The Next Continent (15 page)

“Not a chance. Last century the yen went from 240 to the dollar down to around 80, so in dollar terms, yeah, the price tripled. But this is a domestic transaction, correct? There's no way the final price could even double.”

Reika paused for a moment. “I'm sorry. We seem to have made a mistake. We assumed the costs would be higher.”

Ryuichi smiled. “If we can give you what you want at a lower price, is that a problem?”

“No, of course not. It's just…Tell me, is there only one type of rocket? We thought sending a payload to the moon would require something different from what you have.”

“The moon?” Ryuichi wasn't sure he'd heard correctly. “You want to put two hundred tons
on the moon
?”

“That's right.”

“Two hundred—wait, what's the payload? Are you going to explore the surface?”

“We're going to build a base at the moon's south pole. A manned base.” Sohya nodded.

Ryuichi was now speechless. His visitors had struck him as unsophisticated, but he hadn't guessed that they'd be crazy. So far he'd heard many outlandish proposals, all completely impractical. But for sheer stupidity, this latest proposal beat everything hollow.

Reika looked at him with a hint of nervousness. “Is getting to the moon harder than launching satellites?”

“Hard?” Ryuichi finally mustered a response. “You know how far away that is?”

“It varies between 356,000 and 406,000 kilometers,” she answered brightly. “That's about a thousand times farther than low earth orbit. But there's no gravity in space, right? Once you're outside the atmosphere, we thought the distance wouldn't matter much.”

Right. In other words, you dug out your high school astronomy textbook and brushed up for half an hour
.
And that's about all you know. Hey, wait a minute…
As he groped for a diplomatic answer, Ryuichi suddenly realized that his other visitor looked oddly familiar. Wasn't this the guy from the evening news?

“Mr. Aomine? Are you the Aomine who went to China's moon base?”

“Yes, that would be me.”

“Your training and orientation must've been quite a challenge. How much time did it take to get ready for launch? A year?”

“I'm embarrassed to say this, but we actually trained very little. We had to make the next supply mission, so a month was all we had. Other than the physical exams, all we did was train for basic emergencies.”

Ryuichi groaned inwardly.
And this one's just a space tourist.
He was glad Shinji was here. He looked at his research director.

“Shinji, I think this would be a good time to explain something about rocket capabilities.”

“Should I start with Goddard?”

“Better start with Jules Verne. No, just start anywhere.”

Shinji nodded and turned to the visitors. Without further ado he said, “Do you know how fast a satellite travels?”

Reika answered immediately. “Seven point nine two kilometers per second.”

Shinji nodded. “And why does it travel that fast?”

“So it can perform its functions efficiently, I guess. Like monitor the earth's surface. There's no atmosphere to slow it down, so it can go a good deal faster than an airplane.”

“I see. Okay, maybe I better back up.” Shinji scratched his head and started in again. “A satellite travels as fast as it does to continue falling around the earth. The only reason it goes faster than an aircraft is because if it doesn't, it won't stay in orbit. A ball thrown horizontally to the earth's surface will hit the ground eventually. But if you throw it fast enough, it will keep falling around the curvature of the earth forever. You'd need to throw it at 7.9 kilometers per second. This is known as the first cosmic velocity.”

“I see.” Reika seemed slightly mystified.

“If you throw it even faster, it flies out into the solar system. This is the second cosmic velocity,
escape
velocity: 11.2 kilometers per second. If you want to reach the moon, you have to be traveling at least this fast. Please remember this number.

“Now, the gross weight of the H-3C launch vehicle is 520 tons. Do you know what percentage of that weight is taken up by fuel?”

Reika greeted this sudden shift in topic with puzzled silence. Shinji plunged ahead.

“Eighty percent, about 420 tons. This is called the fuel fraction. For a jet airliner the fuel fraction would be about 40 percent. Why carry this much fuel? Because the first cosmic velocity is so high. To use the usual comparison, it's eight times the speed of a rifle bullet or twenty-five times the speed of an airliner. You don't get that kind of speed from just any engine. A rocket engine is designed to squeeze the theoretical limit of power, or pretty close to it, out of the exothermic reaction of rocket fuel combustion. By feeding a huge amount of fuel into an engine like that, we can escape Earth's gravity—but just barely.”

“So it's not possible to reach the moon?” Reika broke in, seemingly irritated at this long-winded digression. Shinji laughed and waved his hand, no.

“Of course it's possible. All I'm saying is that spacecraft travel at unbelievably high speeds. The differential between the first and second cosmic velocities is 3.3 kilometers per second. That's the extra speed you need to get out of low earth orbit. This differential alone is 12,000 kilometers an hour. So we'll have to carry even more fuel to boost ourselves up to that speed. And the weight of that fuel comes out of your payload.”

“How much payload do we have to sacrifice to carry the extra fuel?”

“Eighty percent. That means you can carry about five tons to the moon,” said Shinji.

“So the cost goes up by a factor of five?”

“I wish it were that simple. If you plan to build a base, you want to put your payload
on
the moon, not just in orbit around it. That means you need a lunar lander. The lander will account for around half the mass you can put on the surface. And there's another problem on top of that.”

“What now?” Reika frowned.

“Look, I'm just telling you how it is,” said Shinji.

Sohya spoke up. “The base will be manned.”

“Exactly.” Shinji smiled.

“The Chinese invested a huge amount on their Long March rocket to make it safe enough to carry passengers,” said Sohya. “The total cost of our launch was almost eight billion yen, with four passengers and the twenty-one-ton Xiwangmu module. But no Japanese rocket has ever taken passengers into space, and the extra safety margin is going to cost us.”

“That's right. We've successfully launched the H-3C fifteen times in a row. Based on the design, the expected success rate is actually 95 percent. Still, that's quite high. Ten years ago, 90 percent was considered enough. Launch ten, lose one. Launch fifty, lose three, maybe four. Failures are expected. Most of them take place early when your design is new. Japanese rockets have a low total success rate for the simple reason that not many have been launched.”

“One out of every ten!” Reika was astonished. “Then how can we put people on them?”

“Well, we're talking about unmanned rockets. For manned flight, you have to work like the devil to get your reliability up to 98 percent, at least. Still, failures happen. NASA's space shuttle flew 150 times in forty years. They lost three vehicles, two with crews. If your chance of failure is about the same as winning a prize in a supermarket drawing, you can't operate commercially.

You have to get your failure rate below 1 percent. But that's a tough one.” Shinji scratched his head again.

“Take the LE-11 engine on the H-3C. Any engine running on LOX and liquid hydrogen is going to be a delicate beast, but the LE-11's two-stage combustion system is unbelievably complex. It uses dual 50,000 rpm turbines. Starting with its direct ancestor, the experimental H-2, then the production-model H-2A, the cluster-engine H-2C, the H-3 using the LE-11, and now the cluster-engine H-3C, we've brought the design as far as we can. That is, without TROPHY.”

“Shinji!” Ryuichi cocked an eyebrow. Shinji's mouth snapped shut.

“So you see how things are,” continued Ryuichi. “Sending people to the moon is a whole different ball game from launching satellites. If you want a crew of people with engineering equipment hauling building materials around on the surface, you can't bunk them in a telephone booth, the way NASA did with the Apollo astronauts. You need to build long-term habitats, rotate your crews, that kind of thing. The operational scale gets very big, very quickly.” He turned to Shinji. “About how much total payload do you think they'd need to launch?”

“Well, if we use the Apollo program as a baseline…” Shinji's gaze floated toward the ceiling as he worked the numbers in his head. He brought his eyes level again and frowned. “Putting two hundred tons on the surface would require a hundred, maybe two hundred tons of support payload. On top of that, sending people there and back, even with current technology, you'll need about five tons of support payload per person. How many you were thinking?”

“We're planning for ten people in the beginning,” said Reika. “Ultimately we want fifty people on the base.”

“Say a hundred people or more over ten years, with rotations. That's five hundred tons. So you'd have to put eight hundred tons of payload on the moon. That's the same as putting four thousand tons into low earth orbit. A ton in low orbit runs a bit over three hundred million yen, so the total would be—”

“One point two trillion…” Reika's voice was hoarse.

Sohya stared at her. “See?”

“Yes, I do. That was the estimate. But for everything: payload, salaries, operations—not just the launches.” Reika looked sadly at her wearcom. She and Sohya exchanged glances. Some shared sense of disappointment seemed to have brought them together for a moment. They lowered their heads.

Sohya whispered, “What are you going to do? That's way over your budget.”

“Mr. Toenji gave me a trump card.” Reika looked up and said innocently, “Everything we've been discussing assumes that we use conventional rockets.”

“Well, of course,” said Ryuichi. “But as I told you, the vehicle is the same for low earth orbit or a trip to the moon. The H-3C is all we can offer you.”

“As of now. But we understand you've got a new engine on the drawing board.”

“A new engine? No, we don't have anything like that.”

“Something called TROPHY?”

Ryuichi and Shinji flinched in surprise.
Yes
, thought Reika.

“I believe it stands for TRansfOrming Power source HYbrid engine. We hear you're working on it right now. Why, Mr. Tai even mentioned it a moment ago.”

“Where did you hear that?” asked Shinji, astonished.

“Shinji, would you
please
?” Ryuichi winced. But Shinji had already taken the bait.

“We're not at liberty to say.” Reika smiled. “But are we in agreement that such a project is under way?”

“Yes, it does exist,” said Ryuichi. “But we're not at the stage where—”

“Thanks for confirming it. If development is successful, we presume our costs would drop significantly.”

“That would be speculation.” Ryuichi stalled for time. He was scrambling to think through the pros and cons of the situation.

TROPHY was extremely confidential. It might be TGT's sole long-term chance for survival. At the heart of the project were Shinji's revolutionary theories—theories Ryuichi was betting the company's future on.

It was his dream to someday apply those ideas to a launch vehicle. Yet if TGT's current dry spell continued, the dream might never be realized. That was something he wanted to avoid at all costs. The alternatives seemed to be getting government approval to seek outside investors or, in the worst case, selling the development rights to TROPHY. If they sold the rights, NASA or ESA could probably finish the work, but it would be impossible for Ryuichi or Shinji to share in the triumph.

Was knowledge of TROPHY something he could entrust to these two people? Perhaps they were industrial spies, posing as greenhorns? That seemed a real possibility.

Reika interrupted Ryuichi's train of thought. “It's not speculation. If TROPHY is feasible, we'll cover your development costs,” she said as Ryuichi's jaw dropped. “Does that interest you?”

“Do you realize how much we're talking here?” said Ryuichi, returning to reality. “It costs ten times as much to develop a rocket as it does to build one unit. It can't be done for a billion or two.”

“We're prepared to pay twenty billion if you can develop the engine. With economies of scale, TROPHY could cut today's launch costs by 95 percent.”

“Where did you find all this out?” marveled Ryuichi.

“Boss!” Shinji slapped his forehead. “My master's thesis. My academic advisor posted the abstract on the institute's website. Other than that, he hardly paid attention to it. Someone probably read the abstract and remembered it.”

“It's always something, isn't it?” Ryuichi said with a sigh. “Well, I guess you're not just fishing.”

He was in a quandary. His visitors didn't seem to be bluffing.

He was no longer concerned about how much they knew. His foreign competitors probably had far more information concerning TROPHY and its workings than these two did. The question was, could he trust them to deliver? Did they really share his determination to go into space?

“I'll be frank,” said Ryuichi. “You have to understand: if TROPHY succeeds, humanity's future will completely change. I'm betting everything I have on it. Give me your firm commitment to stick with this all the way to the end and not bail out when the going gets tough, and I'll do the same. Can you promise me that?”

Sohya straightened up and peered at Ryuichi, who was more than a dozen years older. Ryuichi couldn't help but smile at the fire in his eyes.