Space For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  “You guys can't do that flight rate yet,” Granderson barks back at the OS team.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Hammersmith whispers angrily in Kingsley's ear.

  “Yeah, what are you doing?” Travis asks in Kingsley's other ear.

  “I'm calling their bluff,” K whispers back through a fake smile aimed across the table.

  “What bluff?” Travis asks.

  “They know they can't do these things for 105 million,” K whispers, “so what I'm really offering them is 420 million dollars in exchange for them spending 800 million dollars. If they can really go that cheap, they'll jump at the chance. If they can't, then they'll find an excuse not to take them because they don't want to go another half billion in the red.”

  “Okay, so ULA, what do you think about that offer?” Jennings asks. Granderson stalls. “Come on, do you want the extra four missions?”

  “Watch this,” K says with a smirk, waiting for his trap to spring shut, for the ULA team to balk and thus revealing their bid as the lie that it is.

  “We'll take them,” Granderson says.

  “Okay, do we have any other shenanigans to do today?” Jennings asks, “we could play monopoly with real money. Or maybe we could play poker and bet with our wedding rings and our firstborn. No? No more shenanigans, excellent.” And with that the NASA team leaves.

  “Some bluff,” Travis mutters to Kingsley as he stands up. K stares across the table at Granderson, still trying to read him, still trying to figure out what cards he's really holding. Did he just double down on a lie, or was his bid actually the truth and K just handed him a gift?

  Chapter 9

  Griffin 4 and Griffin 5 flew nearly flawless missions carrying cargo to the ISS and returning both waste and valuable materials back to a nice soft splashdown. On Griffin 4, the Super-Draco engines were used to slow the Griffin down to a soft splashdown while the parachutes remained safely stowed in their home on the top of the capsule. This first production run of Griffins was not equipped with landing gear, so they could still only splashdown and not land on terra firma. Griffin 5 was the first to be laid out to carry humans, flying to the ISS with ghostly seats with cargo and dummies strapped in rather than humans. Griffin 5 was officially called SPX CRS-2 by NASA, which stands for SpacEx's Cargo Resupply Mission #2. As the first man-capable Griffin, part of Griffin 5's job was to carry dummies that would report on how comfortable their seats were through launch, re-entry, and landing.

  While these two capsules were off being launched and orbiting the Earth, Griffin 6 was being more thoroughly scrutinized than any of the previous five, for Griffin 6 would carry human beings into orbit. The crew consisted of Commander and Pilot Tim Bowe, Flight Engineer Travis Clayton, and “passenger” Kingsley Pretorius.

  Griffin 7 lived just fifty yards down the line, preparing to fly passengers to the ISS for SpacEx's crew transfer proving mission. There were no more Griffin's on the manifest after Griffin 7. There was no guarantee of any crew transfer missions to the ISS, and even if they did come, they would not happen immediately as they would have to be awarded a contract at a future conference in competition with the CST-100 and Dream Chaser. Thus, the Griffin assembly line was shut down while it was being modified and upgraded for the change to producing Griffin version 1.1. The 7 Griffin 1.0s lacked landing gear and had smaller fuel tanks for the Super-Draco thrusters than would be required for powered landing. The Griffin 1.1 would make landings a real option and would also improve the Griffin with small upgrades all over from new electronics to a 10% increase in the width of the bottom of the capsule, enabling an increase in the internal volume while new improvements in construction would actually make the skeleton slightly lighter.

  The 90 million dollars from each cargo mission as well as the 220 million they would collect from a successful Griffin 7 would help pay for these upgrades in the Griffin line.

  Meanwhile the Eagle 9s were undergoing a similar upgrade to version 1.1. They would produce an additional four Eagle 9s before they upgraded that assembly line, and they had three Eagle 9s in the inventory. The plan was to fly Griffin 6 and 7, leaving five more Eagle 9s in the inventory before they had to wait until the next version to come along. They would use two of those Eagle 9s to deliver satellites, both would be going to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit, a more demanding launch than simply heading to LEO. A GTO launch takes a payload up to an orbit of 400 km by 80,000 km. The payload would then do a burn once it hits 80,000 km to speed up and circularize its orbit at 80,000 km. No Eagle 9 had yet left LEO. Then with the 3 remaining Eagle 9s, they would construct and launch the first ever Eagle Heavy.

  These last launches of the first version would be necessary to give them data on all the different flight modes that the next version would encounter, that way they could make intelligent choices when they made the final design decisions on the Eagle 9 v1.1. This included attempting to slow the first-stage of the Eagle 9 down to a splashdown on a pillar of fire, as well as performing the turn-around burn that would be necessary to recover a first stage on land. These were maneuvers that had never been attempted and they didn't have the luxury of having test flights to do them. Instead, each of these missions had real goals and payloads and these tests would have to be done on-the-job.

  With all the data collected, they would update the design for the Eagle 9 v1.1. The most important change was the uprating in the thrust of the Arthur engines. This increased thrust would be essentially wasted on the current Eagle 9. In order to take advantage of that higher thrust you need the rocket to carry more fuel, and that means changing the size of the tanks and structure of the rocket, which is easier said than done. Thus, the most significant difference between v1.0 and v1.1 was that the rocket was 13 meters taller, thanks to larger fuel tanks.

  The Arthur engines were being uprated by 19%, raising the first stage thrust from about 1.1 million pound-force to 1.3 million pound-force. That increase means that the entire vehicle can weigh .2 million pounds more at launch without lowering the vital thrust-to-weight-ratio. That 200,000 pounds is almost entirely allocated on more fuel and the weight increase of larger tanks. That extra 200,000 pounds in launch-mass yields an increase in payload-to-LEO from 23,000 to 29,000 pounds.

  Along with more powerful engines, the first stage was going to get landing gear that would deploy in flight and enable a touchdown. Other changes included improved techniques of welding that would reduce the weight of the frame, the addition of thrusters to maintain attitude control of the first stage, as well as ducts on the inside of the propellant tanks to enable good flow in zero-gravity. There would be many small and important changes that would be made based on the invaluable data they would have from all of the v1.0 flights.

  The hope was that in a few years, Eagle 9 v1.1s would be able to launch Griffin v1.1s into orbit while the first stage would return to the launch site for re-use while the Griffin would make a powered landing back at SpacEx headquarters for reuse.

  But before they could do these groundbreaking things, they had to get the data and they had to get the money to pay for these upgrades. They were so close. And yet, a single failure could set them back enough to kill the dream.

  “Maybe we should bump Tim from the flight,” Kingsley says to Travis as they sit in a Griffin simulator at SpacEx HQ.

  “Why?”

  “We don't need three crew,” K says.

  “But why?” Travis asks, sitting up from his position lying on his back. “You think it's too dangerous?”

  “No. I'm confident, but I'm also not somebody's father,” K replies. “Maybe it should just be me.”

  “You're definitely not kicking me off, that's for sure,” Travis says and lays back down. “You're just nervous. Relax.”

  “Maybe you shouldn't go,” Caroline says, standing in the doorway to Kingsley's simulator room in the basement of his, well, castle. Kingsley is strapped in to a motion-control simulator.

  “Go where?” K asks, not taking his eyes off h
is main display.

  “You know where,” Caroline says. “I brought you a coffee.”

  “I got one right here,” Kingsley says, pointing to a pouch on his chest. He's wearing a space helmet that rests on his shoulders. The pouch of coffee connects to a straw inside his helmet.

  “Why are you wearing that?”

  “Practice like you play,” K says matter-of-factly. Caroline approaches, looking over his shoulder at his display.

  “Are you landing on the Moon?”

  “I'm trying,” K says, staring intently at the main screen which shows a video feed from an external camera pointing down at the lunar surface. Two bright lights on opposite sides of this currently fictional lunar lander of Kingsley's design converge beneath the lander, giving K a visual indication of his altitude. The main screen is designed to allow K to see a visual perspective as well as all the needed telemetry data in one place. The video feed is overlaid with his horizontal and vertical velocity, as well as the rate of change of those numbers, his radar altitude, distance to target landing site, and his level of fuel remaining expressed as a percent of total fuel and as a duration of burn time left at current throttle level.

  At the moment the displays show K at just over 3 km in altitude, with a horizontal velocity of 128 m/s, a vertical velocity of -44 m/s, distance to landing site of 6 km horizontally or 6.7 km absolute (factoring in altitude), with 14% fuel remaining.

  “Why are you practicing Moon landings when you've got a mission in five days. Why don't you practice that?”

  “This is how I relax,” K replies.

  “Well, anyway, I came down here to ask you if you're sure you should be getting on that rocket.”

  “Of course I'm sure.”

  “What about Dexter?” Caroline asks.

  “What about him?”

  “He quit because he thought you were being reckless, maybe he has a point.”

  “He quit because he's a dick and they paid him off.”

  “He was your friend, I don't think he would betray you that easily.”

  “He was never a friend.”

  “I don't believe that.”

  “I'm kind of in the middle of something, do you mind?”

  “When are we flying to the Cape?”

  “Noon, Travis and Tim are on their way over.”

  “A week later was the first launch of a man-rated Griffin,” Kingsley says, back on the couch. “And she came to see me off, all romantic like. Before we went to the pad, you know, in pressure suits and everything, she ran out and hugged me and so did Tim's wife Makayla.”

  “Wait, so you were going into space?”

  “Duh.”

  “It's just that...you didn't say that you were getting on a rocket, you said, the first launch of a man-rated Griffin.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Not really, but continue.”

  “So, it was the last we would see anyone before we headed to the rocket. And it hit me, looking at Tim and Makayla and their baby girl, that there's a father and a husband who's going to be riding a spaceship I designed, atop a rocket I designed. I might be responsible for a widow and an orphan. That's on me now. I always meant to only hire bachelors, and I sure as hell didn't plan on having a woman I cared enough about to see me off. I mean, five-years-ago-Kingsley would have been thinking about how much pussy he could get after splashdown. It's called splashdown for a reason, if you catch my drift. But instead, I was looking into these teary eyes. Obviously she was afraid she might not see me again.”

  “Were you afraid you might not see her again?”

  “I don't know. I mean, I'm afraid of the rocket or the spacecraft not working right. I mean, there are some pretty awful ways to go. I could die in a horrible fire. The Challenger astronauts survived the break-up of the vehicle, and the ones that activated their survival systems had a few minutes to think about their deaths as they plummeted toward the ocean and a two hundred mile per hour impact. Most of them were probably unconscious, but still. The Columbia astronauts were ripped to pieces. I mean if something goes wrong when you're going 16,000 miles per hour, it can get ugly real fast.”

  “That's not what I was asking. Afraid of dying, sure, but were you afraid of not seeing her again?

  “That's a hell of a catch,” Travis Clayton, Chief Flight Engineer, says as he and Tim Bowe, Chief Pilot, and Kingsley walk toward the launch tower in their blue and gray SpacEx pressurized flight suits. Just a handful of launch technicians walk with them toward the launch tower. Multiple television cameras document their walk and broadcast it around the world. The first private astronauts. This is big news. The kind of news that doesn't just echo around the nerdosphere, but would get mainstream coverage, be discussed at most water-coolers, if that's still a thing.

  Most SpacEx personnel are either at the Launch Control Facility a few miles outside of Cape Canaveral AFB or at Mission Control back at the SpacEx HQ in Hawthorne, California. Years of work, and weeks of intense preparation by everyone on SpacEx payroll was about to be on national television, success or failure, it would be public.

  “Yeah nice one K,” Tim says. “How'd you land her?”

  “It only cost me like 30 million to get a date with her,” K says.

  “That's like a miss-universe ass, so it's fitting you'd hit that,” Travis adds.

  “Okay, that's enough of that,” Kingsley says as they enter the steel-frame launch tower and enter the elevator that would take them up to the rocket. The elevator has a sign that reads “Elevator to Heaven.”

  As the men wait for the elevator to lift them twenty-two stories to the Griffin-deck, they stand in an awkward silence. “You should get some elevator music, I'm just listening to myself breathe,” Tim says.

  “How about Stairway to Heaven,” Travis says.

  “Zeppelin?” Tim asks, “Gross.”

  “What!? You don't like Led Zeppelin?” Travis is astonished.

  “How about some Bowie?” Tim says.

  “Ground control to Major Tom,” Travis half-sings.

  “Yeah but that's about a guy who gets lost in space,” Kingsley says. “Let's just get Rocket Man, Elton John.”

  “Well, if we're going Elton John, then it should be Tiny Dancer,” Travis replies.

  “That doesn't really fit the theme,” Tim says.

  “And...wouldn't it be kinda weird for a bunch of male astronauts to get in an elevator and listen to Tiny Dancer together?” Kingsley asks.

  The elevator doors open and the three astronauts exit, walking on a see-through steel grate, heading for the open hatch of the Griffin-1.

  “Alright guys, it's just like all the time in the sim, nothing new. Don't get too excited. You'll do fine,” Travis says.

  “Why are you giving us advice?” Tim asks.

  “I've been to space, you guys are noobs,” Travis replies. Tim and Kingsley stare at him, deadpan, with ice-cold blood running through their veins. Travis on the other hand, trying to play the role of the veteran, can't keep his hands from shaking nervously.

  Hours earlier, the Eagle 9 and Griffin rolled out from the assembly hangar a few hundred yards from the pad. The spacecraft and rocket are assembled horizontally, laying on a rolling structure. When ready to launch, the hangar doors open, the structure rolls the several hundred yards to the launch pad, then slowly raises the rocket to vertical. Once vertical, the rocket is mated to the launch tower.

  The three men climb aboard Griffin 6. It takes a few minutes for them to get strapped in and the hatch sealed from the outside. If something goes wrong now, the crew would simply exit the capsule and use an escape slide leading from the tower to a nearby bunker. Three gantry arms extend from the tower to the rocket. The highest arm is the one the crew used to reach the Griffin, and cables and pipes running from this arm lead into the Griffin itself. The first and second stages are not fueled until the Griffin is fully ready to make an abort, in the event of a catastrophic failure.

  Once the Griffin is powered up, the
crew sets the computer to abort-active. If the computer senses an emergency, it could automatically trigger the abort, turning on the Griffin's rockets and separating the capsule from the Trunk and the rest of the rocket. Each crew member also has access to a manual abort button. Once the abort-system is ready to fire, the top gantry connecting the capsule to the launch tower swings away, clear from the rocket. Only then do they begin fueling the Eagle 9's first and second stages.

  Cryogenic liquid oxygen and RP-1 kerosene fuel are pumped into the huge pressure vessels in the first and second stages. The fueling begins at T-minus-4-hours and finishes just before the T-minus-2-hour mark. The cryogenic liquid oxygen would be continually boiling off and vented, which produces two white plumes coming off the rocket that look a bit like steam, but are anything but hot. So the rocket must have a continual supply of liquid oxygen until liftoff to keep the tanks topped off.

  At liftoff, the rocket will weigh a little over a million pounds. Most of that mass is fuel and oxidizer. Of the 1,050,000 pounds, only 23,000 pounds will make it to orbit, and 18,000 pounds of that payload is the Griffin capsule.

  Aside from crew couches, control systems, life support, and all the trappings required to keep men alive, the man-rated version was not much different from the cargo version. If the life-support failed, they could live off suit oxygen for a day. They wouldn't be flying to the Moon, and so could re-enter and return to Earth at short notice, and thanks to the integrated launch-abort system, they had redundant systems that could bring them back to Earth, as well as the capability of aborting at any time during launch.

  To further ensure safety, they had done more than the usual amount of testing of the rocket. Each Arthur engine is tested on the ground, but the ten Arthurs beneath them (including the one in the second stage) have all been through more static tests than any previous engines.