Moon For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  “How many gays are in a metric tonne?” K asks.

  “They do seem to be in good shape, let's say fifteen,” Josh says.

  “Assuming the dry mass to be eight metric tonnes, no food provisions or life-support or anything, a heavy could send 172.5 gays to Mars. How many gays are there?”

  “In the world?”

  “U.S.”

  “I don't know, maybe five million,” Josh says.

  “Then it would only take 29 thousand launches.”

  “How much would that cost? Call it 150 million a launch,” Josh says.

  “Four-point-three trillion dollars,” K replies immediately.

  “No but really, how do you do math that fast?”

  “Simple. What's 29 times 15?”

  “I don't know,” Josh replies. K scoffs at his lack of effort.

  “What's 29 times 10?” K asks.

  “290,” Josh says.

  “What's 29 times 5?” K asks. Then adds, impatiently, “what's half of 290?”

  “145,” Josh says.

  “Add them together...”

  “435.”

  “Exactly. Four-point-three trillion. I rounded down because I rounded up to 29 to begin with,” K is satisfied with his answer, but Josh stares at him like he's speaking a foreign language. “150 million times 29,000. 15 times 29, and then add ten zeroes.”

  “Right,” Josh says. “They may not go for 4.3 trillion.”

  “This is why we need reusability.”

  “Right. This is why we need reusability.”

  “You think 29,000 launches is an absurd number?” K asks.

  “That's the least absurd part of this whole discussion.”

  “What's absurd is that we aren't figuring in cost savings on the massive scale of production,” K replies. “With reusability, and cost savings from the scale, I'd say we could get it down to 15 million a launch. That's only be 430 billion.”

  “That's way more reasonable,” Josh agrees.

  “So, tell Hammersmith,” K says, looking around and spotting her. “Britt! Come over here!”

  “Quit shouting, the clock's at five minutes,” Brittany says as she walks towards K. “Now, with your inside voice.”

  “I have a proposal for the Republican candidates.”

  “What is it?

  “I want you to draft a proposal,” K says, “tell them we can send all the gays to Mars for only 430 billion.”

  “Don't you have a rocket to crash,” Brittany replies.

  “Which reminds me,” Josh interrupts. “Don't do it.”

  “I'm landing this thing.”

  “So do that and quit doing gay math,” Brittany adds.

  “You guys are no fun,” K replies and focuses back on his console. Within minutes, the last cargo Griffin to be launched in that calendar year, the last chance Kingsley would have to prove that the first stage of a rocket could actually turn around and come back to a powered landing at its launch site, was blasting skyward, poised to either make Kingsley look like a genius or a fool.

  Rarely do events break down into clear binary results, rather, they occupy a gray-scale in the middle. But in this case, there was either going to be a rocket landed safely, cooling down in the Florida Sun, or there wouldn't. One of those results keeps this whole enterprise going and the pursuit of reusable rockets as a way of drastically decreasing the cost to get to orbit and thus shifting the paradigm of space travel would push forward. In that future, the number of people who get to travel to space would increase tremendously. We would have dozens of space telescopes, probes for every body in the solar system, and our understanding of our solar neighborhood would advance as much in the next twenty years as it had in all of recorded history. Kingsley would retire on Mars, living in a hab module attached to a greenhouse and surrounded by more hab modules arriving each day, in fast growing Martian neighborhood, with perhaps a dome made of some yet-to-be-invented material keeping in their precious atmosphere without blocking out the Sun.

  There is of course the other result. A rocket crash, perhaps splashing into the sea or slamming into the Earth, the end result of which is Kingsley either losing control of SpacEx or staying on but losing the reusability program entirely. Rockets would continue to cost tens of millions of dollars and be thrown away. We'll stay in this paradigm, the one in which more people visit the summit of Mt. Everest every year than have been to space in all of history. We'd get one new space telescope every couple of decades, the occasional space probe, and promises of missions to Mars, but always a decade or more away.

  No pressure at all, Kingsley.

  The joystick and throttle are covered in sweat by the time stage separation occurs. Kingsley flips the rocket around under the power of the control jets while the second stage flies away. He gives the nearly empty rocket a firm forward thrust from the reaction jets, a move which should press the liquid propellants to the bottoms of their tanks. This move along with the improvements in the internal structure of the tanks, with capillary like veins built into the inside walls to channel the liquids to the intakes, should enable the engine to restart rather than letting the fuel simply slosh around in weightlessness. Kingsley pushes the throttle up and presses the button under his thumb which injects the TEA-TEB igniter into the combustion chamber. The bright green flow precedes a visible ignition in the long-range tracking camera. Kingsley doesn't pay attention to any camera feed however, focusing all his attention on a trajectory screen which shows the projected trajectory of the rocket at that exact moment. The downrange trajectory is halted and the line heads back towards land. Kingsley turns the rocket slightly south to correct a slight horizontal anomaly. The trajectory line proceeds beyond the landing pad, further in land, and should retreat back toward the landing pad during re-entry as drag slows the rocket.

  Kingsley flips the rocket back around, facing the engines into the direction of travel, preparing to do the final approach burn. Kingsley relights the engine with another injection of TEA-TEB. The rocket descends, perched on its single flame, slowing and heading right toward the landing pad.

  “Fuel warning,” Josh says, seated next to Kingsley.

  “I see it,” K says. The rocket descends towards the landing pad vertically, dropping below 1km at a vertical speed of only 50 m/s.

  “You're going too slow, you're gonna have too much gravity loss,” Josh says.

  “I've got it,” K says insistently. The rocket drops below 500 meters at a speed of 29 m/s. At that speed, it would take more than 17 seconds for the rocket to reach the ground. But it wouldn't be going that fast the whole way as Kingsley will want to get the speed down to almost zero at landing, thus the time to landing was somewhere closer to 30 seconds.

  “22 seconds of fuel at this rate,” Josh warns. K realizes that he has slowed down too early in the final approach. He pulls back on the throttle, letting the rocket fall faster and burning less fuel. He'll have to compensate by burning hard closer to the ground. “200, down 41,” Josh says, indicating the altitude is 200 meters and the descent rate is 41 meters per second. Kingsley has these numbers in his display, but his eyes are fixated on the center of the screen, at the view of the landing pad out of the bottom of the rocket, with green cross-hairs overlayed on the center of the pad to indicate the rocket's location and direction of travel along each axis.

  Kingsley pushes the throttle forward, burning more fuel and slowing the rocket. At 150 meters the rocket is falling at 34 m/s. 1.6 seconds later, it's at 100 meters and falling at 27 m/s. 2.2 seconds later, it's at 50 meters and falling at 18 m/s. At 20 meters and 10 m/s, the engine sputters and dies. The Eagle 9 first stage free-falls the remaining 20 meters, while Kingsley tries desperately to slow the descent by applying forward thrust with the reaction jets, but they offer a fraction of the thrust of the Arthur engine and do little to slow the rocket. After a free-fall off about two seconds, the rocket hits the ground squarely on its deployed landing legs at a speed
of 33 m/s, or about 73 mph. The landing legs try to cushion the blow, driving the hydraulic pistons up into their recessed tubes. The nine Arthur engines do much of the work of stopping the rocket, turning that excess of kinetic energy into warped metal.

  The rocket remains vertical, but the engine nozzles are compressed into the asphalt and the rocket leans to one side. The engines are destroyed, the thrust structure damaged, the empty kerosene tank ruptured, the landing legs bent. This Eagle 9 would never fly again.

  Josh doesn't want to say I told you so, not if he wants to keep his job. Kingsley sits back in his chair, stunned, and looks to the camera feed for the first time, seeing the results of the botched landing. Josh doesn't need to tell Kingsley that this crash was his fault.

  Chapter 19

  Two Months Later

  “You're not coming to the launch?” Kingsley asks Caroline from the doorway. Caroline is standing on a step-ladder, carefully painting elegant lines of white over a fresh coat of a soft pastel-yellow.

  “I told you,” Caroline says without turning, unphased, continuing to paint with the fine-tipped brush, “that I wouldn't stand by and watch you die doing something stupid.”

  “Going to space and racing powerboats are different,” Kingsley says.

  “I didn't say they were the same.”

  “But you said it's stupid,” K replies.

  “I think going on one last supposed adventure, trying to remain young forever, assuming that once she arrives, your life will be over, that's stupid. It's childish. Fitting I suppose.”

  “Why fitting?” K asks her back-side as she continues putting down paint in smooth arcs.

  “Boy-Kingsley was so obsessed with seriousness, wanted so much to be an adult, that you now yearn for a boyhood.”

  “That's not true,” Kingsley replies. “And I'd appreciate if you stopped psychoanalyzing me like I'm a god damn tragic figure. The only chance I've got to keep this company alive is to go up there myself, make sure Justin Bieber and that monkey, and Clooney, and Sergei Kuznetzov all work together and they actually make this movie. As weird as it sounds, this space company will fail if I don't go and produce a movie.”

  “Good luck with that,” Caroline says distantly. “And the porn, good luck with the porn too.”

  “Come on, zero-G Bieber porn? That's gotta be a hit. If that doesn't get people interested in space, I don't know what will.”

  “The Kingsley I fell in love with had a saying,” Caroline pauses. “Great minds are captivated by ideas. Average minds keep up with current events. Small minds obsess about celebrities.”

  “I didn't come up with that, that's an Eleanor Roosevelt quote.”

  “There you go again, discussing people instead of ideas.”

  “What are you saying?” K asks.

  “That you used to sell space on its merits. We are star-stuff that has learned where it came from. We are a way for the universe to know itself. Only a hundred years ago, the thought of floating in a space station above the sky would have been totally incomprehensible to everyone, and now you can do it. You can live the impossible,” Caroline says, like she's narrating a trailer for an IMAX film about space. “But now you're focusing on Bieber, celebrities.”

  “Well, when you're trying to sell something to people with small minds, you gotta speak their language.”

  “Maybe that's your problem, you're trying to sell to the wrong people,” Caroline muses.

  “You're wrong about that,” K says.

  “You think small minds care about space?”

  “Not that,” K replies. “A hundred years ago, most people had no idea of space stations or orbit. But it wouldn't have been totally incomprehensible to everyone. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation is what we use to determine the delta-v of a rocket or a rocket stage. It's the single most important equation in all of rocketry and space travel: exhaust velocity times the natural log of the mass fraction tells you the change in velocity. This equation and the consequences of it are what dictate how we go to space, how rockets are designed, why we have multiple stages, why we had a lunar lander. And this equation that underlies all of space travel was formulated in 1897 by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. In 1903 he published 'The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices' in which, using his own rocket equation that he invented, he showed that space travel was possible, calculated the speed that would be required to reach orbit, and went on to point out that a liquid fueled multi-stage rocket burning hydrogen and oxygen could achieve this.

  Thus I would have to say that in 1903, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky could envision what it might look like if you were to build such a rocket and orbit the Earth. He understood that you would be in weightlessness. He wrote about tethered space walks in pressure suits, as well as space stations. He came to believe that humans would colonize the Milky Way. There is a picture of him onboard the Zvezda module of the International Space Station. If Konstantin Tsiolkovsky were to be awoken today and shown a picture of the ISS, he would immediately grasp what he was looking at. However, twerking would totally blow his mind.”

  Caroline comes down the step ladder, leaving behind the name “Marie Juliette,” in white paint.

  “You settled on the name?” K asks.

  “Marie Juliette Louvet was my great great grandmother. She was a poor girl who met a prince and he swept her off her feet, but they were forbidden from marrying because she was lower class. She had his child and then he left her, unmarried and poor.”

  “That was like a Jane Eyre novel in a sentence.”

  “Jane Eyre is a novel, not an author,” Caroline replies as she closes a paint can.

  “What am I thinking of?”

  “I don't know, maybe Jane Austen?”

  “That's it. So why name her after the unmarried baby-momma?”

  “Because it's a beautiful name,” Caroline says quietly, sitting on the step ladder and looking up at the name on the wall. “Everybody tries to use a name from further up the family tree. They take all the princesses and the dukes, the ones who won great battles or were known for their beauty, but they neglect the likes of Marie Juliette because she was lower class and never married into the family. Her mother was a laundress. She married and divorced, became a single-mother of two and had to take up cabaret to pay her bills. Imagine the strength it must take to divorce a man at that time. Cabaret singer is probably 1897 speak for stripper, if not prostitute. But then she fell in love with Prince Louis the Second. Louis's father forbade him from marrying her because of her class. They had a child out of wedlock, Charlotte. But rather than defy his father and marry his true love, he kept her in French Algeria until his father transferred his military unit away. It's not exactly Romeo and Juliette. Louis being the only child, and Charlotte being his only child, this created a succession crisis, and the throne was going to transfer to his cousin, a German duke named Wilhelm Karl, and we Monacans couldn't have that. So Louis had the law changed so that his supposedly illegitimate daughter could be included in the line of succession. She married a Duke, and her son Rainier took the throne, then he married Grace Kelly. ”

  “So you're part African?” K asks.

  “You're focusing on exactly the wrong things here,” Caroline replies. “She was a beautiful woman that was ignored and kept a secret because she was lower class. Her mother was a laundress, she was a stripper, but her daughter became a princess, and her grandson ruled Monaco.”

  “So you're saying that rigid class structures can sometimes be sort of overcome but only if you're really really good looking?”

  “I'm saying that I want people to remember that lady, living alone in Constantine, Algeria, not allowed to become a princess herself, not allowed into Monaco, hidden away.”

  “That's funny,” K says.

  “What's funny?” Caroline asks defensively.

  “I was just talking about Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and then you mention Constantine, Algeria. There's a lesson. If you prop
up a major religion, your name will be remembered for-fucking ever.”

  “So you want to name a son Constantine?”

  “Hell no,” K replies. “Sagan Tsiolkovsky Pretorius.”

  “How did he know there would be a vacuum in space?” Caroline asks.

  “Who?”

  “Konstantin. In 1897,” Caroline replies. “I just realized. Konstantin Russian-name-”

  “Tsiolkovsky,” K adds.

  “Yeah, Konstantin in 1897 came up with that rocket thing, while Marie Juliette met Prince Louis in Constantine, Algeria in 1897. Quite the coincidence that we would both bring up things about Constantines in 1897,” Caroline muses. “Somebody should write a novel about that. Constantine, 1897.”

  “That would make for a terrible novel,” K replies.

  “A stripper meets a prince, they're forbidden from marrying by his father, they hide away in French Algeria and have that one moment in time, long enough to have a baby before his father transfers him away. Louis went on to distinguish himself in the first world war. He was quite a warrior they say.”

  “Yeah, and that class stuff and dukes and laundresses are interesting to some people, and then you mash it together with a story about a Russian guy who's mostly deaf, lives in his own little world, thinking about rockets and envisioning space travel before there were even airplanes.”

  “He was deaf?”

  “Partially,” K says, running his hands along the freshly painted railing of the crib just beneath the name on the wall.

  “He sounds like you,” Caroline says.

  “Yeah, I guess,” K agrees.

  “Deaf, living in his own world, thinking about rockets. Sounds familiar. How did he know there was a vacuum? When did people figure out there was empty space up there?”

  “Johannes Kepler came up with the laws of planetary motion, basically figured out what orbits were, in 1605. Orbits only make sense if there is no drag, no air resistance, otherwise the planets and the moons would slow down and fall from the heavens. So maybe you could say Kepler figured it out. It was widely known that as you go up in altitude you lose air pressure, but we didn't yet know how high the sky actually went. The church maintained that there was no such thing as a vacuum, god is everywhere, so you can't have nothingness. That was until Blaise Pascal came along and used mercury and tubes and math and proved that the vacuum did indeed exist in 1647. The metric unit of pressure is named for him. He showed that air pressure is a function of the weight of the atmosphere above you. Since air pressure isn't infinite, then the atmosphere can't go on forever. Neville Maskelyne proved that altitude could predict pressure, that was in 1774. The first humans went up in hot air balloons in 1783. So I think it's fair to say that by 1800, they knew there was a vacuum in space, and had a good idea of how high you had to be to get above enough of it to be basically free from drag. ”