On queue the room replied with applause, but not thunderous. The Prime minister took a sip of water to wet his throat. He knew what was going through their minds. Terror. The Chinese Premier appeared to be hinting at some sort of restriction on private enterprise. Right now, bond markets were having a temporary scare. It had been a long time since any world leader had said something that hadn’t been already priced into the market. Well, that would be resolved in a second. The applause faded away.
“Do not panic my friends, China is not going to suddenly close our markets or return to the old ways. Private enterprise has been good for our citizens and will continue to be good for our citizens and we the government will continue to do all we can to ensure private enterprise continues to thrive”. He could hear the collective sigh of relief in the room and had to stop himself smiling. “What we have come to realise however, is that there is a place for private enterprise and there is place for state enterprise. Private enterprise cannot stop most of our big global problems because there is no short term profit in doing so. A private company cannot tackle climate change, or unemployment, or economic stagnation within the timescale with which these problems need to be solved. My friends, these problems need to be tackled by the state, they need to be tackled by government because government should have the health and welfare of the people as its main goal and is expected to spend public money with that goal in mind. These are global problems and require global solutions. Only a global organisation such as the UN can hope to solve them.”
This time the applause was thunderous. The UN had often been ignored, sidestepped, sometimes derided, for a Chinese Prime Minister to recognise its importance made the assembly members feel as though they still had a role to play in the world. Politicians, like all people, want to feel needed.
“As I said earlier, we have all heard empty promises for a solution before. Well the People’s Republic of China intends to keep this promise. What we need friends is an idea so big it will change our behaviour forever, an idea that can motivate the world into action, that can stimulate our economies and make our industries grow again, an idea that can create employment and bring back hope, and an idea that can stimulate the scaling up of clean energy production. It is five years since an inhabitable world was found around a star just thirty light years away. Over that five year period we have had public debate over and over again as to whether we could go there, do we have the technology and if not can we develop it? Is it economically viable? Why would we go there?
In 1405 we looked outwards and in a spirit of exploration Admiral Zheng He voyaged across the seas to introduce the world to Chinese culture. Then, to our shame we looked inwards and stagnated. Well, once again China will look outwards, this time to the stars, and Zheng He will sail again, for that is what we shall call the vessel which will take us to this new world. We will not go alone though. Again the UN has been ahead of our individual states on this issue. In 1967 the Outer Space Treaty was created. This treaty states that the exploration of outer space shall be done to benefit all countries and shall be free for exploration and use by all nations. In this spirit the Zheng He will be an international project, but we need an international body to oversee it, and this shall be the UN. We, the People’s Republic of China pledge seven hundred billion Yuan over ten years to begin the ship. We ask that wealthy western nations match this amount, so that together, we can not only take humanity to the stars, but we can improve life for those of us that will remain behind and create a better world for our children. My friends let us satisfy our curiosity, let us challenge our intellect, and let us renew the great human spirit of exploration. Thank you.”
The room exploded in applause, and cheers. The assembly never cheers. The room was on its feet. He looked up at his wife in the viewing gallery, a smile stretched across the face he had fallen in love with so many years ago, a face he still loved. She wiped the tears of happiness and pride from her eyes. Yes, he would be remembered by history, his legacy was secure. What he was unsure of though was the nature of that legacy. Would he be the man who sent humanity to the stars, or the politician who made the most expensive broken promise in history?
Chapter 4: 2028 to 2030
John and Graham didn’t know it already, but thousands of miles away and months earlier, a short man in a plain pine panelled office had decided that they would win the tender anyway. They had been compiling their work for two months since the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) had officially opened the call for proposals. They had a clear head start on all of their better funded industrial competitors but they didn’t know exactly how far ahead they were. They also didn’t know that every word they said in their meeting room was being listened to on the other side of the world by a room full of analysts. In this case the old saying was true, what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them, indeed, it was ensuring they would succeed.
Their heads were a little fuzzy this morning; last night was the sixth annual transit party in the bar just down the street from their office in Houston. Every time the planet made a transit of Gliese 451 the James Webb Telescope added more and more certainty that it was inhabitable, and as a consequence, the Starship office celebrated. The hangovers didn’t put them off their work though. Since John had decided to move job with Graham he had loved every minute of this new work. So far it had been pure imagination and consultation. They would meet an expert in one field or another, find out what they thought was necessary, feed this information to the engineers, and estimate prices on different component pieces. Every day was a new meeting with a new expert, and by now they had a pretty major grasp on what they needed to start the project. More than that though, they had a pretty good grasp on what the ship would eventually look like, and it would be beautiful, at least on the inside.
The design of the Zheng He would be decided by the engineering required for it to fulfil its function. When the process began they had to list exactly what the goal of the ship was to be, and work backwards from there. They hated the phrase “mission statement” but in this case it was an actual mission and not just some public relations rubbish on a company wall. The Zheng He’s mission statement was simple: “to ensure the genetic legacy of humanity”. Within those seven simple words lay billions upon billions of dollars, not just one but several of the greatest engineering projects ever undertaken, and perhaps the most challenging political negotiations of the twenty first century. Luckily for John and Graham they only had to deal with the first two problems. Once they began to break down the mission statement they had to set priorities in order of importance. The first question was whether to build the ship on the ground and launch it or to build it in space? This was answered by the second question, which was how big did it have to be? The answer to that question was “very big”.
The first person they decided to meet for advice was not an engineer or an astrophysicist but a cryobiologist. While common knowledge believed that cryogenics, the freezing of life for long periods, did not work, they needed to confirm it anyway as maybe there was some way of slowing people’s metabolisms so they could be transported. Well, there wasn’t. While they hadn’t precisely calculated the amount of time it would take to get there, this would come later, even at ten percent the speed of light they were looking at an intergenerational ship. A ship that would set out crewed by people who would never see their destination, but their children or more likely their grandchildren would. This was the main reason why it would be very big. The next person they consulted was a geneticist. She told them that to have a genetically variable population on board, a population that wouldn’t inbreed or curse this new branch of humanity with incurable genetic diseases; they would need to accommodate about two hundred people. Yes, this ship would be big but importantly the size might be manageable.
It got bigger though. What would happen when the ship arrived? It wasn’t a bus full of tourists just going there to take photos and buy a t-shirt; it was supposed to settle a planet. How ma
ny people did you need to settle a planet? Unlike the colonization of the Americas or Australia, there was only one ship leaving, one time only. The number of people on board would need to increase further, but by how much? This is where the anthropologists came in. After a few meetings, and a few weeks of thinking and researching, a similar result came back from two universities. Including people needed to operate the ship, a colony required farmers, teachers, doctors, nurses, administrators, judges, builders, carpenters, engineers, miners, metalworkers, etc. Most important were the teachers though. Some skills were not needed on the ship but would be needed upon arrival and so, rather than trusting an Artifical Intelligence system that might break down, these skills would have to be handed down from generation to generation. Some people could have two jobs for a while, or even three depending on how adaptable an individual was. After considering all these questions, the final agreed figure was two thousand. The ship needed to take off with a minimum of two hundred crew, and by the time it arrived at Gliese 451, through population increase, it would have that final compliment of two thousand colonists ready to settle their new home.
Once the number of inhabitants was established the two logistics junkies were in their element. They had a figure to work with. First they tried to reduce this figure. Were men really necessary? Maybe the ship could contain a hundred women and the frozen semen of a hundred men. This led to some blushing and a lot of laughing in group meetings for about a week until the geneticist informed them that while semen could be successfully frozen for a long time there wasn’t enough research to say if it could be frozen for the duration of the trip. Well, it could always be a backup in case of a radiation leak, or if the shielding failed and the crew were exposed long term to cosmic rays. If there were going to be two thousand people at the end, then they needed to plan the space for two thousand from the beginning. John tried to put this in perspective; it’s just the size of a small town, and you can fit that many people easily on a modern cruise ship…except the people on a cruise ship didn’t need to grow their own food, and their children’s food for perhaps two hundred years or more.
Initially, in the days before the Chinese Prime Minister had announced the Zheng He project, the consulting geneticists and anthropologists thought both Graham and John were very nice, but clearly very mad, however the questions they posed fired the imagination. These initial estimates were a huge success in another way; three years later both the geneticists and anthropologists had assembled other enthusiastic experts and they had developed extraordinarily detailed demographic projections. In fact, almost everyone they had first contacted for advice was still feeding them useful information.
Answers on population alone were not enough to send a ship across interstellar space. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) had, over the years, been doing theoretical research in this field. Since they didn’t believe in repeating work that had already been done, John and Graham spent endless hours going through the minutes of old meetings, videos of lectures, and papers published in several journals, though most of the papers were more discussion articles than concrete science. They formed a small team consisting of engineers who had previously done this theoretical work. It would take innumerable long but interesting arguments to turn theory into blueprints. Still, there was enough there for them to begin making decisions on what would work. The three most discussed theoretical ship forms were the Stanford Torus, the Bernal Sphere and the O’Neill Cylinder. The torus was the first to be ruled out. While it was ideal for Earth orbit, a giant bicycle wheel in space, the shape was considered too risky. This thing would be travelling fast with long accelerations and decelerations, so it needed a solid shape where forces would be evenly distributed across the structure; a torus shape big enough would just break apart before it even left our own solar system. The Bernal Sphere provided a more stable shape, like an inside-out mini Earth, but unlike the Earth the centripetal force would be maximum at the equator, meaning the occupants would have to live around the equator most of the time to benefit from artificial gravity. From early costings, the ratio of volume to inhabitable space was not value for money. In the end, an O’Neill Cylinder was the preferred choice by the engineers when the needs of the occupants were taken into account. To feed two thousand people they were going to need a two hundred acre farm in space, taking crop rotation into account, also, they assumed the inhabitants over their lifetimes, needed some open space to prevent themselves from going mad. “Cabin fever” was a real and major threat to the success of the mission. Most colonists would have to adapt to a largely vegetarian diet. Chickens would be used to provide some protein from eggs and some varieties of fish could be farmed. Beef and milk would be a thing of the past as it required too many precious acres to farm cattle. Once they added on extra area to account for photosynthetic conversion of carbon dioxide to oxygen (ie, a forest to purify the air and prevent everyone suffocating) the acreage of the cylinder had increased to three hundred. Initially they thought they would have to base the radius of the cylinder on this calculation, but no, the rate of rotation came into that. It needed to rotate fast enough to generate Earth equivalent gravity, anything less and the occupants would be seriously deformed after a generation, yet not so fast that other effects on balance and movement caused by standing in a rapidly rotating tube would make everyone permanently feel like vomiting. So a radius of 300m was agreed on. This would result in a final rotating cylinder in space with a length of 650m. It wouldn’t be completely hollow. To grow plants you need sunlight, and there is isn’t enough sunlight in interstellar space. The centre of this tube would have an artificial sun running along its length.
Even with these basic estimates they had an answer to their initial question: it was much too big to launch from Earth in one piece, it would have to be built in space. Unfortunately to send something this big up in pieces was going to cost a fortune. Every ten and half tonnes they sent up on an Arienne 5 rocket was going to cost $120 Million and with a price tag like this, the project would be scrapped before it could begin. The International space station at 419 tonnes had cost over €100 billion. Something more cost effective, more imaginative needed to be found.
This answer came to an engineer called Henry Donne. Henry had been consulted by John a month earlier about the rotation question, and had been lost in thought ever sense. One Sunday evening as he looked out his kitchen window drying the wine glasses after a steak super with some old college friends, he thought about the forces that would be exerted on the skin of the ship when the boosters fired to rotate it. Get the calculations wrong and the forces exerted could tear a hole at a weak point in the ship’s superstructure. They needed something much more solid, yet with a little built in redundancy at the surface in case something went wrong. They needed to plan for failure, because over a long interstellar trip, failures were inevitable. The skin of the ship needed to be thick, not only to prevent stress failure, but also to provide radiation shielding and protect from minor impacts. At the speeds it would need to travel, even small meteors could do a lot of damage to any final design. Henry knew that building the ship would be expensive, but thinking about the necessary thickness of the skin he, like Graham and John, realised it would be impossible to launch that much mass into space. That’s when the moon he was absent mindedly staring at came into play. Previous dreamers and thinkers had imagined mining and processing materials on the moon to build such a ship as the gravity there was lower so more mass could be launched per trip. Thing is, it would be just as expensive to build a moon base and the final structure would still need too much material to make it safe. No, that was closer but it would never work. The Earth does have another partner than the Moon on its annual voyage around the sun; Cruithne, an asteroid five kilometres in diameter that crossed the Earth’s orbit twice a year, just sitting there waiting for us to make use of it, with a nice solid surface that would provide excellent radiation shielding. That might be too great a mass to accelerate to any meaningful speed, but
the idea was good. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter contained hundreds of thousands of rocky lumps around a kilometre in diameter, rocks that were rich in metals, rocks that could be hollowed out, rocks that didn’t need to be launched into space because they were already there. All we have to do is reach out and pick one to bring back to Earth orbit to be worked on. Even better than all this, there was no need to go as far as the asteroid belt because the asteroid belt frequently comes to us. Henry even knew off the top of his head five asteroids passing within easy reach over the next few years. In a rush of excitement he picked up the phone to Graham Hutchinson. If Henry got his way then for a while at least, the Earth would have another moon.
While they didn’t have an exact mass yet for the Zheng He, they had an accurate enough estimate to guess that accelerating something this big to a speed large enough to reach Gliese 451 within two hundred years was going to take a lot of energy. Providing the central heating to prevent two thousand people freezing to death, when the outside temperature was just above absolute zero, for two hundred years, was going to be tough. Also keeping artificial sunlight going for twelve hours a day for two hundred years, not to mention keeping the rotation constant over that length of time, added to this problem. The bulk of the energy problem though would be getting something with this much mass to ten percent the speed of light and then getting it to slow down again. NASA did the calculations. There was only one existing technology that had the potential to provide enough energy to reach this speed, and Graham and John just happened to know the right people with the right knowledge to do it. The ITER project might just have a new future, a new goal, to turn a Tokamak Fusion reactor into a Starship engine, several of them. Apart from their head start, a gap which could always be closed by their competitors, this was the advantage Graham and John had over all the others, they knew the right experts to design the only feasible power source to take humanity to the new world.
The Project Manager Page 4