Pillar to the Sky (54 page)

It all settled into a routine in which time seemed to just float for Victoria: a daily EVA to load on the next reel and send it on its way; some hours on her iPad talking with her mother, Franklin, and her various team leaders who were keying up for their test; and, like her father, hours at the large porthole, just looking out in wonder, and dreaming of all that now could be.

NASA’s resurgence had been a source of joy. She was given a video tour of Goddard by her mother, introducing old friends who had been called back, and scores upon scores of new young faces who had grown up believing that space was indeed the future of humanity, while so many others became mired in dystopian nightmares. Now, thanks to the Pillar, dreams not believed in since the 1960s were alive again.

Her mother’s video tour included a stop at Erich’s old office, preserved as if he had just stepped out of it but a moment before. It was now something of a museum for the entire facility, and she smiled at the sight of it, remembering playing under the table as a child of four when her parents held conferences with “Uncle Erich,” who always had a small toy or some such thing hidden in his filing cabinet if she was a good girl while he met with her parents.

How she wished he had lived long enough to now see what was transpiring. But, like her father, she had mystical sense that he was still part of the effort and enjoying every minute.

NASA was again the place of the can-do spirit, the dream factory, the inspiration broadcast daily to a hundred thousand schools in America and yet more around the world. Victoria was pleased with the new role she had assumed, of educator. She finally took on a ten-minute spot each day called “News from Space with Dr. Victoria,” in which she went over the previous day’s events. She turned her imagination to it, stepping way past the routines of showing how a “ball” of water behaved in zero g or doing gymnastics in the station. Instead she would strap a cam unit to her helmet and venture outside so all could see what she could see, leaving time at the end of each session for questions and answers and contests for students who could win a slot in NASA’s summer education program, with an ultimate prize, funded directly by Franklin, for a dozen high school students to achieve a flight out to Kiribati and a chance to intern for a month on the base.

Jason had even raised the prospect of a climb aloft on the Pillar, citing how in the late 1920s the Boy Scouts of America held a competition in which the winner, Eagle Scout Paul Siple, went to Antarctica with the legendary explorer Admiral Byrd. Memories of the tragedy of the Teacher in Space Program lingered, but a new spirit of adventure was arising, and several youth organizations around the world indicated they would join in if such an ultimate adventure was offered … with which Victoria and Franklin readily concurred.

And, of course, some giggly fifth grader finally did ask the ultimate question while schoolkids around the world were listening in.

She did hesitate for a second when he asked her to show them how they “did it” up there. She finally replied she’d get back to him the next day. Down on earth, the media was quickly abuzz with anticipation about how she would handle it. She spent a day getting ready for that one, a show that she was told hit the top of the ratings with the school crowd. While discussing what to do the evening before that broadcast, Kevin, with a smile, offered to show how the “guy side of things” worked, which she and the other two women on board shut down without discussion.

The show the next day, with a rather clinical discussion of the plumbing aboard the station, was capped with Jenna taking a shower—fully clothed, of course—and it was a hit.

Kevin had grown far more quiet and introspective since Maury’s death, and for a while Victoria wondered if he was starting to go spacey, and if so, how to talk him into rotating back down when the next crew came up with the module addition. She finally decided against it. He and Singh would stay on: they had found their lives up there and “there” they would stay. Jenna, however, finally announced one day she was ready to rotate off. It took some prodding but then the real truth came out. It was Sanders. There had been a sense that something was developing between them while he was still on board. He had proposed after returning to earth, and since for the time being he was grounded she finally announced that she would return to earth as well.

The weeks slipped by, the stitchers making the work seem almost routine, especially in contrast to the far more harrowing spinners working off the initial two-millimeter-wide thread. Meanwhile, preparations rapidly continued for Victoria’s “grand experiment.”

Her proposal had met with some serious resistance yet again: besides putting additional stress loads on the Pillar, it presented more concerns about orbital impacts. But she had argued that even if they lost the link she dreamed of after even but a few days of operation—if it worked only briefly—it showed the way to the future that the Pillar ultimately offered.

The next launch mission up was already being discussed in the media as perhaps truly the end of an era going back to the beginning of the 1960s—the drama of a manned launch into space. Certainly for some time to come the commercial suborbital and now orbital private launches would continue, but even those would die off as the Pillar was eventually opened to commercial traffic and the five-hundred- and thousand-mile stations opened for business. Granted, for decades to come, there would still be thrill seekers who wished to ride a rocket to space, in the same way some still restored and ran old steam locomotives or antique aircraft with just stick and rudder and “seat of the pants” flying rather than autopilot, but the days of rocket flight were indeed coming to an end.

But a heavy-lift vehicle with the power of an
Apollo
or a shuttle lifting off from Kennedy, with all its might and splendor? Garlin was there, of course, to lament that the Pillar now threatened the existence of this very facility that had at its peak employed tens of thousands. She neglected to mention that for some time to come low-earth-orbit launches would still be very much the norm; a new generation of sats would go up, however, with enough maneuvering capacity to avoid the Pillar and booster stages that, after achieving orbital velocity, were designed for safe reentry over the Pacific or Indian Ocean.

This last expensive launch would be for an additional manned module, to double the workspace and crew capacity. The station currently aloft definitely had gone beyond its intended lifespan, and everyone would breathe a bit easier when the team aloft had a fallback position. Packed in as well were the materials and drop units for Victoria’s grand experiment.

For in her heart and mind, after all, that was the Pillar’s ultimate purpose.

Gone, then, after this would be the days of ascent upon thrones of fire, and Victoria could understand how those of what one pundit now called “the First Space Age”—that of rocketed flight to space—would indeed miss those moments of high drama, in the same way some in the aviation community lovingly preserved and flew aircraft of a long-ago war and the “barnstorming” days of the 1920s and ’30s, when they took off from grass airstrips in underpowered “tail draggers,” while most others simply sat back and let their iPads guide them through all but the final seconds of landing on modern, paved landing strips.

The launch went without a hitch.

After docking, for the new team there was the ritual greeting of saluting the faded decal of the American and Kiribati flags, now joined by flags of NASA, India, the United Kingdom, and others, the request for “permission to come aboard” from Singh, who greeted them with a touch of reserve. Victoria most definitely felt that reserve as well after so many months aloft with her coworkers, her comrades, her friends.

They looked different somehow, a little too fresh, clean, even tanned, and she wondered how they must look in turn. Spending extended time in zero gravity, even when slavishly devoting two hours a day to the exercise torture machine, made one assume a slightly hunched-over posture, using hands as much as feet to move around, mastering how to glide effortlessly the length of the station by a mere push of a finger without bumping into others, and each instinctively understanding the habits and idiosyncrasies of the others. It must be, the four had discussed more than once, how it had been aboard the sailing ships of the age of exploration, with several hundred crowded together in a living area not much bigger than their ship, on journeys of years, but in their case totally cut off from any word of home, and how when they returned to land it would often take weeks, even months, to learn how to live and move about with the unmoving earth under your feet.

The new team, based on the experience of the last attempt at a crew transfer, and well briefed by Victoria, observed the rituals, one of them, of course, “secretly” breaking the rules with a smuggled-aboard gift, but strangely, this time Kevin did not join in other than a polite sip of the eighteen-year-old Scotch; if anything it seemed to trigger depression on his part. The new crew already had their bunk spaces aboard the new module, and there was a sense of remoteness between the two teams except when directly working together.

With the arrival of the new team and all that was packed aboard their ship it was time to test run her own dream of the future.

The test run required two distinct elements, one of which was in the payload bay of this final launch, the other which would be sent up from Kiribati and anchored at the thousand-mile point. There had been general agreement on the design of the first, upper-level deployment. But the second? What appeared to be the simpler, more logical solution had created howls of protest that Victoria’s scheme multiplied the hazards it created.

But on her side it was suddenly quite helpful indeed to have three governors, one of them most influential indeed, from the most populous state in the Union, along with their bevy of congressional and senatorial representatives on board as well supporting the experiment.

In the weeks leading up to the test, an all-out effort was made to build up the lower part of the tower to handle the stress loads.

When she went out on the EVA to observe the unpacking of the equipment, she was a bit overawed. Kevin floated beside her, muttering, “Isn’t this a bit much?”

In what were now the “old days” of the wire, it would have indeed been a bit too much; but after months of building up the strength of the ribbon tower, the stress load both for the lower package and upper pack she was now staring at had been reviewed again and again. It was, for her, the ultimate reason of the tower anyhow, and time to test it out for real and to do so quickly before the various protest groups—and there were many—were able to ram through some injunction.

The new crew member supervising the unpacking, Andy Metziger, one of the new crew members selected by Victoria to oversee the transition of this project from design to deployment, now chuckled as he maneuvered the “experiment” over to the ribbon.

“Doc, you ain’t gonna believe what happens next,” he said on a private comm channel.

Though they had gone over it a score of times in teleconferencing, he explained yet again that the next step, which was to maneuver the “box” (about the size of a small SUV) to the side of the ribbon opposite that to which the station was anchored. The two clamps extending from the box almost looked like jumper cables, with Andy taking over strapping them onto the Ribbon, then stitching them in place. Kevin, who rightly saw himself as the only true master working on stitching, floated a few feet away, watching and saying nothing, but ready to push in if he felt Metzger was doing something wrong. Additional straps, to secure the “box” to the ribbon, were now anchored in. They were down to a safety margin for their EVA suits of only an hour by the time this was done and Andy suggested they go back inside, rest a bit, recharge their suits, then come back out.

“Like hell,” Victoria replied. “We got two hours, actually; the safety margin allows for an hour of additional air, I want to see this deployed.”

“Your command, then,” Andy replied, carefully moving to the far side of the box and releasing several latches. A panel on the side of the box lit up, looking almost like an iPad touch screen.

“Doc, just push the button,” Andy said with a flourish.

There was a moment of polite arguing with Andy and Kevin, but this was indeed something she really did want and in fact had devoted her dissertation to, so she did not argue too long. Some wag had programmed onto the screen:
it’s all yours, Dr. Morgan, now push the red button!

Was it time for a speech, a comment? There was a comm link feed showing the operation, beaming it down to earth, and without doubt many were watching.

No, just go ahead and do it.

She pressed a gloved finger against the button, then floated back and away several meters, Metziger and Malady by her side.

After a few minutes Kevin actually chuckled. “Like watching a dozen clowns climb out of a miniature car!”

Not the most poetic description,
Victoria thought,
but certainly apt.
What was deploying out of the box was a solar panel, folded over again and again. The mounting system was ingenious, flexible nanotubing that, once deployed out, would lock the flexible units together into a rigid whole. Stretched between each row of tubing, solar panels mounted on a wafer-thin Mylar sheet. In fifteen minutes, deployment was complete: more than five acres in area, a built-in guidance system slowly turned it so that it faced the sun directly. As the upper end of the Pillar did its once-a-day orbit around the earth, it would constantly track on the sun to capture the maximum amount of energy, except in the rare moments when the earth eclipsed the sun; there would be constant energy, no night, no clouds, no atmosphere to block the limitless stream of energy that had been shooting past earth since the beginning of time.

She looked at the monitor on the side of the box and gasped. It was already soaking up nearly 100 kilowatts of power.