AMERICA ONE - NextGen II (Book 6)

by T I WADE

  The rocks were placed into the canisters. This time the work was faster, as there were far more rocks to be picked up.

  Gary and a few others worked up in the area that had been blasted. He was seven feet into a trench, picking up rocks and throwing them to the crew standing above him. The problem was that all the rocks were the same color and they didn’t have time to check each one through the MMA. It was already packed up for travel.

  “One more canister from each team, then we are out of here,” said Pluto Katherine tiredly, lifting a rock thrown up by her husband and placing it into the open canister. Most of the rocks were sized between her fist and her head, and they left lots of free space inside all the canisters.

  Wearily the crew headed back into the ships once the last canister had been packed away. In the time since the blast, they had packed 23 more canisters.

  Discussing what they had of the new rock after they had left the asteroid miles behind them, the crew worked out very approximately that they had five tons of unchecked ore. It could be sperrylite, cobalt and nickel, or plain unwanted iron ore, and that was the main discussion with bets on what it was on the far longer 92-day journey back to Earth.

  Chapter 18

  We Were Getting Worried

  “Sierra Bravo II to Nevada Ground Control, do you copy?” tried Pluto Katherine over the radio 89 days later, and still 400,000 miles from Earth.

  Their reserves of luxury supplies were getting low. The coffee was gone, so were any goodies other than plain food packs, of which they still had several months’ supply left. The water was being recycled, so that wasn’t a problem, and still after two days of trying to get somebody over the radio there had been no luck.

  “Gary keep trying,” she added, stretching and leaving her pilot seat to head to their quarters.

  It would be very early morning in Nevada. Gary could see Earth now reasonably large in their forward windows. They were directly behind the planet, where the Earth had travelled, and it was moving through space at 67,000 miles an hour in front of them. The four mining craft were flying with their forward speed at 72,500 miles an hour, catching up to the blue planet by 132,000 miles per day.

  Unfortunately, their fuel supplies weren’t as plentiful as the water supplies, and they were down to having enough to catch up to Earth, slow down to a slower orbital speed of less than 25,000 miles an hour, and head to the new Orbital Space Station.

  Only SB-II would be going in with the crew and metals needed on Earth. There weren’t enough blue shields to get the mining craft back. They would never return to Earth again.

  What was really exciting for the returning crew was that in their six-month absence there was a working production plant in orbit around Earth for the beginning of the mother ship build. Ninety percent of their returning cargo, the nickel, platinum and cobalt didn’t need to return to Nevada.

  The work down in Nevada had progressed with the rare earth supplies purchased from China. There was enough of the metals for all the departments to build the new spacecraft parts and instruments for a few more months.

  At 250 miles above Earth was where America Two and hopefully America Three would be given birth. The mother ships had not been designed to ever head into atmospheric conditions on Earth or Mars.

  Life progressed until Lunar began to worry. They still had little to no range of communications with their ships in the solar system, but everybody was waiting for the launch of the three new communications satellites one of her Nevada departments was manufacturing. Until then, communications further out than 400,000 miles was just not possible.

  Once the satellites went into orbit and were positioned in a pattern around Earth, then Astermine would have the ability to reach its ships anywhere in the solar system.

  This was something that couldn’t be rushed, and Lunar had no choice but to wait until the Mars mission returned within radio range. Also, it would be necessary to have extremely powerful Earth/Mars communications once her father’s dream of having supply ships going in both directions was a reality.

  When the two planets were close, radio communications across the shorter distance would be as quick as 8 minutes one way and another 8 minutes for it to return once a reply was sent. At their furthest distances, it could be closer to an hour for a message to return.

  The day arrived for the return of the mining mission, and nothing was heard. They were late, a day late, and Lunar began to worry even more as all the stress of commanding her crew began to tire the young girl.

  Another week went by and hourly radio transmissions went out into space for any of the crew to hear. Still nothing.

  “What could delay them so long?” Lunar asked her chief scientists a few days later, and when the window of the returning mining mission was about to close.

  “Many reasons,” returned a few of the scientists. Jack Dempsey also stated that they might have found something good enough to delay them, as there were no more asteroids that could be of interest to mine for another 35 months.

  “Jack, you said that this asteroid 2030JD was the best chance of mining what we need out there,” stated Lunar.

  “Yes, and there are millions of asteroids we could visit tomorrow,” Jack continued. “Unfortunately, Commander, we already know that most of them won’t give us what we need in resources. Even 2030JD could be a whitewash. I mean, have nothing we need. There are more chances that it could have nothing more than iron ore, but that is the risk of asteroid mining rocks that far distance away. These asteroids are whizzing by at astronomical speeds and won’t be back for decades or centuries. Remember, several companies in the era of 2010 to 2018 had exciting ideas about trapping small asteroids, slowing them into an orbit around Earth, and mining them only a few hundred miles out. That idea never got off the ground, due to never being 100 percent certain what an asteroid was made of. In those days, billions of dollars were needed just to get a mining craft and all the equipment into space. Today, thanks to these blue shields you found, it costs Astermine less than a twentieth of the cost decades ago to get ships into orbit.”

  “What about DX2014, and its riches you found for my father?” Lunar asked the astronomer.

  “Like winning the lottery, sorry Commander, you are too young to know what a lottery is,” Jack replied.

  “I know what a lottery is,” replied Lunar. “We studied a lot about Earth and its history aboard America One. It is when one person wins a lot of money at the cost of millions of other people losing theirs. A stupid idea if you ask me.”

  “I agree,” replied Jack. “We were so lucky on our first mining opportunity that I doubt we will ever find such a rich asteroid until we are permanently in space and step from one to the other searching for the wealth we want to find.”

  Five more days went by and Lunar was getting very nervous. She tried to hide her worry, but her pale face and lack of communication with the entire crew showed it.

  Mark ran up with the exciting news that Pluto Katherine’s voice had been heard very faintly two days later.

  “We’ve heard from them,” he shouted, rushing up to their condo where his wife was trying to rest. Lunar immediately jumped up, dressed and ran with Mark back to Ground Control.

  “Sierra Bravo II to Nevada Ground Control, do you copy? What is wrong with you guys down there? We are within the 400,000-mile comms radius. Sierra Bravo II to Nevada Ground Control, do you copy, over.”

  The transmission was very faint and arrived with much static, but Pluto Katherine’s voice could be heard.

  “Nevada Ground Control to Sierra Bravo II, we are just receiving your transmissions. Are you hearing us, over,” replied the radio operator. It sounded like the crew out in space were not, as two hours later Gary’s voice came over the airwaves, and this time he did respond to Ground Control’s call.

  “Thank God, yes, Ground Control, I believe I heard you. We are currently 381,000 miles directly behind Earth. We left 2030JD 90 days, seven hours and twelve minutes ago. We were st
ill collecting rock and left 45 hours late. That is the reason we…” and the transmission died for another hour as the reception was cut off.

  “We must be over the horizon for direct communications, Commander,” stated the radio operator.

  “Give us twenty minutes and we can work out their position,” added the head of Ground Control. Lunar waited, relieved that the crew were alive. She had had several nightmares about what could have happened to her baby sister. There were a million reasons why they might not come back. Space travel was never a certainty.

  “Our data reckons that leaving the asteroid so late, they must be moving at extreme forward speed to catch us up, hence much of the delay,” stated the man once the numbers had been crunched. “Also Commander, SB-V docked at Orbital Build Station-I two hours ago. They are safe inside and unloading the cargo.”

  Lunar had forgotten that Hillary Pitt was heading up with her second load of 6 tons of cargo for the new orbital station above them. SB-I, flown by Pluto Jane Saunders, had already unloaded its cargo of two tons of gear and was expected to re-enter in a few hours’ time.

  “You can relax, Lunar,” added her husband comforting her. “Every mission is going to plan. The mining crew should be reaching the orbital station in a couple of days, and now we only have to wait for the Mars return.”

  “We were getting worried,” stated Lunar to her sister over a clearer reception the next day.

  “Sorry sis, but we had to blast the damn asteroid with the laser to get at her metals, and we still don’t know what half of our cargo is made up of. We do know that we have at least 1,000 pounds of very rich cargo, and a few tons of the two necessary metals we will leave up at the orbital station. I spoke to Hillary a few hours ago. She was docked up there and told us everything is going well. We had no choice but to increase the risk for reward. Sis, do you want us to base up at the orbital station and go through what we have?”

  The scientists in Ground Control all nodded their heads, and Lunar told her,

  “Affirmative. We don’t want any metals down here if we have to launch them back up again. The orbital station still doesn’t have any permanent inhabitants. I don’t want to say too much over the radio, but there are supplies up there for you. You know what to do, and we can discuss what you need to do up there once we are on our ship’s private intercom, not this radio, out.”

  Two days later, the orbital station was inhabited by the returning mining mission, and the crew got busy. The MMA had been spacewalked over to the new station’s load door, and the smaller of the two doors was opened to get it inside and latched down, as it didn’t fit through a docking port.

  Orbital Build Station-I was a pretty simple affair. The three cylinders that had returned to Earth from Mars 28 months earlier had been docked to by the three shuttles. The cylinders were now welded together in a triangle, had docking hatches and were welded to the roof of the actual build station.

  The build station was no more than one of the identical cubes that America One’s inner structure had been made with. The cube was the exact same length as the cylinders—forty feet.

  The cube was also forty feet cubed, which allowed large parts of the future spaceships to be made inside. It had two special opening doors that opened one entire side of the cube, and much like a dry dock, allowed a finished part to be floated out.

  When this happened, the entire breathable atmosphere inside the cube had to be sucked into large tanks, which took 48 hours. About ten percent of valuable atmosphere would be lost and would have to be replaced, but it wasn’t necessary to close the whole work bay to eject a smaller production part.

  Two smaller production chambers had been built and welded to each of the larger side opening doors. These separate rooms were only ten feet cubed. The two larger twenty- by twenty-foot doors opened outwards and these smaller rooms, once unhooked from their life support systems, moved out with them. They could be still sealed, or allow smaller parts out at different times, or at the same time.

  A tenth of the circular part of the wheeled spaceship, the largest builds that could be made inside the closed and atmosphere-filled cube, would be floated out when the large doors were opened. The other five large units to be built in the station were the center forward hub, the two rear engine bays and the bridge.

  The smaller interior parts of the spacecraft were to be made in the two smaller rooms attached to each door, and these had external doors that could be opened separately to save the amount of atmosphere lost. The small rooms had their own smaller doors to outer space.

  In one of these small production rooms was where the MMA was floated in, as there was still no atmosphere in the large aircraft hangar-sized cube.

  Pluto Katherine had floated the MMA in with the help of her husband and two others through the opened door of the smaller room. Once it was inside, and with all of the canisters that hadn’t been checked on the asteroid, they allowed the air tanks stored there to begin releasing their atmospheric contents.

  At the same time, the crew had locked two craft onto the two docking ports built onto the roof of the upper cylinder, connecting the ships to them and through the airlocks to the entire structure.

  The whole station was connected by its four docking ports. The other two ports were underneath the cube, and the crew had to float through the atmosphere-less cube to the cube’s roof docking port to get to the accommodation area which was ready for occupancy with air and heat.

  The whole setup was designed with what Astermine already had in space. The forty-foot pieces of outer wall had been either in storage below ground in Nevada or recently made in Israel. It had only taken six months of design, building, and five flights of both shuttles to get nearly everything they needed up there to open up shop.

  Now all the mining crew needed to do was to rest, and wait until there was an atmosphere in the smaller room to go through the rocks and it was warm enough not to need full suits. They could work faster without them. Also it depended on how much radiation the rocks still had inside them. Geiger counters would show when the new atmosphere inside the chamber was safe.

  Within a week of arrival, the bad news came down from the few of the mining crew still in orbit. SB-II had already headed down with the crew that wasn’t needed, including the three most valuable canisters of goods. The news wasn’t good.

  Only five more canisters were filled with the rocks that had the platinum metals in them. Ten more had valuable cobalt and nickel, and the rest fifteen canisters were full of not-so-important iron ore.

  “The mission isn’t a failure,” Lunar told her mining crew two weeks later when they had all rested for a few days getting strong again after their six-month mission. “We still have a fortune in metal from the asteroid, but unfortunately not enough to complete America Two. Jack, we have to find another asteroid, or all work stops in about two years’ time.”

  “Well, as I said, you can head out to thousands of rocks and try your mining luck, like the lottery we talked about, or we can wait until JD2039 is in range,” Jack replied simply.

  “JD2039?” Lunar questioned.

  “Well, I only found it this year, and we don’t have records that show it ever having a name before,” the old man replied sheepishly.

  “And what are our chances with this next rock, Jack?” Pluto Katherine asked. “The last one wasn’t much fun.”

  “I’m not sure. Your findings on 2030JD weren’t what I expected,” Jack replied sadly.

  “I think it was the way we tried to mine it,” added Gary. “We should have given the rock some C4 and then hauled the nice-looking pieces home with a rope, sorry, cord.”

  “A logical idea,” Jack acknowledged. “Maybe the valuable rock we want is deep inside the asteroid. With DX2014, it was only when the asteroid broke up did the diamond vein open and the glitter escape. It was quite funny to hear how VIN Noble flew around tethered to one of the ships to gather the smaller diamonds.”

  “Dr. Schmidt, when do we run out o
f our metal supplies?” Lunar asked her Head of Production.

  “About 19 months. We will have the exterior skin of the wheel completed and the two spokes sealed inwards towards the hub. The bridge will be attached in front of the hub, and complete, but will be totally empty of equipment. The rear area of the hub will have its thrusters installed, and this area will be complete. We will run out of iridium, palladium and platinum first. Then osmium and the other metals a month or so later. Unfortunately, our copper supplies will run out first, and very little is available in the country. I have tried to source pure copper but with no success. We need 10 tons of copper for wiring our systems, and for the ship’s intercom communications. This is our major problem.”

  “What could we use instead of copper?” Lunar asked.

  “Fiber optic cable, of which there is none in the whole country, and believe you me I have looked, or pure gold would be good,” the scientist replied, and Lunar rolled her eyes. That valuable commodity had just come to an end. There was no more left apart froma few chests that had not yet been melted down, and that small quantity wouldn’t matter in the big picture.

  “Well, we had better look forward until something happens,” she declared.

  A year went by, and the Mars crew had not returned on time a month earlier. Nobody worried for another three months, as it was a big window of arrival for the crew to return from the red planet. The babies grew in size and in numbers, and life in the United States went on as usual.

  Slowly the planet’s manufacture returned to good production. A ton of copper was borrowed from Martin Brusk in Israel, but after that even he was getting short.

  The Orbital Space Station became busy, and in the first fifteen months of production, three out of the twelve parts of the wheel was floated out of the build center with the robots welding them together.

  The hub was also coming along. The two large cylinders extending from the stem to the outer wheel were ready. They were twice as wide as the cylinders America One had been built with, and with big wide escalators up to the evolving part of the ship.