Pillar to the Sky Page 7

  “Give it ten years,” she said coldly. “We will move ahead with all the other problems to be solved, then have them cleared and be ready to go the day the material is at last available to build with.”

  “All right. Let’s say for the sake of argument your dream happens and ten years from now this miracle of C-60 carbon nanotubes appears. Then what?”

  She was about to snap at him again, but somehow the peace gesture of the soda stilled her frustration. She took a big gulp and offered the can back to him and he took a sip.

  “Go on. I’ll listen,” she offered.

  He was about to add, You mean, listen until you disagree, then tear my head off. But he held back on that.

  “You postulate your theory on building a tower on a what-if: the expectation that someone will figure out a way to manipulate carbon atoms and build molecules—what some are calling ‘buckyball’ molecules—into nanotubes hundreds of times stronger than tungsten steel. And then, not just strands a few millimeters in length in a laboratory, but hundreds of thousands of miles of the stuff, turned out by factories that are then capable of spinning them into cables thousands of kilometers long the way they used to make cables for suspension bridges.”

  “Your American history,” she retorted. “When the first suspension bridges were built a hundred and fifty years ago, they didn’t trust steel and used iron, even though it was brittle. So they overbuilt the cables to handle the stress. Fifty years later it was all steel and no one would even think of using something as ancient as iron. But they built the bridges with what they had, and that is my point.

  “Can’t you dream just a little?” she continued. “Back when the people in that building we work in, Dr. Rothenberg included, were dreaming up something called Apollo, they came up against a brick wall. The lunar lander needed an onboard computer. In the final minutes of landing, they could not rely on just an onboard radar system to send the data back to earth and then send the flight corrections back. That would take several seconds at a time when the astronauts needed split-second decisions. They needed a computer on board that could do it instantly. Only problem was, the computers of 1962 were bigger than the entire landing module. Six years later they had one the size of a suitcase that could handle the job. Rather than stop the program until the computer was built, they surged ahead and fit the computer in when it was ready.”

  “Barely,” Gary replied. “Remember, Apollo 11’s computer froze up. The famous 1201 and 1202 alarms. I’ve listened to the tapes. It was a near run thing. There was too much data overload for its forty kilobytes to handle. If not for Armstrong and Aldrin being the best pilots in the world—or should I say the moon—and keeping their cool, they would have crashed.”

  “I’ll acknowledge that,” she said. “But Alexei Leonov could have pulled it off even without the computer.”

  He could not help but smile at her nod to Russia’s most famous cosmonaut, the first man to “walk” in space back in the 1960s—a hero who she was proud to boast had actually come to the veterans’ hospital her grandfather was in, sat by his side, and saluted him before leaving.

  “Listen, Eva. My point is that you are postulating this entire tower on a carbon fiber that does not yet even exist except in theory and mathematical models. At least the guys who built bridges like Roebling and Eads did in the nineteenth century knew the strength of the iron they were using at that time. Your carbon nanotubes are still the stuff of science fiction. And now you are talking about building this tower the moment we think we have material strong enough. NASA does not get or give funding to manned missions with barely a safety factor.”

  “They did with Apollo 11. I read where the experts figured there was a fifty-fifty chance Armstrong and Aldrin would not return.”

  He was silent for a moment. There had been a lot of speculation about that long after the mission. Yes, the odds had been there; what happened with Apollo 13 showed that. But times were different then. Real or not, there was a so-called race on to get to the moon first. That was no longer the case.

  “At the time,” he finally offered, “Apollo 11 was thought to be way beyond 100 percent capable. Believe me, there was a lot of scrambling to upgrade a lot of components on board before they let Apollo 12 take off four months later.

  “You are saying ten years from now someone will develop a material strong enough, just at 100 percent, to handle the stress loads of a tower that will be 23,000 miles tall. Actually around 40,000 when the counterweight is added in.”

  “Talk in kilometers please,” she said haughtily.

  He could not help but smile.

  “OK, 40,000 kilometers just out to geosynch.”

  “So?”

  “No mission is going to get funding into the tens of billions of dollars based upon a zero-safety factor. No one will even begin to entertain the idea until there is a 200—better yet, a 300—percent safety factor. And even then, it will seem so sci-fi and high-risk, you’d be laughed out of the first funding hearing.”

  She shook her head angrily.

  “If we wait that long, you and I will be gone and dead fifty years. There was a time, damn it, when people took risks because the payoff was worth it.”

  “Sell that to Congress. You wouldn’t last ten minutes in a hearing, let alone in front of a doctoral dissertation committee.”

  “If we don’t pick a point in the process where we at least make a trial attempt at building the tower, it will never happen.”

  “Not at only a zero-safety factor,” Gary replied. “Get us up to 200 to 300 percent, but then you are back into pure science fiction, and that is not the mission of this place.”

  As he spoke he nodded at the Goddard campus around them.

  She took the can of soda back from him and drained the rest.

  And now, for the first time in the weeks they had been working together, she actually did manage a smile.

  “Could I ask you for some more soda, please? It’s hot, I’m tired, and if you want to continue this argument, I would appreciate something more to drink.”

  He knew he was being conned by a warm smile, and he was happy to go along with it. He returned a minute later with another can, which was already dripping with moisture in the humid air. In the distance the rolling peals of thunder were beginning to increase.

  “Take that storm for example,” he said while opening the soda and handing it to her.

  “Yes?”

  “The tower has to be built on the equator.

  “One could build it off the centerline of the equator, but that starts to increase stress loads; so, yes, a given for a first attempt. Build it on the equator.

  “So let’s say Brazil or Indonesia. You get storms like that almost every day, towering giants 50,000 feet”—he paused to calculate—“fifteen kilometers high. Wind shear that NASA will not even send a plane through to try to measure. Hail the size of baseballs blowing around at a few hundred kilometers per hour. Take the surface area of the tower, measure out the total stress loads, and you are way past the snapping point the first time a storm like that hits.”

  She sighed, nodded, staring at the dark clouds.

  “We build a buffering shield around it.”

  “A what?”

  “First of all, the weather on the equator, contrary to what some think, is not at all violent. Hurricanes never happen there because the earth’s rotation imparts a spin effect either clockwise south of the equator or counterclockwise north of the equator. So weather is not such a dynamic feature. Then picture the tower as a pencil. Now slide a cardboard tube over the pencil made of the same material for the first fifteen kilometers up. It can absorb the blows of a storm like that, even be broken in places, but the inner section, the tower itself, is protected.”

  “Oh, great. And how much more weight does that add on?”

  She looked away.

  “I haven’t calculated that yet.”

  He pictured her description of a tower that, at points of potential high st
ress or impacts, had a shield around it, even just a mesh web the way an eighteen-wheeler truck exhaust pipe would have a protective baffle around it. It could absorb impacts of solid objects and break up lateral stress. But then, what to anchor that to? Anchor it straight to the tower and the problem would be worse with added surface area. But still, some sort of shock absorbers at the anchor points? He heard her laugh softly and looked back at her.

  “Gary, you have been sitting there in silence for the last five minutes.”

  A bit embarrassed, he realized she was right; the problem had drawn him in and he was now trying to visualize an answer.

  He nodded, took the can of soda back for another sip. He could have purchased two cans, but he liked the idea of sharing one with her.

  “So let’s buy the idea of a baffle down in the atmosphere; what about in low- to mid-earth orbit?”

  “Go on.”

  “At this moment there are something like eight to ten thousand objects orbiting the earth, and it looks like we won’t get the Cray computer time this year to run the calculations as to probability of impacts. Hundreds of them are valuable satellites—for example, your Mir or the Hubble, which weighs several dozen tons. They cross the equator twice in every orbit. Most are just junk: burned-out boosters, fragments from rockets that have blown, even junk just tossed out the window by manned missions or that floated off by accident. You add them up, do a cross section of the tower, and odds are…” Again he paused, running the numbers in his mind of a stationary object two hundred miles up and at least half a dozen feet across. “I’d guess on an average every six to eight months or so something will hit, and hit damn hard, moving at five miles”—another few seconds’ pause—“at least eight kilometers a second. Even if it was just a stray bolt or an old camera or an astronaut’s outer glove, that is a helluva lot of kinetic energy.”

  “Already thought of that,” she replied with a knowing smile. “We’d have mounted lasers capable of vaporizing or shattering the smaller fragments. Functional satellites once the tower goes up, they just have small thrusters mounted on them, and if on a collision course just a few pounds of thrust can move them a couple of hundred meters to one side or the other out of harm’s way.”

  He shook his head.

  “After it goes up? As if everyone would cooperate. I can picture a few nations out there that would get a big laugh out of saying, ‘Gee, sorry we hit your tower and broke it. Our apologies.’”

  “Gary, I think anyone capable of orbiting a satellite would want to cooperate.”

  “And suppose they don’t.”

  She was silent about that one.

  He wanted to mutter again that she was dreaming, but things were going cordially at the moment: they were working together without passionate arguments.

  “And that does not even factor in sats already in orbit.”

  She hesitated.

  “We’ll figure something out,” she said.

  “‘We’?”

  “You’re in on this too.”

  “To poke holes in it, Miss Eva. And frankly, a one-ton satellite would poke a very big hole, even if the tower was made of your miracle fiber.”

  The storm was drawing closer, and now the first heavy drops of rain began to fall, bringing with them the refreshing scent of a summer rain after a day of stifling heat.

  She startled him by actually reaching over and patting his arm.

  “That’s our job this summer. To figure it out. Now let’s get back to work.”

  4

  Today

  Following Erich’s rather confusing directions, they at last found the terminal for private aircraft at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.

  They had packed so hastily, and Erich was being so mysterious about the reason for this trip now, that Gary was absolutely disoriented. Victoria had snatched his GPS for her car and he forgot to bring it along for this run to the airport, and though Erich could navigate the stars, getting from Goddard to the private terminal at BWI did throw him a bit.

  Six hours earlier Gary was being torn apart at a Senate hearing, and now here he was? For what? He had flown in private jets a few times before, and inwardly admitted he was excited by the prospect, whatever it was, given Erich’s insistence that they were going to the private rather than public terminal. At least, it sure beat what commercial flying had become of late. Victoria was beside herself with excitement, and Erich, while occasionally offering vague directions, entertained her with stories about the “old days” and all the famous astronauts and cosmonauts he had known.

  Pulling into a parking space, Gary was surprised when several attendants descended upon their vehicle and helped them to off-load their bags. Years of commercial flying on a NASA budget had conditioned him to lugging his own baggage around and praying it would arrive at the other end. They didn’t even stop inside the terminal other than an offer for a “pit stop” and a soda for Victoria, who took bottled water instead, before heading out on to the tarmac.

  The pilot was at the base stairs to a Gulfstream jet and extended his hand, introducing himself as Danny McMullen. Then Gary looked up and saw who was standing at the top of the stairs, waiting to welcome them, and he suddenly understood why there was so much fuss and attention being paid to them.

  Erich grinned and went up the steps first, and in spite of his ninety-plus years he almost had a spring to his walk, extending his hand to the man who was waiting for them. When he turned and looked back, Gary could not conceal that he was more than a bit surprised.

  “Drs. Gary and Eva Petrenko Morgan,” Erich announced formally, “it is my pleasure to introduce Franklin Smith.”

  Franklin Smith? Gary wondered. What in hell was going on here?

  Smith was definitely a legend in the dot-com world. African-American, he had grown up in the South when segregation was still a reality. If fate had played out just a bit differently, he most likely would have been trapped in the world of his parents and grandparents. But the winds of change were stirring even in a remote corner of southeast Virginia. A friendly local electronics store owner, a refugee from Soviet-occupied Hungary, took an interest in him after catching him one day prowling around the Dumpster behind his shop, fishing out broken and discarded parts of televisions. When questioned, he said his family couldn’t afford a televison, so he figured he would just build one himself. He soon had a part-time job at the store that quickly went from sweeping floors to working on repairs in the back room, and at night he trudged home with various castoffs to tinker with. From such simple gestures of interest, friendship, and love …

  An African-American tech nerd in the South in the 1960s? The school guidance counselor in the typical once-a-year fifteen-minute interview suggested he go into television repair once he graduated or go into the army, but his friend at the store told him to reach much higher and believe in his dreams.

  At seventeen Smith built his first computer. The school librarian, Betty Keller, sat there in wonder when he lugged the thirty-pound contraption into school; it could actually do some rather complex formulas, when it wasn’t shorting out. Three months later, thanks to the love, guidance, long-distance phone calls, and help with applications by Miss Keller—a teacher every student should find at least once in their lives—Franklin was admitted with a full scholarship to MIT. But he never quite finished that degree when it was discovered he had hacked into the university’s supposedly impenetrable computers to change grades for friends … an indication of his entrepreneurial skills at twenty-five bucks a pop. Even as he was being expelled, the dean said he had a bright future, given that the MIT registrar’s office database system had been designed by MIT grads, only to be cracked by a third-year undergrad. On his way out the door, Franklin was paid a rather handsome sum—behind the scenes, of course—to close the door on the registrar’s computers before leaving the campus.

  If someone had been savvy enough to give him five thousand bucks as start-up money back then that benefacto
r would be worth hundreds of millions today. As for the high school teacher, Betty Keller, and his friend at the electronics store, they were enjoying retirement with beachfront homes in Maui, with scholarship funds set up for the store owner’s multitude of grandchildren and an endowment fund for Miss Keller to do with as she pleased. There had been no hoopla and publicity about such gestures; it was simply that Franklin always remembered his friends, especially those who helped launch his career. Even MIT received a major donation every year, scholarships for kids from third world countries—something of an inside joke, given that it came from a student they had expelled!

  Franklin Smith, losing out on the edge of the first “home computers” in the early 1980s, had built a firm specializing in scaled-down hard drives for the first so-called laptops when everyone else was looking for bigger, with the ability to put in a few more megs of storage. Few were thinking that smaller meant fitting them into the fifteen-pound laptops even if they had less than half the storage capacity. He had stayed one skip ahead of that market, selling off a few patents to the big players, but with a royalty fee adroitly added in for each unit sold. He then pulled out of that to go into the “dot-com” field with this new thing called the “Internet.” And then, yet again, he pulled his investments out just before the big collapse, reinvesting in cell phone technology at a time when only the rich could afford such “toys” but foreseeing a day when even kids would be doing something called “texting.”

  He was always one step ahead of the game. Gary had met him several times at conferences, along with hundreds of others who had queued up to shake his hand. He was surprised to see Franklin sitting in the back of the audience when he and Eva delivered a paper on the use of space elevator technology that would eliminate the need for thousands of cell phone towers on the ground. After their talk, which was greeted with polite smiles and nothing more, they were surprised when Franklin presented his card and asked if he could receive autographed copies of their dissertations and any other research that NASA had in the public domain regarding this insane concept. They had not heard from him since that day.