by Hammond, Ray
Larsson stepped out of the Holo-Theater and picked up a glass of water from a nearby table. His audience remained absolutely silent as they waited. He drank, cleared his throat and returned to the display.
‘Now, this is how the satellites will capture the sun’s energy.’ He pressed his remote control again.
As they watched, every one of the pinpricks of white light seemed to grow outwards, enlarging laterally. After twenty seconds each had become many times larger than its original size. When the simulation stopped developing, the twelve spacecraft hung like large silver tiles dotted in a semicircle above the northern half of the Earth.
‘Let me show you that transformation in detail,’ said Larsson, finally growing in confidence. The image cleared to blackness, then they were looking at a holo-model of one of the deep-space satellites.
‘This unit is called a Solaris A-100. It is a deep-space catoptric energy station manufactured by Tye Aerospace in Singapore and then assembled in orbit. Its current position is four thousand kilometres above the sixtieth parallel. That’s the latitude that runs through Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, the Baltic Sea, northern Russia and Siberia.’
Jack saw a smartly suited man to his left making rapid notes on his DigiPad.
‘In its passive condition the core satellite doesn’t appear very different to one of the many manned space-station structures already orbiting our planet – although those are only about five hundred kilometres up, and fully trapped by the Earth’s gravity. Essentially this Solaris weighs 12,000 kilograms, has core dimensions of two hundred and sixty metres by one hundred and forty-eight. Almost all the power used on board is provided by solar energy. Apart from plasma thrusters, employed for purposes we shall see in a minute, there is no alternative energy source. This satellite platform was launched from Cape Hope – from the floating facilities at the island – about fourteen months ago. It was initially placed in a low-Earth geostationary orbit at a location pre-booked with the UN Space Agency by Tye Aerospace. The filing described it as an experimental deep-space research probe. After four months of additional construction work in orbit the satellite was boosted to its present position in deep space.’
‘Also pre-booked?’ asked the note-taker. Jack now recalled he was Joe Tinkler, one of the World Bank people.
‘No.’ Larsson shook his head. ‘International space agreements only apply to orbits up to a thousand kilometres above the Earth. Beyond that, orbit paths and locations are not considered stable – there being insufficient gravity for a spacecraft to be held in reliable Earth orbit. There are therefore no international rules about locations in deep space, no agreements on ownership, no property rights.’
‘First come, first served?’ asked Tinkler.
‘Precisely,’ agreed Larsson.
‘So how do they maintain their orbital positions?’ asked Deakin.
‘I’ll come to that,’ said Larsson, turning back to the spacecraft image. He pressed a button and the satellite shrunk from five feet wide to less than a foot. ‘Let me show you something else first. Now watch.’
Small hatches opened on either side of the rectangular craft and with a simulated puff of propulsion gases two small space pods were expelled and began to move slowly outwards in opposing lateral directions. As they did so, the audience could see that each trailed a silver tether behind it, like an umbilical cord linking it to the mother ship.
Larsson stepped back as the pod on his side continued its outward journey. With a retro-firing of propellant gas the pods then stopped at the very edges of the display zone. The image now resembled a silver thread stretched right across the Holo-Theater, interrupted at the centre by the small satellite. This being a representation of deep space, the thread showed no sign of either tension or sagging.
Jack’s eyes wandered along the entire image, which now seemed stationary. Then he noticed that the pods at either end of this thread had started to spin slowly on their axis. As the line of thread grew thicker, it became clear that the slowly rotating pods were unwinding some form of tightly rolled-up material. Jack thought of curtain blinds being slowly lowered and, as more of the material appeared, it looked as if it was a form of netting.
‘There are plasma thrusters at the bottom of each sail,’ explained Larsson, pointing along the bottom edge of one of the descending nets. ‘There’s no proximate gravity so the sails have to be thrust downwards as the axial motors unwind their rolls. In this simulation the process is speeded up about seven hundred times.’
As they watched, it became clear that each ‘sail’ was indeed made up entirely of silver netting. After a few minutes the ‘unfurling’ process ended and the holo-image pit was filled with the model of a minute central satellite from which two enormously long arms supported what looked like two giant geometrically symmetrical fishing nets.
By now Larsson was enjoying the stunned reaction of his audience. He pressed the remote to freeze the image. ‘Any idea what happens next?’
There were a few shrugs and head shakes. But this audience didn’t seek to be interactive – it just wanted to watch and learn.
Larsson triggered the remote again. At first it seemed as if nothing was happening but then Jack noticed that the latticework of each net was somehow becoming denser. He leaned forward instinctively and realized that the rest of the audience was reacting in precisely the same way.
The holes in the netting were filling in, decreasing the gaps towards their centres. Finally both sails had become solid extents of polished silver. As they watched, the simulation shifted its longitudinal rotation slightly and everybody jerked back as a brilliant flash of light shot across their vision.
‘They certainly know how to build a demo,’ observed Larsson as he restored a 3D image of the fully-extended Solaris station without the dazzling light.
‘Those sails are active solar reflectors, ladies and gentlemen. They are built – well, I don’t think that’s the right word – they have been created from a new type of photonic biological material called Anacamptonite. Let me turn this image of the fully extended Solaris station around.’
‘The meshugener’s put giant mirrors up behind the Earth!’ exclaimed Chelouche.
‘Precisely,’ said Larsson. He pressed his remote.
*
The two-man dog watch aboard the Knossian, a 770,000-ton ultra-large crude-carrier belonging to the Lawrence-Antico Oil Co of Quebec, stared at their instruments in disbelief.
Although not the very largest of the world’s fleet of ULCCs, the Knossian was a modern and supremely well-equipped floating oil tank. Tonight she was almost full, with three-quarters of a million tons of premium crude oil in her fourteen separate watertight compartments. As the use and price of oil continued to decline in the developed world, the oil companies had been forced to adopt the largest possible tankers in order to secure the significant cost-savings associated with bulk transportation. She was on her way from the pipe-head stores of Yamal, a coastal town on northern Russia’s Kara Sea, to the refineries of Halifax, Nova Scotia. From here the petroleum and refined oil products extracted from the cargo would sustain the requirements of the American north-east coast market for nearly eight days.
After a further 280 miles on their present south-westerly heading, the Knossian was scheduled to change course due west – a turn taking over twenty-six miles to complete – and cross the North Atlantic at a latitude sufficiently southerly to avoid the summer ice floes nudging down from Iceland, Greenland and the Arctic.
Outside, the sky was lit by a breathtaking display of red and green sheets of light obscuring those few stars that could penetrate the pale Scandinavian night skies. But sailors on the northern run are used to such sights and on the bridge the helmsman and the navigator exchanged frowns of extreme puzzlement while they waited for the old man to appear. He would be furious with them, having turned in only two hours earlier.
‘Show me!’
Konstantine Stamatis had been at sea since he left school, and h
ad held commands for fourteen years. What he saw alarmed him.
Data Error, Unable to Resolve Inputs. The error message was overlaid across the ECDIS screen – the Electronic Chart Display Information System that usually provided aggregated and error-compensated information from the three independent GPS systems, together with the vessel’s own recent navigation history and radar input.
‘This is the NASA GPS on its own, sir,’ indicated Hideo Su, the thirty-three year-old navigator. The screen cleared to show an outline of the Norwegian coastline and the tanker’s position. It appeared they were approximately fourteen miles offshore.
‘And this is the Tye Network GPS,’ he said as he switched input. The signal showed them dangerously close to the same coastline.
‘But this is the ESA GPS.’ The third signal – provided by the satellite system of the European Space Agency – showed them midway across the Pacific!
‘You’ve checked . . .’
‘System diagnostics report one hundred per cent, sir,’ confirmed Su. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the system, it has to be the data feeds.’
‘Sir?’ Stefan Kronk, the helmsman, bent over the illuminated magnetic compass. It was a fixture on the bridge simply because international maritime regulations still required its presence on board every ocean-going vessel to guard against the unlikely event that the sophisticated on-board navigation systems, and their back-ups, should fail simultaneously.
Kronk stepped back. The captain too bent over the light. What he saw terrified him. The compass indicated that North was off his port bow. He banged on the binnacle as if to nudge a recalcitrant piece of machinery back into order. He saw the needle quiver slightly from the vibration, but North remained where it should not be, 180 degrees in the wrong direction.
He ran to the vast bridge window and stared out at the brilliantly-lit night sky. He would find no help there. He could only rely on a magnetic heading and that made it clear he did not know where he was. He’d have to head out into the mid-Atlantic just to be sure.
‘Go to manual,’ he ordered. ‘Hard to starboard, starboard engine full thrust reverse, port engine full forward. I want double lookouts placed NOW! Then steer due west, magnetic.’
The giant ship began to turn two miles later. Seven miles further on it ran aground on the Ka, a chain of partly submerged rocks three miles from the Norwegian coast. Despite the vessel’s twin hulls, separated by ten feet of air, two of the forward compartments started to spew crude oil into the incoming tide, which calmed it considerably.
*
The image had changed to show the satellite facing away from them. From this angle, they could hardly see its sails against the darkness of the background.
‘As you will know, when light is incident upon a plane surface it is partly reflected and partly refracted – that is, bent and absorbed,’ explained Larsson. ‘This backing material is very thin but hyper-dense and it therefore absorbs so little that almost all light and heat are reflected – it is the absolute proof of Kirchoff’s Law: that the absorptivity of a body for radiant energy of any particular wavelength is equal to its emissivity at the same temperature for the same wavelength. In addition, this backing captures the infra-red wavelengths of light and supplies it back to the reflections of visible light. This bionic material – the Anacamptonite – is the subject of one of the many patent disputes between Tye BioMaterials and university research labs. Ms Rose tells me that this material was originally designed at MIT . . .’
He suddenly trailed off as he realized what he was saying. He coughed and turned back to face the image.
‘The anacamptic surface is a protein-plastic with shape-memory electrorheological alloys,’ Larsson continued in a more sombre voice. ‘Essentially, it is a thin piezoelectric plastic that grows like organic material but has a greater surface reflectivity than a highly polished mirror. The netting on which the material grows is made of an incredibly light but strong carbon synthesis – C-sixty, or buckyball carbon atoms as we know them. I know this will sound like scientific gobbledygook to some of you, but I’ve laid out explanatory sheets on a table at the back.’
He pointed behind the group, but none of them moved to collect the material. They wanted to hear the rest.
‘The framework is also a communications network that connects the different parts of the station and the sails,’ Larsson continued. ‘When fully extended each of these solar sails are two hundred and fourteen miles across by a hundred and sixty-four miles deep! As you can imagine, they are constantly bombarded by space dust, meteor showers, in fact everything that makes deep space the inhospitable place we know it to be. But this material is the answer. It uses sunshine as its energy source and stores its base shape as a cellular memory: it automatically regrows to mend small holes in a few hours. Every so often a larger object will tear a bigger hole, but the material just grows back. The sail is entirely self-healing.’
They were all silent.
‘You see that the sails are made up of squares like a net. There are several reasons for this. The first is that the frames of the squares provide the seating and the point of origin for each segment of – well, maybe I should call it skin – it grows very much like skin. But the frames also do something else. Watch.’
Larsson brought up a new image, this time a large close-up of a single square. As they looked at the flat silver sheet hanging in front of them it began to rotate slightly on its horizontal axis and then on its longitudinal centre. Suddenly it projected another searing effulgence towards the audience.
He flipped the image back to the entire Solaris power station. ‘Each of those frames has a series of micro-motors – all solar-powered – that allow the precise angle, the angle of incidence, of each panel to be adjusted according to the specified destination of its reflection and the attitude of all the other reflectors. You see, these sails aren’t single reflectors, they are made up of hundreds of different and independently controlled active reflectors. Importantly, they can focus a diffused beam of reflected sunlight into a concentrated narrow beam, rather as a school-child might do with the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass.’
There was continuing silence as Larsson allowed this information to sink in. He stepped out of the display pit and took another sip of his water.
‘You were going to tell us how these satellites maintain their orbits,’ Deakin reminded him at last.
Larsson nodded. ‘You’ve all heard of solar wind?’
Several shook their heads.
‘The sun emits a flux – a wind – throughout the solar system. You can see its effect on comets: it creates the tails that stream behind them. This wind from the sun is captured by the huge sails on these space stations: they have enormous area but ultra-low mass. The wind holds the space stations in equilibrium against the gravitational force of both the sun and the Earth – in a condition called the magnetopause, when all the forces are at an equal point. The stations constantly check their position with Tye’s real SLNS – the Space Location and Navigation System of satellite networks that Tye Aerospace is now actually placing at key points throughout the solar system.’
Somebody in the group gave a long, low whistle; perhaps expressing appreciation, or amazement.
‘How much power do these things deliver?’ asked Joe Tinkler.
‘Individually, between two and sixty kilowatts to each square metre at ground level, depending on how the overall sails and the individual reflecting panels within them are aligned and focused. It’s when the output of all the space stations is combined that it becomes truly awesome – watch.’
Larsson dissolved the holo-pit into blackness again and then presented a large image of a semi-darkened Earth with the twelve silver reflection sails floating in their separate locations above the top hemisphere of the planet.
‘So now on this side of the earth it is a winter’s night in Europe and Asia. As you can see, the land masses of Russia, Asia, the subcontinent of India, the Middle East and all of West
ern, Central and Northern Europe are in total darkness. As it is winter in the northern hemisphere you’ll see that the South Pole down at the bottom is tilted away from us. At the top we can clearly see the North Pole and the arctic ice mass here–’ he pointed to the top of the image ‘–and we can even see over the top of the globe to the northern parts of Greenland and Labrador.’
As Jack gazed at the large spherical image of his world, he found himself staring at the small islands that made up Britain and wondering if Haley was asleep. He pulled himself back again, realizing this was a simulation and not a real-time feed from one of the Argus satellites.
‘For the purposes of this demonstration there is no cloud cover on the planet – I’ll talk about clouds a little later – and the small amount of reflected sunlight we can see on this side of the planet is equivalent to what is bounced back from a full moon when it is at its perihelion – its closest point to the Earth. Now . . .’ said Larsson, looking for the right combination on his remote control.
A beam of light from one of the floating sails hanging above the planet’s north-east quadrant projected a small square of light over an area Jack identified as Eastern Siberia. Then another satellite added its beam, then another, and then all four satellites suspended above that quadrant were illuminating the same region with an intensity that seemed very bright in the dim, simulated moonlight.
‘These satellites in the north-eastern segment of the arc are those closest to the Earth’s surface, lighting up an area of about six hundred square miles. If you were standing down there in the middle of that reflected light it would seem like a midsummer evening – still bright, but without the searing intensity of full daylight. As well as the moon, you’d be seeing four little suns in the sky. The power being supplied to this area is about three kilowatts per square metre at ground-level and, from a standing start of zero, that is sufficient to raise the ground level temperature by two degrees Celsius an hour. Let me show you a progression . . .’