Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  They switched places in silence.

  “Do you, Daniel A. Cooper, swear to God that you will never reveal what I am about to tell you?”

  Cooper, naturally, looked at him like he was crazy. Yet he could see that Jackson was deadly serious. And that made him very curious. Henry made so much money in so many businesses that there was no question of hearing him out. So he put his right hand on the Bible, even though he was left-handed, and swore with as much sincerity as he could muster. His father was a Southern Baptist minister, and even though he did not buy into everything his father spent a lifetime selling, swearing on a Bible was still not something he did lightly.

  “And as far as you know, I have been recording this conversation, so don’t fuck with me on this.”

  Cooper’s eyes opened with shock, then he nodded.

  Now they could get down to fucking business.

  22

  “What is the highest point on Earth?”

  Jackson stopped, but then quickly moved on.

  “Wrong! Mt. Everest is the highest mountain above sea level, but it is not the highest point on Earth. Astronomers measure distance not from the Earth’s surface, but from Earth’s center. The Moon’s mean distance, for example, is 384,500 kilometers from the center of our planet. And because the Earth is fat in the middle, meaning it bulges around the equator, the mountain that rises farthest into the atmosphere is Chimborazo, an extinct volcano in Ecuador. When you stand at its peak, you are almost in orbit. You are above so much of the atmosphere that when you look up you see black space instead of blue sky.

  “And careful with this information. Locals call it ‘Chimbo’, which should not be confused with ‘chimba’, which is South American slang for ‘pussy’.”

  Cooper could not help but laugh. “That may be the only thing you say today that I remember tomorrow.”

  “The reason that America launches almost everything from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida is because it is the closest American soil to the equator, and thus requires the least amount of energy to get into orbit. We only launch satellites from Vandenberg in California when we want a polar orbit. The equator moves faster than any other part of Earth, with respect to space. All launches, regardless of where on Earth, are also sent into the east to take advantage of Earth’s rotational energy.

  “Mt. Everest is 8.2 kilometers above sea level, while Chimbo is just 6.3 kilometers. But because our planet bulges around its equator, Chimbo actually rises just over 10 kilometers into the atmosphere. Now imagine if we could launch from there?

  “Orbital velocity is 7.7 kilometers per second, or 27,720 kilometers an hour, meaning a launcher must reach that speed in order to get into orbit. Anything slower is like swimming 99% across a lake, only to drown within sight of shore. Yet at that speed, the atmosphere is a brick wall a dozen kilometers thick. What we want to do is penetrate as thin a wall as possible.

  “Space is only fifty miles away. Many Americans drive more than that every day to work. The reason it is so hard to travel up is that half of the atmosphere is compressed into the bottom 5.6 kilometers. The lower atmosphere is four times thicker than the upper atmosphere. Atmospheric density falls exponentially with height. 100 kilometers above sea level has only one-millionth the atmospheric pressure of sea level. So the higher we go, the thinner the atmospheric wall. The higher we launch, the less atmosphere we must penetrate, which reduces costs.

  “The more atmosphere we must punch through, the greater the friction, the greater the pressure drag from the resulting sonic shock wave that forms in front of the launch vehicle, and the greater the parasitic drag and skin drag from air flowing over the vehicle body. Rockets launched near sea-level face compression from the shock wave that superheats the nose of the vehicle to about 54,000 degrees F. So we use ablating materials as heat shields, which literally melt away in carefully controlled layers like an onion, but protect the vehicle underneath. But heat shields are heavy, which increases costs and reduces payload.”

  “Henry, you’re losing me,” Cooper warned, in his most honest statement of the day.

  “The goal is to get payload into orbit as easily, safely, and cheaply as possible. But today’s launch systems are 99% rocket and fuel, and only 1% payload.

  “What if we could get that ratio down to 1-to-1? Or better?

  “Rockets need fuel to lift their payload, but they also need fuel to lift their own fuel. Carrying fuel to lift fuel quickly leads to diminishing returns. But what if you could leave the fuel and the propulsion system on the ground, and put your energy into moving just the payload?”

  The capsules actually needed small engines for maneuvering in orbit to match speed and angle with the space port, but it was almost engine-less and fuel-less. And Jackson didn’t want to confuse Cooper.

  “Henry, are you saying you’ve solved this? Because if you have, then you have my attention for as long as you want. Or until 9:30, whichever comes first.”

  “When my family and I saw the Olympics in Beijing in 2008, we rode the 19 mile rail to Shanghai. That sucker went several hundred kilometers per hour, the fastest commercial train in the world. The Chinese are spending $300 billion building 8000 miles of maglev tracks. The magnetic levitation trains, as their name implies, never actually touched the tracks. Because there is no friction, maglev trains can go incredibly fast. The track has no moving parts, uses electricity for power, and the tracks last virtually forever since there is no friction to wear them out.”

  “But they can’t go into orbit,” Cooper pointed out, while watching Jackson click away on his laptop. The guy had the teenager’s irritating ability to type at high speeds and hold a conversation at the same time.

  “Actually, they can. Reaching orbit is a question of speed, not altitude. Anything that can be accelerated to 7.7 kilometers per second can reach orbit. And it turns out that a maglev catapult can reach that speed. And then some.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Check this out,” Jackson boasted, rotating his laptop around so Cooper could see the 22 inch screen. “A maglev catapult, at a constant acceleration of 5 g’s, which is the most the average healthy person can tolerate with a pressurized G-suit, blood thinners, and a special seat, only needs to be 25 kilometers long to reach orbital velocity. Some roller coasters, like the Fahrenheit at Pennsylvania’s Hershey Park, hits nearly 4 g’s.

  “High speed airlocks will maintain a permanent vacuum, and it leaves the atmosphere at nearly 11 kilometers up, so it avoids about two-thirds of the atmosphere. Imagine how easy you could hit home runs if the back fence was two-thirds closer.”

  Now he had Cooper’s attention. Jackson must have put a lot of money into this, because his software had tons of buttons, links, and data points. It was a full business project, not something he did himself. He watched as Jackson clicked through a series of pages, all detailing different aspects of his launcher. Thousands of hours of work already went into this. Jackson may be fucking with him, but he is certainly serious about this launcher. Albert Camus once wrote that no man is a hypocrite in his behavior, and Jackson was certainly putting his money where his mouth was.

  “Lorena and I enjoyed our honeymoon in Ecuador 25 years ago. The green mountains south of Quito are the most spectacular I have ever seen. Anyways, after hitting the hot springs in Los Banos, we visited Riobamba where I learned that the nearby Chimborazo Volcano has the highest peak on Earth.

  “When I told my dad about it, he insisted we climb Chimbo ourselves. Now, Chimborazo is not, technically, a difficult mountain to climb. It has relatively gentle slopes and most of its ancient glacier has melted away. We took along a team of geologists and surveyors and have continued researching this project ever since. I am telling you we can build this.”

  That is, if he could convince the Ecuadorian government to sell the national park it was located in. He had been working on that for twenty years as well.

  Jackson clicked through hyperlinks located within the image of the mountain to
show Cooper data on composition, density, fault lines, glacier envelopment, slope angle, landslides, chemical makeup...

  “The idea of using a maglev catapult is at least as old as the 1950s movie, When Worlds Collide. Arthur Clark described it in a book half a century ago. Over a decade ago researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Center proposed a 2.4 kilometer long track for the Kennedy Space Center that would accelerate at a constant speed of 2 g’s for 9.3 seconds to reach 1000 kilometers an hour.

  “What is original is building it within Chimborazo Mountain. My dad even found a research paper that ran the numbers for Mt. Kilimanjaro at 5.9 kilometers above sea level, Mt. Kenya at 5.2, Margherita Peak at 5.2, and in Ecuador, Mt. Cotopaxi at 5.9 and Mt. Cayambe at 5.8 kilometers high.

  “Chimbo worked better than these others because it reaches farther into space, it’s right on the equator, and because its summit is almost four kilometers long and has a long, gentle slope. Alpine peaks, in contrast, have sharp slopes. The wide caldera on Chimbo lets us extend the amorphous metal launch to about 11 kilometers.

  “I want as long a track as possible, but one that stayed within the national park, so we started from the peak, then worked our way backward. My dad predicts the ride will be the longest two minutes of your life.

  “To learn from the experience of others, we hired consultants of the Irvine-Corona Expressway, the $5.8 billion traffic tunnel that goes for twelve miles under the Santa Ana Mountains between Orange and Riverside Counties. Our tunnel will actually be smaller, but 20% from straight vertical presents its own challenges. Instead of a huge corkscrew-like machine, we bought a very high pressure water canon that cuts through the hardest rock like a hot knife through soft butter. Even better, by digging up, gravity should take away most of the debris, cutting time and costs. Fortunately the volcano is already hollow inside. The extremely high speeds mean we need a relatively straight line, even as we cross ravines or burrow underground. And, to top it all off, we have to fully enclose and seal it to vacuum the air out.

  “Not only do we leave the fuel and propulsion system on the ground, but the amorphous metal capsules are very light, strong, and heat-resistant. Bypassing two-thirds of the atmosphere means a fraction of the heat for a fraction of the time, which saves literally tons of ablation shielding.

  “The capsule will actually ride on top of a sled that has superconducting magnets. Otherwise, the capsule itself would need magnets, which would add weight and drag. This project was little more than a wet dream until researchers found a new superconducting material made of iron pnictides that operated in far higher temperatures. In contrast, Europe’s Relativistic Hadron Ion Collider was delayed a year by a liquid helium leak that kept their first-generation superconductors at near absolute zero.

  “The sled will parachute after it separates out of the launch tube and the capsule itself will land on water in order to eliminate the need for heavy landing gear.”

  Jackson now showed him several versions of the bullet-shaped capsule, for passengers, bulk cargo, water, pressurized gas, fertilizer, and heavy equipment.

  “We will need a three gigawatts power supply and 50,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. The local utility can power it only at night, so I may need to buy a nuclear battery from Toshiba, like the 4S design that they put in Alaska. It’s only two meters tall and encased in cement 100 feet underground. It uses molten sodium as coolant and has no moving parts to maintain or repair. Once buried, it stays buried forever. I don’t have permission yet, but I’ve already started the permit process in Ecuador. The battery operates 24/7, so I will use all excess electricity to charge my largest industrial ultracapacitors and to split water into hydrogen gas for my largest fuel cells. Although my initial capital expenditure may run as high as $10 billion to complete the launcher, my operating costs should be just pennies per pound.

  “We have designed a 25 X 5 meter-long capsule that can lift twenty-five metric tons of payload. That gives us a 1-to-5 ratio of vehicle-to-payload, compared to 25-to-1 for today’s rockets. We should be able to launch 500,000 metric tons of payload a year, compared to today’s total global capacity of a few hundred tons. In other words, we could put more payload into orbit in a few hours than the rest of the world in an entire year. And a 1000X cheaper.”

  Now he showed Cooper computer animation of what the sled and capsule would look like in the airless launch tube, with the sled separating and returning back to Earth via a parachute.

  “The passenger versions can accommodate thirty people with two pilots, or a few thousand a day at full capacity if we had the ability to receive them somewhere. The capsules need small engines to match angle and speed to dock with the space port.”

  “Space port?”

  “Uh, yeah. I’ll get to that.

  “That spaceship my father is emailing Lockheed about is also just five meters wide so it can fit on all of the couple dozen maglev launchers we plan to build in the solar system. However, at the space port, we will be adding sections to hold layers of water, compressed hydrogen gas, and various alloys that deflect cosmic radiation, which will double the ship’s diameter. The ship will actually spin within this outer casing to give it some artificial gravity to minimize bone and muscle loss. The long lunar maglev will catapult ships at over 100,000 miles per hour, then the nuclear engine will fire up to maximize speed and minimize travel time to the outer planets.

  “The asteroid swarm could destroy every satellite in orbit and leave most orbits uninhabitable for several years. Convenient since it will take several years to build the Chimbo launcher. However, once built, we could monopolize a few thousand of Earth’s best orbits. Today’s satellites only last several years. Ours will last several times that long.”

  “You’re talking about monopolizing space!”

  “Every orbit we occupy denies it to those unfriendly to us, which means we must occupy all GEO orbits over North America and Europe. China right now has military sats sitting over us that can drop uranium rods over major American cities at a moment’s notice. Which is why we should not get between them and Taiwan. Are you willing to sacrifice a dozen American cities when Taiwan can defend themselves without our blood?

  “Can you appreciate the national security implications? Our weakest link is our dependence on satellite communications and services. Having a few thousand satellites in a network, rather than the hub-and-spoke system we have today, would be virtually impossible to destroy on demand. We would have not just space superiority, but space supremacy. No nation can wage a conventional war against us unless they can deny us our space supremacy. Conventional war would end. For us.”

  “Fuck me.” Cooper seemed stunned.

  “Now imagine how much such a network of multi-functional satellites would be worth. We could save taxpayers $40 billion a year, every year, while offering several times the satellite services. Communications, imaging, remote sensing, weather tracking. Our farmers alone would save billions.

  “We could dominate the $60 billion global launch industry and install solar power satellites that beam down electricity so developing countries don’t have to build billion dollar dirty energy power plants. Asia alone builds hundreds of coal-fired power plants every year. One billion people don’t have electricity and another 1.6 billion don’t have reliable electricity. So we make big bucks, reduce extreme poverty, pollution, and global warming, while bringing cheap, clean, reliable electricity to the world’s poorest people. We do well by doing good.

  “We could even reverse global warming by positioning huge arrays of solar panels in sun-synchronous orbit, meaning it always stays between Earth and the Sun. With that many gigawatts of power in orbit, we could turn those solar power satellites into speed-of-light laser weapons. Forget Reagan’s Star Wars plan. As Eisenhower put it, hitting a missile with a missile is like hitting a bullet with a bullet. But a laser strikes at the speed of light. A network of solar powered laser sats could fry hundreds of ICBMs in midair. Such a laser satellite network could str
ike anywhere at any time with virtually no lead-time. Except maybe the poles.

  “Oh, and have I told you about the space port?”

  23

  The hatch from the garage above suddenly opened, startling them out of their conversation. They reacted like boys caught watching porn with their pants down. Jackson heard Daddy Yanke reggeton music blasting from the house. Cooper didn’t know what the hell that racket was.

  A pleasant voice called down to them.

  “Morning, boys! Could you give us a hand?”

  Jackson’s wife, Lorena, carefully handed down a tray of food and drinks to Jackson, who beat Cooper there by a country mile and a New York minute. Lorena’s younger sister, Lina, passed another tray to Cooper. Lina was pretty like Lorena, but lacked something that Jackson’s wife had. Like makeup.

  Jackson’s wife was Colombian, but looked Italian. She had the dark eyes, copper skin, and long, flowing black hair that reminded him of Monique. Yet while Monique was simply stunning, Lorena instead resembled a friendly TV news anchor. While Monique seemed to radiate sex, Lorena gave off a comfortable motherly vib.

  Lina wore very loose-fitting clothes and dressed as plainly as possible. In contrast, Lorena sported tight, form-fitting Colombian jeans and a light green blouse that hugged every curve and suggested a few more. Lorena dressed to be noticed, while Lina dressed to not be noticed. Happiness is the best cosmetic, and Lorena looked very happy.

  “First kiss of the day!” Jackson exclaimed as he planted a noisy kiss on her lips. Lorena giggled in delight. His actual first kiss of the day was an hour before sunrise when she was still sleeping, after his morning shit-shower-and-shave routine. It was either cute or nauseating, depending on how happy one’s own relationship was.

  “Your father says he needs to talk to you.”

  Well, picturing his father sure killed his buzz.