Power Failure

by Ben Bova

  For the first time, Tomlinson looked concerned. “You think so?”

  “You’ll generate lots of media coverage when you announce that you’re running—with a solid campaign manager and some money in the bank.”

  Tomlinson glanced at his wife. “That’s what Kevin told me.”

  Amy accused, “So you’re on Kevin’s side?”

  Shaking his head, Jake said, “There aren’t any sides in this. We all want the same thing: Frank and you in the White House. But let’s not jump the gun. Let’s show that we know what we’re doing.”

  Tomlinson said, “I suppose Reynolds could plant a few rumors. That’d get some media coverage.”

  “Frank, you’ve got to decide whether you want headlines now or the election next November.”

  “Both,” said Amy. “Frank’s got to get his name out there, he’s got to be known.”

  “Then let’s do our homework. Let’s get a solid campaign manager and the beginnings of a staff for him.”

  “Or her.”

  Jake felt his eyebrows hike up, but he granted, “Or her.”

  “What you said about campaign contributions makes sense, Jake,” the senator acknowledged.

  “Good.”

  “But we’ve got to get moving,” Tomlinson went on. “It’s almost July already.”

  “Good,” Jake repeated. “Let’s get moving.”

  Shooting for the Moon

  Tomlinson invited Jake to stay for dinner and Jake phoned Tami to join them. Once she arrived—in the middle of the evening news—Amy told the butler to serve their dinner in the formal dining room. Then she poured another round of drinks for everyone.

  The formal dining room always made Jake feel a little uneasy, as if he’d pick up the wrong fork or drop a spoonful of soup on his lap. The huge chandelier dripped with crystal and Alexander Tomlinson’s full-length portrait seemed to be staring at him accusingly. What’s this little guttersnipe from the slums doing at my son’s dining room? the elder Tomlinson seemed to be demanding.

  The long table was set for just the four of them, with candles glowing, gleaming wineglasses, heavy silver cutlery, and blue-patterned dishware that the senator said went back nearly two hundred years.

  Tami made her eyes go wide and joked, “Be careful, Jake. You wouldn’t want to break up the set.”

  Halfway through the main course of roast beef, Tomlinson, sitting at the head of the table facing his father’s stern portrait, asked Jake, “So what’s this idea you’re working on?”

  Jake stopped his fork halfway between his plate and his mouth.

  “The idea for a science issue,” Tomlinson prompted.

  “Oh! That.”

  Tomlinson smiled expectantly.

  Sitting next to him, Tami said, “Tell him, Jake.”

  “It’s not much more than an idea,” Jake said, thinking furiously. “It’s about our space program.”

  Amy said, “That’s pretty much in the doldrums, isn’t it?”

  Nodding, Jake said, “Yes, that’s right. What it needs is presidential leadership.”

  “On to Mars?” Tomlinson asked, with a grin.

  “No,” said Jake. “Back to the Moon.”

  “But we’ve been there.”

  Doing some quick arithmetic in his head, Jake replied, “Not for the past fifty-one years.”

  “Why go back there? What’s the point?”

  “The point is,” said Jake, putting his fork down, “to begin to develop the space frontier. Use the Moon as a resource center. A mining and manufacturing center.”

  Dead silence around the table.

  “Look,” Jake said, warming to the subject, “the reason the program is in the doldrums is that we’ve been thinking of space as a series of onetime objectives, where we plant footprints and the flag and then move on. But it’s not a set of tourist attractions. It’s a frontier! A frontier that we can settle and use to make life better here on Earth.”

  “Settle?” Amy asked. “You mean with people?”

  “Right. Just the way we settled the western frontier. Hell, Jefferson thought it’d take a hundred generations to settle the west. It took less than five.”

  “But in the west there’s air to breathe and water to drink. The Moon doesn’t have either.”

  “There’s water on the Moon,” Jake countered. “You just have to dig it up. And half the content of the Moon’s rocks is oxygen.”

  “You’re saying that people can live on the Moon?”

  “We’ve got the technology to make it happen.”

  Tomlinson asked, “But why, Jake? What good would it be?”

  “What good was Kansas, when we first got there? Zebulon Pike called the Midwestern prairie ‘the great American desert,’ for god’s sake; not a tree in sight for hundreds of miles. Now it’s the great American breadbasket. It feeds half the world.”

  “The Moon instead of Mars,” Tomlinson mused.

  “Not instead of,” Jake corrected. “It’s not a matter of visiting this place or that place. It’s not either/or. Hell, if we had treated the western frontier that way we’d still be arguing over whether we want to build Chicago or St. Louis.”

  “Space is the new frontier,” Amy said.

  “It’s a frontier waiting to be developed, and the purpose of the development is to make life better here on Earth.”

  “How?” Amy asked.

  “For one thing, we can build solar power satellites. Take in sunlight in orbit, convert it to gigawatts of electricity, and beam that power to the ground. Bring down the cost of electricity all around the world.”

  “But it would be expensive building the satellites, wouldn’t it?” Tami asked. “Billions of dollars.”

  “You could cut the expense by a factor of twenty if you took the raw materials from the Moon instead of lifting them up from Earth.”

  “Really?” Tomlinson asked.

  Jake thought the senator was starting to look interested.

  “Really,” he said. “The Moon’s gravity is only one-sixth of Earth’s. And the Moon is airless. You wouldn’t even need rockets to send the raw materials down to Earth orbit. An electric catapult could do it. Cheaply.”

  “So you want to go to the Moon—”

  “To set up the facilities to provide raw materials for building solar power satellites,” said Jake. “Show the taxpayers that space resources can lower their electricity bills. Space isn’t just for astronauts and scientists. It’s for everybody!”

  But Tomlinson shook his head. “Giggle factor,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “You remember when we were putting together the energy plan?” the senator asked. “You wanted to include solar power satellites. But my father pointed out that the voters would think that’s too far-out. Remember?”

  “The giggle factor,” Jake grumbled.

  “People would think it’s too fantastic,” Tomlinson said. “Space cadet stuff.”

  “No!” Jake snapped. “We’ve got this enormous frontier that starts just a hundred miles away from where we’re sitting. It’s got resources of energy and raw materials that can make jobs here on Earth, produce whole new industries, transform the global economy—”

  “But how much will it cost to get there? Can we afford the expense? Would Congress vote for hundreds of billions of dollars for some wild space adventure?”

  Feeling anger simmering inside him, Jake answered, “It’s not a wild adventure, no more than settling the western frontier was.”

  Before Tomlinson could respond, Jake went on, “Do you realize that the old Apollo program was the greatest peacetime stimulus to the American economy, ever? Sure we spent twenty billion to get to the Moon—”

  “Twenty billion in the nineteen sixties. It’d be more like a hundred billion in today’s dollars.”

  “So what? The new technologies we developed for Apollo have poured trillions into the economy. How much is the computer industry worth? Cell phones, the Internet. How about the ICUs in
hospitals? All based on technology originally developed to keep astronauts alive in space.”

  “Isn’t that a slight exaggeration?” Amy asked, emphasizing the slight.

  “What about the cordless power tool industry?” Jake challenged. “That was created when NASA realized they couldn’t run extension cords from Cape Canaveral to Tranquility Base.”

  Tomlinson broke into a hearty laugh. “All right, Jake. All right. You put together a space program, like you did the energy plan. Maybe it’ll work.”

  Jake could feel his pulse thundering in his ears.

  Then the senator added, “But it’s got to make economic sense, Jake. No pouring money down a rathole. I want to see a plan that makes a net profit for the American people.”

  Jake nodded, thinking that Tomlinson was already talking like a political candidate.

  Good.

  Isaiah Knowles

  Jake and Tami drove back to their condo in their separate cars. All the way there, Jake kept thinking, We can do it. We can go back to the Moon and start using space resources to grow the economy, make more jobs, start whole new industries.

  But he knew the flaw in that thinking. An enhanced space program would have to be funded by tax dollars. NASA would have to lead the way. The benefits to the economy would come later, from private corporations. We’ll have to sell the new space program as an investment in the nation’s economic future.

  But whoever’s going to be running against Frank will paint the program as a huge new expense that the taxpayers will have to foot.

  What was the term they used back in the sixties? Moondoggle.

  The giggle factor again.

  That’s what helped to kill the Apollo program in the first place. How do I get past that?

  Tami’s car was already parked in the building’s underground garage, Jake saw. How’d she get here ahead of me? he wondered as he rode the elevator up to their top-floor unit.

  When he opened the front door he saw Tami standing at the kitchen cabinet where they stored the liquor.

  “Ready for a celebratory drink?” she called to him.

  Jake went to her and gave her a swift kiss. “What are we celebrating?”

  With a delighted smile she said, “Your new space program, of course.”

  Jake shook his head. “I’ll take a drink, but we don’t have a new space program, not by a long shot.”

  “Drambuie?” she asked, undeterred. “On the rocks?”

  “Whatever.”

  As she poured, Tami said, “You don’t seem very excited.”

  “I’m not. All I’ve done is made a lot of work for myself. Frank wants a plan that makes a net profit.”

  “So?” Tami asked, handing him a small snifter.

  “It’d take ten years or more for the program to show any profits. Meanwhile it’d have to be funded by taxpayers’ money; all expenses, no profits for at least ten years.”

  They walked to the sitting room sofa and sat down: Jake glumly, Tami still smiling at him.

  “What about the private space companies?” she asked. “You told me they’d be interested in this.”

  “Most of them are barely hanging on. None of them have the equipment or the money to go to the Moon. They’re mostly talk and dreams.”

  Tami’s smile faded. “I thought they’d be eager to help.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Maybe you should ask them?”

  Jake took a long swig of the iced Drambuie. “Maybe I should,” he agreed.

  * * *

  Isaiah Knowles, Jake remembered. He’d been a deputy administrator at NASA back when Jake was putting together the energy plan that helped get Tomlinson elected to the Senate. A former astronaut, Knowles was hot to trot about solar power satellites, but NASA’s top management had scant interest in the idea. Jake had wanted to include space solar power in his energy plan, but eventually took it out because of the giggle factor.

  Pie in the sky. Moondoggle. So Jake had cut out the solar power satellite from the energy plan and stuck with Earth-based ideas like new, more efficient electric power plants and methanol additives for gasoline.

  And Tomlinson got elected.

  Grimly, Jake told himself, That was then, almost six years ago. This is now.

  It turned out that Knowles had left NASA two years earlier and was now the Washington representative for a coalition of small, struggling, private space companies that called itself the Space Futures Foundation. With an office on K Street, no less.

  Knowles answered Jake’s phone call warily. In the phone’s small screen, Jake could see that the ex-astronaut still felt betrayed by Jake. He was an African-American, his skin the color of cocoa, the expression on his face combative.

  He looked almost pained as he forced a smile and said, “Hello, Dr. Ross.”

  Feeling the strain, Jake forced a smile too and replied, “Jake.”

  “What can I do for you … Jake?”

  “You can have lunch with me at your earliest convenience. I need to talk with you.”

  “The last time we talked you slit my throat.”

  Flinching back in his desk chair as if he’d been slapped in the face, Jake stammered, “I … I guess I can’t blame you for feeling sore.”

  Knowles pulled in a deep breath. “Okay, sorry. That was uncalled for.”

  “I do need to talk with you,” Jake said.

  “Lunch, huh?”

  “As soon as you can make it.”

  With a sardonic little smile, Knowles said, “My calendar isn’t all that crowded. How about tomorrow?”

  “Fine,” said Jake.

  * * *

  They met at the Old Ebbitt Grill, within walking distance of the White House. It was a popular hangout for Washington’s office workers, a place where government bureaucrats and corporate executives could meet and hammer out their differences—or at least have a few drinks together and ogle the women at the bar.

  The place was jammed, as usual, but being a senator’s aide carried some weight when Jake called for a reservation; when he came in he was immediately seated at a booth toward the rear. The bar was crowded four deep and the noise of dozens of conversations made the whole place quiver.

  Jake sat down and ordered a club soda. No booze, he told himself. Keep your head clear.

  The TV screen above the bar was muted, but Jake could see a view of the Kremlin. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, had apparently suffered a stroke and was hospitalized. Straining to read the printout of the news commentator’s words, Jake saw that Putin was hovering near death.

  Jake began to fear that Knowles was going to stand him up, but at last he saw the former astronaut shouldering his way through the standees at the long bar, following the harried maître d’ to the booth.

  Knowles was on the small side, an ex–jet jockey, but built solidly, his midsection still flat, although his buzz-cut hair was turning salt-and-pepper.

  Jake half stood up as Knowles slid into the booth opposite him. They shook hands. A waiter appeared out of the crowd and Knowles ordered a Guinness.

  “Been a long time,” Knowles said tightly.

  “Nearly six years.”

  “So what’d you want to talk to me about?”

  “The Moon.”

  Knowles stared at Jake. The waiter arrived with his glass of dark beer and departed.

  Knowles took a long pull on the beer, then said, “The Moon.”

  “I’m putting together a program—”

  “Another plan,” Knowles said. “Like your energy plan.”

  “This one’s about the space program.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I need to talk with the movers and shakers in the private space industry and see how interested they might be in building a permanent base on the Moon.”

  Knowles grunted. “Most of ’em are more interested in figuring out how they’re going to survive the next fiscal quarter.”

  “Space tourism isn’t profitable?”

  �
�Not much. We’ve reduced costs, but the best ticket price we can manage is still around fifty thousand for a three-orbit ride. Fifty thou for three spins around the world, then back to New Mexico.”

  “Your launching center is in New Mexico?”

  “Yeah, and it’s running on a shoestring.”

  “But I thought you had big backers, Silicon Valley billionaires, that kind of money.”

  “Even billionaires get tired of red ink,” Knowles said.

  Hunching forward and leaning both forearms on the table, Jake asked, “Do any of your companies—or a combination of companies—have the hardware to reach the Moon?”

  “With people?”

  “Yes.”

  Knowles shook his head. “We’ve got plans. We’ve got rocket boosters that could be beefed up, given the financing to do the beefing. But nothing in being.”

  “Suppose the federal government provided the financing? Could you handle a program to build a permanent base on the Moon?”

  Knowles reached for his beer, but stopped halfway there. “Why do you want to build a base on the Moon?”

  Jake couldn’t help grinning at him. “To manufacture solar power satellites, among other things.”

  Knowles blinked once, twice, then broke into an answering grin.

  Campaign Manager

  Money is the root of all evil, Jake said to himself. Then he added, And all good, too.

  He was holed up in his office, a small but comfortable room on the far side of Senator Tomlinson’s suite: solid oak desk, waist-high bookshelves filled with volumes that Jake had actually read, a window that looked out at the Supreme Court Building across Constitution Avenue.

  For the past week Jake had been trying to figure out how much his proposed space program would cost. Billions, he saw. Tens of billions. Maybe a hundred billion.

  Too goddamned much, he realized. Frank isn’t going to stick his neck out for a program that costs a hundred billion dollars. He’d have his head cut off inside of a week.

  But the facts of the matter were that space operations are expensive. The struggling private space companies had brought down costs somewhat, but launching human beings into orbit still cost at least ten million per shot. Sending people and equipment to the Moon cost still more.