Delta-v, page 12
“After 1 sievert, I was forced to retire.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, why would the company take you on as a candidate if you’re already maxed out on rads?”
“This is private space industry. Rad limits are different. Besides, I have three ex-wives to support on my pension.” Yakovlev scratched his neck and face. “This puzzle—it would be difficult in normal air. In here, it is impossible.”
Tighe had to agree.
Next to them Adedayo Adisa sat working on his puzzle alone. His cross-table partner, Anselmi Rinne, a Finnish cross-country skier, struggled to stay awake and might as well have been asleep for all the help he was providing.
However, Tighe noticed that Adisa’s puzzle was nonetheless nearly finished. “The air doesn’t seem to be affecting you, Ade.”
Adisa glanced up. “This puzzle, it has a flaw.”
Tighe and Yakovlev exchanged looks.
“What flaw?”
Adisa held up two wooden pieces. “The designer, he is lazy. If you touch two puzzle pieces on their ends, then turn them perpendicular, you can lower the pair onto alternating corners. They will always fit.” He looked up, having successfully added another pair of pieces.
Yakovlev sighed. “This is his brain starved for oxygen.”
Tighe followed those instructions, and it worked like a charm. “I’ll be damned.”
FEBRUARY 3, 2033
Tighe floated in a wet suit with a dozen other candidates, in the waters off the eastern coast of Ascension Island. They clung to a rope line strung between orange buoys and in turn linked to rope lines that descended to marked depth measurements.
A coordinator sat in a nearby Zodiac fast boat, shouting instructions. The candidates all shivered, despite their wet suits.
“Grab one of the dive lines! When you hear the whistle, dive to the 10-meter mark. Remain at depth as long as you can, then return to the surface. You will be scored in the order you surface—first one up fails. Falling unconscious or failing to surface under your own power also means you fail the exercise.”
Rescue divers in rebreather gear treaded water nearby.
Tighe swam for one of the vertical lines and in doing so crossed paths with Isabel Abarca.
“You’re still here.” She grabbed the dive rope beside his, and they both treaded water. Her once long hair was now short black with a few streaks of gray.
“Don’t bother telling me—I already know your name. They say you’re a mountaineering legend.”
“Cualquiera, I don’t say that.”
“What I can’t figure out is why you’re here.”
“For the same reason you are: to get to space.”
“You must know Joyce’s asteroid-mining scheme is bullshit.”
She nodded. “What’s that got to do with getting into orbit?”
“So you lend your name to his publicity stunt. Is that it?”
“Haven’t you?”
The coordinator just then blew his whistle. After exchanging another glance, Abarca and Tighe took a deep breath and dove under the water.
Holding the rope, Tighe pulled himself downward past the 5-meter marker and then stopped at the 10-meter line. Above he could see the coordinator boats and the buoys. The ocean below extended into darkness. Although they were just half a kilometer offshore, the bottom had dropped off alarmingly fast. Large and small fish swam on the periphery. Tighe could only make out blurs without a diving mask.
He turned to see the blurry outlines of other candidates extending to the distance in a line. Abarca floated calmly next to him.
He let his mind wander as they stared at each other. Before long his lungs began to burn. Thirty seconds later a couple of candidates down the line started racing for the surface.
Tighe looked back at Abarca and could tell she was looking right at him. She folded her arms and drummed her fingers.
Tighe let the burning in his lungs continue. Several more candidates broke for the surface. His need for air was starting to become intense.
But Abarca still didn’t move.
Tighe knew his own body. At this depth, he didn’t have too much longer until he’d start to black out.
The rest of the other candidates suddenly started clawing for the surface. Bubbles raced upward, and the rescue divers moved toward one motionless subject.
Tighe looked toward Abarca again. Her eyes were still on him. They were the last two candidates underwater.
Screw it.
His lungs screaming, Tighe swam for the sunlight. He broke the surface and sucked for air, grabbing the buoy line.
Several people around him were coughing and gasping for breath.
Tighe looked down and saw the rescue divers move toward Abarca—but she waved them away. They circled her like sharks. She looked upward.
Another voice nearby: “Christ, is she still down there?”
In a few moments, Abarca swam toward the surface, and as she emerged she took a deep, controlled breath.
The coordinator blew the whistle. “All candidates accounted for!”
Abarca didn’t look particularly affected by the exercise. She noticed Tighe’s look. “This sea level air is like a meal to me.”
CHAPTER 10
Puzzle Pieces
Lukas Rochat fobbed in through security and crossed the atrium lobby of his Flexspace building. Here he leased an officette on daily terms for his law practice. Located on rue Edward Steichen, just a couple of blocks off Space Row, every square meter was exorbitant, but you had to spend money to make money.
Six months ago he had a suite with a temp legal assistant. Twenty-first-century agile business practices now allowed him to fail slowly, instead of all at once. With every week that his bank balance dwindled, he was tempted to downsize further. Soon he figured he’d be renting a spot to stand in.
As Rochat walked the common areas on the way to the elevator, it amazed him how the place was crawling with hopeful young people—aerospace engineers and marketing folks from all over the EU, Asia, and the US tapping at laptops and tablets, discussing NewSpace startup ideas in a dozen languages around the coffee kiosk. He’d initially viewed these youthful entrepreneurs as potential clients, but pro bono work had been a waste of time. That first batch of entrepreneurs was long gone, along with the hours he’d put into them.
However, Rochat did not give up. He networked constantly for new business—attending meet-ups and “launch” parties (for companies that were launching their first payload into space). None of his carousing had yielded paying clients.
Rochat tried to recall how excited he was when he first arrived in Luxembourg City. The entrepreneurial atmosphere here was so unlike the staid business scene in Switzerland. But lately he’d noticed that the faces kept changing as he remained. Either everyone else was failing and giving up faster, or they were succeeding and moving up. Either way, he was doing something wrong. It depressed him.
While he was taking the elevator to the third floor, Rochat’s phone rang for the fifth time in the last hour. He checked the caller’s number and weighed the chances of it being a bill collector. He decided the likelihood was 100 percent. The incoming call went to his voice mail. Collection calls sapped his confidence. They were a reminder that his lack of success was long-standing.
Rochat checked for mail at his floor’s reception desk. The friendly young woman who’d been there the day before had been replaced by a surly young man who looked down his nose as he handed over a stack of mail marked “Second Notice” and “In Collections.”
“Oh, and there’s this . . .” The young man handed over a heavy brown package the size and weight of a law book.
Rochat perked up. It was marked from the Ministry of the Economy—Office of Space Affairs. “Hello . . .” He hefted it as he retreated to his officette.
The package weighed a kilo at least. The ministry seemed impervious to the irony of a twenty-first-century space agency shipping around paper files.
Rochat waved his key fob over his office door lock and entered the tiny windowless cell. There was barely space for the half-sized desk, chair, and filing cabinet. Gazing on his officette depressed him all over again. He took one more glance at the overdue bills and tossed them onto the desk, then headed out cradling the package under his arm.
There was a quiet café a couple of blocks away on the rue Dr. Nicolas Clasen. As he walked in the winter chill, Rochat inspected the package. Hopefully it was worth the three hundred euros in processing fees it had cost him, which was sorely missed at the moment. He needed business leads.
Rochat’s phone rang again, and he went through the effort to power it down. He didn’t want any reminders of his failures just now. After all, the only reason this package had been sent to him was because he’d managed to convince the Ministry of the Economy’s deputy director of space affairs to help him out. That showed moxie, didn’t it? That was the sort of thing winners did.
He was in a better mood by the time he entered the quiet café. Just a few blocks off Space Row, most of the office buildings nearby had their own automated coffee kiosks. Yet, the café’s proprietor stubbornly refused to fail. For that reason alone Rochat was happy to patronize the place. He sat at a table in the rear, away from the window, and ordered an Americano.
Only then did he place the package on the table and pull the zip seal. He slid the package contents onto the marble tabletop. Before him was a thick stack of Space Operations Permit applications processed by the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg’s Ministry of the Economy Space Affairs Division. These were the filings that the deputy director had told him were linked to his own client, Lunargistics, LLC.
Rochat spread them out across the table, dozens of applications, each twenty or thirty pages thick—printed on both sides. Same as the forms he’d been hired by Lunargistics, LLC to complete and shepherd through the application process. He glanced through the signature blocks at the names of the space attorneys who’d filed them. None looked familiar. Nor their firms. No doubt they would say the same of him.
Form 37-B was designed to give the grand duchy a clear idea of what commercial space activity the applicant proposed to engage in—for example, Moon mining, microgravity pharmaceutical research, fiber-optic printing, or whatever. Applicants had to delve deep into the details of their financing, expertise in the industry, and also detailed specifications for any spacecraft or equipment they intended to use, operating budgets, pro forma profit and loss statements—basically their entire business plan.
The difference between this and a normal business plan was that the grand duchy wouldn’t invest. They’d merely act as the Earth sovereign nation through which any space-earned revenue would flow. For this, Luxembourg expected a small cut, and in order to ensure their nascent private space industry wasn’t tarnished by fraudulent investment schemes, the ministers examined applicants carefully.
Lunargistics, Rochat’s only client, was most likely a fraud. However, its parent company might be real enough to require space-law services.
He took out his computer tablet and snapped photos of the first page of each application. Each of these was financially linked to his own client in some way. He was surprised there were so many—thirty-three applications in all. Poring through the filings, he found they encompassed cislunar businesses in personnel training, avionics design, spacecraft maintenance, and logistics for a NASA/ESA Moon base, as well as for Moon-mining companies that had yet to commence operations. Most of the revenue projections on these applications were optimistic at best.
Among the applications, he also noticed an internal Ministry of the Economy report listing shell companies linked to these thirty-three firms. The shell companies were incorporated in places like Dubai, Panama City, and the Cayman Islands, but the report went on to link those shell companies to venture capital firms managing tens of billions of dollars—some of them sovereign funds in the Middle East and Asia.
He flipped back to the applications.
That’s when he noticed that several of the firms had already commenced construction of spacecraft in low Earth orbit. He leafed through pages of documents showing launch dates from Kourou in French Guiana, Sriharikota in India, and Cape Canaveral in the US, payload manifests, and flight permits—all of which had already been approved in other legal jurisdictions.
Thirteen of the companies had actually sent equipment into space. At least according to all this documentation. That didn’t match the behavior of a money-laundering operation.
As he spread the documents out, Rochat realized that those thirteen companies had collectively spent billions of dollars lifting several hundred tons of construction materials and equipment into geostationary and lunar distant retrograde orbits. In front of him was a substantial percentage of last year’s commercial launches. These entities already had half a dozen unmanned private spacecraft orbiting the Moon. The other twenty firms appeared to have contracts with one another providing security, training, staffing, design, construction, communications, logistics—the list went on. Some of these firms had launch-services contracts with Burkett’s and Macy’s firms. Another with Halser’s company.
These were huge bets to make on a Moon-mining industry that had not yet even commenced. Of course, Rochat was aware that big bets were being made—it was part of the reason he’d come to LC—but what he hadn’t known was just how much of it was interconnected.
Rochat contemplated this. Why would these linked companies spend so much money launching and building spacecraft in lunar orbit when they didn’t even have their commercial space enterprise permits approved yet? Were they so convinced the industry would be huge that they didn’t want to miss out on first-mover advantage? Is that why they did everything they could to spread the launches out across so many companies—to make it appear like it was a smaller individual bet than it was?
As he paged through the forms again, Rochat stopped at the design specification for one of the spacecraft. There was an accompanying schematic. It looked a lot like the gantry cranes used in construction around Luxembourg City, with sparse composite box trusses running for a hundred meters or so and an inflatable habitat on one end. The company’s business application indicated they planned to serve as a hub for storage of Moon-mined aluminum—although the spacecraft’s suitability for that purpose didn’t seem immediately obvious. There were only two docking ports and lots of girders—on which to mount what? Shipping containers? Material hoppers? Fuel tanks?
The companies apparently used telepresence construction robots to do most of the modular orbital assembly. It was safer and cheaper than having humans do the construction, and one of the other companies had designed the robotic construction equipment.
He flipped through several applications and folded one open on the design illustration for another company’s spacecraft.
This looked similar to the first. A long truss of exposed girders. A flat-bottomed, inflatable habitat module on one end.
Rochat opened the first application and looked at the two ships side by side. They were damn near identical—which wasn’t surprising, considering that the ministry’s forensic accountants had determined the companies were actually owned by the same investors. No doubt they’d used the same aerospace subcontractors for both designs.
He pored through more filings, looking for companies planning to operate a spacecraft in lunar orbit.
Locating one, he folded the page back and placed that illustration alongside the first two.
Similar in theme, this spacecraft was longer—a girder truss nearly 200 meters in length with five methalox rocket engines purchased from Burkett’s Starion Aerospace. There were spherical inflatable fuel tanks on one end and a circular inflatable habitat built by Halser’s company on the other.
The startup was proposing orbital transfer services—which explained the rocket engines. It was intended to move hundreds of tons of mined resources into different cislunar orbits.
But five rocket engines? Each of them had a vacuum thrust of more than 400,000 pounds. That was a lot of delta-v.
Just beneath that application was yet another spacecraft—this one with a large solar panel array at one end of a long box truss and a four-slot docking collar at the other.
As he studied the illustration, he noticed the other spacecraft designs had identical composite trusses. Rochat laid them alongside one another and saw the spacecraft with the engines and the other with the solar panels were both vertically oriented, while the other two were horizontal.
An odd thought occurred to him, and Rochat started sorting through the couple dozen other applications, searching for any more spacecraft designs. After paging through them all, he discovered one more girder truss design—this one remarkably like the first four. He slid it next to the others, rearranging them in several configurations.
Until one layout fit just right.
He stopped short as his pulse began to race.
On the café table in front of him was a single large spacecraft—he was convinced of it. It had a vertical truss with rocket engines on one end, a circular hab in the center, and a solar array on the other end, with three spokes radiating from its center, all three ending in identical inflatable habitat modules. The spokes joined at the central habitat module on the vertical truss.
After a minute spent staring he suddenly remembered to breathe.
This was a gravity ship—clearly intended to spin to create centrifugal force; in effect, artificial gravity. The habitat modules at the end of each spoke were designed with flat bottoms. That had seemed unusual to him since they were supposed to be microgravity habs, like Ray Halser’s Hotel LEO. However, if they were rotating to mimic gravitational force, the flat bottoms made perfect sense. And each of the spokes was identical.
