Space For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  “I hate to make things worse,” Greenwood says, “but if that money's gone, then what does that mean for Griffin 7?”

  “What do you mean?” K asks.

  “Well, Griffin 7 is supposed to go to the ISS to prove our crew delivery capability, and thus fulfill our contract with NASA and then they would owe us, what was it? Two hundred million?”

  “Two hundred and twenty million,” K corrects. “Why does everyone always forget that twenty?”

  “That money is still on the table,” Hammersmith says. “They cut funding for the future. There won't be a contract for crew delivery. But as far as I know, we're still under contract for this proving mission.”

  “Yeah,” Greenwood say, “but with the crew delivery missions that follow the proving mission off the table, what's to stop them from just saying 'no thanks,' and not letting us go to the ISS. I mean, they were already pissed about us taking paying passengers to the ISS.”

  “They have to let us, we've got a contract,” K insists.

  “So what happens if they don't let us dock to the ISS?” Tim asks.

  “I'd like to see them stop us,” K says.

  “Our lawyers have been on the phone with NASA all morning,” Hammersmith says. “They're trying to back out of the whole thing. No money, no coming to the ISS. In fact, they said if we brought passengers to the ISS, they would charge us 20 million per person.”

  All eyes converge on Kingsley. He doesn't know what to do.

  “Our lawyers think we have a solid case however,” Brittany says.

  “The other day you were scolding me about suing our customers,” K says.

  “Well, now they're trying not to be our customer,” she says.

  “So we sue their asses,” K says.

  “It's not so simple. There's no promise as to how quickly this could get resolved. The launch is in six weeks,” Brittany says.

  “Well, let's work up an alternate mission plan,” K says. “If we can resolve it before then, we go to the ISS, if not, what else can we do?”

  “We can't send up six people in a Griffin for very long,” Greenwood says. “That's not a big space. You'd be lucky to last four days before the smell would be too much. Griffin is a ferry, not a hotel.”

  “What if we launch a Cargo Griffin?” Tim asks. “Dock two Griffins together, three people in each one. How long could we last?”

  “We don't have any other Griffins ready to go,” Greenwood replies.

  “We could buy an Antares/Cygnus launch and dock with that.

  “Wouldn't it be expensive to send that up?” Greenwood asks.

  “Without a destination, we can't take passengers to space. Doing this mission will hopefully get more people interested in going,” K says.

  “What if we cut back the crew to five, how long could five last in just the Griffin?” Brittany asks.

  “Who are we cutting?” Tim asks.

  “Cut Travis,” K says. “I can fly right seat, I designed the thing, I think I can be the flight engineer.”

  “Why not cut your seat?” Hammersmith asks.

  “Because Caroline will only go if I go,” K says. “And if she doesn't go, then you can say goodbye to our prospects of attracting passengers. So with five, how long can we last? Two weeks?”

  “There's something you guys are forgetting,” Tim Bowe says. “Griffins don't have toilets. We'd have to use bags for waste disposal. And there's a woman on board, so that's even more complicated. How many diapers you plan on taking?”

  “Shit,” K says. “Well, it's not pretty, but let's work up an alternate mission plan. We move forward as if we're going to the ISS while we pursue legal action. Get our lawyers on this B.”

  “I'm on it,” Hammersmith says.

  The next morning, Arnold Schwarzenegger lays on his back, legs in the air, in a bathtub being filled with plaster to make a mold of his body.

  “So with the cast, they'll be able to make your seat to your exact specifications,” Kingsley explains, standing over Arnold. “That way you should be evenly cushioned and it'll be pretty comfortable when we rack up the g-forces.”

  “Cool,” Arnold says as more plaster is poured over him.

  Caroline arrives at SpacEx headquarters the next morning, ready to begin flight training, having not seen Kingsley since their fight in the Las Cruces Spaceport. She brought along with her Richard Branson, Justin Timberlake, and Robert Downey Jr..

  “Look who I found,” Caroline says from behind Kingsley.

  “Sup K,” Timberlake says, shaking Kingsley's hand.

  “Justin is interested in flying on the next one, for a price,” Caroline says.

  “And I'm thinking about it. Gotta spend that Avengers money somehow,” RDJ says.

  “When do you need me to do a cameo for Iron Man 3?” K asks.

  “Ooh, uh, we wrapped on that a couple months ago,” RDJ says.

  “Shoot, oh well, I'll just have to drown my sorrows at the ISS that I won't get to be a movie star,” K says. “How did you manage to run into Justin Timberlake and Robert Downey Jr. in a day and a half?” K asks Caroline.

  “They were flying on SpaceShipTwo,” Caroline says.

  “Yeah, so I should get some kind of finder's fee,” Branson says, “if you think you can just hang out and poach my clients.”

  “Oh shut up Richard,” Caroline teases him playfully. “But really, we should have a partnership going, because people who fly SpaceShipTwo are probably pretty likely to want more of that.”

  “And so you guys all have zero-g experience, both in space and on the vomit comet, right?” K asks.

  “I'm thinking about buying my own vomit comet,” Justin says. “I could make some sweet music videos up in that thing.”

  “Hey now there's an idea, we do some music videos on Excalibur,” Kingsley says.

  “Excalibur?” everyone asks.

  “That's what I'm gonna call my space station,” K says. Everyone looks at him weird. “What? You guys don't sit around thinking of what you would name your space station? No? Okay, well Dick and Caroline, we need you to go get into one of these stylish ensembles you see Arnold wearing so we can mold your seats. JT and Bobby, if you've got your check books handy, you can go to Brittany's office and fork over twenty million. Otherwise, you're trespassing on private property.”

  “Don't call me Bobby,” RDJ says.

  That afternoon, the prospective astronauts, Richard, Caroline, Arnold, Justin, and Robert, are fitted for SpacEx space-suits. These are flight-suits to be worn on launch and landing, not for space walking. The blue and orange suits are pressurized, with a bubble helmet.

  “It's a bit snug in the...the crotchal area,” Robert says.

  Kingsley enters in a hurry. “Hey, you guys wanna see something cool?”

  “Is that what he says when he wants to get you in bed?” JT asks Caroline.

  “Come on, let's go, it'll only take a minute,” K says. The five wannabe astronauts, who all have been on sub-orbital flights, follow Kingsley toward the elevators in their flight suits, sans helmet.

  The elevator door opens and an intern holding a large remote control helicopter finds himself suddenly facing five famous people in space suits. His eyes widen. He steps to the side, giving the suited celebrities a wide berth.

  “Where we goin?” JT asks, ready to hit the floor button.

  “Already going to the roof,” K says. “Tim this is Sir Richard Branson, Caroline the Duchess of something that's not in Monaco, but she's from Monaco. And I imagine you know the Governator, that's Iron Man, and this is some boy band guy. Everyone, this is Tim the Intern.”

  “Hi Tim,” they all say.

  “Hey,” Tim says as calmly as possible as they ride the elevator to the roof. The exit on the rooftop and join a few dozen SpacEx employees at one end of the roof, looking toward the Hummingbird about a mile away, ready for a test flight. Tim the Intern gets to work with his helicopter. It's actually a quadracopter, having four separate fans, one at
each corner, providing a stable platform. Two other interns help Tim in attaching an HD camera to the underside of the quadracopter. With the camera attached, Tim fires up the electric chopper and flies it via remote control to fifty feet up over the roof and heads toward the pad. Another intern has a control for the camera, tests his ability to aim the camera, seeing the display on a screen that Tim also watches.

  An alarm blares across the green landscape, a loudspeaker announces, “One Minute. All personnel clear the area. One minutes to H-B-One-Dash-Seven.”

  “So what are we watching exactly?” RDJ asks.

  “You'll see,” K says. Tim and the other interns pilot the quadracopter and camera, flying it toward the Hummingbird launch pad, hovering around five hundred feet in the air.

  The single Arthur engine of the one-quarter scale Hummingbird I fires up, sending a loud roar across the mile to the rooftop. They see the jet of flames and the four legs lift off the ground before the sound reaches them. The Hummingbird takes to the air, lifting off slowly, ascending to one kilometer in altitude, or about 3250 feet.

  “Why's it slowing down?” JT asks.

  “Is it supposed to do that?” RDJ asks, stepping backward slowly.

  “It's supposed to do that,” Caroline says.

  The Hummingbird hovers almost completely still. A gust of wind picks up, blowing in everyone's faces.

  “Shit,” Tim says as the quadracopter is buffeted, he has to give a lot of input to keep it stable in the face of the sudden gust. The Hummingbird, balanced on a flame, begins to waver in the face of the wind, tilting back and forth as the computer tries to maintain control.

  “That's not gonna come crashing on us is it?” RDJ asks.

  “Relax, it's probably not going to crash,” K says.

  The Hummingbird begins its descent, heading back down to the pad. The sudden change in wind has taken it off course and it has to fight the wind to get back to the launch pad. It's angled into the wind, fighting its way upstream, and touches down on only two legs, reducing thrust and falling back on the other two legs.

  The SpacEx employees erupt in cheers. “That's how you do that,” Kingsley says. Just then, the Hummingbird explodes, sending bits of burning aluminum flying in all directions. The boom hits them in the chests a moment later.

  “Was it supposed to do that?” RDJ asks.

  “We're not flying on that right?” JT asks.

  Within a few hours the cause of the explosion was already determined. Kingsley was down in the Reusability Office for the postmortem.

  “We've only tested the engine gimballing for five degrees off center,” Josh Yerino explains to K. “Since at takeoff, we didn't expect the wind to come on so strong, the computer should have been able to maintain control with only two or three degrees of movement, so we put a cap on the auto-pilot of four degrees to prevent it from over-stressing the engine as the auto-pilot has been prone to over-correcting and then oscillating. We obviously don't want it to do a crazy over-correction and give the engine an input of like ten degrees and have it fly off crazy sideways. But as it approached the hover point, the wind suddenly picked up and the computer was struggling to fight the wind with its limited range of motion. So we made the decision to lift the cap on engine gimballing and it quickly regained control, ending the feedback loop that caused the attitude variation. It then fought back into the wind just fine, and made a perfect landing in the face of a strong wind. However, the telemetry shows that the computer commanded the engine to gimbal as much as eleven degrees off center, and that stressed the thrust structure unequally. We think the turbo-pump assembly become partially dislodged, while the nozzle was still firmly in place, so the rocket maintained control, however the turbo-pump was vibrating wildly and that caused leaks in both fuel and oxidizer lines which filled the internal structure of the Hummingbird, turning it into essentially a pipe bomb waiting for an ignition source, which came after the engine shut down. We're not sure what the ignition source was, but we're confident that the explosive event was caused by the excessive gimbaling which overstressed the turbo-pump assembly.”

  “So how do we fix it?” K asks.

  “We're looking into strengthening the thrust structure, however we think this problem is only going to manifest at this scale. The Eagle 9 already has a much beefier thrust structure than the Hummingbird did. So we think we should just go ahead and push forward with Hummingbird II and make sure we do enough static testing to measure the gimbal stresses.”

  “Alright,” K says. “Stay on top of it.”

  An hour later Kingsley tweeted the video from the quadracopter, adding Johnny Cash's “Ring of Fire” over the video, and of course omitting the explosive ending. He tweeted, “Quadracopter had a nice view of our 1 kilometer rocket hover.” Adding, “Plan on powered descent attempt on next Eagle 9 first stage. Don't tell the Governator he's a guinea pig.”

  At the end of the day, Kingsley went down to check on his passengers as they were put through a centrifuge test taking them up to six Gs. When he arrives in the centrifuge control room, he finds Arnold is in the machine and it's running at ten Gs.

  “What are you trying to kill him?” K asks as he sees the display.

  “More power!” Arnold shouts enthusiastically. The tech speeds up the centrifuge, hitting eleven Gs. Arnold roars like a grizzly bear.

  “He looks a lot younger,” K says. “You know, they could re-make Hercules right now, they'd just have to put a green screen behind him and do all the shots in there.”

  “Hercules?” the tech asks.

  “Wasn't he Hercules?”

  “Conan the Barbarian!” Arnold corrects K from inside the centrifuge.

  “That's my bad Conan,” K says. “Where are the others?”

  “They all left for the day about fifteen minutes ago,” the tech replies.

  “Really!? Where'd they go?”

  Kingsley continued to work in his office and in the simulator, training himself up to fly right seat on the upcoming mission until late that night, frequently checking his phone, but hearing nothing from Caroline. He headed home quite late for a dinner date with himself and a bottle of forty-year old scotch.

  Kingsley wakes up the next day, hungover, alone in his bed, after noon. He takes a shower and heads for his garage. He opens the door then looks over his Tezla cars, trying to decide which to take to work.

  “Kingsley?” A voice asks from behind him. K turns around to find a young blonde woman standing just outside his garage door.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I don't know, can you?” she asks seductively as she walks towards him.

  “Okay, so this isn't weird,” K says, pressing the garage door button before she can enter. The woman dives under the closing door and into the garage. “Interesting.”

  “I was sorry to hear about your breakup.”

  “Breakup?” K asks as the woman reaches him. She stands too close for comfort and K backs away slowly.

  “Okay, well I'm gonna go to work. If you want to come back later...don't, because I have no idea who you are. Or bring a friend. Those are your options,” K says as he gets in his car. She tries to get in the passenger side of his Tezla R. “It's locked. Could you just leave please, I don't want to have to call the cops.” She bends down, looking at him through the low window of the R with pouty lips and giving him a look down her shirt.

  K gets out his phone, “I'm calling the cops.” He looks through his phone, finding hundreds of tweets, missed calls, messages. “What the hell?” He discovers the source of all of this nonsense. TMZ was reporting that Caroline, the Duchess of Monaco and Kingsley Pretorius had split, as apparently she went home with Justin Timberlake last night, and was seen with him at a coffee shop this morning.

  “God damn TMZ,” K says. “She's not the Duchess of Monaco. She's the Duchess of something French.” K finds the pictures of Caroline and Justin Timberlake over coffee this morning. He looks closely, blowing up the picture, looking at every deta
il of her face, the smile. What happened? K runs his hand over his stubbly face, thinking. He lowers the passenger window. The woman pokes her head inside.

  “So, you saw this on TMZ and immediately stalked me for the chance to become Mrs. Pretorius, is that what's going on?” K asks.

  “Who said anything about marriage?” She asks.

  “So you just want me so bad because of how cool I am, you're not a golddigger?”

  “That's right.”

  “Alright, then answer me this,” K says, “E equals M-C squared, what's that mean?”

  “Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. It's the simplified version of Einstein's equation that shows the relationship of matter and energy, which comes directly from his theory of general relativity.”

  “That was an easy one,” K says. “What was the first man-made object to break the speed of sound?”

  “I didn't come here for a pop quiz,” she says.

  “As hot as you are, I've got plenty of hot women that want me, so I demand a little bit more, say like a working brain. And if you don't realize, the fact that you stalked me is a bit indicative of the opposite of that, so unless you want me to call the cops-”

  “The whip,” she says seductively. “The crack of the whip is created by a sonic boom. You don't have any whips here do you?”

  Gulp. “One more question,” K says, thinking. “How many horsepower are in a gallon of gasoline?”

  “Trick question,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Power is an expression of energy per unit of time. If you want to know how much energy is in a gallon of gasoline, it's about 34 kilo-Watt-hours-per-gallon, last I checked anyway.”