“Oh, thank you!”
Their dinner arrived and Ell and Phil fell to eating. Ell asked, “So how long is your astronaut training?”
He rolled his eyes, “Just the basic training alone is a couple of years. Once you finish basic you hope to get assigned to a mission and then have to train for that particular mission for a while before there’s even a chance you can go up.”
“So you aren’t going to be coming back to Earth and your legions of ‘googly eyed girls’ for quite a while yet?” Ell grinned at him.
“I thought you promised to be my googly eyed girl?”
“You bet! You let me know when you get a long weekend and I’ll even come visit you in Houston.”
“Really? That’d be cool.” Phil felt a surge of delight at the thought that she’d be willing to do that. He leaned forward, “What I’m really hoping is that things might loosen up in the astronaut business.”
Ell frowned and tilted her head, “How come?”
“Well I’m sure you heard about the trouble the Space Station was in?”
Ell nodded and bit her lip.
“I was down in Houston for a briefing/orientation last week and everyone was excited about some kind of ‘new technology’ that was used during the rescue of the Station. It’s all really top secret right now but the rumor is that it might make it easier to get into space!” Phil leaned back and raised his eyebrows.
Ell released her lip from between her teeth and said, “Oh! That would be really cool huh?”
“Yeah! Maybe I’ll get to go up sooner? Of course, astronauts wouldn’t be so rare then and I’d have to share my legion of googly eyed girls with all those other astronauts.”
Ell slapped his shoulder, “What about girl astronauts? Do they get googly eyed boys to chase them around?”
Phil’s eyes widened, “Oh no, no, no. Boys are intimidated by intrepid girl astronauts.”
Ell laughed, “I guess I won’t apply then.”
After their dinner Phil took her to downtown Chapel Hill and had his car drop them off at UNC’s “Old Well.” The evening was pleasant and he sat beside her on the bench in front of the landmark. After a moment he turned to her and said, “I thought we should return to the scene of my crime so I could apologize again for the way I acted that day we first met four or five years ago.”
Ell grinned at him, “Hey I forgave you for that years ago… I think… long before you forgave yourself.”
“Well that’d certainly be true, since I still haven’t forgiven myself.”
She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “I was hoping you’d brought me back here to have another try at getting that kiss?”
He grinned, “Well, I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that had crossed my mind.”
She reached up and cupped the back of his neck, pulling him down to her…
***
Clarkson knocked on Dennison’s door again. Once inside he held out his AI’s jack to remind Dennison to unjack his. “One of our guys at NASA says he’s pretty sure the rocket was actually launched by that company in North Carolina, ‘D5Resarch.’ He’s the only one of our people at NASA who has any clue. Doesn’t seem possible because they don’t have any contracts to launch from Canaveral or any other launch facilities, but that’s what he claims. Rumor has it that they have some new tech that lets them launch small rockets to orbit! The theory is that they are small enough that they don’t show up much on space watching radar. Maybe they send them up to high altitude with balloons or something?” Clarkson shrugged.
Dennison looked like he had indigestion, “Get Phelps after them. Hire some of their people, buy the tech, buy the company, whatever. Just make sure we wind up in control. Whoever they are, they are not going to cut ILX out of its own business! Tell our people at NASA to do what they can to stonewall them for now.”
***
Ell looked around at her D5R group. “OK, who wants to go first?”
Braun put a hand up and said, “We’ve placed rush orders with GE for the construction of D3 type rocket motors with surrounding water shrouds. They’ve got experience working with the alloys we want for our nozzles though one of their engineers has repeatedly told me that the cooling shroud around the nozzle is a dumb idea. He’s patiently explained how I should run the propellant through the nozzle walls to cool them instead. I get the impression he thinks he’s working with a complete idiot, but I’ve just told him he has to build it my way.”
Ell grinned at him, “Seems like I remember someone talking to me that way when he first came to work here.”
Braun sheepishly mumbled, “Yeah, that guy was a complete idiot.”
“What about a fuselage?”
“I gave it a lot of thought and we’re going to order a used Lear Jet, assuming the budget’s up to it. We’ll remove the engines and install rockets. The nose has radar built in, a cockpit for our eventual astronauts, though we’ll need to brace the chairs, and a comm section that already meets FAA standards.”
Ell frowned, “Will it hold up to the vacuum out there in space?”
“Hah! Caught you thinking old school! If it leaks, we just pump more air into it through a port.”
It was Ell’s turn to look sheepish.
Braun shrugged, “But it should be pretty airtight, Lear jets are pressurized to fly at high altitude and so they have to be fairly airtight. Of course, they do leak some at altitude but they just pump in more air. I’m planning to do some leak testing and tighten it up before we send it up. But, if you think about it we actually do want it to leak some because replacing losses with fresh air simplifies our problems. That way we won’t have to scrub out the carbon dioxide and put in new oxygen etc.”
“What about heating during liftoff and reentry?”
“We just ‘fly’ it up to altitude so it doesn’t heat so much going through the dense air down low. Then we ‘retro’ it down rather than aerobraking so it doesn’t heat so much on the way down.”
“Sounds good, are there other problems?”
“Oh yeah! There’ll be hell to pay getting the FAA to let us launch and land a rocket on a regular airfield. They are gonna take forever to decide it’s safe! Have you had any luck getting NASA to let us launch and recover from Canaveral?”
Ell frowned again. “No. We’ve hired a lawyer with some experience in this kind of stuff, though no one has really ever done what we’re trying to do of course. He’s getting the run around too. He thinks that ILX has connections in NASA that are resisting us just on the principle of stifling competition. NASA is supposed to let private companies launch from their facilities, though there usually is a lot of red tape. In our case though, we can’t even seem to get the red tape started. We’re looking into whether we could buy an island in the Caribbean? Or maybe launch from a boat at sea? Would that be possible?”
Braun looked aghast, “A boat? Like an aircraft carrier?”
“No, like a big boat. Vertical takeoff from a launching cradle on the boat. Land the same way, or in the water and crane it out.”
“Whoa! I’ll have to think about those options. The boat certainly wouldn’t work with my Lear Jet idea though.”
Ell looked around the group. Fred lifted a hand briefly and said, “Brian and I have pretty much automated a ‘port constructor.’ My ‘entangler’ feeds in the entangled buckyballs as the discs rotate under the jet. Brian set up the machine to rotate ports of five mm and one, two, five, 7.5, ten and twenty centimeters under the jet. We’ll have to retool to make bigger ports than that, but energizing big ports will be a bigger problem than making them.”
Vivian said, “You can say that again! I’ve drawn up a design for the electronics to energize a ten centimeter port and ordered parts. We’re having to ask Duke Energy to bring in a bigger power line though. We could run a ten centimeter port with the power the building already has but,” she chuckled, “we might drop breakers if people used many other machines at the same time.”
Ell turned to
Ben, “How about you, Ben? What are you working on?”
He shrugged, “We don’t really have need of my micromanipulation skills. I thought for a while about just quitting here and finding another job.” He made a wry face. “But I didn’t want to miss out on all the excitement… So. I’ve started working with a couple of the new guys in the machine shop on ‘macromanipulators.’ Essentially we’re making small rockets that we can fly up to space, open up an aerodynamic shroud, then extend arms that we can manipulate stuff with.” He reached under the table and pulled up a rocket that he set on top of it. “Meet Armstrong.” He looked up to his HUD and gave a command. The tubular body of the rocket hinged open, exposing a lot of mechanical looking insides. An arm extended out of it, reached down, grasped a nut that lay on the table, lifted it and placed it into a chamber that had opened near the top. Nothing happened for a moment, Ben gave another command, repeated it, then said, “Dammit! The specimen drops onto a 50mm port inside the rocket and was supposed to fall through that port and into the specimen jar over there,” he pointed to a five gallon glass jug with a port apparatus on top of it. “We’ve obviously got a little work to do yet, but the idea is that it could fly to the moon like ‘Neil Armstrong’ then use its ‘strong arms’ to retrieve specimens, or do some other kind of work. I’m a little worried about whether everything will work in a vacuum, but as you can see, we haven’t even gotten everything to work here on Earth yet.”
Ell had been staring at it. It had fins like model rockets do, or like you would see on pictures of “spaceships” in old magazines. With a puzzled frown she said, “Are the fins decorative?”
“Oh! No. It has port nozzles at the bottom and top of the fins. Obviously it can use its main rocket to travel long distances. But what about when you just need to move it a couple of feet? Watch this!” Ben gave a command and with a hiss the rocket scooted across the table top. “You just open the nozzles at the bottom of all three fins and it skids across surfaces like a hover craft! If you want to hold it still while you use the arms, you blow gas out of the nozzles on top of the fins to pin it down to the surface and stabilize it.”
“Cool! When are you going to launch?”
“Maybe this afternoon?” He shrugged. “As soon as we work out the rest of the bugs. Then I’m sure we’ll have to fix some bugs that occur up there in space before we’ll be ready to actually send it on a mission. I thought that for its first mission we’d send it to Tranquility Base where Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon?”
“Hey! That’d be really amazing!”
Ell looked around the group. They were bemused by her childlike enthusiasm. “Any other updates or issues?”
Sheila said, “I’ve arranged for Aerogas to deliver some really huge LOX and RP-1 tanks to our ‘tank farm’ out back tomorrow. The tanks’ll have sensors to let Aerogas know how full they are and Aerogas will start making daily trips to top them off if needed. Also Vivian says we need insurance against a power outage that could ruin all the ports we have already existing if it lasted long enough that the fields stabilizing the entanglements dropped. I’ve ordered a very high end generator to go out back.”
Ell said, “I thought we already had a small back up generator?”
“We do, but it hadn’t been tested for a while and when we did, it didn’t work. It’s been repaired now but the new one tests itself once a week and runs off our natural gas line, presumably indefinitely. The old one will back up the new one.”
Ell said, “Great work, appreciate your thoroughness.”
Brian lifted a finger, “I’ve just about finished making a connector that can hook up to the airlock on the Space Station. Sheila hasn’t been able to get us permission from NASA to test it against the dummy lock down at Canaveral though, so we don’t know for sure if it will work. We might have the same problem that the Chinese had with their connector.” He grimaced, “You’d think after we saved their bacon, the people at NASA would be falling all over themselves to help us help them. Instead they’re acting like a bunch of assholes and treating us like we haven’t a clue just because we’re new at this.”
Vivian shrugged, “No one likes being shown up.”
Ell looked around at her team. “I’m kinda surprised myself. From some of the friction we’ve seen, I’m getting the sinking feeling that ILX is looking at us as an adversary and doing whatever they can to make our lives harder in an effort to ‘break’ the competition. Our patent attorney says we should expect them to start making attempts to infringe our patent soon. He figures that if ILX can figure out how to make them, they’ll just try to build ports commercially and let us sue them for infringement. They’ll be happy to fight it out in court, expecting that we won’t have the ‘juice’ to stop them there. To figure out how to build their own ports he thinks their most likely strategy would be to hire some of you guys away from D5R rather than trying to figure out how ports might work by reading the original paper themselves.
“I think he’s right because the electrical fields for the ports are very weird, to say nothing of the issues with placing entangled molecules around the periphery.
“Anyway, D5R has decided to preemptively ask you to come to them, through me, if they make such an offer. Let us make a counteroffer. I’d also like to remind you that you stand to make a pretty penny on your share of our port technology if you stay and we win any battle with ILX. Your contract specifies that you must maintain confidentiality about what you’ve learned here about ports if you want to keep your D5R shares.” Ell raised her eyebrows at them.
Fred snorted, “ILX already made me an offer. I told them to ‘take a hike.’” He snorted, “It didn’t hurt that D5R was already paying me more than they offered.”
Ell shrugged, “They may just keep coming back with better offers, but you can rest assured that D5R intends to match any offer they might make.”
***
Emma was staring at her screen, trying to absorb a paper that had implications for her research when her AI announced a call from Ell. “Put her on! Hey, Ell! How’re you doing?”
Ell sounded depressed, “I’m in bad need of a social life. Do you ever go out on the town?”
“Occasionally. Mostly I’m too busy and too broke.”
“Well, I’ve got a job now. I could finance us going out on the town?”
“Sure! I could go out a lot more if I had a sponsor!”
“Alright! Saturday night?”
“Sure, what about Roger? Or your hunky wrestler in the Air Force?”
“Well Roger and I are good friends and we go out sometimes. But I’m kinda his boss, so even though I’d like to do more with him, it feels too weird pushing our relationship. Phil is in Houston doing astronaut training.”
“Woohoo, you’re dating an astronaut?”
“Correction, I occasionally see a guy who’s in training to be an astronaut.”
“Okaay. I guess I can see why you’d need a night out.” They spoke a few minutes more making arrangements.
***
Ell was working on a tiny rocket when Ben came up and said, “Hey, we’re about to launch ‘Armstrong.’ D’you want to come watch?”
“Yeah!” She picked up the tiny rocket and said, “This little guy is ready to launch too, I’ll shoot him off right after Armstrong.”
As they walked out to the parking lot launch pad Ben looked at the little rocket Ell had in her hand. It was only about three quarters of an inch in diameter and eight inches long. “What’s that one for?” he asked, thinking it couldn’t really carry much except its guidance package and the port apparatus for its engine.
“This guy?” she said holding it up, “He’s to test one of the predictions the math makes about the ports. The math predicts that the ports will un-entangle above a certain speed relative to one another.” She shrugged, “That obviously has tremendous bearing on whether we could use ports to send something to another star so I want to test it.”
Ben’s eyebrows went up. “Wo
w, you’re thinking a long way ahead.”
She frowned at him, “Isn’t that what you’re paying me to do?” She grinned and winked at him.
He said, “Well that speed must be pretty high or we wouldn’t be able to send our rockets up into orbit right?”
“Yeah, I’m estimating that it’s high enough to reasonably travel around the solar system, but not to another star. But, that’s just what the math predicts, we’ve got to test to see if it’s really true.”
A few minutes later Allan checked for overhead traffic, then they counted down together and watched Ben’s rocket streak into the sky. Ben and his team went back inside to watch the take from “Armstrong’s” cameras on the big screens inside. Ell went over to the launching rack and clipped “Percent-c” as she had named the little rocket onto the test rail. She had Allan test all of its thrusters and then it shot into the sky as well, accelerating at 5 gravities once it got to a high enough altitude that it wouldn’t overheat.
Ell went back inside and found Ben and his little team cussing and looking disgusted. The doors on Armstrong had failed to open in space and they had it coming back down for some more work. Ell said, “You’ve checked to be sure our airspace is clear before you bring it back, right?”
Ben grinned sheepishly, “I’d forgotten, but that high performance AI you sicced on me reminded me. We’re holding altitude at 40,000 feet for a couple minutes before we come the rest of the way back down.”
Ell was momentarily grateful she’d upgraded all her science crew’s AIs to PGR connected near supercomputers and had Allan put the launching guidelines onto them. She said, “Great! I’m coming out to watch us land our first rocket.”
As Ell stood outside with the others watching for their first glimpse of ‘Armstrong’ coming down, Allan said, “You have a call from a Manfred Phelps of ILX.”
Deciding that she could both talk and watch the landing Ell said, “Put him on.”
Rocket! An Ell Donsaii story 4 Page 14
