On to the Asteroid

by Travis S. Taylor

  “How many people will be going?” asked another member of the audience.

  “That’s to be determined. We believe it will be between three and five, depending upon the final logistics that can be worked out. These people will be together in deep space for months and we need to make sure that all of their physical needs can be met as well as their psychological needs. This is going to be a high stress and high risk mission. Crew selection needs to be very carefully thought-out.”

  “Isn’t the rock spinning? All the studies we’ve done show that it’ll be risky to try and rendezvous with a rotating mountain in space,” asked the Lockheed-Martin CEO.

  “They attached two small spacecraft to the asteroid, one on each side, each containing a long cable—a tether. Think of an ice skater when she pulls her arms and a leg in in order to speed up. She’s conserving angular momentum. As she reduces her rotational inertia by pulling her arms and leg in, her rotation speed must increase to maintain constant angular momentum. Now do it in reverse with a spinning rock and extend five-kilometer-long tethers instead of arms and legs. The rock stops spinning. Cut the tethers and you’re ready to go.”

  “Surely you’re joking,” the CEO smirked.

  “Not at all. We’ve seen their data and confirmed it by radar imaging. The rock was rotating and now it isn’t.”

  “What about the Mars mission?” The question came from the CEO of Northrop-Grumman. Childers knew that they were the prime contractor for the Mars Lander, a piece of hardware that didn’t look like it was going to play a role in the mission.

  Reese-Walker stood to answer this one. “Mars can wait for another launch opportunity. They come roughly every two years and by then this will have been resolved. Hopefully.” She added the laugh.

  She’s telling you to sit down and be patient, you dope. She truly believes that you’ll get your money and that you just won’t get to fly as soon as you’d like, Childers thought. Clearly she has been in government her entire life and has no clue what it is like on the outside. The big concern for Northrop-Grumman would be, Gary thought, if they got money to string them along until the next launch time. Otherwise, there would be layoffs. The CEO would likely lose his job and it could actually kill the mission. Government contracting was always touchy because the government made all the rules and could bend or break them whenever they needed to with no required compensation. There were way more implications to this thing than one would think. There would be a new Congress before the next launch opportunity. Northrop had better hope the election goes their way or Mars will fall out of favor and Northrop-Grumman will be out a few billion dollars that had been promised to them by legal, apparently nonbinding contracts.

  “Were it me,” Gary mumbled to himself, “My lawyers would be looking at who caused this mess to be paying for my layoffs.”

  The director continued, “Now, for the details. First…”

  The meeting continued until they broke for lunch at 1:00 p.m.

  Time until Asteroid 2018HM5 “Sutter’s Mill” reaches Earth: 251 days.

  CHAPTER 11

  Childers’s flight back to the Nevada Spaceport was uneventful. For Childers, who always flew first class, that was the best kind of airplane flight—on time, boring and otherwise uneventful. During the flight, he mentally reviewed the outcome of the meeting in Washington and gave his silent thanks that he had opted to invest in space tourism instead of asteroid mining. He knew Anacleto Rosalez and thought highly of him. He also knew this accident, even if the asteroid were diverted, would be the death knell of his mining company and perhaps even mean Anacleto’s personal bankruptcy. Fortune sometimes favors the bold. Sometimes one can be too bold to be favored.

  Childers was met at the airport by Hami Kunda and his newly enlarged security detail. He and Hami slid into the back seat of his modified SUV and departed McCarren Airport for the spaceport. The Nevada sun was unrelenting and, as usual, Childers had to squint in order to admire the countryside despite the tinted windows of the vehicle.

  “Mr. Childers. I’ve assembled the habitat management team as you requested. They’ll be in the conference room waiting to hear from you as soon as we reach the building.”

  “Excellent. What’s the status of the testing? Have we shaken her down yet?”

  “Not yet. That’s planned for later this week. The thermal vacuum testing is complete though. No major problems. One of the heaters near the reaction control thrusters failed, but the backup kicked in and there was not a real issue.”

  “Good. We’ve got a few minutes; let me fill you in…”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Childers was in the conference room briefing his assembled team on the new mission for their Mars habitat. The engineering team, though mostly populated with “can do” types, was nonetheless full of questions and technical concerns about the new mission and the amount of analysis that would be required to make it happen.

  “Mr. Childers, the environments are mostly the same, but we don’t know what we’ll encounter at the asteroid. Some of these rocks have their own atmosphere of dust and debris around them.” The comment came from one of the materials experts.

  “The power system should be able to function just fine going to an asteroid instead of Mars. That’s beauty of having our own nuclear reactor to work with. It doesn’t care if the sun is shining or not,” said another.

  “Yeah, but that’ll make the heat rejection problem even worse. We’ve already stretched the radiators to their maximum capacity. Where’s all that extra heat going to go?”

  The comments were coming rapid-fire. They were coming too fast for Childers, who was not an engineer, to keep up. He decided to leave and let Hami keep the team focused on the new job at hand.

  As he left the room, the path to his office had him walking along the upstairs corridor that overlooked the assembly area where Dreamscape, the Out-Of-This-World and now the Deep Space Habitat were assembled. The latter two were in a clean room on the west side of the floor, separated from the area where the Dreamscape was being serviced by a wall that served to keep dust, dirt and the heat of the Nevada climate from contaminating the sensitive mechanisms and electronics within them. The Dreamscape needed none of that. It was designed to operate like an airplane and that meant it had to tolerate all of the inconvenient environments that nature, and humans, could send her way. The side of the walkway overlooking the high bay was covered with glass to keep down the noise and to prevent the accidental VIP from dropping something, usually a camera, on the heads of the workers down below. He paused to admire the activity below him on the floor.

  The five-story-tall door on the East side of the building was open, probably to allow the free flow of parts to and from the Dreamscape service area and, if Childers were to hazard a guess, to allow the sunlight to illuminate the room. It had long been his opinion that people work better in natural light.

  And it was from there that he had a bird’s eye view of the small airplane-like vehicle that flew into the high bay from outside. It flew high above the floor and close to the top of the door. Childers squinted to get a better look and saw that it appeared to be a remote-controlled toy airplane. The realization that something was amiss was only beginning to dawn on him and among some of the workers on the floor below. He reached for his phone to sound an alarm, but before he could do so the explosives packed in the plane exploded, showering the room below with deadly bits of metal that had been packed within the body of the craft.

  Childers saw the glass in front of him buckle and then shatter, taking on the spiderweb appearance characteristic of automobile safety glass before shattering into literally thousands of small glass shards. The spiderweb shatter pattern saved Childers’s life by absorbing most of the pressure wave resulting from the blast. That, and the fact that the shrapnel packed in the remotely piloted vehicle was shaped to eject downward, not up and out, so as to maximize the damage to those below it on the ground. Despite all this, Childers was thrown backwa
rd and onto the floor and covered with thousands of tiny glass pieces that had once been his observation window.

  The alarm sounded among the mayhem that had been an orderly, high-tech assembly plant only moments before. As Childers brushed himself off and rose from the floor of the catwalk, he saw that there was a lot of smoke and, through the haze he could see a gaping hole in the tail fin of the Dreamscape. Closer to the ground, he saw several of his technicians lying on the floor, apparently injured from the blast or the shrapnel.

  Without saying a word, Childers worked his way down the hallway toward the far exit. He glanced out the window and into the clean room below. He noticed that the wall of the room had not been breached and that the Deep Space Habitat had not suffered any apparent damage. The workers there were following their safe shutdown procedures and evacuating. For the moment, at least, Childers could see no evidence that the explosion had caused any sort of fire.

  He was met at the stairway by the plant manager and two security guards.

  “Mr. Childers, we need to get you out of here,” said one of the guards. He was a “typical” security guard, all muscle and no neck. In other words, not someone to trifle with. Except that Childers was the boss and used to trifling.

  “Not now. I need to see to my people. Have the police been called?”

  “Yes, sir. They’re on their way.”

  “Alright then,” he said looking at the plant manager. Childers continued, “Great. Now do your job and don’t worry about me. I’m sure these two gents can keep me safe while I’m out there doing something useful until the medical professionals arrive.” With that, Childers continued down the stairs and exited into the high bay on the first floor.

  The smell was the first thing he noticed. Unlike the somewhat antiseptic smell of the building under normal circumstances, the air in the high bay smelled like sulfur—like the aftermath of a Fourth of July fireworks celebration, but without the celebratory feeling among those nearby. To Childers’s surprise, there wasn’t much noise other than the fire alarm wail. People were either seriously hurt or in the process of rendering aid.

  Childers ran to the first unattended victim he saw, a woman whom he recognized as one of the newest employees of the company. He’d personally interviewed and hired her last week. Reaching into his short-term memory, he recalled that her name was Maria and that she was an electrical engineer just graduated from Purdue. Her clothes were tattered, her face covered in soot and the right side of her body bleeding in several places from the shrapnel that had come from the bomb. There was a lot of blood, but none was gushing—a good sign. She was conscious and trying to raise herself up with her left arm—another good sign.

  “Mr. Childers. What happened? There was an explosion and the next thing I remember is now,” she said, only just beginning to realize that something terrible had happened. To her credit, though she exhibited signs of being in shock, she didn’t panic.

  “Maria, isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “Maria, help is on the way. You are injured, but it doesn’t look like you’re going to be on the company’s disability plan for very long,” Childers said with a forced grin, trying to put her at ease. He could tell she was in a great deal of pain, but her wounds didn’t look immediately life-threatening.

  “No, sir,” she said.

  “Good. I’m going to see if there is someone more seriously injured than you that needs help. If you can get yourself up and out of the middle of the floor, it will make it easier for the emergency medical people to get here and move around. Can you do that?”

  She again nodded.

  Childers stood up and started to move down the floor to the next injured person when he heard a sound that was out of place among the chaos. It was coming from the direction of the open high bay. A buzzing sound. He looked up and saw an object, a flying object, approaching the high bay from outside. He wasn’t yet sure, but it appeared to be another remote-controlled airplane headed their way.

  Childers stood and grabbed the sleeve of one of the bodyguards that was still with him. The other had moved to help Maria get on her feet and moving to the side of the high bay. He pointed at the airplane.

  “It’s another bomb. The bastard who did this is sending in another one to take out the survivors and the emergency personnel,” Childers said.

  The plane’s engine got markedly louder as it crossed the threshold into the high bay. It was thirty feet off the ground and flying directly toward the wall at the back of the room. The targeted wall was the one that had protected the Deep Space Habitat and the engineers working on it from the initial blast. Childers estimated that the remotely piloted plane would reach it in less than fifteen seconds.

  Childers began running toward the largest group of people who would most likely be affected by another blast. Unfortunately, this meant he was running toward the area where the bomb would explode. He was shouting for people to take cover and pointing excitedly at the plane now flying directly overhead.

  Bang! Bang!

  Childers heard the sound of his bodyguard’s sidearm as he fired at the plane. Childers wasn’t a gun aficionado, but he knew that hitting something that small and far away was a challenge for anyone equipped only with a handgun. The guard was standing with his knees slightly bent, shooting with his right hand well supported by his left.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Finally, one of the shots hit the plane and knocked it off its path toward the back wall. The left wing appeared to have been hit, causing it to begin spiraling toward the ground which was, unfortunately, exactly where Childers and at least seven other people were standing. Too late, those that were still mobile began to move away. Childers watched the plane approach, wondering if this was how his life was going to end.

  The small plane, not much larger than a backpack, just big enough to carry enough explosives to cause some serious damage, hit the ground and broke into pieces a mere ten feet from where Childers was standing. There was no explosion. Just the thud of the plane’s mass hitting the concrete floor of the high bay.

  Once Childers realized he wasn’t dead, he recovered his wits and again began directing those that were uninjured to help those that were, if they were able, and urging the rest to get out of the building. The emergency medical personnel were now coming in through the open high bay doors and tending to the seriously injured. There was no sign of an additional plane or any other sort of attack.

  “Mr. Childers, we have to get you out of here. That’s an order sir.” Childers’s bodyguard was back at this side and firmly taking him by the arm.

  “I get the message. I’m all yours. Let’s get out of here and let these people do their jobs.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “No, thank you. That was a great shot. It looks like you took out the wing and whatever he might have been using to detonate the bird. It was probably radio controlled.”

  “I use a Sig Sauer 229. It’s a 9 mm with a 3.9 inch barrel. I’ve been training with that gun since I was a boy and it has never let me down. When I was in Special Forces, we’d train shooting at drones with our sidearms. I guess it’s like riding a bike; once you learn how to do it, you don’t ever really forget.”

  “We were all lucky to have you here today.” Childers nodded at the bodyguard.

  “Thank you sir, but I’d rather give the credit to my training. Now let me do my job and get you out of here, okay?”

  “You’ve got it. Take me to my office. I should be safe there.”

  “If it looks safe, then that’s fine with me. Otherwise, we’re going to get you in a car and as far away as possible.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Childers said as he took one last look at the remains of his assembly facility and the damaged Dreamscape that stood in the center of the room.

  CHAPTER 12

  “The Europeans and Americans are responsible for this mess and now they want us to join with them in a foolish attempt to fix the very system that caused th
e problem to begin with?” Evgeni Golov, the Director of NPO Energomash responded to the speaker who had just delivered the same story, the Russian version, that the NASA Administrator had provided to Gary Childers in Washington just days before.

  “You are correct, Evgeni. The American president called President Lazarev just yesterday explaining the plan and inviting us to send a cosmonaut on the journey to the asteroid,” said Makariy Loktev, Chairman of the Planetary Protection Committee of the Russian Academy of Sciences and, more importantly, the man President Lazarev placed in charge of coming up with the Russian plan to deflect the incoming asteroid.

  “Why would they believe that they can repair the failed system and that it won’t break again? Given that it will take precious time to send astronauts to the asteroid in the first place, and then additional time to repair or replace the electric thrusters, they surely realize that doesn’t leave much time to actually deflect the asteroid in the first place.” Evgeni Golov was now speaking to the other twelve assembled engineers and scientists in the room, as if their affirmation of his comments would help convince the chairman that he was correct.

  “We don’t have much confidence in their proposed solution. It is very risky and we may not know whether or not it works until it is too late to do anything about it. Nonetheless, President Lazarev has decided to accept the American offer. Russia will fully cooperate with the American team,” said Loktev.

  “This is madness. To place the lives of millions of people in the hands of those who believe a space propulsion system that emits the equivalent of mouse farts will be able to deflect a two-billion-ton piece of rock is sheer madness.”