Even with Starbooster/Centurions and Apollo IIs to take up some of the slack, there was going to be a shortage of ways to get people into space for a few years. But there was very little hope of finding additional money in the federal budget to take the next logical step: build a follow-on to the shuttle, something that could use the flyback Zenit as its first stage and then go on to orbit, carrying a crew.
The X-33 had dead-ended on the way to a true SSTO—single stage to orbit—spacecraft because no material suitable for its hydrogen tanks existed, or was likely to for a while. Eventually, the commission said, there would be SSTOs, and recommended the establishment of a long-range research program to solve the tank material problem. As a friendly gesture to very disappointed SSTO advocates, they suggested that the United States commit to have the material, and begin the design, for an SSTO in 2013, ten years from that date. They suggested dubbing the development effort Project Yankee Clipper, pointing out that the great trading vessels that had carried the American flag all over the globe had also been brilliant designs pushing materials far beyond their limits—and unofficially, as Lori observed, the original clippers could have performed far better if nylon and fiberglass had only been available at the time. “Yankee Clipper” was the perfect name for the ship that would outdo everything else—if only the materials problem could be solved.
Meanwhile, the conservative low-risk approach to getting people into orbit would remain the way everyone had used so far: the staged rocket. You didn’t have to meet that so-far-impossible 90 percent fuel ratio if you launched not from the stationary ground but from the top of another rocket. Hence, in the almost sixty years of human spaceflight, rockets always flew in stages: a big rocket (the “booster”) lifted a smaller rocket onto a high, fast-moving trajectory, or a group of rockets began the upward journey, all lifting each other, and the rockets that burned out first dropped off. The Saturn V that sent Apollo to the Moon worked on the first principle (the second and third stages were lifted off the Earth and set in motion by the first, the third stage was thrown most of the way to orbit by the second, and the third stage was then already high enough and moving fast enough to head for the Moon). The space shuttle worked on the second principle; it began with all three main engines and the two solid rocket boosters firing, accelerated rapidly upward under all that thrust, then dropped the weight of the solid boosters when they burned out.
In effect, it had another stage as well, the external tank; when the fuel in that big tank was burned, the tank was dropped. Doing this instead of mounting the fuel tanks inside the vehicle meant, among other things, a much more compact body to return from orbit (which was much easier to work with) and less mass to pull around for operations in orbit.
Ultimately, better performance would come with better upper stages; as long as two stages were necessary to get to orbit, rather than build a complete new system each time, it made more sense to alternate—first improve the boosters, since they were clearly a major problem, then build a new upper stage to fly on that booster, then return again to improving the booster—a process familiar to anyone who has ever rehabbed a house or rebuilt a car on a tight budget, of fixing whatever is most wrong first and improving other things later, and always returning to redo the weak spot.
And since to design a new craft took years, if there were to be a follow-on upper stage in a few years, the process would have to begin now—but in the tightly strapped year of 2002, there was practically no money for it.
There was a solution available to the problem, but there were many people who thought the solution was worse than the problem. To such people, it was a deal with the devil—even if the devil came to them in the form of a man as pleasant and charming as the one who would eventually become my stepfather, Sig Jarlsbourg.
At the time he was just thirty-two, but his sandy red hair was already graying, and though he was strong and fit, he moved so quietly and precisely that he gave the impression of someone twenty years older. Four years later, when I first met him, he amazed me the first time he stepped onto a tennis court and seemed to abruptly shrug off his years and play like a teenager.
By the time he was testifying in front of the Congressional Joint Committee, and his picture was on the cover of Business Week, it had already appeared there four times—the last time with the caption “CAN THEY STOP HIM? DO THEY WANT TO?”
He was living proof that the best way to get rich is to start that way; his father had been a major player in a large number of oil ventures, and Sig had grown up all over the world. Always adventurous, and with the money to pursue it, he had been a passionate diver by the age of fifteen, with more than twenty technical dives before he enrolled at Stanford. He had gotten his sailplane license a few months after his fourteenth birthday and had begun seriously trying for records before he was twenty.
Given that he was remarkably handsome and well-groomed, he could have become one of the more successful playboys of the decade, but he had his mind on other things. In his first couple years of college he had joined a number of environmental and “green” groups, only to realize, as he put it later, that “the only way to keep crap out of the air and water, and preserve the beautiful places, is to fix it so that it pays to do that; otherwise you’re always just chasing down the next oil company.”
His father had sent him a short letter telling him that Stanford tuition cost a lot and that the money was coming from oil companies. The next summer, Sig got together a small group of friends who had a wide variety of outdoor skills and some experience with remote areas, secured a start-up loan, took out ads as Planet Vision Adventure Tours in the highest-end travel publications, skipped classes for a week to go to a travel agents’ convention and buttonhole people, and sold “two-month planetary tours” at $29,000 a shot. With 250 clients over the summer, he shuffled them from one friend to another, taking them climbing the Andes, fly fishing in Patagonia, on camera safari in Kruger National Park, diving off Sri Lanka, and thus eventually around the world. Meanwhile he and his friends got to spend the summer doing things they loved, as guides to the small group of the extremely well-off that he had managed to charm into the experience. As a side benefit, he extracted donations from many of his clients for various “green causes.”
At the end of the summer, he paid the remaining two years of his Stanford tuition in cash, sent his father a check for the past two years, and, after covering the loan and taxes, had $8500 left.
The next summer, he talked a private foundation into a highly irregular grant that let him wander the earth for three months managing PVAT via modem while writing a report on “A Sustainable Planet” in a clear, literate style that made it saleable to a commercial publisher. (To the surprise of the foundation, it turned out that Sig had drafted a contract that gave him all the earnings from this, leaving them with the report but no legal right to publish it.) Some people thought it was the equivalent of Paine’s Common Sense; others tended to compare it to Lenin’s What is to be Done?, or Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
As the business magazines summarized it, Sig Jarlsbourg had concluded that at least half of the most respected industries, ones that could be counted on in any portfolio, had to be shut down within the next century, and proposed a radical plan for putting them out of business. To the environmentalists, he had proposed that all the wild and beautiful places of the Earth, the common heritage of mankind, should be reserved as playgrounds for the rich. And, as he told me years later, “Actually, the only person I cared about what I looked like to was the one in the mirror. Though it didn’t hurt that people like Ted Turner and Richard Branson kind of liked me, too.”
A fairer summary of the idea was this: the Earth’s population was so large and the number of people who were either still in childbearing years, or had yet to enter them, so big a percentage of it, that only the most advanced technologies available could supply food, medicine, housing, and heat to keep them alive (and even then there was bound to be some starvation). Yet those technologie
s, in turn, were extraordinarily energy intensive, and every known large-scale method of producing energy had severe ecological drawbacks: relied on rare metals that were chemically active, and thus would have highly unpredictable effects when released into the biosphere; depended on complex molecules that were so similar to those found in living things that these, too, were bound to have disastrous effects; and so forth.
Furthermore, these interacted; to avoid the hazards of gross pollution associated with coal, one might turn to uranium, only to discover more complex problems associated with radiation, from which one might turn to solar power, only to find that manufacturing solar cells required processing industrial quantities of a witch’s brew of heavy elements.
To return to nineteenth-century or earlier technology would insure famine and plague; to try to keep going with advanced technology on the face of the Earth would insure a series of worsening environmental catastrophes. The escape hatch, then, was not to do it on the face of the Earth.
After all, even if you were trying to, you couldn’t significantly pollute the quadrillions of cubic miles of space that lie within the orbit of the Moon; and that’s only the nearest and most convenient space. A hundred and twenty miles straight up was inexhaustible solar energy—and if you didn’t build the solar cells on Earth, from Earth-based materials, no worries about releasing biologically active metals. The asteroids and Moon contained every raw material needed, and when you were done processing you could leave the slag there and it would never hurt anyone. Eventually you could grow food up there—with no need, ever, for pesticides, since all you had to do was not take the bugs with you, and if by chance you did, you need only quarantine the infected crop—and open the door to hard vacuum and hard radiation to exterminate the bugs. The whole Earth could be supplied from space, at least in principle, with no need left for a smokestack or a chemical vat anywhere on its face, and virtually unlimited material goods for everyone.
Or in short, Earthbound resources could not support the Earth’s population for more than another couple of generations, unless large parts of what made the Earth beautiful were destroyed, or a much higher percentage of the global population died young. Neither was acceptable. Therefore within fifty years—somewhere around the end of Sig’s lifetime— there would need to be an outside source for energy and minerals from either the seabeds or space. The seabeds were hooked to the global ecology in ways that were poorly understood, and there was little point in replacing ruining the land with ruining the oceans. So it would have to be space, and for the space source of resources to work at all, it must be cheaper than the terrestrial source. If it were, then much of the Earth would become too valuable to “waste” on agriculture and industry, and the planet would “re-green” as he called it.
The key was cheap exploitable resources from space. But when Sig looked at the numbers of the time, “cheap” seemed like a very strange word to use. With technologies available at the time, it cost a thousand times as much to generate electricity in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) as it did on Earth, ten thousand times as much to move a passenger into LEO as it did to fly the same passenger across the Atlantic, and a hundred thousand times as much to create work or living space for a person in LEO as it did to create the equivalent in Chicago.
By themselves those numbers did not intimidate Sig. When he had been out of college for two years, his Planetary Vision Adventure Tours had swelled, by acquisition and merger, into Share-the-Planet Tours, which had already become a giant in the burgeoning industry of low-impact high-priced ecotourism. Acquiring a dozen specialized firms to do it, Sig had built hotels offshore in deep water, flown comfortable living quarters into and out of Antarctica, put up independent, solar-powered buildings on Pacific reefs, and in every case filled them with people who wanted to see the wild world—as untouched as possible—without leaving any creature comforts behind. He knew that you could still make a profit in places that were very expensive to operate.
Yet although you can get tourists to pay for all kinds of bizarre things—consider the number of ski lodges that are built in places where concrete costs six times the normal price and labor costs are double— tourism and other very high cost-per-weight industries can only be the beginning of getting people there. The first Western and Chinese traders to Borneo went for spices that were literally worth their weight in gold, but there wasn’t much traffic until it became a cheap place for tin and rubber at pennies per pound, and development didn’t take off there until it was possible to make computer components at pennies per ton. From a business standpoint, space could begin with tourism, but tourism would have to finance the research and technical improvements that could eventually lead to moving energy production, then mining, and finally industrial production itself, up to orbit.
Chances were it would take a lifetime. That was okay with Sig, because—as he told me years later—”Well, I had a lifetime and I wasn’t planning to do anything else with it anyway.”
Just as importantly, in the short run, his high-end ecotourism had given him an extraordinarily valuable set of contacts, for obviously the people his business served were mainly those who could afford thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for vacations of a month or more. Furthermore, though his relations with his father were poor, the family contacts he had inherited served him well. And many of his employees and consultants were necessarily experts in high-risk and extreme-conditions sports, and through them he met more adventurers.
Thus, when he was twenty-nine, knowing the vacation habits of a dozen of the world’s wealthiest people well—and in contact with hundreds of adventurers from high-altitude balloonists to technical divers and extreme skiers—Sig Jarlsbourg was able to call together one of the most remarkable meetings of the twentieth century. Many of the people in the room—Ted Turner, Bill Gates, Michael Eisner, and Steve Forbes, for example—were nominally on vacation, attending the “free retreat” that Sig had offered them at his new Greenland Glacier Lodge, supposedly to both celebrate the opening of the new facility and also, because the conference began on Friday, July 16, 1999, and would conclude on Tuesday, July 20, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, J.F.K., Jr., was there, ostensibly to celebrate his father’s legacy, actually because Sig had been quietly exploiting political contacts through that channel ever since Kennedy had taken his submarine tour of the Great Barrier Reef; and because Kennedy was there, several other people whose names were household words were there. Perot himself wasn’t, but four people from his national organization were, all quietly referring to themselves as “employees of a major national corporation and friends of Mr. Jarlsbourg.” Also in the group were members of the small elite of wealthy adventurers, including Richard Branson, just returned from yet another ballooning expedition. The bankers, perhaps, carried more weight, but they would follow the lead of the entrepreneurs and adventurers; the people with political connections mattered a great deal, but again, no one mattered so much as the dozen or so people in the room, most of them men, most in their late fifties or early sixties, each of whom commanded large fortunes without being answerable to boards of directors or other conservative forces.
If Sig’s business had taught him nothing else (and of course he had learned an enormous amount from it), it would have taught him how to show people a good time and get them in a relaxed frame of mind, enjoying themselves while becoming alert and receptive. For the first three days the group mostly mingled, trying various kinds of remote skiing, taking excursions to observe rare wildlife along the seacoast and carefully planned no-impact visits to mountain valleys. Always, as they did this, they were reminded of how essential space operations had become to environmental and conservation projects; how fragile the Earth was and how many people needed a share of it now; and somehow—strange that a tourism mogul would do such a thing—they were constantly reminded that nowadays the number of high-adventure experiences available on Earth, while still very large, could be exhausted by a wealthy thrill-see
ker before the age of thirty. By Monday at dinnertime—the last big meal of the vacation and the general gathering for the “special program” about which they had all been whispering to each other for three days now—they were all glad that they had come, happy to be there, reasonably fond of each other and of Sig . . . and vaguely uneasy, troubled by a sense that things could be much better.
As the lights dimmed, Sig drew a deep breath, stepped to the podium, and began. Behind him a large high-definition screen sprang to life.
“I think,” Sig Jarlsbourg began, “that we all understand each other here. We know how good life can be, and we know quite a bit about building for the future, about thinking of a few generations into the future. We know that our wealth is secure only as long as others do well enough, and we aren’t foolish enough to think that we can stay in our enviable position either by sheer force or merely by tradition. No, I think all of us here understand that if we wish to preserve our success, we must move on to other successes—and we must take the rest of the human race with us. Now, I want you to imagine something.”
An image began to swim before them on the screen, not quite defining itself yet. “What I want you to imagine is this. All of us here know that the Earth is hitting its limits, and sooner or later—through exhaustion of fossil fuels, global warming, ozone loss, accidental release of nuclear wastes, or a dozen other possible scenarios—the world is going to take a disastrous turn, and no matter how much wealth and power we have, we will not be immune.
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