Yesterda's War 5 - Untimely Conflicts, page 29
“Yes, if one of the landing legs doesn’t hit an unexpected boulder and break off.” Sarah interjected while continuing to closely watch the monitors.
“Well, that is why we mapped the entire landing area with the survey satellites that we sent last year. Then we dropped homing transmitters and mapped them too so that our incoming modules can home in on them to land right where we want them. All each module has to do is triangulate on the specific set of transmitters and land in the basket that we programmed for them to land in. The transmitters were dropped in a location where there were relatively few boulders or cliffs that could tip over a module upon landing.
It’s all analogue too. Each module is configured for the frequencies of three specific transmitters only. We only turned the transmitters on a few hours before the scheduled arrival of the modules to conserve battery power, of course.” Judith explained.
“It’s all pure genius though, especially when you consider that we didn’t even come up with the idea. One of our engineers working on the guidance system for the Mars modules designed this on his own without any input from us at all.” James replied.
“This is the sort of development that I hope to see a lot more of. Independent solutions that have no connection to Father’s database take a lot of pressure off of us.” Sarah quietly noted.
“Shhh! We are coming up on the possible reporting of a successful landing.” Judith cautioned.
A black and white image suddenly appeared on one of the monitors. It showed what appeared to be a vast sterile landscape out in the distance.”
“We are getting images from the Alpha habitat module. The module has successfully landed.” The technician at the console excitedly announced, followed immediately by a loud cheer from everyone else in the control room.
“It worked! Hopefully, the other five will be equally successful.” James responded to the news.
“Hopefully, they will also all land successfully within the designated area. We will soon be finding out through. The next module is only thirty minutes out now.” Judith replied.
One after another, the modules that would make up the habitat, fuel production and crew return capabilities made successful landings on the Martian surface. The first module was able to transmit video images of the other modules as they landed, bringing an even more dramatic perspective to everyone in the control room. Everyone in the control room breathed a collective sigh of relief when the last module touched down.”
“That was incredible! Every one of the initial settlement modules landed within a one kilometer radius. We got an even better result than what we had expected would be our best estimate too.” An ecstatic James said while everyone hugged each other and clapped with the success of the landing.
“I’m very happy that we decided to over-engineer the landing systems and add the redundant systems to ensure they would handle whatever Mars threw at them.” Beatrice added.
“We are going to have to send the video footage out to our television correspondents so that they can broadcast it to the world. It will help garner a tremendous amount of support when the citizens of the Commonwealth get to see the success that their tax dollars have purchased.” Sarah told her siblings.
“I’m still glad that we didn’t broadcast this live though. If there had been a failure for everyone to see unedited, it could have been disastrous to our credibility in the eyes of the world. Now, we need to get the various systems activated so that everything will be ready when our first crew arrives. We will send even more modules with the first crew so that there will be more than enough supplies available.” Judith told her siblings.
“I am looking forward to being on that first crew, especially since we now have confirmation that our reentry systems work.
We are getting telemetry from all six of our modules now, I see. Our next hurdle will be whether or not our fuel production plant works as advertised in turning the Martian atmosphere into rocket fuel and oxidizer for the return flight back home.”
“What are we going to do if we can’t produce enough fuel from our automated production plants on Mars?”
“Then we will have to bring more fuel with us to start with. Then we will see what Martian resources like water ice that we can find. Then we will use those for conversion into fuel.
Chapter Forty-One:
Cavill Space Station One
Low Earth Orbit
June 4, 1968
James Cavill sat at the secure communications console at the space station after having arrived via one of the new large spaceplanes a few hours earlier. His oldest sister’s face appeared on the video screen in front of him. A television camera on top of the monitor transmitted James’ image back to Judith Cavill’s office where she had been sitting when she called.
“Hello, Judith. Everything is going well up here, I’m happy to report.” He radioed back home through their encrypted radio link. His voice was slightly distorted by the encryption but still audible.
“That’s great to hear. The expansion of the station with the third habitat ring is still working out alright, I trust.”
“Yes. We badly needed the space since virtually all of the space in the first two rings had been taken up by personnel quarters, laboratories and other working spaces. Of course, the situation would have been far worse if Space Station Two had not finally gotten its core modules launched and integrated. Now, we have workers who only have to travel a few dozen meters from relatively comfortable quarters on the station to get to Ares to continue its assembly.”
“True. It is also good that both space stations are being used as way stations for the astronauts traveling back and forth from our lunar installation. This way, we will always have a station that is relatively close to travel to from the moon at any given time.
We will soon be adding a large fuel module to the second space station so that it can be used to refuel spacecraft that are travelling far beyond Earth’s gravity well. The station’s manipulator arm with its attached television camera has already proven to be a great help in the assembly of the Ares craft orbiting next to the station. The forward control section and the interface for the craft’s rotating habitat segment have now been installed onto Ares in the past week.”
“It sounds like everything is going well in orbit. What has been happening with the expansion of the lunar colony? I understand that Captain Lenson is at Space Station One currently. He has spent the last three months there at our lunar base.”
“That’s true. Robert is rotating back to Earth for a family emergency. But I was able to spend a couple of hours with him for a private debriefing before he is scheduled to return to Sydney. We are having a light spaceplane land directly there rather than come back to our facilities at Kalumburu.”
“It’s a little inconvenient for us to land the spaceplane at Sydney. But the humanitarian nature of the flight will be great public relations for Cavill Industries. Regular people will also get to see one of our craft in person for once.
So what did Captain Lenson tell you, James?” Judith then asked.
“To start with, he confirmed that the designs for the modules, power generation system and life support that we built for the lunar colony have all worked very well. Our engineers had taken our suggestions and effectively applied them to create working hardware. They had no idea that the technology that they eventually built was at least ten years more advanced than the previous state of the art.
He also explained that the excavations for burying the habitat modules on the lunar surface are working out very well indeed. All that his people needed to do was to use the battery-powered loader to dig out a wide, long trench that is about twenty-five meters deep and about twelve meters wide. His people then set up a rail and winch system to slide the habitat modules into the trench while still upright.
Then they removed the rails and used the loader to refill the trench with regolith around the modules to bury them sufficiently so that only a small portion remains above the surface. The cosmic radiation that penetrated to the lower levels of the modules was found to have been reduced by over ninety percent.
We connected the modules at the surface with flexible plastic walkways that are pressurized. We use the same pressurized walkway tubes to link the modules to the inflatable greenhouses also.”
“I hope that we can work things out that we can set up hard case connecting passageways between future habitat modules that can be covered by the regolith and not be exposed at all to the radiation on the surface. The plastic on the surface walkways will eventually have to be replaced due to embrittlement. This is something that we would like to avoid. The inflatable greenhouses will need to be replaced by domes for the same reason.
Our people have encountered a few problems during the process, but they have been able to come up with solutions with the help of our engineers back here in Australia and England.”
“Our people on the lunar base have certainly proven themselves. Their work has validated much of what we will have to do with the future colony on Mars. We will be continuing to send more modules there so that we can expand the size and population of our lunar settlement.”
“I wonder if the Americans and Europeans have noticed what we have done with our lunar base yet?” Judith asked.
“We know that the Americans and Europeans have both managed to put satellites into orbit around the moon. So it is highly likely that they have been taking lots of images of the operations at our lunar base.”
“Maybe they will learn something useful from watching what we have been doing then. After all, our objective is to spread out humanity for its long-term survival. So we want them to succeed when they establish a permanent manned presence on the Moon too.”
“That’s true. So when the Americans and Europeans set up their own bases on the Moon, we will try to give them all of the help that we can, of course. Mind you, if they want materiel from us, then they will need to compensate us for it. We still can’t afford to give our property away for free.
The one significant shortcoming that Captain Lenson has mentioned is how he wished that the base had a more capable computer system to operate everything.” James noted.
“You told him that it was a state-of-the-art system, didn’t you?”
“I told him that it was the best system that we could pack onto a rocket to send to the Moon.”
“Obviously, we are going to need something better on Mars for ourselves. Beatrice has been harping on the need to be able to send a working copy of the entire technical database to Mars for the colony’s use. We are going to have to design and build something as close to Father’s original computer in capability as possible in a form factor that we can actually put together and fit inside one of Ares’ cargo modules.
“That is going to be one hell of a challenge for us. We are decades away from the sort of computing power and circuit density for microprocessors, much less the necessary data storage density.”
“We will have to task the expert AI on Father’s portable computer to come up with a solution that can be created by us. We’ve already done a lot of work towards this goal over the past ten years toward the goal of building a complete replacement for Father’s computer. We should be able to design a mainframe system that comes close enough.”
“The Mars colony is also going to eventually need the means to manufacture parts from blank stock and even do three-dimensional printing. We already know that it is possible and the potential that these technologies hold. But the colony will need this to be self-sufficient in the long term. We are all aware of the danger that exists if these technologies are revealed prematurely, obviously.”
“I know. But I’m sure that Beatrice has already realized that Mars is going to be too far away for us to send her a component that she might need or to transmit a detailed schematic from the database. She needs all of that information close at hand along with the means to produce something useful from that information quickly.
We are incorporating as much redundancy as possible in all of the lunar and Mars colony equipment. But we all know how ‘Mister Murphy’ can manage to find the one critical system that we have without a redundant system or the appropriate spare part needed to fix it.”
“We will do the best that we can. In any event, I’m sure that you are anxious to be on your way back home to your wife, James.”
“Oh, I am definitely stoked about that. I will soon be flying back to Earth with Captain Lenson. Then I will catch a regular transport flight back from Sydney to Derby so that I can get back home to Miriam. Now that she is pregnant, I would really like to spend as much time as I can with her.” A smiling James replied.
“Very good. I trust that your examination of our orbital satellite control system went well also?”
“Yes. Now that we have over sixty-five satellites in terrestrial orbit, the two space stations have given us the ability to stay in contact with them at all times. We can also monitor the satellites that other nations have launched as well.”
“That’s very important since we are still in the process of setting up ground control stations outside of Australia and England. They are needed to handle the increased number of satellites that we are launching.
Our Sea Dragons are now dedicated to supporting space station construction in addition to the lunar and Mars colonies. We have transitioned virtually all of our satellite launches to Doctor von Braun’s division. His division is also working on their heavy launch vehicle which will be able to allow it to share the load for heavy payload launches. Naturally, their super-heavy rocket will not be able to have the payload of the Sea Dragon though.” Judith explained.
“The Doctor’s people have been launching satellites to both the Moon and Mars as well as elsewhere, I believe.” James noted.
“Yes, they have been. We have four satellites orbiting the Moon at this time. One of them is a mapping imagery satellite. The other three are communications relay satellites. We expect to put another pair of imagery satellites into lunar orbit within the next couple of months.
Of course, the survey satellites and landers that we launched to Mars were sent aboard Kalumburu-group launch vehicles. This has cost us slightly more money but was necessary with our relatively limited launch vehicle availability from our Sea Dragon group.
But we have also launched multiple scientific satellites for Australia, several Commonwealth nations in addition to other Western countries. It’s been very good publicity for us to launch satellites to Venus, Jupiter and Saturn for other nations while they waited on America and Europe to finally build rockets powerful enough to do the job.”
“But that is going to change soon, Judith. The Americans and Europeans are both going to launch modules to integrate into our Space Station Two in a couple of months. We also expect both of them to be launching manned lunar missions before the end of the year too.”
“I don’t have any problem with that. It’s better that they spend their money on space than on more military hardware.”
“Me, too.” James replied.
Chapter Forty-Two:
The White House Oval Office
Washington, DC
November 19, 1968
President Joseph Kennedy sat down with his chief political adviser Charles Wilson as the administration continued to glow in the aftermath of Kennedy’s successful reelection campaign.
“Charlie, how are things sorting out in Congress now? If we are going to get our second term agenda moving, we are going to need a fair amount of support from the other side of the aisle, aren’t we?” The President asked.
“Yes, Sir. They are going to want to increase our defense budget though, especially because of the conflict in the South Atlantic, the rise of the military government in China and the increasing military strength of Germany. That is probably going to be the price for supporting some of your domestic agenda.”
“The Republicans are still uncomfortable with the increases in social welfare spending that have been called for by some of our political allies in the Northeast. We were able to fend off most of their demands during our first term. But their voices along with those of their media allies are getting louder. I don’t know how we are going to pay for the combined spending increases that they want without corresponding revenue increases.”
“I hate to say this, but your predecessor had the right idea. We need to reduce our overall tax rates to boost our economy. This way, we can increase overall tax revenues. But we will also have to get Congress to look at simplifying the tax code to make taxes easier to file and fairer by flattening the tax rates somewhat.
There is also the issue of regulations. If we were to simplify the US Code and reduce the size and scope of Federal regulations, it would also spur further economic growth and potentially shrink the cost of the Federal bureaucracy at the same time. That could free up some funds for increasing the defense budget and certain domestic programs.” Wilson explained.
“That would have FDR rolling in his grave if he learned that a Democrat President was proposing this. The labor unions will not be overly happy about this. Neither will the special interests or the federal agencies that would be on the chopping block with a streamlining of the regulations that they administer.
There is also a growing need for us to actually add a limited number of new regulations to help protect our environment. That burning river in northern Ohio drew a lot of attention to the problems that we are having with our environment.”
“That would probably be something that you could focus on as the lead issue for your domestic agenda. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we need to do something to help Americans as a whole. If we simply throw money at the minority community like some people want to do, I fear that we will end up doing more harm than good to that community in the long run.” President Kennedy’s political adviser warned.
“I am afraid of that as well. The vast majority of our minority community would much rather have the dignity of regular employment over simply receiving a check from the government. Let’s see what we can do to help get more of them to receive better education and work skills. That will help provide the people with good jobs who need it most.”
