QL: My name is Quentin Lewis, Senator. And at present I occupy a cell in the federal holding facility in Rosslyn, Virginia.
SM: You know what I mean, Mr. Lewis. Get on with it, please.
QL: If you’re asking what I did before your marshals plunked me into solitary, I was director of cislunar space traffic for the Moonmine Operation: United States Extension.
SM: Order! Stop that laughter in the galleries! Unlike some of my colleagues, Mr. Lewis, I am not amused by that unofficial acronym. This is very serious business. It’s alleged that you were responsible for the untimely loss of a cargo worth on the order of one hundred million dollars to the taxpayers of this country. Sabotage and treason are not charges to be taken lightly.
QL: I am aware of the seriousness of these proceedings, Senator. And I willingly take responsibility for my role in the affair. I just find your choice of words misleading, if not to say amusing.
SENATOR CESARONE: Well, then, Mr. Lewis, how would you characterize your actions on the day in question? As a “timely and effective rescue operation”?
QL: That does sum it up pretty well. Thank you, Senator.
SC: An interesting point of view. Do you live in the same universe as the rest of us? Let me see if I can refresh your memory. [Reads from a printout.] At 04:20 hours UMT, on the fifth of May, year 2012, you were awakened by your assistant, Ms. Arjanian, with the news that the Gaucho tether-retrieval system had been sabotaged.
QL: To be precise, she told me somebody’d planted a bomb on the Gaucho. Six hundred kilometers of bolo-tether were shredded, throwing slivers all over cislunar space. The Gaucho was completely destroyed, and with it our elevator off the moon.
SC: You leave out the cargo the Gaucho had only just snagged from the lunar surface when it exploded-twelve hundred tons of freshly mined and refined lunar oxygen, the first full-sized shipment from our lunar factory.
QL: Well, while we’re quibbling, what about the other end of the bolo, Senator? While the oxy was going up, our supplies were coming down! After Gaucho blew, we had no ice cream for six months! Had to live off algae paste, plankton pond scum, and wishful thinking.
SM: Order! . . . Mr. Lewis, we are all aware of how you and your colleagues suffered before a new rotating elevator could be established to replace the Gaucho system. Making light of that struggle for survival does you credit. But although you starved with the rest, yours is a special case.
QL: Right. Sacrificial lamb. Scapegoat. Yum. Thanks for the honor.
SC: Now sir. Nobody’s holding you responsible for the loss of the Gaucho or its cargo. It’s what you did afterward that we’re concerned about here. Seven days later, before full-scale investigations had even begun, you used the traffic-control apparatus at your base to send commands to the approaching spacecraft Eclipse, did you not?
QL: That was my job, Senator. Giving trajectory instructions to approaching spacecraft is what a traffic coordinator is for.
SC: Indeed. And you ordered the computer pilot of the robot freighter Eclipse to change course.
QL: I did, Senator. Eclipse was entering cislunar space fast, using her solar sail to decelerate toward a matched orbit with the moon. Her cargo was one hundred and fifty tons of dirty ice, scraped off asteroid 1986 DB. But when I realized Gaucho would no longer be available to snag the stuff . . .
Hello, Akiro? It’s me again. Maybe I’d better explain here, since at this point Lewis gets awfully technical. You see, Eclipse was something very new back then, a robot-controlled solar sail freighter. The first of its kind. It was hauling the first load of ice ever harvested from an asteroid.
Today, of course, we take space ice for granted. We get it from Saturn, the moons of Jupiter. But try to put yourself in their shoes, back then.
They’d found no ice on the moon, none even at the lunar poles. Oh, the lunar soils had plenty of oxygen, bound up with silicon and aluminum and iron. Twentieth-century studies had shown that it would be possible to set up mines and factories on the moon, to extract and separate all those elements for industrial purposes. The oxygen, in particular, would be terribly important as propellant for rockets in cislunar space. In fact, a lunar oxidizer would, they thought, bring space resources just past the point of breakeven—where the whole endeavor to live and work profitably in space would start to make sense.
Anyway, it was convincing enough to get people to invest in a prototype factory, manned by sixteen astronauts, to see if they could harvest oxygen and other elements economically. They had a break when it proved possible to construct a whirling bola-type space elevator in orbit. Skimming above the lunar mountains, the bolo tip just missed grazing the surface, enabling it to snag cargos from the base and throw them into high transfer orbit. At the same time, it would bring fresh base supplies down to an almost gentle touchdown. (Amazing, no? Ingenious people, our grandparents. Oh, but if only they could imagine what we’ve got today!)
Alas, though, it still wasn’t paying. There were delays, problems to solve, glitches to iron out. Took a while to get the oxygen plants running. Back then people were impatient, for some reason. Wanted quick profits. (Maybe it was because their lives were so short.)
Anyway, it was beginning to look as if the whole project would just miss breakeven. Already there were powerful voices at work to get the entire space resources bid canceled. And if that happened, there would go all chance of building up large-scale space industry, factories, colonies . . . (Can you imagine? I might have been born on Earth! Brrrr!)
Things would have been a lot different, of course, if anyone had ever found ice on the moon. Water is just so damned useful. (You Earthers tend to forget that, actually swimming in it as you do.) Besides life support and farming, it’s particularly useful in providing hydrogen fuel.
So the economics of living and working in space would change forever if there was only a source of water that didn’t have to be hauled all the way out of Earth’s steep, deep pit of a gravity well.
All right. No ice on the moon. Where’s the nearest alternate source? Well, it’s obvious to you and me now, but back then lots of people laughed.
The asteroids, of course. The carbonaceous types. The dead comets and dark sludgeballs, some of them as easy to get to, in energy terms, as the moon.
Anyway, back around the turn of the century, a few daring science types finally persuaded Congress to fund one mission. Send out an automatic scraper to a likely ’roid . . .
But let’s get back to Lewis’s testimony and he’ll tell it in his own words.
QL:. . . entirely different kind of mining operation. The little robot didn’t have to fight gravity at that tiny asteroid, or even refine the ice at all. All it had to do was scrape all that lovely dirty snow into a bag, then spread that beautiful solar sail and carry the goods home to us. We’d do all the refining at our plant on the moon. That water would make our jobs easier in a thousand ways that—
SM: Yes, yes, Mr. Lewis, we are aware of how enthusiastic many of you were about that part of the program, and how you’ll inevitably feel when we cancel the space industry—
SC: That’s not been decided, yet!
SM: My apologies, Senator. But it’s a foregone conclusion, now that Mr. Lewis has taken all that wonderful ice he so lusted after and simply dumped it! Jettisoned it, like so much garbage! Why did you do it, Mr. Lewis? Why did you do such a stupid thing?
QL: Well, Senator . . . time. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
SM: Order! If the spectators continue with these outbursts I’ll have the room cleared. That is enough levity, Mr. Lewis.
SC: Um, in all fairness to the witness, I think it should be noted that the question was tendentious. Mr. Lewis, I assume you dumped Eclipse’s cargo because of the Gaucho disaster?
QL: Thank you, Senator. That’s right. We’d intended for Eclipse to adjust her solar, tacking on sunlight, to slowly spiral her cargo onto just the right trajectory. It would have been snagged by Gaucho’s bolo hook and gently lowered to
Copernicus Base. Meanwhile, relieved of her burden, Eclipse herself would fly on, sailing back out toward another asteroid and another load.
SM: That second mission had not been authorized, yet.
QL: That’s right, Senator. But it was essential. Just 150 tons of water wouldn’t pay for the investment already made. But Eclipse could go back again and again, for more and more ice. And that ice would make all the difference between getting rich colonizing the solar system and struggling just to break even, or even retreating, as some cowards would have us do—
SM: I’d watch it, if I were you, Mr. Lewis. You’re bordering on contempt. Already the Attorney General has contemplated filing charges of attempted murder—
QL: [Laughter] For what? Throwing snowballs?
SM: Order! That part of it is very serious, Mr. Lewis. Not only did you dump Eclipse’s cargo, but you sent it on a trajectory that just missed a potentially catastrophic collision with Copernicus Base! You and all your comrades might have died! Was that your motivation? When you saw the Gaucho destroyed, and with it all your hopes, did you try to end it all in one grand murder-suicide that failed?
QL: Oh, I assure you, Senator, I’m a better shot than that. If I had wanted to, I could have smacked Copernicus head on. I hit where I aimed, all right. Caused a moonquake, too. We felt it a hundred kilometers away.
SC: But—
QL: Senators, I had two reasons for what I did. First, I had to dump the cargo. It was that or lose Eclipse.
SC: Explain, please.
QL: Surely. You see, at the time the solar sail freighter was coming in, cislunar space was still filled with debris from the Gaucho explosion. Shreds of tether material were flying all over the place, as well as chunks of our freeze-dried coffee and duck pate. [Laughter] Anyway, while we were busy feeling sorry for ourselves, it suddenly occurred to me just how incredibly delicate a solar sail is.
SC: What . . . Oh, I see.
QL: I’ll bet you do, Senator. Eclipse is a terrifically efficient machine, you see. Solar sails may be too slow to be useful carrying human beings, but they’re by far the best way to send bulk cargo, the sort of cargo where you don’t care so much when it arrives, just so long as it gets there. Handle them right, with good programming and a smart robot pilot, and they simply can’t be beat. But there’s only one problem with them. It’s generally not a good idea to send a sun clipper tacking straight into a cloud of shrapnel! Does bad things to the sails, if you know what I mean.
SC: So your intention was to divert Eclipse before she entered an unstoppable collision course with the debris?
QL: That’s right. After dumping the cargo, she was much more maneuverable. I tilted her sails and filled them with sunlight to lift her out of harm’s way on a new course, toward a new asteroid site, a very promising one—
SM: That was not authorized! Besides, Mr. Lewis, weren’t your priorities a little mixed up, there? Moonbase needed Eclipse’s first cargo—the first one—to prove the concept and rescue it from bankruptcy this year. If that had worked, we might have been willing to fund more solar sail freighters.
QL: Might. Maybe. After how long a delay? Eclipse was there, man. She was working! Odds were she’d be the only solar sail freighter available for a long, long time. We had to save her!
SM: Fine. So you dumped her first cargo and sent her out for a second. And that second won’t arrive, even if all goes well, for two more years! Did it ever occur to you that there now probably won’t be a moon factory to receive that new load, when Eclipse finally returns? It was the first cargo that mattered, Mr. Lewis. The first. You dumped that cargo—
QL: Ah. Let me see, now. I think I see the problem here. It’s one of terminology. You see, Senator . . .
Hi, Akiro. Me again. Have you figured it out yet? So much for the “inexorable forces of history” argument. Important, crucial decisions are sometimes made by great men and women. And figure this: hardly anybody even knows the name Lewis anymore. Everyone gives Cesarone the credit for fighting the Space Freighters Bill through, back in 2014. There are factories and streets and even a city named after him, out on Ceres, but hardly a back-asteroid lane named for Lewis. Who can figure history?
QL: . . . any faster than that and it will hit with the force of a typical meteorite, resulting in flash vaporization, kicking most of the material back upward in a fine spray. Of course, anything striking the moon at speeds like those will be unrecognizable in microseconds.
SC: Ah . . . wait a minute. That’s if the material hits at a speed greater than the speed of sound?
QL: The speed that sound travels in rock, Senator. A meteoroid striking faster than that . . . well, there’s no place for the kinetic energy to go except into a big explosion. Certainly anything volatile, like water, is gone instantly.
SC: But if it lands slower . . . ?
QL: Very good, Senator, you used the word land.
SM: I don’t see what difference it makes—
SC: All the difference in the world, George! Don’t you see? We’re used to the idea that anything falling from space has to hit with a bang. But that’s because most meteoroids come in with—whatsit, hypergolic—
QL: Hyperbolic velocity, yes, that’s if something arrives from deep space. But this stuff had already entered orbit! And the moon has a much shallower gravity well than Earth.
SC: How fast was the ice traveling when it hit the surface, Mr. Lewis?
QL: Oh, we were able to bring Eclipse close enough so its cargo landed at about eighty meters per second, give or take.
SC: That slowly?
SM: What’s going on here? Will you explain what you’re talking about?
SC: Let’s see, that’s about three hundred kilometers per hour . . . less than the speed of sou . . . Say. The ice wouldn’t necessarily flash-vaporize, would it! There’d be some spraying, of course, and mixing with lunar soils, but—
QL: But it would stay pretty compact. That’s right, sir. In effect, we’ve created a small ore deposit, just one hundred or so klicks from—
SC: [Laughing] So this is why you delayed giving us your testimony for so long, Lewis! All right, I see you clutching a space cablegram in your fist. Out with it. What have your buddies on the moon found?
QL: Well, sir, it took a while after the Gaucho disaster to get things back together, then a survey and assay party had to be sent out. Vehicles had to be modified. My people are actually rather upset with me for targeting the ore site so far away. Seems they resent my margin of safety . . . would rather I’d taken a chance of hitting them on the heads!
SC: Out with it, man!
QL: Well, along with a request for supplies to be sent up on the next shuttle, this cable contains confirmation of the complete purification of seventeen tons of pure-grade water—
SM: Seventeen tons!
QL: Yeah. Collins estimates they can probably refine another twenty or so before the lode runs out. I’m a bit disappointed, but the ice did come in pretty fast. A lot got turned into steam and drifted away. We’ll do better next time.
SM: Order! Order! The spectators will remember that this is a closed session! Nothing about any of this will leave this room except as the committee decides. And . . . and . . . criminy, did you say seventeen tons of water?
QL: Yes, Senator. And now, about this new request for supplies. There’s one item here . . . we’d appreciate it if someone would send up six pounds or so of elemental chlorine, which, I’m sure you are aware, is a very scarce element on the moon.
SC: [Laughter] No! You aren’t going to say it’s for your—
QL: And why not, Senator? While we’re waiting to use it for fuel and farms and factories, to make everybody rich, while it’s just sitting around, I see no reason why we shouldn’t be allowed, in the meantime, to have a swimming pool.
Well, there you have it, Akiro. Our world of today, our wealthy community of the solar system—all resting on one moment’s ingenuity. And you know something? They only stopped using the “div
e-bomber” method to deliver ice ores to the moon just five years ago! By then, of course, it was so mundane and ordinary that nobody noticed. Finally had to quit because the Lunar Sierra Club objected to the way rainbows were starting to ruin the “stark vacuum beauty” of the moon!
Of course, by then the method was obsolete. The factories had moved to deeper space, along with a large chunk of humanity. But for decades it allowed the robot sail freighters to operate at maximum efficiency, allowing us to leverage a toehold into a living economy in space.
All this has made me think about Eclipse. I went to see her, last month, in the Museum of Transport. Crowds of sightseers hurried past, eager to look at Orion and Gorshkov and all the other famous manned exploration vessels. Who cares, after all, about just another little robot freighter, especially now that its once pretty sails are spalled and pitted and furled away for good?
We’ve grown used to the sight of them, the fleets of bright-winged freighters, cruising the solar system on winds of sunlight, patiently hauling the bulk cargoes while we humans go flitting about in our high-speed rockets. Frankly, I’d never even heard of Eclipse, the first one, until I began this research. But I was amazed when I looked up, yesterday, how many of her descendants are out there.
Four million, Akiro. Four million little spidery robot sunjammers, each with its own woven sail of gossamer, each patiently hauling ice from Saturn, iron from the inner belt, platinum from the Trojans. Making us all so rich we can turn your beloved Earth into a park . . . as if anyone with any sense would want to go trudging about in all that gravity. Okay, I take that back.
But isn’t it amazing? I’m not talking just about Quentin Lewis, the first ice pilot, or even all the wonders we take for granted today. It goes beyond that, Akiro.
Right now I’m looking out my window and I can see another freighter passing by. Her sail is so immense she looks near enough to touch. And yet, she must be several thousand kilometers away, headed for Neptune, if I judge the trajectory right. Her cargo is probably terribly boring; still, she sparkles like a bright star.
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