by T I WADE
After thanking Mr. Rose, they exited Hangar Eight for Hangar Nine, thirty feet away. Suzi wheeled herself next to VIN and they entered a totally different world.
“I have to go to space and listen to bloody roosters crowing. That’s all I need!” grumbled Jonesy.
If Hangar Eight was the meat department, Hangar Nine was the produce department. This hangar was far larger, one of the three largest hangars situated around the apron. Inside were the usual closed sterile rooms, this time five of them. Inside, the rooms in the middle of the hangar looked like the garden section of a Home Depot; trees, shrubs and vines grew everywhere in unsealed units, lighted by “grow” lamps. There were also plastic shelves full of equipment, like watering systems, hoses, and anything that could be found in the “Gardening” section.
“Welcome to my research hangar,” started Suzi speaking from her wheelchair. “My system is far more simple, but also far more complex than the meat hangar. Here, not only do we have to produce food for human consumption, but also for animal consumption, reseeding and, most important, to produce oxygen from stale air full of carbon dioxide. My section is the “Eden” that supplies two of the three basic needs for life: air and food. If we ate only meat, humans would not last more than twenty years in space. Humans need a balanced diet that includes greens and vegetables, and fruit, as well. We will walk inside the closed rooms, and my team will show you the plants we will ship into space. Remember those silver space panels?” Everybody nodded. “My section will have all seven cubes Ryan has designed to be our new home. Before we enter the sterile rooms you will each need to shower using a special soap, and wear a suit to make sure nothing gets inside the rooms; but first let us all have a cup of coffee and cake. This will take time and today you will miss lunch”.
After coffee and cake, they all showered in the scientists’ large area of change rooms and each was given white clothing to put on. VIN’s legs would not be allowed, so he was given one of Suzi’s sterile wheelchairs.
“So now, handsome, we are at the same height,” said Suzi bending across and kissing him as he wheeled himself out of the men’s area through a special door. Outside, before entering each special room, they were sprayed down and asked to sit and read magazines for thirty minutes under ultra-violet lights.
In each room there was very little area that did not support plant life; one narrow path led across each 40-foot cubed room to a closed door leading to the next spray section.
“Here you will see that every inch of floor, walls and ceiling is filled with several different types of plants,” Suzi explained to the long line of people on the narrow path. “On the floor we have a small area of wheat, sorghum, pepper plants with several varieties of peppers, and an area of asparagus. The walls are covered with lattice, which hold up tomato plants, beans, and melons on the lower regions. Remember, here we have full earth’s gravity. The path in space will go straight through the center of the cube. In a revolving spacecraft, with only 15 percent earth’s gravity, the weight of the crops on the six walls will be greatly reduced; essentially all six walls will be floors.
“The gravity will be produced by a magnetic field of rare-earth metals passing through the middle of the room up there.” She pointed upwards to an aluminum non-slip, square path about two feet wide, similar to the path they were on. “We will not have the path we are standing on in space; the path up there will be the walkway and we will stand on it with magnetic boots. The minor magnetic field will keep covered soil containers in position and also means we can grow every inch around the six walls without the heavy weight plants gain growing on earth.”
“How will the plants look with so little gravity?” asked Maggie.
“They will all point towards the center path, where the sides and underneath areas of the square path will have extremely bright lights with all the light spectrums that allow plants to grow. Light, heat, water and nutrition are the necessary attributes for sustained plant growth.”
After the group was sprayed and rested for a few minutes, they moved to the next room. It looked exactly the same as the one before, but in this room, Jonesy was singled out by Suzi.
“Mr. Jones, when you are not flying something in space, or shooting down space invaders like in Hollywood, you can help work in this section. VIN, you too!” smiled Suzi. “Here we have certain types of wheat and barley. The plants you see covering the walls and roof are three different types of hops. Not only is this the beer section, this is back up for our daily bread. The yeast is produced in that small enclosed lab in the corner over there, can forever renew itself, and will be kept cold or frozen until used,” Suzi pointed at a small six-by-six-foot lab in one corner. We will be able to produce the same two types of beer we have drunk here in Nevada for the last couple of months, a Bavarian Wheat Beer, and a top-fermenting lager beer, and we expect to brew forty to fifty gallons per month in ten-gallon kegs.”
“How can you make beer without gravity?” asked Jonesy.
“Screw the beer, how are the poor animals to survive without normal gravity?” asked Penny looking sternly at Jonesy.
“This middle section of our new home is for our gardens and storage. The outer corridors revolving around these center squares, like the wagon wheel Ryan explained, will have 85 to 95 percent earth gravity, and this is where we humans and the animals will live, and where our animal production will take place,” replied Suzi. “Every detail of our spaceship has been designed over the last ten years. Even some of these plants have been in sterile space environments lighted by simulated sunlight for a couple of years; they will be taken up in loads as they are, and replanted in our new home in space. Many of my tests aboard the International Space Station over the last several years have focused on what happens when plants are grown in a limited gravity environment. All plant growth needs only minimum gravity and doesn’t lose nearly as much nutrition or strength in lower gravity situations, as does animal life.”
“This third room is once again for grain crops, for our daily bread, and backup for beer and animal feed. Bread will be a luxury,” continued Suzi in the next room an hour later. “Instead of hops, we have red and white grape vines, good for fruit and the sugars needed to make bread. Grapes provide necessary nutrition for human survival, and for you ladies who don’t like beer, the odd glass of wine will be available.”
Room four had more soil and root vegetables, VIN noticed. They were told that here potato, onions, garlic and several other important vegetables, as well as a couple of grain crops for animal feed and a small herb garden, could be grown on all the six walls. Each cube would have 9,500 square feet of wall space, plus another 2,500 feet of hanging area for crops.
The last room had a dozen fruit trees, already bearing fruit; oranges, lemons, apples, a peach tree and an avocado tree were in sealed plastic containers ready for shipment. There was also a patch of strawberries, kiwis, and other fruits. “Here is our main fruit area, with one wall which will be grain crops, one wall of six different nuts, and a wall divided between three coffee trees and nine tea plants. Yes, we will have a coffee roaster on board. In this room we also have our bee hives, which will be placed in the different rooms now and again for what bees do best, pollinate plants and produce honey for our bread. Remember, we will not have butter or cheese. What you haven’t seen is that we have over 300 types of vegetables, herbs, other plants and fruit in seed form or dormant, in storage units; we will rotate crops, replacing wheat with a crop of green beans, which adds nitrogen to the soils, or hydroponic growing chambers or bags. Just like any farmer, we will need to rotate and plant different crops to duplicate the life-supporting elements in our greenhouses with normal farming practices. Also we will be using every type of growing system humans have developed over the last thousand years. Salt will be taken up in bulk. We cannot produce salt, but we can reuse it once it is in the system in space, and we can mine it somewhere if we run out.
“Now we should join Ryan who will be waiting for us outside i
n about thirty minutes. It is going to take you this time to change, shower, and make sure you don’t take anything out of here with you.”
They emerged hungry and found a cold buffet waiting for them; it was to replace lunch. The food looked normal to VIN, like a buffet found in any store or supermarket lunch section. Everybody helped themselves and sat around a large table saying very little.
“What are the slices of the darker meat?” Maggie asked Suzi.
“Cold rabbit, roasted and deboned,” Suzi said simply.
“Mr. Rose and Suzi have grown everything on this table in their two hangars, from the lima beans to the tomatoes and from the meat to the dessert fruits. The only thing I’m personally going to miss is cheese. There is no way we can produce butter, cheese and milk in space yet,” explained Ryan. “I was thinking of a couple of cows, but that is not going to happen, I was told by Mr. Rose. We can limit our food growth to rabbits and chickens, but not a grazing animal like a cow. Also we will be taking added items like salt up with us until we find an asteroid or planet that has sodium chloride on it. We will make margarine from vegetable oil though, but it won’t be as creamy as cow butter.
“Our bodies will need certain additional foods, minerals and vitamins. Several of the smallest 40-foot cylinders will be storage facilities for over 5,000 needed items, like salt, 1,000 lbs. of freeze-dried cheddar cheese, 40 or so tons of frozen beef and again pork which I plan to take up if we have time, syringes of vitamins in liquid form, medical equipment and supplies, seeds, dormant plants, etc., while one is planned to have 30,000 gallons of water. Every gallon will be pure, clean, distilled water, and several gallons flown up on every flight. A couple of the cylinders will have backup liquid oxygen, and even a twelve-ton backup soil supply, for when we reach somewhere we can grow crops. A surgeon, a medical specialist and a registered nurse will be on board, and two of the 40-foot round cylinders are an operating theater/ICU unit and a hospital ward/elementary school.
“Several dozen extra sun lamps will be in storage with three one-ton rock mining machines from Hangar Four. I believe that we may have to go underground on either Mars or an asteroid to establish a new, permanent home. There will be eReaders all over the ship with every bit of practical knowledge about agricultural, humans, and animals ever known; they will also be loaded with star charts, planetary systems and every asteroid and planet’s history and whereabouts within our solar system. I don’t believe we will leave our own system on our first journey, but there is a lot of real estate out there, and we should be able to find a place to live. The most ideal place could be on an asteroid, or even better inside it, or underground on another planet.”
“Do you plan to return to earth?” VIN asked.
“Yes, I have thought about it. I will tell you my intimate thoughts on returning once we get closer to leaving. Unfortunately at this moment in time, and a changing political situation in our country and the rest of the world, power has become very cutthroat. The new president is already acting like he has absolute control of everything in this country, but in reality there are dozens of projects and scenarios playing out he is unaware of, many of which are within Washington and the Pentagon, where men are striving for more power than their ranks of office. The last president is still a friend of mine, and believes this space race is a great competition. And, it is and will continue to be, until someone in power wants to co-opt it, maybe somebody in the Air Force, or the CIA or FBI, or another organization I have never heard of. Every new project today has a chance of being squashed, or commandeered, or simply made to disappear because it interferes with somebody else’s grab for more power.
I believe that there are at least a dozen people out there, mostly in Washington or the Pentagon, and some in other countries, who will invade our private airfield as soon as they begin to suspect what we are doing. And, my friend, the ex-president, won’t even know about it, nor will the good citizens of this country. Greed is a powerful motivator, and so is the power, the absolute power, of having a secret nobody else knows about. Having a weapon, or even exceptional private knowledge, conveys power in this new political, and robotic military era. The opportunists, who want to capitalize on those things which could bring great advances to humanity, are not burdened by conscience; they do not care about the welfare of the country, its citizens, or who gets killed, in their quest for power.
“That is why the secrecy is so tight here. Right now, we have time on our side, and decades of knowledge from the best scientists in the world; don’t think for one second that others, outside our airfield, are not wondering what is going on here. I believe that these people will begin coming out of the woodwork when we achieve something of note. I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole airfield is made to disappear and every person attached to it, terminated, if it means riches and power beyond people’s dreams. That is why you will see our top-secret armament section with liquid xenon and liquid nitrogen gas manufacturing facilities in Hangar Ten.”
VIN did not understand much of what Ryan had just said, and now wondered if this guy was a pretty complex conspiracy nut.
As the group rose to leave to tour the next hangar, they thanked everyone for a great lunch. Suzi again kissed VIN on the cheek as they left. She had helped him put on his old plastic legs again.
Hangar Ten was totally different. It was one of the smaller hangars and was divided by two brick walls, turning the interior into three sections.
“The first two sections,” Ryan told them “is for the production of xenon gas, the propulsion fuel for deep space flight. Xenon is obtained commercially as a by-product of the liquid oxygen produced will contain small quantities of krypton and xenon. Both pure oxygen and pure nitrogen are needed for our mission. The pure nitrogen gas is pumped to Hangar Eleven where it is made into liquid form and then sent outside to one of our underground Dewars for storage.
Liquid oxygen and nitrogen are obtained from the air by air separation plant. In other words we get three products for storage when we separate the air in this hangar: liquid oxygen for our air breathing backup, liquid nitrogen which has a thousand uses in space, and xenon gas, a fuel for space. It is a very simple but very expensive operation. In our third section is our laser department,” Ryan added as they went through. “We need lasers for three different reasons in space. A laser is a great weapon to break up a meteor, or a rock that could cause damage to our base. Second, it is a great tool for cutting through objects, like hard solid rock, and third, it can be used as a weapon for defense. We have all three.” There was silence and Ryan continued.
“The word laser started as an acronym for ‘light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation’; in modern usage ‘light’ broadly denotes electromagnetic radiation of any frequency, not only Redondo Beach had successfully built and tested an electrically powered solid state laser capable of producing a 100-kilowatt beam, powerful enough to destroy an airplane. This is an electrically powered laser, and was assumed to be capable of being mounted in an aircraft, ship, or other vehicle because it required additional space for its supporting equipment. They didn’t state how this new weapon was fueled, but unknown to many at Northrop Grumman, this same idea had been researched by several German and Russian scientists as early as 1965. We have a laser that will be powered by a nuclear reactor, if and when its use is necessary.” Everybody looked at each other.
“I understand you are thinking of a nuclear reactor that powers an aircraft carrier, or even a submarine, Ours is half the size of a nuclear submarine reactor, uses plutonium-238, a non-weapons grade plutonium, but is powerful enough to emit a laser that can break up solid rock, melt steel, or any other heavy man-made metal in seconds, and from a distance of a thousand miles. I believe the U.S. military is not far behind us, but would not like to be told that we have a better weapon than they have. Their most modern tests show their laser weaponry one hundred times weaker than ours. They will never know about it once it is in space, and if we are never attacked.” Ever
ybody nodded, pretty shocked at what they were learning. “The machinery for the laser will be taken up in parts; each part weighs less than 100 pounds.
The last hangars were Hangars Eleven and Twelve. The movement through these was pretty fast. These last two hangars were liquid gas production plants. Ryan told them that six gases would be needed in space in liquid form for concentrated storage; liquid oxygen for air, liquid argon for heat storage, liquid nitrogen, liquid hydrogen and xenon for fuel, and helium for production and manufacture. “Helium will be important in the cooling of our arc-welding by our robotic spiders in space and for some of our mining tools. Our panels will be welded together in space by a range of these gases, but mostly helium. All these gases can be found in space, as can water. This gas production equipment, though in smaller forms will be with us, ready to go into production sometime in the future.”
That was it for the day; the pilots now knew nearly everything there was to know about this project. They knew that Ryan Richmond had a dream. A dream of being the first human to live in space, and somehow they had all been roped into this plan, no matter how mad it was. It was also too late to withdraw.
Chapter 17
The Final Frontier
The next flight was to be a practice flight to 50,000 feet, to test the maximum height Bob Mathews could fly the C-5 with a shuttle and a spacecraft in its belly.