Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  The two crewmen looked at Yi in disbelief. He was standing naked in front of the screen, the blanket previously covering his manhood lying on the floor.

  His soul had been touched. He had found his calling in life.

  Over the next few weeks, he quit his own company, sold his shares, gave most of his belongings to charity, and took a plane to the USA, determined to devote himself to helping the mission to Saturn.

  9 | Starship

  Three months later, October 2024, 961 days before launch

  SPACEX PLANT, PORT OF LOS ANGELES

  As James waited in the small rental car for security clearance at the gateway of his former workplace, he tried again to focus on the cranes of all sizes, shapes, and colors muscling around the skyline of the largest port in the country: incessantly packing, stacking, and offloading a fourth of all cargo that entered and left America. The mission has about $600 million too much … we should have capped the crowd funding—nonsense. Nobody could have anticipated this level of interest. Besides, who doesn’t want extra money apart from a Jeff Bezos? We don’t. Sometimes less is more. The Kickstarter campaign had been fabulously successful, which had the side-effect of accelerating everything beyond everyone’s expectations—certainly his. This was meant to be gradual—well, now it’s not. Man up. And we said no whining on Tuesdays. He strove once more to distract his exhausted, feverish mind by paying attention to the port hubbub: clangs of metal against metal, gulls’ choirs and soloists, the humming of outsized machinery. It seems everyone everywhere in the world has a reaction. The one thing this mission doesn’t elicit is indifference. The fiery support and raging opposition had been unrelenting. He was grateful to very many, but also hurt and disturbed by the rabid attacks, sometimes from astronauts from his own class. We need to increase the team size. Urgently—you must do better than that. If everything is urgent, nothing is. Pick another word. Something more hyperbolic—we need to increase the team size. Desperately. He grabbed and bit into the half-eaten muffin, but it tasted pasty and ashy. Even his taste buds seemed to have unionized against the lack of sleep. His stomach now had a permanent hollow feeling.

  James looked up to meet the gaze of the black bushy-mustachioed security guard on the other side of the car window. He seemed to have been knocking for a while. The gate was open.

  Not nearly the right state of mind to meet with Elon.

  SpaceX still felt like a start-up to James. There were few dividers inside the hangar, all of them made of glass. No cubicles, no offices. It was designed to force a continuous interaction between the scientists and engineers, and the technicians manufacturing and assembling the largest heavy-lift space vehicle in history. It consisted of two parts: the Super Heavy rocket at the bottom and the Starship spaceship on top.4 This is where the future of humanity is being built. In my lowly opinion anyway.

  A museum was suspended from the roof. The second rocket ever to go to space, return, and self-land—on an autonomous drone deck barge in the Atlantic Ocean in April 2016—was right above James. Its paintwork partially burned by the extreme heat it encountered upon Earth’s re-entry. Hanging next to it was the first private capsule that delivered supplies to the International Space Station in 2012. This made SpaceX the fourth entity in history that sent and brought back a capsule into orbit after Russia, USA, and China.

  There was intense movement. Hundreds of people scattered across the extensive floor area—automated forklifts cutting through invisible lanes, large industrial robots beyond security fences bending metal, welding joints, coating surfaces. Everything and everyone working on the colossus. SpaceX had always been vertically integrated. Raw metal and carbon fiber went in at one end of the factory, rockets and spaceships came out the other.

  The Super Heavy rocket and Starship spaceship were so large they could only be transported by barge through the Panama Canal to SpaceX’s launchpads in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Boca Chica, Texas. That was the practical reason for setting up the factory in the Port of Los Angeles in a Navy destroyers’ shipyard from World War II.

  “Jimmy! The Jimmy Egger?” Lana, the redhead engineer extraordinaire, kissed and hugged her friend, former workmate, and one-time lover. “You were always a celebrity here, an engineer astronaut among mere mortals. But now … now you’re John Lennon! Come on, they’re waiting for us at the assembly line.”

  An all too well-known voice approached Lana and James from behind. “I hope you are aware there’s nowhere to land on Saturn.” Elon Musk, the legendary business maverick, was as tall as James, but broader.

  After a few minutes of light talk, they walked by a line-up of Raptor engines. “From here onward,” Elon pointed to an imaginary line on the ground, “everything becomes Gulliverian.” The people working on the area recognized James and came over to shake his hand. He looked at the engine standing by his side. A thirteen-foot-tall, bell-shaped metal nozzle, crowned by a combustion chamber wreathed in plumbing whose complexity and lightness was only possible through 3D printing. For the first two minutes after launch, the few-dozen Raptors of the Super Heavy rocket produce enough power to satisfy the electricity demand of the entire United States during that time.

  “Obviously I’ve thought about this mission a lot.” Elon had publicly supported the project but James was expecting candid feedback from the quintessential risk-taker, especially on the tight schedule. “Are you prepared to die?” he asked after a long pause. Elon surely didn’t beat around the bush.

  “No, I’m not … but I feel it’s my destiny to go to Saturn and death is a …” James searched for the right word.

  “Likely.”

  “… possible consequence of that decision,” James concluded.

  “If you need to keep one idea from this conversation, let it be this: I am certain the spaceship will make it to Saturn … but it could be a one-way ticket for the crew. As you move to implementation and launch, keep thinking long and hard about your chances of success. Don’t communicate them to anyone, but constantly calibrate. And if you get to a crossroad where the odds begin to stack against success, you owe it to the crew and—listen carefully—all of us on Earth to abort. It will come at a great personal loss, but you will preserve what a lot of people, including all of us at SpaceX, are doing. Because unbeknownst to most, this mission is a bet we are all making. If it goes even partially well, it will be a quantum leap in space exploration. But if it fails catastrophically, we could kill manned space exploration for decades.”

  The comment had no bias and James already knew all this, and yet he had a hard time seeing the glass half full. I am an incurable optimist. What’s going on with me?

  They came to the berthed Super Heavy rocket. No wonder it could carry three times more payload than the second-biggest rocket on Earth, SpaceX’s own Falcon Heavy. The thing was gargantuan: twenty stories in height by three stories in diameter. James worked on the design and knew the specs by heart, but was still amazed by the sheer size. And this is just the rocket. The Starship spaceship was ahead.

  They arrived in front of it—sixteen stories, half of them used by the engines and propellant tanks. The remaining, the pressurized area for crew and cargo, was greater than the cabin of the Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger airplane.

  Elon patted the fuselage. “Hard to believe it’s already been two years.” Two summers since one of her twins carrying equipment had landed on Mars. “And still we missed this year’s window because of that public-private partnership. This automatically delays the first crewed mission to late 2029, best of cases.” Due to the alignment of Earth and Mars, the optimal launch window happens once every twenty-six months. “The good news is that your mission is running solo on the race to set foot on another celestial body … the bad news is there’s no sharing of fixed costs for the refueling infrastructure in orbit. Your mission will need to foot the whole bill. Better get creative on the financing.” He sounded apologetic even though SpaceX would operate for the mission at cost.

&nbs
p; James looked at the immaculate liquid silver hue, the soft round angles, the two grand observation windows of the Starship. The engineering marvel looked like the offspring of an inspired jam session between Elon Musk, Jony Ive, and Peter Pan.

  “It’s utterly gorgeous,” James said.

  “You’ll live here for six years. You’d better like it.”

  * * *

  4 The rocket’s function was to hoist the spaceship out of Earth’s atmosphere. The vehicle was a visionary industry checkmate and was quickly becoming the company’s workhorse. In the economically eye-watering trade of delivering stuff to orbit, the name of the game used to be reliability above all else—hence the eye-watering prices. SpaceX conquered reliability and turned it into cost-per-pound. This wasn’t simply good business, it was essential to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars—after all, the company was founded with the goal of making our species multi-planetary.

  The cornerstone for low cost was reusability, considered science fiction among industry insiders until the very day it happened: before the company’s 2015 coup d’état, each launch was equivalent to flying a commercial airplane a single time and then crashing it on landing. Furthermore, on the low-cost road the vehicle was a jack of all trades: not just a rocket for launching satellites into orbit, but a spaceship capable of transporting and landing a payload on Mars—which it had already done with cargo in 2022, in preparation for a human landing by the end of the decade. Not just that, but preparations were ongoing for point-to-point intercontinental passenger transport on Earth on a similar time frame. And not just that, but maybe the spaceship for a manned mission to Saturn. James knew the multi-purpose vehicle was already doing miracles for the economics of space travel, and within a decade it should effectively become the first space airline in history. Indeed. Before this vehicle, the mission to Saturn was financially inconceivable and technically impossible.

  10 | Space Agencies

  Four months later, February 2025, 854 days before launch

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The commercial airplane flew above the Potomac River, approaching Ronald Reagan National Airport. James’ window was filled with the long strip of green between the Washington Monument obelisk in the foreground and the Capitol in the distance. At both sides of the park the bureaucratic machine of the most powerful nation on Earth resided in the many buildings, including NASA.

  James stared at the sleeves of his old gray suit. Yep, definitely missing an inch. If I’m being kind. He avoided the sight of the trousers and concentrated instead on the passing streets. Even the schoolchildren looked overdressed. Way to go, Jimmy. Why bother buying yourself a new suit, really? This’ll only be the most important meeting you’ve ever had. The heating inside the limousine was blasting in his face but he had decided this was his atonement for being so sartorially rash and stupid.

  The black car stopped in front of NASA’s nondescript headquarters. Less glitzy than I remember. James exited the vehicle, followed by Helen, the mission’s head of communications, and Arne, its chief technical officer.

  The room was packed with about twenty people sitting around a long oval table, plus a similar amount either standing, or subtly leaning against the walls. An hour into the meeting, James felt it was increasingly stifling and unnatural, at times almost like an interrogation.

  The introductions were brief, so he only knew the people seated at the table by their prominent desk nametags. Both NASA Administrator and Deputy Administrator, members from the Advisory Council, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, and the directors from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Johnson Space Center in Houston. These were scientists, engineers, former astronauts, or a combination of them. Some he knew personally, but there were also high-ranking people from the Air Force, Pentagon, and Congress. To James’ right and left sat Helen and Arne.

  “As I said, it’s the Shackleton crew managing every aspect of the mission preparation. We decide what’s essential, what’s important, and what’s expendable,” answered James. One of the fan groups baptized both mission and spaceship with the legendary polar explorer’s name, and it had stuck like cement.

  “You are thirty months away from your self-imposed launch, but there are a number of mission-critical systems that haven’t progressed beyond sketches,” said a NASA official.

  “With all due respect, I think we have been stuck in euphemisms. You are hinting specifically about artificial gravity, and the insinuation is that the mission is destined to fail. I propose we talk on those terms,” said James, while striving for eye contact or telepathy with a restless Arne. We call you Pit Bull, but deep down I know there’s a poodle in there. Keep cool.

  Artificial gravity was on everyone’s mind for a reason. It had never been tried before. Floating in space was fun, but accumulating evidence showed the harmful effects of weightlessness over long periods of time. Muscle atrophy could be greatly minimized by exercise, with bone loss up to a point, but the weakening of the immune system and eyesight deterioration could not. This mission would stretch Valery Polyakov’s record of 438 consecutive days in space to 2,300, so the elephant in the room was not whether but what would be the artificial gravity solution for Shackleton.

  Artificial gravity was conceptually straightforward. Spin a cylinder, and just like clothes in a washing machine, the centrifugal force would push everything against the edge. Increased spin increased the simulated gravity.5

  “Fair enough,” said the NASA official. “Then how are you tackling artificial gravity?”

  “Shackleton’s radius is less than thirty feet, which means there is no way of avoiding low tangential velocity coupled with high angular velocity … it’s a complicated way of saying that it only works for humans in a horizontal position. Regardless of the technical solution, it will need to be for sleeping hours only. That means intermittent.” James saw a few heads raise, which betrayed them as the engineers. There were few things space system engineers abhorred more than moving parts, one of them being mechanical starts and stops. Both created stresses and material fatigue, and what James just mentioned probably included both. “Two possible solutions are being studied: a wheel that rotates the sleeping quarters or spinning the entire ship.”

  One of the engineers raised his hand. “You’re a big boy. No need to put up your hand to go to the toilet,” said Arne. James’ stomach contracted.

  “How do you know that partial gravity during nighttime won’t have side-effects on the human body? Maybe the cure could prove worse than the disease,” said the engineer, politely ignoring Arne’s remarks.

  James cut Arne off before he answered. “The Japanese have done extensive microgravity research with mice on board the International Space Station, and by now there’s solid evidence that one third of a day inside a centrifuge cancels out the effects of weightlessness. For mice. We still have a few years to confirm that this translates to humans.”

  Another engineer said, “A gravity wheel would modify the ship, changing its capabilities. That changes the mass. And that changes the structural loads and stresses, and the possible failures. And the interactions between materials and pieces. The prudent thing to do would be to spend a few years re-developing, doing new simulations and tests. Afterward, draft new rules and procedures—”

  Arne hit back, “I see you’re all about compromises. You could have been a fine politician. Instead, you made it into a half-baked engineer.” Arne the hope slayer, the gravedigger, thought James. “Engineering is the art of making the impossible possible. But we don’t even need to go that far: the mission is using a vehicle that SpaceX began designing in 2012 and which has already landed on Mars! NASA in the 60s went from having a napkin drawing of Marvin the Martian’s flying saucer to a man on the Moon in eight years. You, on the other hand …” he looked around, enlarging his sample to just about everyone in the room, “… seem fixated on making the possible seem impossible. Acknowledging that our generation has become lesser people.” James glanced at Helen
in despair. She seemed ashamed of having been born. Salvation won’t come from that corner.

  “What I was about to say before you interrupted me,” said the engineer, “is that any space vessel is, by virtue of being surrounded by a vacuum and subject to a brutal temperature range, a house of cards. One failed rivet in a spaceship made of millions of parts may be enough to produce a catastrophic failure … as with most fields of human endeavor, the KISS principle almost inevitably applies.”

  Keep It Simple, Stupid. James was about to apologize to smooth things out when the NASA Administrator stood up.

  “James, Helen—Arne … as a former astronaut and as a human being, I am enthralled by the concept and its boldness. I really wish the mission the very best …” James’ soul sank with the presentation of the shit sandwich, “… but as NASA’s representative, I am officially communicating to you that we cannot and will not finance or collaborate with the mission … we also cannot endorse it.”

  James played his ace. “Sir, doesn’t this stance put NASA in an awkward position, considering that both the European Space Agency and Japan will put significant technical and financial resources behind the mission?”

  “Jimmy, the three agencies had a conversation this morning. None of us can back your mission anymore. There are too many uncertainties, too many risks, and frankly quite vocal opposition. We are spending taxpayer dollars. There are too many eyes watching.”