The Mayan Resurrection (43 page)

—unaware that his fiancée is following him, less than ten car lengths behind.

Situated on 140,000 acres of wildlife refuge, located northeast of Cocoa Beach, Florida, are the two barrier islands housing America’s gateways to space.

The smaller barrier island east of the Banana River, bordering the Atlantic Ocean is Cape Canaveral, former home of the Cape Canaveral Air Station and its unmanned launches. Just west of the Cape is Merritt Island, situated between the Banana and Indian Rivers. This larger land mass belongs to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), which includes the facilities of NASA and her sister organization, 3M-P (Manned Mission to Mars Project).

The origins of KSC and America’s space program can be traced back to the first Cold War, when the conflicting ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union blossomed into a full-fledged race into space. In an attempt to keep pace with the Russians, America formed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), ordering the Department of Defense and other ‘rival’ national organizations to step up their own research in the fields of rocketry and the upper atmospheric sciences. Unfortunately, the lack of a unified program and the typical in-house bickering among the Armed Forces combined to severely hamper the nation’s
progress toward achieving their number one goal: human spaceflight.

America would receive its wake-up call on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1. Responding to a race the United States was clearly losing, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA would take control of space away from the Armed Forces and absorb all existing research centers.

NASA began by focusing the bulk of its hundred-million-dollar annual budget on Project Mercury—a series of launches and experiments designed to evaluate whether humans could survive in orbit. Thirty-one months later, Alan Shepard Jr. became the first American to fly into space. Mercury’s success led to the Gemini Project, an extension of the human spaceflight program that utilized a spacecraft built for two astronauts.

President John F. Kennedy recommitted the nation to space in 1961 by announcing his goal to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely before the end of the decade. It was a specific goal—exactly what NASA needed, giving birth to Project Apollo. On July 20, 1969, eight years, eleven missions, and $25.4 billion dollars later, astronaut Neil Armstrong uttered his famous words, ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’

Mankind would take a giant leap backward in 1967, when politics once more interfered with science.

The Outer Space Treaty was a document initiated, negotiated, and rammed through Congress by a group of National
Security and State Department officials whose only desire was to use fear to shut down the space program so that monies could be redirected to the Vietnam War. Within four short years, space funding had dropped a crippling 45 percent.

Had this not occurred, the momentum of the Apollo program might have led to the establishment of a moon base in the 1980s and a Mars colony before the year 2010, uniting the global superpowers, preventing the nuclear war of 2012.

More devastating political decisions would follow.

A 1969 task force was asked to come up with three long-range space options. These were: a manned Mars expedition; a space station in lunar orbit with a fifty-person Earth-orbiting station serviced by a reusable ferry, or the Space Shuttle, a vehicle designed to take off as a rocket and return to Earth by gliding home like an unpowered airplane.

President Nixon opted for the Space Shuttle.

On April 12, 1981, the shuttle’s first mission, STS-1, took off from NASA’s launch operations center, now renamed the Kennedy Space Center. For the next six and a half years, the STS Fleet would perform brilliantly as their crew conducted a wide variety of scientific and engineering experiments in space.

A Space Shuttle launch costs approximately $600 million dollars, yet this extraordinary price tag has little to do with the laws of physics or engineering. In simple terms, the business of space never had any cost constraints or competition, leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse.

As an example, Lockheed Martin, the largest aerospace contractor in the world, rarely accepted hardware contracts on a fixed-cost basis. Instead, they ‘suggested’ what a space vehicle
might cost, then added 10 percent as a profit. Once contracted, a myriad of managers and planners are added, driving up the cost of the vehicle—along with Lockheed Martin’s profit.

Besides making space extraordinarily expensive, this tactic created an ‘old boy’ mentality that stagnated progress in space technology, resulting in no new U.S. launch systems in development. Instead, NASA continued to use an antiquated vehicle, armed with pre-Pentium electronics inferior to most video games, and fragile heat-dissipating tiles designed before breakthroughs in materials science.

Cost overruns and White House cuts would lead to even more serious negligence.

Following the
Challenger
and
Columbia
disasters, and the public’s realization that the development of the International Space Station held no scientific purpose, the Bush and Maller administrations forced a ‘reorganization’ of the space program, refocusing its strategies not on space exploration, but space missile defense systems reinforced by policies of fear. Six years and $120 billion later, the only major accomplishment of SDI was to jump-start the second Cold War.

And once again, the future of humanity stumbled.

What the space program lacked was vision and a clear set of goals. Landing probes on Mars was important only if it led to the colonization of the Red Planet in the foreseeable future. What the public really wanted was space tourism. What had happened to all the promises of the ‘Buck Rogers’ era? Space, like politics, had become the frontier of the elite, each mission becoming more prosaic. Tax-payers could care less what temperature aluminum oxidized in a vacuum; they wanted to be a
part of the action. The Wright Brothers’ invention had led to the advent of commercial airlines. Space had led to the sale of personal computers.

When would John Q. Public be afforded the same opportunity to take his family into space?

The Russians would be the first to give space tourism a go, funding the Cosmopolis-XXI (C-21) space plane, a craft designed to be piggybacked atop an airplane and released at 56,000 feet. From there, the space plane’s solid-fuel rocket engine would propel it to an altitude of sixty miles for three minutes of weightlessness.

At $98,000 (or $540 per second) it was hardly a bargain, and the space plane was fraught with mechanical problems.

President Chaney’s ‘vision’ speech moments before Jacob Gabriel’s murder was turned into a rallying cry that recommitted the American public to the space program. Two months after the Gabriel twins’ death President Marion Rallo and a new team at NASA announced its Manned Mission to Mars Project (3-MP), an ambitious 143-billion-dollar project designed to establish a series of habitable hubs on the Red Planet’s surface by 2049.

Mars is the only other planet in our solar system endowed with the natural resources necessary for human civilization. Its soil possesses carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, as well as water frozen as permafrost. Its atmosphere is dense enough to protect inhabitants from solar flares, its solar light ample for greenhouses.

The 3-MP’s mission was based on an exploration approach developed in 1990 by Robert Zubrin, then a senior engineer at
Lockheed Martin. The key to the ‘Mars Direct’ plan was to travel as light as possible, with rotating crews establishing habitats that would allow them to live off the land. The soil on Mars would provide for food, water, materials, and rocket fuel.

By September of 2029, the ERV (Earth Return Vehicle), a new multistage rocket constructed using parts from already existing vessels, was sitting on its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, ready for takeoff.

Everything changed six weeks later, when the private sector officially stepped up to the plate.

Project HOPE (Humans for One Planet Earth) was conceived in 2016 by a group of former astronauts, design engineers, and rocket scientists who had left NASA years earlier because of the agency’s ‘good ole boy’ policies. Unlike other private rocket companies, they were not interested in launching satellites. HOPE was interested in space as public recreation.

The key to HOPE’s future was a design for a new space plane, one that could take off horizontally like a jet, rise to its maximum turbojet altitude, then use boosters to rocket the passenger vehicle into space. Once in orbit, the paying public would enjoy twelve hours of zero gravity and a lifetime of memories.

All HOPE needed was a major investor, one that could provide factories and the financial backing to launch the company.

Enter Lucien Mabus, CEO of Mabus Tech Industries.

Lucien had inherited MTI, but was bored with running his father’s company. What he needed was a challenge, something he could call his own.

At the urging of his intoxicating fiancée, Lilith, Mabus struck a partnership with HOPE’s directors. Fourteen months later Project HOPE went public, offering investors an opportunity to claim their stake in the future.

The response from the global market was mind-boggling. Opening at 22, the stock closed the first day of trading at 106. By week’s end it had split twice and was still soaring at $162 a share, making majority stockholder and HOPE’s CEO Lucien Mabus the world’s first trillionaire.

Attitudes in Washington changed overnight. Cape Canaveral Air Station, which controlled the barrier island and all launch facilities east of the Banana River, offered to move the Air Force’s Forty-fifth Space Wing in exchange for a long-term lease with HOPE. Lucien Mabus turned them down, preferring to erect a new complex in the city of Cocoa Beach at half the cost.

On December 15, 2029, HOPE’s first ‘space bus’ took off down its new fifteen-thousand-foot runway. On board were 120 passengers, including key stockholders, political dignitaries, a dozen members of the media, and a crew of twelve.

Nothing real or imagined could have prepared these civilians for the magic of space. The sixteen-hour flight was smooth, the service first-class (just eating in zero gravity an experience unto itself) and the view—well, the view was both spiritual and humbling.

Within two months, HOPE was shuttling four space buses a week at a cost of $100,000 per ticket. Even with its high price tag, there was still a fourteen-month wait.

By April of 2032, three more space buses had been added to
the fleet, dropping ticket prices to $39,000. By 2033, over eight thousand people representing every nation had orbited the planet.

The residual impact upon humanity was profound. ‘One Planet—One People,’ became HOPE’s mantra. Many believed it was no coincidence that the last oppressive government fell to democracy during the space bus’s reign. Religious and racial tensions eased. The global economy boomed as technology raced to keep up with the exploitation of space, and the exploitation of space created new Earthbound technologies.

By focusing its energies on the heavens, humankind had finally grown beyond its childish adolescence.

Plans were soon revealed for Space Port-1, the first space platform/hotel designed to accommodate the paying public. When completed, SP-1 would contain three main structures, each configured in the shape of a bicycle wheel. The upper wheel, known as the ‘hub,’ would house a restaurant, bar, gymnasium, and, at the very end of the structure, a nonrotating zero-gravity observation deck. Below the hub, connected by a main elevator shaft surrounded by spokelike corridors was the middle wheel, or ‘Spotel.’ The largest of the three structures, the 1,950-foot donut-shaped living quarters, rotating one revolution per minute, would provide guests with a third of Earth’s gravity. Below this massive wheel, connecting to the Spotel through an access shaft were SP-1’s control room, infirmary, crew and staff’s quarters, and the Space Port’s docking station.

Seventy-five private guest modules would afford SP-1’s clientele five fun-filled days in space. No amenity would be spared. All
suites would be equipped with videophones, Internet uplinks, twenty-four-hour-a-day room service, and private viewports. Activities would include space walks, guided tours of the command center and engine room, and full-body, gravity-free workouts in the gym. For another $30,000, a lucky few could even board a lunar shuttle for a two-day excursion around the moon.

Advertisements were already flooding the global market:
SPACE PORT-1: Join the 220 MILE CLUB
. Total standard vacation package (including round-trip launch fare) a mere $120,000 per person.

Six months after its plans were revealed, SP-1’s reservation list (nonrefundable 15 percent deposit required) was already two years long, and three more hotel chains were negotiating with HOPE to build a Spotel on the moon.

Undaunted, NASA’s MP-3 program continued moving toward the successful construction of its Mars Base. With the global economy humming and humanity focused on space, the U.S. Congress increased the space program’s budget to levels previously enjoyed by the Defense Department, allowing for the design and construction of a moon base and lunar observatory/radio telescope.