said. “When Jack Kennedy first spoke about going to the moon in May 1961, our total flight time in space was under fifteen minutes with a suborbital by Alan Shepard. The goal of going to the moon by the end of the decade, when you thought about it back then, seemed damn near crazy, but then again just perhaps reachable.

  “Suppose instead he had said, ‘We are going to Mars by 1975’? More than a few advisers said the Russians were so far ahead that they would reach the moon well ahead of us and we should aim for Mars instead. But Mars? We could beat them to Mars by 1975. In fact, the technology to go to the moon is 90 percent of the way to go to Mars. It is not a question of distance, as you know, but of lofting power. Three Saturn V launches to low earth orbit could have then assembled a Mars vehicle and sent it on its way. But would the public have bought it?”

  He was right, of course. Kennedy would have been mocked off the stage rather than cheered that day. And, of course, the tragedy was that we could have indeed gone to Mars in another five to ten years after Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin first set foot on the moon, given the technology mastered by Apollo, but the dream of the mission and the goals had been lost by then.

  “We take it one step at a time,” Franklin counseled Gary. “Victoria’s plan will work, the same way as when I first came across the papers you and Eva wrote while still graduate students; even before you completed your dissertations, I knew your idea for a tower would work. But let’s not talk about it just yet.”

  And then a glitch finally occurred, this time a human one.

  One of the four crew members aboard the geosynch station overseeing the spinning process and testing the first segments of ribbon, for lack of a better term, simply “freaked out.” The team up there had signed on for a six-month tour of duty; a couple of Russian crew members aboard the old Mir and the International Space Station had stayed aloft far longer. At a billion dollars a launch for a replacement crew, it was sign on for the long term or someone else would, and there were volunteers aplenty. The long-term effects of zero gravity and cosmic ray and CME exposure in high orbit were a concern. The station did not have upgraded shielding, a major weight and therefore cost factor for the launch, therefore in the event of a major solar storm they would retreat to their reentry vehicle and place the heat shield between them and the sun until the storm abated.

  The launches to start bringing up sections of ribbon, which they would “park” until enough was in place, had started. Short sections were taken out on EVAs to practice deployment, stitching, and laminating, since it was a whole new approach versus the single wire on a drum and then spinners building upon the first wire. As it was, there were now concerns about the effectiveness of spinning and getting the new cables to adhere to the existing ones. The potential problems of laminating and stapling ribbon sections thousands of miles long had to be clarified before tens of billions of dollars more would be spent on assembly and lowering down to the earth’s surface.

  The human crisis, however, put all of that planning on the back burner for the moment. Mission Control in Kiribati had been made aware of the situation on the ground regarding one of their crew member’s family within an hour of the tragedy, and even while Franklin debated what to do and how to convey the information, the news was all over the Internet, which the crew had full access to and unfortunately not blocked in time so that the tragic news could be broken in a gentle civil manner. An astronaut’s wife had been killed in an auto accident, hit by a drunk driver, and one of their five-month-old twins had been killed as well; the other was in critical condition. Singh finally had to sedate the crewman to stop him from popping a hatch to “space” himself, he was so overcome with grief.

  If they used the capsule they rode up in to send him back, it would leave the other three truly stranded for at least three months until their replacement crew was scheduled to be lofted. Singh and the others offered the capsule for their comrade to return home in, more pragmatically to get him off the small station before he harmed himself or, by blowing a hatch, killed all of them. However, the capsule also served as a fallout shelter in the event of a major solar storm, its heat shield blocking out the potentially deadly levels of gamma rays produced by a CME. If the capsule was sent back down, all four crew members would have to return together, and work on the upper end of the Pillar would cease for at least three months.

  There was only one alternative: the small descent pod used on the tower. Sent up by the last launch, it could house one person and was intended to be used to descend the tower to work on a jammed spinner and then re
turn to geosynch, but if necessary it could go all the way back down to the earth’s surface. It had a rocket pack on board to provide deceleration or lift and the first experimental transmission of energy via the super conductive wires woven into the tower. A friction braking system could actually take it all the way back to the earth’s surface. At least that was the theory but it had to be tried out, for to do so would mean that the spinners, which were operating now at several different levels would have to be cleared. So it was still an untested concept.

  Regardless, the following day, after being heavily sedated, the tragic young man who now held the attention of the entire world was bundled aboard the pod, a chamber little bigger than that of an old-fashioned telephone booth, and about the same size as what a Gemini astronaut once had. Audio and video transmission except directly to Kiribati control was cut off as he descended, and in one of those rare moments of global unity, there was understanding for one man’s grief, though those in Mission Control had more than a few tense moments with Franklin and a team of psychiatrists talking him through it, convincing him to remain sedated and in the last twelve hours lying to him that his other son was pulling through just fine. They would break that ultimate tragedy once he was safely back on the ground, knowing with certainty that if given the truth that his other son had died as well he would indeed “space” himself. Franklin and so many throughout the world damned all drunk drivers who had destroyed three lives and the life of the young man returning from space as well, and a communications block had indeed been maintained. More than once after Franklin had linked to the young man, he kept the full reality concealed to encourage him to stick it through the last few hours; once off-line there was not a dry eye in the control room, and even Franklin broke down into tears.

  Three spinners had to be blown clear of the tower to allow the pod to pass, at a cost of a hundred million each, but that did not matter at the moment, in the same way no one ever spoke of the cost involved in saving Apollo 13.