Pillar to the Sky Read online

  He kept his binoculars focused on the rocket as it angled over, the sound of its thunderous ignition at last reaching them, washing over the gathering, the shock wave rippling the surface of the ocean between them and the island.

  “We have…” There was a pause.

  And in that instant it all just disappeared into an ever-increasing fireball. Gary let his binoculars drop. The fireball expanded outward, ever outward, the sound of the engines from the first seconds of launch drowning out the cries of shock, dismay, even fear. All had been warned that if the rocket detonated on the pad, they should start running to the other side of the island and find whatever shelter they could.

  Eva screamed for Victoria to run, then Gary tried to pull them back.

  “It was arcing away from us!” he shouted. “We’ll be OK.”

  He looked over at Franklin and felt reassured in his thinking. The man just stood erect, unmoving, binoculars focused on the expanding fireball, though more than a few around him were beating a path to the west side of the island. The Brit and the American remained unflinchingly by his side.

  The fireball reached its maximum; it appeared to actually touch the ocean’s surface, aboil now as debris rained down, water foaming. The third stage of the rocket, which had continued on up out of the explosion, was beginning to tumble, ground control hitting the auto-destruct so that it, too, blew apart, the sight of which made Franklin wince. The sound of the explosion now washed over them and was like the roar of a hurricane, which then gradually subsided into absolute silence.

  Gary limped up to Franklin, who just remained silent. There was shouting now from the press corps, who were storming toward them, cameras raised, swooping in like buzzards eager for a feast, held back by a cordon of burly islanders, construction workers.

  Gary stood in the circle of mourners and finally the Brit stirred.

  “Bloody hell,” was all he could whisper. “There goes three billion.”

  There would be plenty of time for the arguing, the blame casting, the postmortem that would finally reach the conclusion, revealed by one of the cameras positioned on the island that had survived the blast, that an oxygen fuel tank on the second stage ruptured at ignition, wisps of liquid oxy visible in the high-speed film pouring out from the side of the second stage until at twenty-six seconds it completely let go.

  Franklin turned to head back to his helicopter, making only one comment to the press, that “stuff just happens when you fly rockets” (though he didn’t quite phrase it that way) and that work would resume the following morning.

  Gary and Eva flew back in another chopper along with their daughter and Jason—there was no airsickness this time with Victoria; she was seasoned now—the four in mournful silence, her parents wondering if after all of this they would still be employed come tomorrow.

  At the staff meeting that evening, when the first film from the cameras on the island was run for review and the liquid oxygen plume became clearly visible when the images were computer enhanced, along with telemetry of a pressure drop in the LOX fuel tank, the Brit calmly sat back and said it was his team’s fault and that they would take the bite for it.

  “We move ahead, then,” Franklin announced calmly. “We must assume the wire in space and deployment reel works exactly as our computer simulators said they will. Step two, next launch in six months.”

  He finished the last sentence looking over at the phlegmatic Englishman and his American partner. They looked at each other and nodded.

  “What the hell,” the American said. “You guys remember what Chuck Yeager said after we lost Challenger? They had it pegged to a frozen O ring in little more than a month. He said, ‘Go back to flying and don’t launch if the temperature is below fifty,’ but no one listened and it took nearly three years to get back in space. We can’t afford that. My friend and I have agreed we’ll hock the rest of our holdings for this. The oxygen tank will be reviewed. I suspect that with the high temperature out there, 107 degrees at launch, either a pressure relief valve failed, cracking the tank, or the valve jammed open and the liquid oxygen just flooded out.”

  He paused.

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “Thank God we are not dependent on Senator Proxley anymore,” Gary whispered, “or this thing would be over with.”

  “They’ll find a way to tangle their fingers into us anyhow,” Eva said in reply, and as usual her prediction was correct.

  * * *

  The second launch took place six months and three days after the first. Though never proven conclusively, the assumption that a relief valve in the primary liquid oxygen fuel tank of the second stage did bear out in testing back in New Mexico, when a tank using the same valve developed a leak when temperatures went over 105 degrees and then hit a high level of vibration. Of course the old Russian design, with launches from Kazakhstan, had never encountered such temperature extremes prior to launch; usually it was the exact opposite.

  This time they did achieve orbit, the heaviest payload ever lofted by a private venture firm: over fifty-two tons to low earth orbit, and from there over six tons to geosynch. Unfortunately, with this test the reel used to deploy over a thousand miles of “wire” and keep it stationary utterly failed after only seventy-eight miles had been taken out. Remote cameras showed the two-millimeter-wide thread had jammed the deployment, the jam occurring in the “shuttlecock,” which moved back and forth, like in the old spinning mills, guiding the thread through a narrow aperture as it came off its spool. Conclusion: an astronaut with the right tools could have cleared the jam in five minutes, though more than a few baleful eyes were turned toward Fuchida’s team, which had promised that a deployment drum and reel guide—also made of carbon-60 nanotubing—was simple and foolproof. It settled once and for all the question of attempting an unmanned deployment of the actual “first thread,” as it was being called.

  This fateful decision, which would cost three billion more, was to send up a three-person team—which was inevitable anyhow once the first thread was actually deployed and the “spinning” process along the primary thread began.

  Fuchida’s firm lost a nine-figure bonus because of this failure, and it was never discussed that several of the designers were unemployed a day later.

  Both the Brit and his partner argued they should go as the first crew—they absolutely wanted to go—but there was no way in hell Franklin would ever risk that. Drawing from their increasing ranks of astronauts for their suborbital firm and their first test flights of low-earth-orbit manned flights, the two-man-and-one-woman crew—the woman had been the copilot on Victoria’s flight—was selected.

  They would launch independently of the cargo vessel lofting up the “space station” and rendezvous with it at geosynch. Their capsule was increasingly referred to as “Spam in a can.” It was basically off-the-shelf, a throwback to the Apollo designs, but lacking most of the backups and redundancies that had come to be expected in this, the second decade of the twenty-first century and more than fifty years into manned space flight. Given that they would be in deep space for two weeks—far beyond the Van Allen belt, and thus exposed to significant solar radiation—the answer was to simply keep the spacecraft aligned with its reentry shield always pointed at the sun.

  After the first wire was deployed, a very primitive crew base would be positioned at geosynch, another throwback to 1970s technology: a hollowed-out third stage from a rocket, almost identical to the Skylab of the post-Apollo days, which would be parked and then anchored to the “wire,” then occupied by subsequent crews after the first wire was in place. These crews would monitor the “spinners” that would build up the wire until eventually it could handle a useful load.

  Once in place at geosynch, this primitive crew base would become the operational point as the “threads” of the first tower were spun out. As the tower was gradually “built up” with additional threads, it could be used to carry up the real payload—the still-under-development and testing of the ribb
on design—at a fraction of the cost of sending the material up via rockets. This first “thread” was like the first wire across the East River, nearly 150 years ago, out of which the mighty cables of the Brooklyn Bridge were eventually put into place.

  Franklin increasingly turned to young Jason Fitzhugh, the historian, to write his comments and counterarguments, drawing on the great technological advances of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with their risks.

  “If men and women are willing to put their lives on the line for the greater good of all, then we should say Godspeed and go! Fear never held back Columbus, Magellan, Cook, or those who came to first settle America. Let that spirit flow in our veins yet again!” became a frequent closing line to his speeches.

  So far the suborbital and test-orbital manned flights of the firm he was partnered with had a sterling safety record, though one flight had been a near disaster when a port-side wing did not lock back into place properly on descent. It was one hell of a piloting job bringing it in and Enterprise One was all but totaled on landing, but the six passengers and two pilots walked away from the wreck. The pilot on that flight, Miss Selena Singh, who had copiloted the flight the Morgans flew on, was now heading up the team that would be the first to go to geosynch.

  Franklin’s publicity team was at last talking about the environmental aspects of the Pillar’s construction after he had adroitly lined up a few more patents on upgrades to solar panels that yielded a 40 percent increase in their energy output, and in high orbit attached to the tower would deliver a magnitude increase in energy that the same panel could achieve if put out in the Sahara. Popular Web sites and old-fashioned print media dedicated to science were soon awash with articles and debate about the prospects of harvesting not just gigawatts, but hundreds of gigawatts of electricity out in space and “piping” it down to earth via superconductivity cables and lasers.

  Talk in the past had speculated about solar panel arrays larger than all of Manhattan and their potential, but the fundamental stop point was always the same. If the energy was beamed down to the surface as microwave, it would require hundreds of square miles of collection stations around the planet, and the potential impact to the upper atmosphere would only hasten global warming and heaven help any bird or plane that flew through the microwave beam. For the first time, a logical answer of harvesting limitless energy for earth—along with another “disruptive technology”—was offered: once solar panels in space had a means to transfer that electrical energy to earth, every coal-fired, oil-fired, and even fission energy plant on earth would soon be obsolete and shut down.

  It was, Franklin and his supporters declared, like a wanderer dying of thirst in the desert when just on the other side of the hill there was an oasis waiting to be tapped. Limitless energy from the sun constantly flowed around our planet; it was now time to use it and end our dependency on CO2 fuels. The secrecy he had kept wrapped around this concept was at last falling aside as he judged they were far enough along to ensure public support and block the resistance that was to come from oil-producing nations.

  What did not go smoothly was the increasing protest. Eva’s prophecy about Proxley had been on the mark. Suits had been filed that “Franklin’s Folly” would be an obstruction to space navigation, placing even the International Space Station in jeopardy, even though supporters in NASA pointed out that, if need be, the built-in maneuvering thrusters aboard the station could provide the necessary boost to steer safely clear when, it was now estimated, every eight months or so, it would pass within half a kilometer of the Pillar.

  Calculations were run across every known object in orbit, from functional satellites to space debris from the thousands of launches that had taken place since 1957. When Gary and Eva were first presented with the analysis, all they could do was sit there, numb. Several hundred functional satellites were in low- to mid-range earth orbit, but so was space debris: factor against that an initial strand two millimeters wide, not yet shielded with Eva’s mesh (the final design would, at least on paper, include high-energy lasers drawing their power from the solar arrays to all but vaporize debris, along with a harmonic wave to oscillate the tower out of the way of impact as an object passed), and the odds were unsettling. Within a year they could expect at least one significant impact.

  There was one thing they could not accurately calculate: the strength of the carbon nanotubing against the kinetic energy of an unknown object striking with a velocity of perhaps five miles per second or more. Tests were run, but the variables were the velocity of the impacting object and its mass and the diameter of the first strand when impacted. Within the first few weeks, a strike by an object weighing as little as ten grams traveling at eight kilometers a second would be catastrophic. But given enough time to spin a few dozen additional strands onto the first one, out to the first thousand kilometers from earth, and the odds of survival increased significantly. There were too many variables, though, and when Eva, at one meeting, finally just sat back, stared at the ceiling, and told the staff, “Learn to pray,” the room was silent.

  But there was no turning back now, and Franklin, as their public persona, dodged the tough questions like an accomplished politician while continuing to sell the dream of the future. As to the threatened hearings and some attempt by the UN to block the tower, his response, though never “on the record,” was: “How many rogue nations, bent on evil, have been doing their chicanery right up to making nuclear weapons and the world did nothing? We in contrast are doing something that, once proven, all humanity—except those who wish to see the old collapsing economic system remain in place—will come to support.”

  There had been several debris strikes in space on the shuttle during its 135-plus flights and total flight time far exceeding a year in orbit, as well as on the space station during its nearly twenty-plus-year record. One gouged a crater over a centimeter deep to the forward windshield of a shuttle, striking with a loud bang that echoed inside the crew compartment and giving everyone a scare. Analysis later indicated it was most likely a bolt, of all things, but if it had been ten times the mass, it might have penetrated and caused a catastrophic decompression. Only those who carefully followed the news about space flight were even aware of it. It was the type of thing that simply didn’t get a major press release. It did not ground the program, it came down to a calculation of risk aversion versus the benefits of building the space station, and NASA had kept its fleet flying … and replaced the nearly cracked windshield.

  Franklin more openly compared this situation to that of the legendary Captain “Sully” Sullenberger. Bird strikes had been a reality of aviation since Wilbur and Orville. Every private pilot with enough hours under their lap belt had taken a deep gulp at least once on lifting off when a flock of ducks came soaring up out of a nearby marsh or lake. Every aviator learned that ducks and geese, unlike most other birds, will go for altitude when panicked—meaning they will come up under you where you can’t see them until that final split second before impact—and that could spell disaster, yet it did not stop pilots from flying. Commercial airlines regularly suffered bird strikes, but a total engine loss? God put Captain Sully on board that flight out of New York that day, Franklin would say with a smile, and they were designing the Pillar with that in mind. There would always be a Captain Sully on board and in control of the Pillar.

  It was, Gary and Eva knew, an argument that did not hold much water until their second phase, when the actual commercial tower rather than the construction tower was in place. The ribbon design had evolved over the last few years: unlike the initial “strand” tower, the commercial tower in its final form would be a ribbon that could easily have additional layers stitched onto either side and could be made any width—a dozen meters or more—so that even if one of the individual ribbons, each about the width of old-fashioned 35mm film, was hit and taken out, the ribbons stitched to either side would remain intact, and repairing the broken section would be a simple enough task. The first towe
r was simply to haul up the hundreds of tons of “ribbon” at reasonable cost to build the primary tower for actual commercial use.

  Until then, it was hoped that the space-faring nations would at least attempt to cooperate and nudge their satellites a few hundred meters to one side or the other if on a collision course.

  However, that had not stopped a few opponents in the Senate from demanding high-profile hearings on this “new hazard that can shut down space travel,” even though those same senators for years had systematically choked off funding to NASA for their own projects and driven engineers like Gary and Eva into the arms of Franklin Smith and his team.

  The harassment built. Franklin appeared before one hearing in which he was shredded. The following day he flew to Kiribati, and within a week most of his key administrative staff had followed. He ignored the next summons to appear in Washington.

  He was in near exile now, but his project was in full swing. And although those in power at that moment vilified him, those who supported him—who understood the science involved, and the dire prospects if new answers were not found—grew in number. Franklin’s eternal optimism captured something about the American spirit. An older generation began to speak more to the younger one about a time in their own youth when a young president challenged the nation to dream of new and higher frontiers. The current dystopic vision of America’s future—economic collapse, its decline into a second-rate power, threats of war, gas at twenty dollars a gallon, even zombie invasion—was gradually changing. The belief that a resurgence was at hand for America, and with it the entire world, just might be taking hold.

  11

  Two Years Later

  “Kiribati control, this is Pillar One, we have hard dock.”

  “Pillar One, Kiribati Control. Great work. You have a lot of men and women down here about to turn blue.”

  Victoria could not help but smile at that one. She looked over at Jason and squeezed his hand, for he had quietly passed along the suggestion that Mission Control say those exact words. It was a direct salute to the famous exchange between Neil Armstrong and Houston when he announced touchdown on the moon: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”