Alpha Centauri: The Return (T-Space Alpha Centauri Book 3)
Page 15
“Assistant director, then. But I’m not sure what I or Skrellan can do to make that happen. Or what would make that worth our effort.”
“Oh, come on, Victoria. If you’re putting up that much money, you have some influence over how it gets spent. And I am qualified for the job. They might offer it to me anyway, but there’s the risk that some admiral’s or politician’s protégé will get slotted into it. A few words in the right ears....”
Holmes nodded. “Okay, you’re right, that much we could do. But that’s a favor we’re going to want to call in at some point.”
Drake had expected that, and came prepared. “I’ll tell you what, Victoria. Get me that position and I’ll name one of the Endeavour’s sister ships after you.”
“You—what?”
“Okay, to be honest, I can’t guarantee it. But I’ll have influence. Victoria was the name of the first ship to circumnavigate the world, one of Magellan’s fleet. It would make a fine name for a starship.”
Holmes laughed. “I’ve said before that you were a flatterer. You’re an interesting man, Commodore Drake. Alright, I’ll see what I can do.”
“That’s all I ask. Thank you.”
Part III: Construction
Chapter 24: The New Design
Admiral’s office a month later
“Drake, report to my office. I have something I think you’ll want to see,” the admiral messaged.
“On my way, sir.”
Drake made his way to the admiral’s office, wondering what was up. He knew there was movement on the return mission, but so far as he knew it had all been contracts and finance proposals, with little to show for it. He’d heard nothing on the possibility of his own direct involvement.
He reached the office and rapped on the frame of the open door. “Commodore Drake reporting as ordered, sir.”
“Come on in. Close the door behind you and take a seat.”
Uh oh. Bad news?
“You said you had something to show me?” Drake said as he sat down across the desk.
“Relax, Frank. Yes, I think you’ll like this.” He swung his computer monitor around so they could both see it. “Okay, what I’m about to show you is Top Secret, you’ll be formally read into the program this afternoon, so keep this under your hat.”
“Understood.” So, not bad news then?
The admiral tapped a control, and on the screen appeared an image showing a 3D representation of some kind of spaceship, a triangular wedge of a vehicle, sweeping out from a small, rounded nose to a wide, flattened aft section sporting what looked like jet or rocket exhaust nozzles. There was a large protuberance on the upper surface, like a dorsal fin but sporting a pod-like structure mid-fin. There were other details but Drake couldn’t quite take them all in, the admiral was rotating and panning around the image.
“What do you think?”
“It, it looks a bit like an Imperial Star Destroyer from an old Star Wars movie. What is it?”
“Ha! You’re right, it does at that. Too small by a factor of fifty or so, of course. This is about the size of the old NASA Space Shuttle. It’s your new starship.”
“What? Starship? My starship? I think you need to explain.”
The admiral grinned. “The look on your face is priceless, Frank. All right. This is obviously a model from the engineering CAD files, but the finished ships will look a lot like this. This is the Endeavour.”
Drake knew of the ship, of course, but secrecy around the details had extended to any accurate images of it. Artists’ impressions based on leaked rumors were either completely fanciful or looked more like the Heinlein. This was different.
“Construction is well under way. As I said, it’s Top Secret, although we’ll be releasing much of the design to our international partners. What I meant by ‘your ship’ is that you got your wish. You’re going to be overseeing the project. You won’t be the Director, that’s a more political position anyway, but you’ll be expediting the integration, and you’ll have some authority over the sub-projects.” He paused, then grinned and added “And yes, when finished, you’ll have command of one, if you want it,”
“If I want... Of course I do!” Drake looked at the image again, studying it. He could see the lifting-body influence in the design, but there had to be something missing.
“How does it get to space?” he asked. “The Shuttle needed an external fuel tank and boosters. Our SSTOs are almost all fuel, and the shape is driven by the tanks. This thing is too flat.”
“You’ll get more details in this afternoon’s briefing. But this is it. Oh, don’t get me wrong, much of the interior is still tankage, but we won’t be using chemical rockets anymore. This baby is fusion powered.”
Drake was astounded. He knew they’d made significant advances with compact fusion reactors over the Chinese tokamak design that powered the Heinlein, but to generate enough thrust to lift a ship was something else again, and doing it at a size small enough to put in a ship was, well, astounding.
“The flat shape, you got Brenke’s artificial gravity working?”
The admiral nodded. “Yes. Only under warp, of course, so you’ll still be in zero-gee part of the trip. But horizontal take-off and landing, hence the lifting body.”
“There won’t be any runways at Alpha Centauri.”
“Which is why it’s also VTOL—” vertical take-off and landing “--capable.” He manipulated the image on the screen, rotating it to show the underside. “See these jets?” He indicated several thruster ports. “The exhaust is a mix of direct thruster exhaust and air ducted through a turbofan. They won’t get you to orbit alone but they’ll lift the vehicle so you don’t need a runway to get to flying speed.”
“Seriously? That’s a hell of an advance in a year.”
“Oh, people have been working on this a lot longer than that. A lot of it was just waiting for some key pieces of technology to fall into place. And don’t misunderstand, this is still an experimental ship. But it should do the job.”
“I have so many questions....”
“And you’ll get some answers this afternoon. And keep your schedule clear. Day after tomorrow we’re going to Jackass Flats to watch a test firing of the main thrusters.”
“Jackass Flats? The old nuclear test site?”
“Part of it is. Where we’re going is Area 25. They never detonated any nukes there, but they did test atomic rocket engines there about a century ago. Seems as good a place as any to do that again.”
Drake couldn’t argue with that logic. “Cool,” he said.
“Right. I have things I need to do before lunch. I’ll see you at the briefing at fourteen-hundred. Act surprised.”
Drake knew when he’d been dismissed. He rose to leave. “I am. Thank you, sir.”
∞ ∞ ∞
Area 25, Jackass Flats, Nevada
The original Nuclear Rocket Development Station had long ago been decommissioned and dismantled. The new station, the Advanced Spacecraft Propulsion Facility, had been constructed near the original site. The test stands were two kilometers from the lab, the cavernous assembly hall, and the adjacent two-story administration building.
The test was set for early in the morning, before the desert heat became too unbearable for both the technicians doing final work at the test stand, and the small audience of VIPs gathered in the assembly area. Mostly, the latter were milling around in a cordoned-off area in front of a small set of hastily-erected bleachers. Drake grabbed a cold bottle of water from cooler atop a table near the stand. This was definitely a low key, low budget demonstration, nothing at all like some of the lavish commercial combination demo and sales pitch that he had attended in the past.
“Commodore Drake!” he heard someone call, and turned toward the voice. It was Vukovich, his astrophysicist on the original Centauri mission.
“Yes, well, I’m based just up the road. Brenke’s old lab. I didn’t want to miss this, so I worked it into my schedule.”
“You’re not actually involved in the engine work, then?”
“No. Officially my work interfaces with the same power system, and some of the ship design systems, but I really don’t have much to do with the thrusters. Fortunately, there are enough common subsystems that I’m cleared for both.”
Just then somebody else caught Drake’s eye. The admiral. “Greg, come over here, let me introduce you.” He steered Vukovich over to where the admiral was standing, his aide just returning with a water bottle to hand to him.
“Admiral Howard, sir, this is Greg Vukovich. He was our astrophysicist on the Anderson on the way out, and returned with me on the Heinlein. Greg, Admiral Howard.”
“Of course,” the admiral said, extending his hand for Vukovich to shake. “I remember Vukovich. I hear you’ve been stepping into Algernon Brenke’s shoes.”
Vukovich grinned. “Well, those are big shoes to fill. I do what I can. Thank you, sir.”
“So, what can you tell us about today’s test?” the admiral asked. Drake was sure the admiral already knew the details, but reaching his rank was half politics, and half of politics was knowing how to make small talk.
“It’s not exactly my field, sir, but essentially it’s a high-power plasma thruster. We’ll be running it on electrical power generated by the SSFR—that’s Solid-State Fusion Reactor, although the fusion isn’t actually solid state—and it will be ionizing fuel fed from the tank beside it there.” He pointed at the test stand, and the large tank beside it. On the other side stood a water tower.
“I thought plasma thrusters were only good in vacuum?”
Vukovich grinned. “That used to be true. It took too much power to generate a plasma beam that could push through any distance of air, so the back-pressure killed the thrust. We have a little more power at our disposal now. Once it gets warmed up it should look almost like a continuous lightning strike.”
The admiral whistled. “No kidding? I can hardly wait. And I’m looking forward to hearing about the field trials of your new warp drive.”
“Still a few months out I’m afraid. The spacecraft we’ll be using is undergoing refit.”
“I understand. Well, carry on. I see someone I need to talk to. Drake, I’ll see you later.” With that the admiral turned and walked off, his aide in tow.
“You know more about it than I thought,” Drake said, turning to Vukovich.
“Other than work, there’s not much to do out here in the desert. There’s a bit of cross-talk between teams after hours. Nothing security sensitive, of course. And I could see the first test from my office. Didn’t know what it was at first, I thought a nuke had gone off, or we’d had a WMI.”
“Excuse me, ‘WMI’?”
“Jargon. Warp-matter impingement. What we thought had happened to the Xīng Huā. Hasn’t happened yet, but that’s one reason they put the warp research out here where they used to test atomic bombs.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Hey, here’s a bit of trivia for you. Did you ever hear of the old Project Orion, Freeman Dyson’s idea? About a century back.”
“That was the plan to propel a massive spacecraft using nuclear bombs, wasn’t it? Crazy idea.”
“Well, in theory it would have worked, with a few unfortunate side-effects. But this place, actually about a dozen kilometers north-east of here, was planned as the launch site.”
Drake shook his head. “Wow. But I guess, until the war, that part of Nevada probably ranked as the most-nuked part of the planet. I’m glad we’re past that. At least, I hope we are.”
“Yeah. We have bigger things to worry about.”
Before Drake could agree, an announcement came over the PA system.
“Attention please. Attention please. We are at T-minus ten minutes to test firing. You are welcome to stand so long as you remain behind the cordon, but if you wish a seat in the stands, you might want to make your way there now. Ten minutes and counting.”
The crowd started moving, some toward the stands, some moving closer to the cordon to get a position at the front.
“Sit or stand? Or do you have somewhere else to be?” Drake asked.
“They have cooling fans set up by the stands. A few meters won’t make much difference to the view.”
It was getting warm out. Drake looked at the stands. Greg was right, there were fans with refrigeration coils set up, blowing cool air over the spectators. “The stands it is, then.”
There were a couple of tables set up by the stands, and two young men in khakis were handing out binoculars. That helped make up for them confiscating their omniphones and similar gear when Drake had arrived.
Vukovich and Drake found a couple of seats near the top of the stands. That would give them a better view. Drake raised his binoculars to look at the test stand.
The area had already been cleared of personnel. There should be little explosion hazard, unlike a chemical rocket there wouldn’t be both fuel and oxidizer present, but it would still be hot and loud, and with any rocket test there was always the chance that something would over-pressurize and fail.
A plume of vapor jetted from a relief valve on the propellant tank, billowing into puffy clouds before quickly dissipating in the dry desert air. The rocket itself was mounted nozzle-up, to direct its exhaust into the air. This avoided the need for a thrust deflector and a massive stand to restrain the engine against forces if it were directed sideways or downwards.
“What’s the propellant?” Drake asked Vukovich.
“Liquid hydrogen. Liquid to both cool the engine and pump it in at a high rate. In theory, we could use almost anything, we’re just heating it to a plasma and letting it jet out the nozzle. We’re still working on options for the flight vehicle; hydrogen takes up too much space.”
“You need hydrogen for the fusion reactor though, right?”
“Deuterium, yes. But we don’t need much of that. A few barrels of liquid deuterium will give plenty of power.”
Drake thought about that. It was still a lot of energy going through that fusor in a short time. “Just how efficient is that thing? It must get awfully hot.”
“It does, but it’s also cooled by the fuel flow. That’s another kink we’ll need to work out for deep space. But it’s also surprisingly efficient. The SSFR is engineered to optimize the fusion pathways away from neutrons, which helps both the radiation problem and thermal losses.”
“The dead graduate student problem.”
“The what now?”
“I did some reading on the early cold-fusion experiments when I heard they were working on SSFR. The dead graduate student problem was that there weren’t any dead students. Theory at the time suggested that at the reported excess energy, there’d be so many neutrons that they would have dead grad students. They didn’t have, therefore there couldn’t be any neutrons, therefore there couldn’t be any fusion.”
“Ah, I’d never heard it put that way. Well, now we know why there weren’t any. Good thing, too.”
“One minute,” the PA system announced. “Test firing in one minute. Places please.”
Drake checked with his binoculars again. Most spectators were doing the same. The people responsible for controlling the test were somewhere in an office in the building behind them. Several pole-mounted warning lights near the test stand were flashing, and though he couldn’t hear it, he imagined there was a siren or other audible warning. In the unlikely event that anyone was still in the immediate vicinity of the test, they’d better find one of the land-line phones to
call a halt, or a deep bunker to hide in. It was about to get noisy.
“T-minus ten seconds. Vents closed.” The plume of vapor from the tank stopped. “Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Ignition!”
At first it looked like nothing was happening. Then Drake noticed a shimmering of the background behind where the exhaust plume should be. Then a few flecks of pale yellow flame flickered around the edges of that invisible plume.
“It will brighten in a moment; they’re ramping up the power.” Vukovich said.
A tremendous hissing roar, like the mother of all high-pressure gas leaks, drowned out the tail end of his comment. The sound waves from the ignition had reached them, and the hissing roar rose in volume as the rocket throttled up.
Then, as Vukovich had promised, the pale, near invisible yellow plume suddenly brightened. A blue-violet glow appeared at the nozzle, and a straight streak of lightning beamed into the sky. A few seconds later, a tremendous thunder-clap sounded over the rocket’s roar. It kept going, an overpowering crackle superimposed on the hiss of the engine. Drake dropped his binoculars and covered his ears, noting that others were doing the same.
Just when he thought he couldn’t stand it anymore, the lightning went out, leaving a purple after-image on his retina. Six seconds later, the sound stopped. Drake’s ears rang.
Then another roar arose; the applause from the onlookers. Drake joined in enthusiastically. Now that, he thought, was a rocket.
“...tion please. Attention please.” The PA was difficult to hear over the trailing off applause and the ringing in his ears. “Ladies and gentlemen, as some of you have realized, that was a little louder than we were expecting. Our apologies. If you feel the need, we have a medical tent at the south end of the viewing area where we’ll be happy to get you checked out. Please be assured that our decibel meters show us that peak sound levels were not, I say again, not loud enough to cause permanent damage. Our scientists and engineers are reviewing the data. Preliminary results are, aside from the unexpected noise, that the thrust levels were at least as good as expected.