The Next Continent

by Issui Ogawa

  “Hold on, everyone!” Hibiki raised his voice again. “You’re assuming we’ve got H2O. Don’t get carried away. That ice might be methane or CO2.” He was right. The excitement died down. “Start drilling. Save the celebration till we’re finished.”

  “Will that give you the answer?” asked Tae.

  “It’s a simple test. We heat a sample in a chamber inside the lander. If the ice liquefies at zero and boils at a hundred degrees Celsius, it’s definitely water. Now that we’re on the surface, that’s all we need to find out.”

  “Mr. Hibiki?” Sohya raised his hand. “Can I sit with the C&R team? I’d like to check the site statics.”

  “You want to watch the dynamic load test? That’s right, you’re a structural engineer.”

  A dynamic load test applied a standard shock to a pile inserted into the ground. The change in pile depth was measured to calculate the bearing strength of the ground, an essential piece of information needed before constructing a building. Furthermore, if the surface were composed of water ice, knowing the hardness of the ground would be useful in estimating the difficulty of digging to recover the ice.

  With Hibiki’s permission, Sohya approached the C&R team. The engineer was already drilling into the surface. “The load on the drill right now is thirty-two newtons—about the resistance of cork. The habitat modules won’t be in any danger of sinking.”

  The second team engineer added, “Unfortunately, the ice is full of regolith. Not gravel, but particles of all sizes. Well, it’s still permafrost. There’s more than enough ice—oh shit!”

  A warning flashed red on one of the subscreens. The controller sighed in frustration. “Drill one is jammed. We better stop drill two.”

  “A rock?” asked Hibiki, craning forward across his console to look.

  “It’s not a rock. But drill one is locked up tight. We won’t be getting a sample from this one.”

  “You stopped drill two, right?” said Hibiki. “Okay, that’s far enough. Bring it up.”

  Drill two was reversed and drawn upward. Images from the belly camera were still visible on the main display. One of the controllers said, “Look. What’s that?”

  Everyone looked up at the display. The room went silent.

  The two drills were visible to the left and right on the display. The drill on the left was withdrawing from the surface. As it rotated, a substance resembling gold thread stuck out at all angles.

  “That almost looks like coconut fiber,” said Hibiki.

  “The reflections must’ve been from this material. It looks pretty densely tangled around the drill.”

  “So what is it?” said Hibiki. No one knew; there was no way they could have known. Neither the moon’s ice nor the comets that brought it were theorized to contain anything like these fibers.

  Drill two was free of the surface. The C&R team placed several grams of material in Serpent’s test chamber. The rest of the sample was placed inside the return module. The probe sent its answer within minutes.

  “Melting point: minus 0.41 degrees Celsius. Boiling point is 99.22 degrees. That’s it. The sample is water ice.”

  “From how deep?” asked Hibiki.

  “About 2,850 millimeters. We were expecting it at four thousand.”

  “That means—”

  “The moon has water,” said Sohya. “The surface is soft enough for digging but strong enough to support engineering equipment.”

  “Congratulations,” Hibiki said to Tae and Sennosuke. “You have everything you need, Mr. Toenji. There’s nothing to stand in the way of Sixth Continent.”

  Tae looked at her grandfather. They both stood and faced the observation booth. Sennosuke borrowed a headset so the journalists could hear him.

  “I want to thank you all, and I ask for your continued support. Now the real work begins.”

  The sound of applause gradually rose and filled the room. TGT was not applauding their own success, hard-won as it had been. By discovering water on the moon, their groundbreaking mission would become the foundation for an even grander vision. It was that vision they were applauding.

  Tae looked at Sohya, who gave her two thumbs-up. Shinji joined in the applause. Their faces strobed white from the journalists’ cameras.

  The mission was not over. But for once, Hibiki waited a few seconds before shouting his next command.

  [3]

  FOUR DAYS LATER, Serpent touched down at Tanegashima with three kilograms of surface samples. Careful testing revealed their exact composition.

  Fifty-five percent of the sample was water ice by weight. Another 40 percent was composed of regolith particles. The water contained small amounts of dissolved aluminum, calcium, iron, silicon, and other minerals from the regolith, along with minute amounts of glycine, serine, and other amino acids. This closely matched one of the proposed models.

  Eons before, a comet composed of water and amino acids had struck one of the craters in perpetual shadow. The intense heat and shock of impact had vaporized the ice, blowing regolith upward and mixing the water vapor with it. But in the cold of perpetual shadow, the vapor quickly refroze and fell to the crater floor as ice. Comets are more fragile than asteroids—sometimes enough to be vaporized by the sun’s heat—and rarely leave impact craters. The shallow depression created by the comet was soon covered by falling ice. This was the origin of the plain of ice and regolith within the craters in perpetual shadow.

  The sample’s remaining 5 percent was composed of those mysterious metallic threads, which proved to be an alloy of aluminum and silicon. Their composition did not differ from elements that could be found on the moon, but there was no known natural process that could create a threadlike alloy. Electron microscopy revealed a regular, tubelike structure similar to the branching structure of plant roots, but the tensile force applied by the drill as it snapped the threads had destroyed any fine structural detail. Clearly, the material possessed high tensile strength.

  The threads also solved at least two mysteries: the strong metallic radar response and the jamming of the drill as it bored into the densely packed threads. Still, the material posed far more questions than it answered.

  Gotoba was inundated with requests from scientists around the world for even a tiny sample of the material, but the firm decided to use two kilograms for experimental concrete production. The last kilogram would be donated to research institutions. This didn’t prevent a storm of criticism from the scientific community—using samples with such research value merely for concrete production! But Gotoba was unperturbed.

  The moon’s water was indeed suitable for making concrete. That was all they needed to know. The team standing by in Yamaguchi Prefecture began working feverishly with a large local cementmanufacturing firm to design a production module that could process lunar permafrost containing 55 percent water and produce cement in a vibration kiln designed to operate at one-sixth G.

  The first task in building a structure on Earth was site selection. Once the site was chosen, surveying and soil-bearing capacity tests were carried out. Serpent not only confirmed the characteristics of the lunar water but also answered the question of site selection. Sixth Continent would be built outside the crater—quickly christened Eden—on the side facing Earth.

  Dynamic load tests were unnecessary. The moon had no alluvial soils, no active fault lines, and virtually no quakes. Though Sohya had worried about the simple siting technique used at Kunlun Base, the approach used by the Chinese was more than adequate.

  Still, it would not do to replicate Kunlun Base. The Chinese had simply placed their modules on the surface, but Sixth Continent would carry out full-scale construction using concrete blocks. Leveling the site would mean moving large amounts of surface material. With no erosion from wind and water, the lunar surface bore the record of three billion years of asteroid impacts and volcanic activity. There were no truly level sites, but without one the robotic engineering equipment could not be put to best use. Base design would face major lim
itations.

  “Space development” usually brought to mind rockets rising into the sky on pillars of fire or satellites with huge solar arrays. But aerospace-related activity was only one facet of space development. What was needed on the moon was nothing less than the engineering technology developed for construction on Earth. Manufacturers of launch vehicles and satellites might pretend to offer such expertise, but those claims were just talk. The lunar environment would quickly punish any half-baked development effort. What was needed was for construction engineering firms to start participating in space development.

  That she saw this from the start was proof of Tae Toenji’s genius. And Gotoba Engineering & Construction was the only organization capable of realizing her vision.

  For a company with Gotoba’s experience in construction for extreme environments, designing a base on the moon was straightforward. What they realized early on was that the engineering equipment was a far greater challenge. Multidozer development was a key step; once that was accomplished, one of the most challenging hurdles had been cleared.

  In September 2029, TGT’s Adam 1 heavy-lift launch vehicle lifted off with the first ten tons of cargo—half its rated capacity—for lunar orbit. The payload consisted of one multidozer and 340 square meters of solar panels capable of generating 150 kilowatts of electricity.

  Four days later, the cargo safely touched down outside Eden Crater. TGT’s minimalist landing module had been given the unprepossessing name Turtle. It was far simpler than the highly advanced Serpent lander—a simple metal frame with retro-rockets and a fuel tank, radio altimeter, GPS system, and communications antenna. It was designed solely as a mass-produced space truck capable of putting seven tons of cargo on the lunar surface.

  On landing, Turtle deployed the solar panels with a spring-loaded device. The panels were deployed perpendicular to the sun, which sat just above the polar horizon. The flexible panel unrolled like a carpet four meters wide by eighty-five meters long, launched outward in a parabolic curve. As it unrolled, support struts on the back unfolded. The panel fell to the surface and landed on these struts with its power-generating side toward the sun. The entire deployment took all of ten seconds. The method was crude, but in the airless environment it was possible to precisely calculate how the panel would unfold. Spring-loaded deployment would play a major role in future cargo deployments.

  The news that the moon held abundant supplies of water was greeted with widespread excitement. Second only in importance to water was generation of electricity. The multidozers were not equipped with solar arrays because this would hinder their movements. Instead, they would derive power from the stationary solar panel via a cable. At the moon’s polar regions, the sunlight struck at such a low angle that vertical solar panels were the only way to generate a stable supply of power.

  Once word came—“The panels are up!”—the success of the mission was assured. Now power would be plentiful as long as sunlight was falling on the deployment side of the crater.

  With electric power, everything else was straightforward. The multidozers were tough enough to handle heavy work. Even if one flipped over, it could right itself by anchoring its ripper claw and using a lifting lever. The dozers were also intelligent enough to solve most problems they might encounter. Drawing power from the panel, Dozer 1 rolled off the lander and began moving surface material, the first step in base construction. An absolutely flat area was required for future landers, to prevent their engines from kicking up regolith and contaminating the solar array. In a pinch, the dozer was capable of shaking the panel to loosen any collected regolith.

  The video feed from Dozer 1 showed no large boulders or ground fissures in the area, indicating that operations would go smoothly. Unfortunately, Dozer 1 itself could not be observed from Earth. Like Sir Edmund Hillary on Mount Everest, Dozer 1 could take pictures of everything but itself. Nevertheless, the images it sent as it vigorously moved about pushing rocks out of the way and packing the surface flat demonstrated that it was successfully fulfilling its objectives. The project teams, especially the staff of Gotoba Engineering, crowded around the monitors in a state of high excitement to watch the work in progress. For the first time since he had joined the company, Sohya even saw Takasumi Iwaki smile.

  SHINJI TAI LOOKED out the window, then back to the monitor in front of him, comparing the views. “Yes, I guess that would make him happy,” he said to Sohya.

  Shinji and Sohya were at the Gotenba multidozer production facility and proving ground at the base of Mount Fuji. The facility also served as the control center for multidozers on the lunar surface. Shinji shuttled back and forth between Gotenba, Tsukuba, Tanegashima Space Center, and other research facilities, helping to maintain the virtual private network between the different project teams.

  “I’ve only met him a few times, but Iwaki seems to like efficiency,” said Shinji. “Sending robots to the moon is more efficient than sending people, so he should be happy with that.”

  Sohya was calibrating the telemetry data sent by Dozer 1 with the data coming from the multidozers at the proving ground. “Now that you mention it, I remember him saying that when a machine makes a mistake, it’s a mistake of the people who built it. If a machine’s reliable, it’s not necessary for humans to go to the moon.”

  “So why are we working so hard to send people there?” murmured Shinji.

  “If you want a technologist’s opinion, the answer is simple: because it’s possible.”

  “Because it’s possible? That’s backward. First you’ve got to have a goal. What you want to find out is whether your goal is feasible or not.”

  “That’s what most people would do,” said Sohya. “Take Kennedy—he started the Apollo program before he even knew if a moon landing was possible.”

  Shinji smiled faintly and shook his head. “We’re a different breed. If it’s doable, we do it, whether it’s necessary or not. Oppenheimer built the bomb. Genentech made Nellie and Mary, the first human clones. The last big general construction company built a tunnel under Tsushima Strait. Ethics and cost/benefit aren’t in the equation.”

  “Are you saying Sixth Continent is another boondoggle, Shinji?”

  “History books a hundred years from now may say it was the biggest folly of the twenty-first century—wasting precious resources to colonize a planet with no practical potential for development. We could just stick close to home and look after the environment.”

  Sohya frowned. Shinji added casually, “But folly is all right. Even folly can advance human culture. Even if Sixth Continent shuts down after a year of operation, it will have been worth it as far as I’m concerned—even if all we get out of it is pure technological advancement.”

  “You’re more of a cynic than I thought.”

  “People who might be working on the next A-bomb should at least be aware of the possibility. I mean, look—are you certain this project is for the best?”

  “Well, I’m like you. I can only see so far. But I agree with Gotoba’s take on things. Progress means creating something where previously there was nothing. Building habitats for people on a desolate place like the moon is proof of that progress.”

  “Sounds like your take isn’t that different from mine,” said Shinji.

  “You’re right. We’ve both got swelled heads.” Sohya chuckled. Shinji looked up from his monitor and stretched.

  “With my personality, I could’ve easily ended up doing obscure research for some metal refiner rather than developing something revolutionary like TROPHY. But I’m not, thanks to Ryuichi. I have to hand it to him, he’s got a lot of passion.”

  “I envy him. He’s a straight shooter. I can easily picture what he’d think of this discussion.”

  “No, you’re wrong about that,” said Shinji before Sohya could say anything further. “He’d say, ‘Young people shouldn’t worry about other people’s opinions. Don’t think. Get moving!’”

  “You’re probably right.” The two men laughed.
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  “Come to think of it, it’s amazing that so many people with different viewpoints are working on the same project. Some of us want to test the technology, some of us want to build, and some of us just want to go there.”

  “You forgot one motivation. Some of us want to make money.”

  This caught Sohya off guard. “You mean Reika Hozumi? I guess money should really be the main reason. This whole thing is private enterprise. It’s hard to think of a project less suited to making money though.”

  “As far as Reika’s concerned, money’s the only thing. Oh well, whatever it takes to motivate her.” Shinji whistled as he began running a stress test on the link to TGT’s Yokohama Data Processing Center. “Ah yes, money…”

  As ELE’s auditor, Reika was like a human calculator. Was she interested in anything else? Shinji glanced at Sohya a few times before speaking.

  “I’d say you have less to worry about than anyone else on that account.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have just the right balance of enthusiasm and doubt. I envy Ryuichi, but I also envy you.”

  “I’m not sure what that means.”

  “See?” Shinji laughed again. “That lack of self-awareness. Just what TGT’s president preaches: no doubts.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Sohya. He pretended to be hurt, but in fact he didn’t mind Shinji’s ribbing. Representatives from space agencies around the world referred to him as “Professor Tai,” yet he was as unaffected as ever, liked by everyone. Sohya felt fortunate to be able to work with a man like Shinji. He was certain that someday Shinji would be mentioned in the same breath with pathfinders like von Braun and Korolyov.

  TROPHY’S SUCCESS GENERATED a storm of calls and emails to Tenryu Galaxy Transport. As usual, many came from crackpots and clueless amateurs, but there were also more than three hundred serious offers from space development companies. Most of these feelers were for launch services using the revolutionary Adam and Eve rockets, for purchase of entire launch vehicles, or for TROPHY engines. But Ryuichi had to choke back his tears and refuse them all. Sixth Continent had booked all of TGT’s launch capacity for the next six years. Ryuichi would be unable to service other clients for quite some time.