Oceanworlds

  At least his father is now patently interested. Billy runs toward an elderly woman on a mobility scooter.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. Can you tell me where you saw her?” Billy asks urgently.

  “Saw …?” she answers.

  “Dame Belinda Egger,” Billy says incredulously, as if the lady had forgotten her own name.

  “Of course, I’m sorry. Got confused—anyway, yes, just follow the crowds.”

  “It’s definitely her.”

  “Shh! Emily, don’t,” the man whispers to the woman, “let’s leave them alone, okay? Not here, not now.”

  Belinda and her family are strolling some thirty yards in front of the couple.

  “I’m a doctor, darling, and she’s Belinda Egger. Belinda Egger, get it?” the woman says in an intentionally high pitch for Belinda to overhear. “Six people have received two Nobel Prizes in the history of, like, the Universe. And of those, only three have received two in different sciences: Marie Curie, Sophia Jong, and Belinda Egger. I say we women are kicking some ass, don’t you?”

  “I’m a nurse, sugar. Chemistry prize in 2038 and Medicine eleven years later. But I really don’t think it’s cool to—”

  The woman was already striding uphill toward Belinda.

  As they near the Shackleton Memorial, Belinda puts on dark glasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Arm in arm with Emma, she sees her three grandchildren dart ahead and coalesce into the crowd.

  They pass an Eagle Scout addressing his twenty-three-strong troop, “—so that’s the thing: no one will ever know which one it is. Remember how when Yi’s mom died, he inherited her wooden carved Buddha? We know he took both on board Shack and we also know, from Sophia’s memoir, that Jimmy was wearing one as a pendant a few days before the accident. And then as they were leaving the Saturn system she found one in the cargo bay—which by the way I saw two years ago in the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum during the 37th World Scout Jamboree. A-maaay-zing, as in karaborrah-karaborrah-sis-boom-bah!—so, its twin is either on Titan’s surface or inside Saturn—”

  The memorial had been unveiled on the fifth-year anniversary of the mission’s return to Earth: a single piece of white Carrara marble chiseled into three human-sized deities—Saturn, one of his Titan brothers, and his son Jupiter—supporting a twenty-foot-tall Shackleton. Magnificent and a tad over the top, Belinda thinks. It looks like what would result from commissioning the Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima photograph from an ancient Roman sculptor. And interred right under its pedestal are a few tons of Shackleton’s remains that had washed onto beaches far around the Pacific.

  Belinda and Emma make their way between pilgrims representing most continents to a spot overlooking the Potomac River and Washington, D.C.

  “Right there in that boxy white building, Grandma?”

  “Not the most flattering description for the place where Lincoln’s buried and Dr. King delivered the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech,” says Emma.

  “Yes, Oliver. On its steps,” Belinda answers.

  “And where Nana fell in love with Grandpa,” Poppy, her youngest granddaughter, declares. “And where did he fall in love with you, Nana?” she follows, already anticipating and savoring the answer.

  “If we were to believe what he told anyone who cared to ask, well, that happened the moment he saw me—a few hours before I did, anyway,” says Belinda.

  “I believe that, Nana,” Poppy says with a reverence that could only come from exhaustive repetition.

  While her family basks under a balmy Sun revisiting well-trodden conversations, Belinda sneaks out and dodges the scattered bouquets, smiling at a child resting a vase of flowers on the ground.

  Was it worth it? Belinda rests her ear against the cold, stone pedestal. She feels a far away reverberation coming from inside but, as with every other time, it comes without answer. Was it worth it? Anyone would agree the world is a better place because of it. The sacrifice of a precious few for the very many. “It was in the destiny of our species,” some have even said. And perhaps one day I will accept that too—you are and always will be my prince, the one and only man I ever truly loved.

  Trying to restrain the tears, she follows with her right index finger, from memory, the contours of the engraved letters. It says,

  THE REASONABLE MAN ADAPTS HIMSELF TO THE WORLD; THE UNREASONABLE ONE PERSISTS IN TRYING TO ADAPT THE WORLD TO HIMSELF. THEREFORE ALL PROGRESS DEPENDS ON THE UNREASONABLE MAN.

  —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  Is This Possible?

  Is a manned mission to Saturn, as portrayed in this novel, plausible in the near future?

  This section will argue that if SpaceX develops a spaceship with similar specifications to those made public by Elon Musk in 2017,1 the answer from a technological point of view—ignoring the psychological aspects relating to the crew—seems to be yes.

  The biggest technical challenge for such a mission would undoubtedly be this: how to take a 752-ton3 payload to Saturn and return back to Earth, within a reasonable time frame.

  Orbital mechanics marries ballistics (the field of throwing objects) and celestial mechanics (the field dealing with the motion of astronomical bodies) to the science and art of taking a spacecraft from point A to point B. For the purposes of this discussion, it boils down to a trade-off between minimizing propellant4 or minimizing time.

  For the entire history of space exploration including today, minimizing time has been a luxury beyond our reach. Not just that, but the need to minimize propellant has usually been extreme. This is best exemplified by the Cassini mission, which orbited the Saturn system from 2004 to 2017: it took the largest rocket available at the time to launch scarcely 6 tons of payload to Saturn, and it only arrived—after a 7-year journey—because of the extra velocity gained from a series of flybys around Venus, Earth, and Jupiter.

  Without a radical new approach to rockets and spacecraft, manned exploration of the Solar System will remain safely within the confines of science fiction until the end of time.

  Enter SpaceX’s Super Heavy/Starship architecture.

  Super Heavy, the launch vehicle that will hoist Starship into orbit around the Earth, will be the largest rocket ever made. But that’s not revolutionary enough. The greatest innovation will be the ability to refill Starship in orbit. According to SpaceX,5 Starship with a full tank would allow the following curve:

  This would, clichés be damned, change everything.

  How? By opening the entire Solar System to spacecraft carrying large payloads, including those of the human variety.

  Why? By having a lot of propellant or delta-v, a term that allows for direct comparisons between the range of a vehicle and the propellant cost to reach the multiple destinations around the Solar System—this is rocket science after all.

  Moving around outer space by minimizing propellant

  If we are following the illustrious tradition of minimizing propellant to go from Earth to elsewhere, the Hohmann transfer orbit is generally the cheapest way of getting there. The Hohmann propellant cost to get from Earth’s orbit to orbiting any of the planets is shown below:

  * Yes, I listed Pluto as a planet. The decade-long scientific debate is far from settled.

  ** This means escaping the influence of the Sun, allowing an object to permanently leave the Solar System.

  Plotting the above values onto the previous SpaceX’s Starship curve puts things in perspective:

  The implications are hard to overstate. A few examples:

  •Mars and Venus. Starship would be able to take a stupefying 200 tons of payload to the inner planets’ orbits,6 with fuel to spare.

  •Saturn. The Cassini mission would have been able to send nearly 50 tons of payload, almost 10 times7 more than it did—without any need for flybys to accelerate the probe in order to reach Saturn.

  •Leaving the Solar System. 10 tons of payload. For contrast, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2—both already in interstellar space—had a launch mass of barely 0.8 tons each and sti
ll needed to use both Jupiter and Saturn to catapult themselves to infinity.

  SpaceX’s Super Heavy/Starship architecture would turn what’s preposterous nowadays to not just technically possible, but also economically feasible.

  However, this is still not good enough for a roundtrip mission to Saturn—getting there and coming back to Earth—a rather desirable requirement for a manned spaceship.

  A roundtrip mission requires an extra layer in the Super Heavy/Starship architecture: in addition to a conventional launch of Starship into orbit, another launch of a Super Heavy with little or no payload to take it all the way into orbit (instead of bringing it back from the upper atmosphere to the surface after hoisting a Starship). Fully refill them. Join them together. Ignite Super Heavy and once it’s running low on fuel,8 disengage Starship to in turn burn its own engines and thrust itself toward Saturn. This would mean an upper displacement9 of the previous curve:

  This permits not just a roundtrip to Saturn but also allows the design of a shorter mission duration at the cost of extra propellant. Which takes us to,

  Moving around outer space by minimizing time

  Focusing the discussion on Saturn, let’s analyze the following roundtrip mission:

  Step 1. The spaceship departs from Earth’s orbit toward Saturn,

  Step 2. The spaceship is captured into Saturn’s orbit and stays there for 112 days,

  Step 3. The spaceship escapes Saturn’s influence and falls toward the Sun, converging with Earth.

  NASA Ames Research Center’s computations are used to plot the shortest duration roundtrip trajectory for every year between 2020 and 2035, capping the maximum delta-v to 10 km/s in order to allow Starship to carry 75 tons of payload:

  Let’s zoom in on the shortest roundtrip, a 2030 departure with a total length of 6.65 years:

  *** This could theoretically be an almost propellant-free maneuver via aerocapture, as depicted in the novel.

  We now have, in essence, the very mission narrated in Oceanworlds—only three years later.

  But what about the folks on board?

  While there are a number of physiological challenges for the human body that would need to be addressed,10 the biggest hurdle for a long-duration manned mission will likely be psychological.

  There are extensive studies about the psychosocial issues that affect astronauts in space, from studies performed in space-analogue experiments on Earth (space simulation chambers, submarines, permanent stations in Antarctica, etc.), to studies conducted in space, notably on board Russia’s Mir (1986–2001) and the International Space Station (2000–present).11

  However, nobody knows the mental toll of being surrounded by the deadly vacuum of space, in a severely restricted environment, with a small group of people, past the point where Earth becomes yet another dot in the cosmos—perhaps it could prove too much pressure for the mind to endure. And we simply won’t know until a heroic few undertake, as President John F. Kennedy dared humanity in 1962, “the most hazardous, dangerous, and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”

  * * *

  1 Elon, if you are reading this, I unsuccessfully tried reaching out through 28 different channels to learn the latest specs of Super Heavy/Starship. I thought my network was pretty strong. I’m less confident now.

  2 This number is arbitrary but appears conservative for a 5-person crew on a ~7-year outer space mission. According to Mitchell R. Sharpe’s classic 1969 book Living in Space: The Astronaut and His Environment, the metabolic daily needs of an astronaut of average size are 0.84 kg of oxygen, 0.62 kg of food, and 3.52 kg of water. Considering current oxygen recovery (75%) and water recycling (93%) technology on board the International Space Station, the requirements decrease to 0.21 kg of oxygen, 0.62 kg of food, and 0.25 kg of water. Therefore, a 5-person crew, 8-year supply of oxygen, food, and water amounts to 16 tons. Let’s assume a 10-ton Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS). Let’s also consider the two Dragon spacecraft as cargo mentioned in the novel (each 4.2 tons dry mass + 5 tons of propellant, equipment, and consumables). Adding all this up leaves a healthy buffer of 30 tons for to-be-determined payload.

  3 While the novel was written using the Imperial System to make a rather challenging book more accessible, this chapter uses the language of science: the Metric System.

  4 Given there’s no oxygen for fuel to react against in space, a spacecraft must bring both fuel and oxidizer, hence “propellant.”

  5 Elon Musk’s September 27 2017 presentation at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC).

  6 Landing is an altogether different challenge, requiring—among many other things—extra propellant.

  7 At launch, the Cassini probe weighed 5.7 tons, of which 3.1 tons was fuel. From the remaining 2.6 tons, barely 0.3 tons were the actual scientific instruments making the observations and taking the measurements, each of which had extreme weight restrictions during the design and assembly phases. It’s impossible to fathom the additional discoveries that could have been made with essentially no weight limits for the science payload—in what’s already widely considered one of the most successful science missions in history.

  8 This would leave Super Heavy in a highly eccentric orbit, similar to a geosynchronous transfer orbit, which could allow the Super Heavy to be landed back on Earth.

  9 This calculation is entirely speculative given that no specifications have been publicly shared by SpaceX regarding the latest iterations of Super Heavy. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation is used with the following parameters: a specific impulse of 380 for the Raptor engines, a final total mass of 1,185 tons, and an initial total mass of 2,500 tons.

  10 One of the many is sustenance. Nutritionists at NASA have not yet developed food with more than a few years of shelf life—mostly because there hasn’t yet been a need.

  11 One could even make the case that extreme cases of solitary confinement—for those inmates that manage to survive the ordeal physically and mentally unbroken—would share similarities with such a mission in terms of both physical space available and time spent in isolation.

  A Short History of Space Exploration

  The librarian came out into the splendor of daylight. The cool, damp air inside the large building was replaced by the scorching heat under the oppressive Shamash, the Sun-god. The drumbeats from the festival engulfing the city and culminating in tomorrow’s sacrifices under the Temple of Marduk sabotaged his tranquility. The brutality of what would happen there may appease the crowds but it troubled his mind. Yet the insulting smell of rotting fruits and feces from the crowded bazaar a thousand steps away reminded him of their fortune. He looked down with pride and wonder at the main avenue, filled with thousands of pilgrims from across the kingdom.

  He marveled at the unlikely set of circumstances that turned this land into the shining city, the exuberant oasis amid the arid plains. The measure of the empire’s achievement would always be the geographical invasion and cultural absorption of the greatest civilization that ever lived, its towering pyramids the mirage of an era of prosperity and technical prowess the world would likely never see again, fading behind the haze of time. Even at his age, the librarian hadn’t surrendered the childhood dream of one day standing before the magnificence of Giza towering over the Nile. It depended on scholars like him to keep the legacy alive in the grand library behind him. Now that the inevitability of the city’s great future was secured, it was their responsibility to extend the reach in all directions, to house all human knowledge in one hallowed, central place.

  It was the fateful year of 612 BC. As night fell, a messenger struggled past the massive walls and fainted from exhaustion in front of the king. Something terrible was coming from beyond the horizon. Nineveh—famed in the Tanakh and Old Testament, the greatest city in the world and capital of the Assyrian Empire—was about to be sacked by a coalition of its former subjects: Babylonians, Persians, Cimmerians, Medes, and Scythians. Nergal, the god of war, glowed red above the cit
y.

  Some historians believe the mythic Hanging Gardens of Babylon—the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World whose location or existence has never been confirmed—may have been here, destroyed by the great fire that ensued. What is fact is the ravaging by flames of another marvel, the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal and its 40,000 clay tablets, the largest and most important repository of knowledge up to that time.

  The city’s fall meant the spectacular renaissance of Babylon, whose former glory days as the largest city on the planet had happened a millennium prior, around the 18th century BC.

  When in 331 BC Alexander the Great and his colossal army crossed the Tigris, the ruins of Nineveh had been unoccupied for centuries. Persian and Armenian traditions say Alexander felt an eerie sense of foreboding as he closed in on the monumental ruins. He dismounted his horse Bucephalus and 47,000 troops watched him enter the ghostly rubble alone. The penumbra couldn’t conceal the majesty of the inside, nor the scattered clay tablets. Tutored by Aristotle himself until the age of sixteen, barely nine years before, the sight of pillaging and desecration deeply moved him and inspired one of his most important legacies. It would be protected for posterity by the greatest empire that ever lived, a single territory stemming from Greece to India. A monument to human intellect in the Egyptian city he had founded a few months prior. The Great Library of Alexandria, where many of the famous thinkers of the ancient world studied, remained unsurpassed for almost two millennia. By the time the printing press was invented circa 1439 AD, the whole of Europe had a few thousand books, a mere tenth of the Great Library.