A science fiction short story by Mike Combs, Copyright © 2020
My name is Arthur Mattson, and Forbes lists me as the richest man on the planet. I got there by being the creator of the Whammy website, which I doubt any of you don’t use on a daily basis.
I was on my way to have lunch with Tom Leslie, who is listed as the second-richest man. He got there by being the author of the Upceleration app, which I doubt many of you don’t have installed on all your data devices.
Another thing we both had in common: We each had our own space programs.
Tom, through his Star Vector Corporation, was pursuing Space Based Solar Power, which I had explained to him more than once was an economic loser. A solar panel in Geosynchronous Earth Orbit might harness 70 times the power of an equivalent panel here on the surface. But there was no way you could emplace that panel in GEO for anything as low as 70 times the price. He was never going to undersell the current cost/kilowatt of natural gas or coal, so why was he bothering? Still, he was plowing ahead with the idea. Like me, he had developed his own reusable space transport for his purposes.
Me, I was aiming for a much higher goal: nothing less than the human settlement of Mars. The name of my company is RedWorld.
Tom was already at his seat at the table. I settled across from him. Just to tick him off a bit I’d made a point of wearing my “Get your ass to Mars” t-shirt.
“Tom, how are you getting along?”
“Just great, Arthur! Just great!” he replied. “Say, I see you just passed a major milestone with Pollux: 100 successful launches. Congratulations!”
Pollux was my reusable launch system. It involved two parallel winged craft. One serves as a booster and the other the orbiter (although they’re essentially the same design). The innovation was propellant cross-feed between the two. As both vehicles fire their engines, the fuel and oxidizer levels in their tanks would drop. But in Pollux, the craft designated the booster also pumps its propellant into the craft designated orbiter. The booster’s tanks run dry very quickly at which point it detaches and begins coming back around to the surface. But at this point the orbiter is several miles up, going at several miles per second, and with fuel tanks very nearly as full as when the vehicle was sitting on the launch pad. Both craft were capable of landing on a standard runway.
Tom’s design was a more-traditional 2-stage rocket, both stages of which splashed down in the ocean for retrieval and reuse.
“Thanks,” I said. “I think what really helped us out is the design equivalence between booster and orbiter. There had been any number of such system design studies, but the booster was always a distinctly different design from the orbiter. Usually a lot bigger, too. I halved my development costs by making both essentially the same vehicle. That also confers an operational flexibility we enjoy. A vehicle might serve as a booster on Monday, an orbiter on Wednesday, and then back to being a booster again by Friday.”
“When a vehicle is designated a booster, what do you do with its cargo bay?” Tom asked. “Is it just left empty?”
“Left empty if the payload is small to medium. For a heavier payload, we insert auxiliary tanks in the cargo bay of the booster. It’s all plumbed together, and there’s propellant cross-feed throughout the system.”
“And I always assumed you chose the name ‘Pollux’ because the two stages are like twins?”
I started to grimace a bit at this point. “Yeah, ‘Gemini’ had already been taken by NASA a long time ago. So it was either that or ‘Castor’. My marketing people worried that Castor would make people think of Castor oil, and wanted to avoid negative connotations. So I went with Pollux, and now find that detractors of my design call it the ‘Bollix’ launch system.”
“Well, you’ll never find me among its detractors. It’s a gorgeous bit of aerospace engineering.” I looked at him closely, but the admiration seemed sincere.
Then came the reason for him asking me out to this lunch. “In fact, Arthur, I’d like to discuss using your Pollux launch system to help with my Space Based Solar Power venture. My launch system is doing reasonably well, but it’s better to have two independent systems you can rely on than just one.”
“Tom, I’ve explained to you more times than I can count that SBSP is a non-starter,” I replied. “Besides, my launch schedule is completely filled. You know we’re ready to start stockpiling in orbit in prep for the next Mars launch window.”
Tom replied, “I’m working an angle on the SBSP. It’s something I can’t discuss in detail right now, but I think it could get me to profitability at an earlier point than you might be imagining.”
“Actually, Tom, I’d much rather discuss you dropping this technological chimera from the 1970’s and coming with us to Mars. Can you think of anything you could be doing with your company more exciting than making Mars the second home for humanity?”
Tom grinned. “I think you know very well I have similar aims, only in high Earth orbit. Once I have everything in place to make Solar Power Satellites out of lunar and asteroidal ores, I’ll also have everything I need to build comfortably Earth-like orbital habitats out of same. I anticipate doing that past a point if for no other reason than to reduce worker turnover. You know, it’s like the billboard alongside the major commute route which says, ‘If you lived here, you’d be home by now’. But I think long-term, building orbital habitats for sale to immigrants from Earth might become an even bigger enterprise than SPS manufacture. We’ll end up making the orbital spaces around the Earth a second home for the human race.”
Before I could even open my mouth Tom started waving a hand in front of him. “I know, you keep saying that vision will never happen because you question the economic viability of the SPS business plan it depends on. But then you propose settling Mars seemingly in the absence of any business plan at all.”
“The economic opportunities on Mars will be boundless!” I asserted.
“Name one,” Tom challenged. “How do you balance the trade with Earth? Name one export for the red planet which will be worth the space transportation costs. You see, my export is going to be energy, and in that fortunate case the export can be beamed down to my customers on Earth. Now if you had Scotty’s transporters…”
“The main export of Mars might be intellectual property,” I countered.
“Sounds kind of vague. And even if that point is valid, I don’t see why my orbital habitats couldn’t balance their trade in the same way, even if you’re right that SBSP is a bust.”
“Planetary science might be the major export.”
Tom leaned back in his chair. “Really? Of the entirety of humanity, what small percentage are scientists? Of that subset, what percentage are planetary scientists? And of that subset of a subset, what further subset studies Mars specifically, or even terrestrials generally as opposed to gas giants or ice moons? What you’re visualizing happening on Mars is something akin to colonial Boston. Do you think that planetary science and intellectual property combined are going to get you to the economic scale of colonial Boston?”
“There will be all kind of ways to make a profit on Mars. Miners will sell ores to refiners. Refineries will sell pure materials to fabricators. Power companies will build solar array farms and sell power to all the other industries…”
Tom interrupted with, “Your Mars habitats won’t be nuclear-powered?”
“No,” I replied. “We’d just as soon avoid the political difficulties of nukes. We’re going with solar.”
“I’d simply assumed you’d use nuclear. Can you name a single community here on Earth which gets all the power it needs from solar? And how much less likely is it when insolation levels are only 59% what they are here at our distance from the sun? Then factor in the seasonal dust storms…”
He badly needed to be interrupted at that point, so I gladly did so. “The major economic opportunity on Mars will be for the manufacturers making habitats for all of the immigrants from Earth.”
“No, see, you’re begging the question there. I don’t mean ‘begging the question’ in the more-modern sense of requiring the question, but in the original sense of the phrase. You know, in the sense of you’re trying to establish a proposition, but your argument presumes the existence of the thing you’re trying to logically establish in the first place.”
Tom’s a bit of a pedant, if you can’t tell.
“You can’t say thousands of settlers will flock to Mars to pursue the economic opportunities being created by all of the thousands of settlers heading for Mars. It’s circular logic. How do you get to square one?”
“You’re putting too much emphasis on economics,” I told him. “Zubrin said, ‘Those who go to Mars will go for hope, not for cash’.”
“Even the idealists will still need a job once they get there. Look, you say I emphasize the economics too much. But you’re discussing settlement, and whether you choose to acknowledge it or not settlement is an economic activity. People only uproot their families and leave all their friends for a frontier if they feel that the economic opportunities there are considerably better than where they’re presently sitting. Until you can get to that, it’s going nowhere.”
Then Tom seemed to think a bit and pivoted to another point. “But let’s discuss what percentage of Mars enthusiasts will actually sign up for your settlement program. Do you think it will be a population on a par with the membership of the Mars Society?”
“I think it will be many times that!”
“I assert that it won’t even equal the membership count. It’s one thing to love Mars enough to send off some dues to get an attractive newsletter. It’s another to love it so much that you pull your family away from the rest of the family and every friend they’ve ever known to go hew a new life out of a rocky wilderness.”
“You think life in Earth orbit will be comfortable or easy in the beginning?” I asked him. “Don’t get fooled by all the pretty paintings. Even if you’re right about the space islands, life in orbit will be pretty rough before you get to that stage.”
“I’m certain you’re right. People will endure the hardship of an untamed frontier, but only in pursuit of economic opportunities which exist there and nowhere else. That’s what I’m trying to get space to. Sure, if the population in my orbital habitats never exceeded the membership of the old L-5 Society then it would never amount to anything of significance. I expect people with no particular love for space whatsoever to come, just in pursuit of the economic opportunities. You would have to get Mars to that point for the same thing to happen there. That’s what I’m trying to get across to you.”
For the second time, our waitress approached the table, and for the second time retreated to a safe distance as the battle still raged.
Deciding to shift to another tack, I told him, “You can’t convince me that I’m not going to have a much easier time building livable habitats on Mars than you’re going to have trying to do same in orbital space. Mars is a world. It already exists. You don’t have to build it from scratch. Why spend so much time and effort moving stuff around from the moon and from asteroids to this and that orbit when you could just tweak a planet instead?”
“Arthur, do you hear yourself?” Tom snorted. “Tweaking an entire world is a feat worthy of the Magratheans.”
“Well, what you’re proposing is like building the entire United States out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”
“Eh, more like building a small Pacific island,” he allowed. “You talk like there’s an advantage for building habitats on Mars and it’s that Mars somehow meets you half-way. But I really don’t think it does, not in any meaningful sense. If it had half the air pressure of Earth, then that would make constructing large pressurized environments a lot easier. But the pressure is less than 1 percent.
“I think we tend to get fooled by the photos sent back. It’s not like the moon; the sky looks as bright as on Earth. It’s a different color than we’re used to but that just makes it all very Star Trekian. But the brightness of that sky is misleading. It’s mostly due to airborne dust. There’s just not a significant difference between engineering for vacuum and for less than 1% atmosphere. On the other hand, that airborne dust will present major problems.
“We’ll both face roughly equal challenges with habitats which are essentially enormous pressure vessels,” he continued. “The other major challenges will be industrializing from scratch, and setting up closed, balanced ecologies, also from scratch. Again, I see the challenges as equal-magnitude. On the other hand, my solar energy costs are going to be a lot less than yours since I’m not operating in the shadow of a planet, and those costs are going to factor into the cost of everything else. And there might be manufacturing and construction advantages in having access to 0-G.”
“That’s very speculative!”
“Eh, maybe.”
“Oh, hey, here’s something,” I said. “You’re going to be surrounded on all sides by hard vacuum. The atmosphere of Mars may be thin, but it’s available anywhere on the planet. My habitats can do something yours cannot which is suck in carbon dioxide from outside, obtaining all of the carbon and oxygen we could ever need. Maybe even useful quantities of nitrogen, too.”
“Well, I’d leave the oxygen out of the discussion. If we’re both refining ores, then we’re both producing much more oxygen than we’ll need. Okay. Let’s stipulate that whenever I need a certain amount of carbon, I have to mount a mining expedition to a Carbonaceous Chondritic near-Earth asteroid. Whereas you can just ‘suck it in’ as you say. Fine. But what percentage of the total amount of material we need is the carbon and the nitrogen?”
Tom snatched up a napkin and began scribbling numbers on it with a Sharpie.
“We don’t have any 10,000-person-habitats for Mars studies, at least not in the level of detail of the old NASA space settlement studies. But let’s use those numbers, since like I said, the challenges will be much more the same between the two cases than what’s perhaps widely appreciated. The biggest line item in the mass-budget is the radiation shield. Now on Mars you might be able to get by with shielding 1/3 the thickness of what I’ll need in high orbit, although it would be a mistake to think you could skip that requirement. But the shielding can be any old material. I’m planning on using the slag left over from the ore refining. You can use surrounding regolith. So let’s base this comparison on the structure itself and its internal furnishings.
“So that takes us from 10 million tons down to 500,000 tons which we’ll label ‘Habitat structure and atmosphere’. The Stanford study had a mass-budget line item labeled ‘Gas and hydrogen’ which I think will cover the nitrogen; that accounts for 21,100 tons. Another is ‘Biomass’ at 5,900 tons which ought to cover the carbon that you’ll instead be able to get from the Martian atmosphere.”
I watched as a column of digits grew down the napkin. It showed the level of fanaticism Tom had for those antiquated NASA-Ames space settlement studies that he could pull those numbers off the top of his head.
“So what you’re talking about represents something less than 5% of the total mass of what we need. The lion’s share of what we’ll need is steel, aluminum, concrete, and glass. Now, what if it turns out that I can refine and process metals and glass more cheaply than you can? I think that will be the case, since I’ll have non-stop solar power which I can harness with enormous-yet-flimsy solar concentrators operating in vacuum. So the economic benefit of being able to pull in some outside gases might pale beside continuous availability of solar power.”
“I’ve heard these arguments before, and it was a long time ago,” I reminded him. “Look, I know you studied under Gerard O’Neill when you were at Princeton, but you’re following this one man to the exclusion of all the other thinkers in the space field.”
“I’d sooner follow the one man who’s right than the crowd that’s wrong,” Tom declared.
Then he straightened up in his seat and shot another question over the table. “What if one of your Mars colonists wants to return to Earth, maybe just for a visit? If he’s been living in 1/3 G for several years or decades, he might find that he can no longer tolerate 1G. At best, it would be a horribly unpleasant experience. My settlers in orbit should have no problems in this regard because we can always rotate for a full 1G of centrifugal force.”
“The people who settle Mars will consider Mars their home,” I explained. “They won’t have any desire to go back to Earth.”
Tom shrugged. “Americans of European descent consider America to be their home. But I’ve observed that they still like to vacation in Europe if they have the finances to do so. It just seems a shame for your Martians to be forever cut off from the land of their ancestors like that. My space settlers needn’t be.”
Then Tom fixes his gaze on me. “What if it turns out that 1/3 gravity is not enough to prevent serious health problems over the long term?”
“One-third G will be enough to keep us healthy,” I asserted.
Tom grimaced and started shaking his head. “No, see, you believe that because you have to, not because there’s any data on this. Curses on the penny-pincher who cut the big centrifuge from ISS! One thing which bothers me about all this is that you’re charging off to Mars with a declared plan of permanent settlement without having first done any long-term life-science experiments in orbit with rotating structures.”
He grabbed up another napkin and began to draw a graph. The X axis he labeled “G” from 0 to 1. The Y he labeled “Adverse health affects”.
“We have some data on 0 G,” he said, putting a little x on the upper-left corner. “And we know that looks really bad. We have only the tiniest bit of data on 1/6 G, and none of it is long term. And we have no data at all on 1/3. Now it could be the relationship is linear,” he said, drawing a straight diagonal line downward. “If so, then you might expect to experience perhaps 2/3rds of the medical trouble astronauts get into in orbit on long durations. The relationship you’re asserting to me is a curve like this.” The curve swooped downward, below the diagonal. “And maybe you’re right. Maybe you’ll only experience 10% of the trouble astronauts in the stations have. And hey, if 1/3 G is fine over the course of a life-time, then I can make my rotating orbital habitats with 1/3 the radius, which makes them a lot easier and quicker to build.
“But we can’t rule out that the curve is like this.” This curve bowed outward to the right, staying always above the diagonal.
Sitting back again he continued the lecture. “There may be a knee to this line, and I think maybe that’s part of your assumption. But even if so, we can’t presently know where it lies. Maybe someone trying to live long-term on the moon would experience terrible medical problems, while one living on Mars would experience almost no trouble at all. Maybe you’re right. But you can’t know. Arthur, you might be sending these people to a place where their health will decline, and then you won’t be able to do anything about it. And what about the babies born there? You say 1/3 G will be enough, but that’s because the entire dream comes crashing down if it isn’t.”
I pushed back from the table. “We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” I said, and then left.
And those are the terms Tom Leslie and I parted on.
* * *
I didn’t see Tom again for 22 years. Partly because the next 2 ½ years were extremely busy for me, but mostly because for the rest of those years I was not on Earth.
Expedition 1 went off and established our first small base on Mars. We selected the southern end of Acidalia Planitia (actually not that far off from where Mars Pathfinder touched down). Expedition 2 involved a much larger build-up in orbit, and that went off on the next launch window. And I made sure I was on board for that. It was the culmination of my dream since childhood.
I found the stark beauty of this harsh landscape breathtaking. The lower gravity conveyed a buoyant, exuberant sensation. I felt more alive than ever before. It fired all of our souls to know that we were on the next frontier for all humanity. And we certainly had the rapt attention of the entire world. What we were doing here was in all the media on a constant basis.
I would have hoped the non-stop interest back on Earth would have translated into higher crew numbers, though. Much to my aggravation, Tom may have been right about our population never even equaling the membership of the Mars Society. The number of volunteers was lower than we had projected, and we faced labor shortages.
Establishing the closed-ecology life support system was problematic. We would get a system most of the way functioning, and then belatedly realize we had to have a certain kind of fungus or bacteria otherwise we would be up to our hips in so-and-so. We’d send off to Earth for a sample of what was desperately needed, but the ecology would have always collapsed by the time it arrived. It took multiple false starts (at enormous expense), but we did finally get our life support system functional and reasonably stable.
The first dust-storm season was a challenge. When the dust finally cleared, we found to our dismay that the glass surfaces of our brand-new greenhouse were now thoroughly sand-blasted and were reflecting away almost half the light. We quietly shelved the plans we’d been working on for a 1,000 person transparent dome colony.
The lower insolation levels on Mars had already been a challenge for our agriculture. This greenhouse fogging setback made us realize use of natural sunlight would be completely impractical here. We fell back to a strategy of using red and blue LEDs to illuminate our crops.
The problem there was the electric bill for doing this. This infernal dust required constant cleaning of our solar arrays, and we’d been power-starved from the beginning. At first the dusting off of the arrays was a very manual operation and the labor costs were phenomenal. We implemented some automation into the process, and that helped some.
But after the sand-storm season we saw that our arrays had taken a 21% efficiency hit. We realized that our solar panels would have to be completely replaced perhaps as often as every 3 to 4 years. This would make our already-high energy costs even higher.
Then media interest in our settlement seemed to taper off rapidly. Maybe the same thing which happened to Apollo was happening to us now. But it’s always possible we made a bit too much out of the hope of finding life, or at least the fossilized remains of life. Year after year went by with no exciting discoveries to report on that front, and we seemed to pay for that in public interest.
Past a point, I had expected my RedWorld company to become profitable. But every year I had to sink tens of billions more of my money into this venture. The revenue streams were few and narrow. A lot of it had been media deals which were now drying up as public interest in what we were trying to do here declined.
Then things got bad.
Aggravatingly, we found ourselves plagued by frequent suicides. I’m really trying to avoid using the word “ungrateful” here, but when I thought about the expenses involved in shipping each of these people from Earth to Mars it made me want to blow a gasket. We were already in a labor shortage; this was intolerable.
I desperately consulted psychologists back on Earth, hoping for a useful solution. They weren’t able to offer us much. The reasons for the problem they offered up varied (isolation, cramped quarters, green-fever), but chief among them was lack of access to sunlight. Most of our population did not make frequent Marswalks, and even those who do don’t exactly have sunshine on their skin. And we’d learned that transparent domes would never be practical on Mars. So now I had to contend with suicide rates worse than those in the Scandinavian countries.
Then, when we were about 18 years into our settlement effort, our medical people began to notice an accumulation of health difficulties. Muscle atrophy. Heart trouble (since your heart is a muscle). Bone decalcification. Falls and other accidents which before would have only involved a few stitches and band-aids were now involving casts. Fifty-year-olds were breaking their hips. There was even a disturbing decline in the immune response.
We were seeing all of the same medical complications as did the astronauts in the orbital space stations, just in a somewhat milder form. The difference was that those astronauts were seldom required to stay in orbit much more than a year. We were living in lower gravity year after year, some of us for more than a decade. The effects were cumulative.
Even just giving up and going back to Earth with our tails between our legs was no longer an option for us. With the present state of our bones and muscles, a trip back to a 1-G environment was medically impossible. Imagine waking up next morning to find that someone has surgically grafted lead weights onto every portion of your anatomy. The result being that your head, limbs, and torso had now tripled in weight.
No pregnancies among our population yet, thank God. I felt it necessary to declare a strict moratorium on anyone starting their families here unless we could come up with some solution to our health problems. Now one of my chief nightmare scenarios was an accidental pregnancy for a female who was morally-opposed to abortion.
Things had reached a point where I really didn’t know where to go or what to do next. I began to dread rising out of bed each morning, worrying what fresh hell the day would present.
* * *
But one morning I was pulled from my bed by a report that radar had picked up an approaching spacecraft. This was a bit of a mystery, as it was not one of ours. I got dressed and made my way to the Control Cylinder.
Ortiz was manning the radar console. “Kind of a peculiar return,” she told me. “Long and skinny; not really like the kind of return I’m used to seeing off a spacecraft. But it’s definitely a ship. It’s been under a small but continuous acceleration the whole time, and there are other indications of intelligent maneuvering. Definitely aiming for us. And it’s substantial.”
“Can we get our biggest telescope on this?” I asked the other technicians in the module.
In short order the biggest screen at the front of the room was showing us a view of the object.
Most of it was like a long thin line. And when I say “long” I mean several miles. But on looking closer, I could see that the line sprouted rectangular solar arrays both above and below. I finally concluded it was a mass driver being used as a reaction engine. I could even see that they had erected aluminized Mylar reflector panels on either side of each solar array, increasing the amount of solar power striking each panel. It was their way of compensating for the weakened rays of the sun at this distance.
On the front of the lengthy mass driver was a pair of counter-rotating bolo habitats for crew. Then ahead of that was a big cluster of technology festooned with parabolic dishes, spherical tanks, and other complicated-looking structures.
The mass driver propulsion system was already making me start to suspect who was behind this when I spotted a Star Vector logo.
“Incoming signal.”
And now Tom Leslie’s insufferable face was on the screen. He was much grayer than when I’d last seen him, but I wasn’t about to tease him about that. I knew my own hair had long since gone solid white, and was also a lot thinner for all the hair-pulling.
“Arthur Mattson, so great to see your face again,” he beamed.
“What the hell are you and your people doing out here?” I asked him.
“I’ve been aware of the difficulties your team has been facing, and I’m here to help.”
“I don’t think you’ll be able to land that long skinny monstrosity here at Acidalia Planitia,” I told him.
“Oh, I assure you we have no plans to descend much further into the Martian gravity well than we already have,” he said with the tiniest note of disdain. “Give me the coordinates for your base on Deimos. We’ll dock there.”
“We… don’t have a base on Deimos.”
“You don’t?” said Tom with surprise. “Why wouldn’t you establish a base on a source of raw materials orbiting high up in the gravity well and largely outside the shadow of Mars? Never mind. We’ll just pick what looks like the best spot, and ground there.”
“How in the world were you able to finance an expedition like this?”
“Oh, the entire thing came in at under a billion,” he related casually. “Star Vector is in the black now. SBSP has been very good to me.”
Trying to keep the sullen out of my voice, I said, “Really?”
“Yeah. Turns out there is a customer already paying several times the going rate for electricity: the military. They were interested in SPS energy for their forward bases in enemy territory. It’s the only alternative for them to trucks delivering diesel, which is horribly expensive as well as dangerous for their personnel. It’s a very small market, but it was enough to get me established. I’ve since been able to drive my costs down, and we’re already starting to make inroads into the broader energy markets now.
“Is all this news to you?” he stopped to ask me. “Are you not keeping up with events off Mars?”
“When I’m watching the news and see the Star Vector logo pop up, I make a point of changing the channel,” I informed him.
Seemingly ignoring the insult, he continued, enthusiasm undiminished. “I was also able to get to orbital habitats much more quickly than I’d anticipated due to a couple of technical innovations. We have 3 small habitats up already, and the 4th will be much bigger. The first 3 were only sized for a population of 10,000 each.”
If I could have crawled through the video transmission to throttle the man, I would have. What he was calling one of his smaller habitats had a population far in excess of my entire base.
“What got us off to such a rocky start was the closed ecology,” I mentioned.
After I told him a bit about how we would keep realizing there was a microorganism we needed after the fact, he said, “Oh, believe me, we went through the exact same thing in the beginning.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah. The difference is that when we would send off to Earth for this kind of bacteria or that kind of insect, the emergency delivery could be to us in 2 to 3 days, not 7 to 10 months. That’s soon enough to rescue a tottering ecology,” he lectured. “There’s something to be said for the idea of starting the first independent biosphere off the Earth a bit closer to home.”
“Why are you here?” I repeated.
“I think I have a solution to your problems with the lower gravity. We’re going to build you a 1-G orbital habitat using raw materials from Deimos. One of our smaller habitat designs should be able to accommodate your entire crew.”
“I hate to tell you this, but that space factory you have on the nose of your spacecraft is not going to have the industrial throughput to build a space habitat in any reasonable timeframe.”
“Oh, well that’s a replicator. Just give it a source of raw materials and sunlight, and it can reproduce itself. We just keep doubling until we’ve ramped up to the industrial capacity we need to do the job.”
“But there’s something else you’re not thinking of,” I reluctantly informed him. “There’s no way we can tolerate 1-G of centrifugal force. We can’t immigrate to your orbital habitat for the same reason we can’t return to Earth.”
“Ah, but you’re forgetting that since we make our gravity ourselves, we’re in complete control of it,” Tom said with intolerable smugness. “We’ll initially only spin up to a RPM producing 1/3 of a G, even at the equator. But then we slowly and gradually increase the spin until you’re at full gravity. My experts tell me that a period of just over two years ought to make the transition gradual enough for you to not experience any major problems. But as we get you closer and closer to full gravity you should find all of your medical problems reversing.”
Okay. This just might work.
“Deimos is just barely above Aresynchronous orbit,” Tom continued. “So that’s where we’ll put the habitat. You’ll get solar eclipsed by Mars a bit more than we get eclipsed by Earth in high orbit, but I think it will be manageable. We can arrange for the eclipses to always happen during your night. Since you’ll be in a geostationary orbit, you’ll even be able to continue your surface explorations via telepresence without any need for relay satellites.
“The habitat design we plan to use is a more-modern version of the old Bernal Sphere design. We call it the ‘Utopian Plains’ model.”
“You’re a bastard,” I said. “You know full well that one of the regions here on Mars is called ‘Utopia Planitia’. Now you’re deliberately messing with me.”
“Not at all,” said Tom, feigning hurt. “You might have had a point if you’d settled in Utopia Planitia, but you instead chose Acidalia Planitia. So your point is completely invalid. But if the name bestowed on this particular model gives offence, a close second choice was ‘Western Hills’. Let’s just agree that’s the name for the Martian version of this space habitat model.”
“How do we get my people up to you?”
Tom looked confused now. “Don’t you have the space transportation systems needed?”
“We have the systems, but maybe not the fuel for a complete evacuation.”
“Why would you be fuel-limited? You’ve got lots of hydrogen and oxygen lying around. You can even make methane if hydrogen is any problem.”
“Well, more like energy-limited,” I confessed.
“Oh, okay. If I wasn’t so stupid, I would have thought of that before,” Tom said, managing to combine false modesty with yet another dig.
He thought intensely for a few seconds. Then he said, “We will be using this space transporter in parts of the operation, but it won’t be needed 100% of the time. And as you can see, we’ve got quite the solar array on this thing. If you guys can build a rectenna on the surface, we can outfit this transporter with a microwave emitter. We’ll park in Aresynchronous orbit, and beam extra power down to you. That should power you enough to help you make the fuel needed.”
“Hey, humanitarian missions to the poor brittle-boned Martians aside, are you sure that you and your people aren’t just here to establish a beachhead for a later push into the asteroid belt?” I asked warily.
Tom chortled, and then said, “No, that’s not it. We’ve already been in the belt for over a year now. That’s actually what this class of crewed space transporter was designed for.”
“What?!!”
“Uh, I see. You thought you had the inside track on exploiting the asteroid belt just because you were closer to it. True, you guys would have enjoyed shorter travel times to the belt than we do, but you’re at the bottom of a planetary gravity well while we’re near the top of one. From a delta-V standpoint we were already halfway to the belt.”
“Fine,” I said. “Let us know when you have your Battlestar Gloatica grounded on Deimos, and we’ll start working up the plans.”
Tom Leslie laughed out loud at my witticism. Then he seemed to grow thoughtful.
“Am I being mean? I’m trying to be a good person here.”
“Yeah, you’re being a real sweetheart,” I replied, sighing. “But seriously, I am looking forward to mixing it up with you again. I know we can do some great engineering together.”
I found myself actually meaning that.
“You bet! I’m looking forward to it, too. See you in a bit!”
And then the face of the apostle of Gerard K. O’Neill was gone from the screen.
I turned to the people around me, and said, “Well, I guess we’re all Gerry’s kids now”.
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This content is a part of the Mike Combs Space Settlement collection and is provided as a courtesy of the Chicago Society for Space Studies and Mike Combs.