Time. Stephen Baxter
the giant softscreen behind him he let them look at a software-graphic image of George Hench’s BDB on the pad. It looked something like the lower half of a Space Shuttle – two solid rocket boosters strapped to a fat, rust-brown external fuel tank – but there was no moth-shaped Shuttle Orbiter clinging to the tank. Instead the tank was topped by a blunt-nosed payload cover almost as fat and wide as the tank itself. And there were no NASA logos: just the Bootstrap insignia, and a boldly displayed Stars and Stripes.
There were some murmurs from his audience, one or two snickers. Somebody said, It looks more Soviet than anything American.
So it did, Malenfant realized, surprised. He made a note to discuss that with Hench, to take out the tractor-factory tinge. Symbolism was everything.
Malenfant pulled up more images, including cutaways giving some construction details. ‘The stack is over 300 feet tall. You have a boat-tail of four Space Shuttle main engines here, attached to the bottom of a modified Shuttle external tank, so the lower stage is powered by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. You’ll immediately see one benefit over the standard Shuttle design, which is in-line propulsion; we have a much more robust stack here. The upper stage is built on one Shuttle main engine. Our performance to low Earth orbit will be 135 tons – twice what the Shuttle can achieve.
‘But LEO performance is secondary. This is primarily an interplanetary launcher. We can throw fifty tons directly onto an interplanetary trajectory. That makes the avionics simple, incidentally. We don’t need to accommodate Earth orbit or re-entry or landing. Just point and shoot …’
It may be Big and Dumb but it’s scarcely cheap.
‘Oh, but it is. What you have here is a bird built from technology about as proven and basic as we can find. We only use Shuttle engines and other components at the end of their design lifetimes. And as I’ve assured you before I am investing not one thin dime in R&D. I’m interested in reaching an asteroid, not in reinventing the known art. We believe we could be ready for launch in six months.’
What about testing?
‘We will test by flying, and each time we fly we will take up a usable payload.’
That’s ridiculous. Not to say irresponsible.
‘Maybe. But NASA used that approach to accelerate the Saturn V development schedule. Back then they called it all-up testing. We’re walking in mighty footsteps.’
There was some laughter at that.
You have the necessary clearance for all this?
‘We’re working on it.’
More laughter, a little more sympathetic.
‘As for our own financial soundness in the short term, you have the business plans, downloaded in the softscreens in front of you. Capital equipment costs, operating costs, competitive return on equity and cost of debt, the capital structure including the debt to equity ratio, other performance data such as expected flight rate, tax rates and payback periods. Even the first flight is partially funded by scientists who have paid to put experiments aboard, from private corporations, the Japanese and European space agencies, even NASA.’
You must realize your whole cost analysis here is based on flawed assumptions. The only reason you can pick up Shuttle engines cheap is because the Shuttle program exists in the first place. So it’s a false saving.
‘Only somebody funded by federal money would call any saving “false”,’ said Malenfant. ‘But it doesn’t matter. This is a bootstrap project, remember. All we need is to achieve the first few flights. After that we’ll be using the resources we find out there to bootstrap ourselves further out. Not to mention make ourselves so rich we’ll be able to buy the damn Shuttle program.
‘I know this isn’t easy to assess for any investor who isn’t a technologist. Exercising due diligence, how would I check out such a business plan? Who else but by giving it to my brother-in-law at NASA? After all, NASA has the only rocket experts available. Right?
‘But NASA will give you the same answer every time. It won’t work. If it did, NASA would be doing it, and we aren’t. All I can ask of you is that you don’t just go to NASA. Seek out as many opinions as you can. And research the history of NASA’s use of bureaucratic and political machinery to stifle similar initiatives in the past.’
There was some stirring at that, even a couple of boos, but he let it stand.
‘Let me show you where I want to go.’ He pulled up a blurred radar image of an asteroid, a lumpy rock. ‘This piece of real estate is called Reinmuth. It is a near-Earth asteroid, discovered in 2005. It is what the astronomers call an M-type, solid nickel-iron with the composition of a natural stainless steel.
‘One cubic kilometre of it ought to contain seven billion tons of iron, a billion tons of nickel, and enough cobalt to last three thousand years, conservatively worth six trillion bucks. If we were to extract it all we would transform the national economy, in fact, the planet’s economy.’
How can you expect government to support an expansionist space colonization program?
‘I don’t. I just want government to get out of the way. Oh, maybe government could invest in some fast-track experimental work to lower the technical risk.’ Nodding heads at that. ‘And there may be kick-starts the government can provide – like the Kelly Act of 1925, when the government gave mail contracts to the new airlines. But that’s just seedcorn stuff. This program isn’t called Bootstrap for nothing.
‘We have a model from history. The British Empire worked to a profit. How? The British operated a system of charter companies to develop potential colonies. The companies themselves had to bear the costs of administration and infrastructure: running the local government, levying taxes, maintaining a police force, administering justice. Only when a territory proved itself profitable would the British government step in and raise the flag.
‘The French and Germans, by contrast, worked the other way around: government followed by exploitation and trade. By 1900 colonial occupation had cost the French government the equivalent of billions of dollars. We don’t want to make the same mistake.
‘We believe the treaties governing outer space resources are antiquated, inappropriate and probably unenforceable. We believe it is up to the US government to revoke those treaties and begin to offer development charters along the lines I’ve described. What we’re offering here is the colonization of the Solar System, and the appropriation of its resources as appropriate, on behalf of the United States – at virtually zero cost to the US taxpayer. And we all get rich as Croesus in the process.’
There was a smattering of applause at that.
He stepped forward to the front of the stage. Before him there was a sea of faces – mostly men, of course, most of them over fifty and therefore as conservative as hell. There were representatives of his corporate partners here – Aerojet and Honeywell and Deutsche Aerospace and Scaled Composites, Inc. and Martin Marietta and others – as well as representatives of the major investors he still needed to attract, and four or five NASA managers, even a couple of uniformed USASF officers. Movers and shakers, the makers of the future, and a few entrenched opponents.
He marshalled his words.
‘This isn’t a game we’re playing here. In a very real sense we have no choice.
‘I cut my teeth on the writings of the space colony visionaries of the ’60s and ’70s. O’Neill, for instance. Remember him? All those cities in space. Those guys argued, convincingly, that the limits to economic growth could be overcome by expansion into space. They made the assumption that the proposed space programs of the time would provide the capability to maintain the economic growth required by our civilization.
‘None of it happened.
‘Today, if we want to start to build a space infrastructure, we’ve lost maybe forty