Encounter With Tiber Read online

  Sig nodded. “Of course. As long as you don’t go all the way out to the Moon—as long as you just go up, and make a few elliptical orbits out to a thousand kilometers—then the acceleration at peak is about the same as it is for a simple low Earth orbit trip. Peak acceleration comes from reentry, you see, not from launch. If you were to go to a lunar distance, then you’d be up at six g’s or so, which is rough—because you just can’t take enough fuel along to allow you to come back, decelerate into low Earth orbit, and then descend. From a lunar return you’d have to plunge right into the atmosphere and use the air to slow you down, same as the old Apollo capsules did. That’s why we’re not planning to offer flights to the Moon for a long, long time—not until we can think about decelerating people in stages to hold down peak acceleration.”

  The heavy man nodded. The woman beside him tentatively put up her hand and said, “Didn’t you mean hold down deceleration? You’re slowing down—”

  Sig smiled. “Deceleration is an English teacher word.”

  “I was an English teacher. At least until this actor led me astray.”

  “Well, if you’d taken a walk down the hall to science class, you’d have found out that physicists define acceleration as change in speed or direction of motion, because it all has the same effect. Your body doesn’t care whether you’re experiencing one g because you’re in a centrifuge that’s constantly changing your direction of motion, or because you’re speeding up or slowing down, or because you’re in a one-g gravitational field. It’s all the same thing and it’s all called acceleration.” He stretched and smiled at them all. “And, of course, recreationists have known for many years that acceleration, at least in reasonable doses, is what’s known as fun—or how do you explain skyboarding, extreme skiing, roller coasters, and aerobatics?”

  Salesman that he was, he knew it was time to set the hook, so he put the questions to them then—would they want to take this step? Was this the time?

  Some, of course, resisted it; no salesman is perfect. But enough had stepped forward to shake Sig’s hand and make arrangements for further discussions. Within weeks papers were drawn up, large loans at long terms were extended, and a board of directors for the new company was in place (though in reality Sig had control of everything). As of August 4, 1999, ShareSpace Global was underway.

  From the beginning it was attacked by government and media. After two years of running tours to Canaveral, Baikonur, Hainan, and JPL, plus “Meet the Astronauts” luncheons and expanded Space Camps, ShareSpace Global had begun to sell shares and tickets for suborbital flights, though they did not yet have a vehicle.

  Just as the beginnings of investigations were underway, ShareSpace Global rolled out plans for their first project: Skygrazer, a modified version of a Starbooster shell. The forward engine was there, but where the Zenit rocket itself had been, there was a comfortable space for a dozen passengers, pilot, copilot, and attendant. The Skygrazer could then be attached, belly-to-belly, with a Starbooster, and launched vertically.

  It didn’t have nearly enough thrust to get to orbit, but it didn’t need it to provide people with the ride of their lives. When the Zenit burned the last of its fuel and the stages separated, the Skygrazer would continue on upward until it reached an altitude of just over 50,000 meters. At this point it would be moving at nearly Mach 4 (four times the speed of sound—orbit is about Mach 25) as it plunged over and dove back into the lower atmosphere. At its tremendous speed, the pilot could then bring it to almost level flight, and it would glide for many hundreds of miles, far higher and faster than any airliner ever conceived. This suborbital ride would include almost ten minutes of weightlessness, a view of the Earth from well above the atmosphere, and of course the amazingly fast and silent glide across the better part of a continent. Flights were arranged to various resorts that Sig owned, where runways were to be specially lengthened for Skygrazer landings; passengers would be whisked from the Skygrazer to a large, comfortable cruise ship, taken on a tour of some of the more interesting areas they had overflown, and finally flown home first-class from wherever the cruise ship took them. Or, if they wished, they could spend a long, leisurely shipboard vacation, eventually reaching one of Sig’s remote sites, and then return in less than an hour on a Skygrazer. Sig could sell both the adventure of a space ride and the ability to enjoy your vacation until almost the very last minute before being whisked home in comfortable luxury.

  As for when Skygrazer would actually be built, Sig had another simple answer: it would take about forty flights to pay off the cost of one Skygrazer plus the Zenit boosters for it; as soon as enough people had paid in, either with full-price tickets or with shares, ShareSpace Global would contract with Boeing (which was ready to go whenever given the go-ahead), build and test Skygrazer, and have it flying its first passengers within six months of the magic number being reached.

  Federal safety officials were appalled at a suborbital craft carrying human cargo—much of it well-connected influential human cargo whose heirs would have access to the best lawyers on Earth—with so brief a test period. Financial officials did not like what looked either like extensive no-interest loans from customers, legalized gambling, or perhaps a Ponzi scheme; some of the tickets on the first few flights were now being scalped for more than $60,000.

  But neither could do much about it; Sig’s base of operations was in Brazil, and Brazilian authorities seemed to think nothing of the irregularities. The Brazilians had had a small-to-medium launch base for a decade, and they were happy to provide the space for long runways as well. Conveniently, too, as Sig always pointed out, they had land along the equator, where added velocity from the Earth’s rotation made getting to orbit easier. The fact that they hardly ever inspected anything or asked any questions was the unmentioned additional advantage.

  As of 2002, ShareSpace Global had filled thirty-six flights and eight of the full-price seats were now being taken up by heirs of the original purchasers. It looked very much as if by the end of the year people would finally know whether Sig was a visionary or a con man; if so, then the first flights would be in 2004, and about one out of every three seats would be assigned by the Encounter Space Raffle.

  And in the middle of all these doubts, with the world about to find out whether Sig was the “entrepreneur for the twenty-first century” (as Forbes had called him), or “a plain old-fashioned con man straight out of the nineteenth century” (as The Wall Street Journal would have it), he walked into Congress and revealed that Skygrazer was a mere first step—if you believed him—in a much bigger scheme. The next step, which physically bore a remarkable resemblance to the graceful spacecraft that had appeared on the screen at the meeting that launched ShareSpace Global, was Starbird, which, mounted on the next generation boosters, would be able to reach orbit.

  Sig’s offer was simple: the designs were essentially complete. He had bought them from a retired engineer, Hubert Davis, and provided Davis with enough qualified people and sophisticated computers to make it possible for Starbird to be flying as early as August 2005. By that time ShareSpace Global would have at least a year of experience with the Skygrazer, and furthermore would have acquired sufficient public confidence to begin expanding the Encounter Space Raffle for orbital trips.

  The Starbird had been designed to take advantage of existing technology at every turn. A simple rocket plane, its first stage would be the reliable Starbooster. On top of its sharply sloped delta wings, it would carry two DTs—drop tanks—using exactly the same disposable-tank technology that had worked so well on the shuttle. Further, Sig proposed that the drop tanks would have cutouts for easily installed hatches, which meant that every one of them could potentially be used as a habitat or for other purposes in orbit.

  Moreover, for building and operating the Starbird/Starbooster system, Sig was not asking for any direct federal money up front. Thus it wouldn’t involve spending one dime in the tight-budget year of 2003.

  All that was needed was enough o
f a guaranteed market so that the Starbird could be built right away, instead of having to undergo the “unfortunate delays that the necessity of proceeding cautiously had imposed” on Skygrazer. And Sig’s idea was that since Starbird would be perfectly capable of reaching the ISS, and equipped with standard docking equipment, if NASA would simply guarantee that it would buy 100 seats to either orbit or to ISS per year, at a discounted rate from ShareSpace Global, that would suffice to get him the loans he needed to put Starbird on-line much sooner. The idea was not new—it had been known as “anchor tenancy,” the idea that a guaranteed market could call a service into being, and indeed the most famous example, encouraging aviation by paying any air carrier to carry the mail, had been a great success in the 1920s and 1930s.

  Furthermore, he suggested, they could improve matters even further by not making it a special deal for ShareSpace Global, but allowing anyone, worldwide, public or private, to do the same thing: at the price set by NASA, NASA would be obligated to buy 100 seats to orbit per year from any vendor willing to offer them at that price. “In return for this,” he said in his prepared testimony, “I propose only this: that NASA be allowed only to require that its engineers evaluate the safety and reliability of the launch system. They may not in any way specify how the system achieves its goals, who builds what, where parts or fuel are acquired from, or anything else concerned with normal operations.” Here Sig paused and looked over his glasses at them. “Senators and Congressmen, let’s make sure we understand each other. The Conestoga wagons that settled this country were built with no specifications of any kind, except that they be able to go a long way without breaking down. The first airliners had fewer than ten pages of specifications each—generally only saying that they be able to carry a specified number of people a given distance, inside a fixed time, without killing them. If there is anything that this new frontier desperately needs, it is flexibility. If you treat this as an opportunity to parcel out goodies to Boston, South California, Texas, Seattle, and Georgia, you will quickly run the cost and the time taken through the ceiling, and you will have to pay the entire cost of the program, because no businessman in his right mind is going to touch a project in which he can neither control what he can charge nor how much it will cost him. But if you merely want to buy the results of such a project, then if it is possible to sell them at that price, someone will sell it to you. The choice is yours.”

  The controversy the commission triggered was to first bring Sig before the Congressional Joint Committee—and then to recommend that the federal government take the deal, without changes or modifications.

  There was an uproar about that which dwarfed everything else connected with the commission’s report. Congressmen from the states with large aerospace industries (except, of course, for Washington State) were appalled at the idea that the federal government might buy flights into space without spreading the expenditures around to the appropriate districts. Free-marketers declared that the millennium was at hand and soon everyone would be able to fly into space whenever they wanted. Safety officials, and the insurance companies, urged that no regulation be compromised in any way and that control of safety issues remain firmly where it belonged. Interviewed in retirement, Newt Gingrich said that this had been his idea all along and that he was sure no one in Washington now could touch it without screwing it up.

  Rockwell and Aerospatiale jointly announced that they would be happy to build and conduct an extra seven Ariane/Apollo II launches per year at that rate, and were immediately denounced for price gouging despite their claims that they were getting more per launch under their monopoly arrangement with NASA.

  Lockheed-Martin brought out a beautiful design by Bert Rutan for a gigantic airplane, the Condor, which would carry aloft an orbital vehicle, the Peregrine. A Peregrine would be carried aloft with its fuel tanks empty, because in aerodynamic flight (flying with wings) it takes much more energy to lift a weight than it does to keep it in the air; the two craft, still joined, would rendezvous with a tanker to fill the Peregrine’s fuel tanks in midair, and then the Peregrine would be pushed into an upward trajectory by the Condor and released. It would then fire its engines and continue on to orbit.

  Starbird/Starbooster, Condor/Peregrine, and the improved Apollo II/Starbooster/Centurion were all perfectly workable choices; Congress, to its bewilderment, was not being asked to choose, but only to permit.

  In the middle of all of this, my father managed to place himself in a position that no one else had thought of. When a reporter asked him, he declared firmly that he was opposed to it, because if space began to pay its own way, then “commercial and not scientific considerations will decide the nature and character of our space flights,” he said, very firmly. “The great tragedy of space is that what matters out there, finally, is the ultimate chance to find out what the universe is all about, but no one ever goes there for what really matters. The scientists gave us the potential to get there, raised the questions that could only be answered by going there, but they were shoved aside, first by the warriors and now by the businessmen, who have made space the arena for violence and greed. I’d be happy to see a space program only half as big if it could be free of the taint of blood and the sleaze of commerce.”

  That got a lot of airplay; Mom, sitting next to me on the couch, watched the statement and said, “Well, that’s two ways your father is in trouble.”

  “Dad’s in trouble?” I asked, always worried about him since the accident the year before.

  “Yep. He’s in trouble with his bosses for taking a position like that without clearing it—I’m sure he is. And he’s in bigger trouble with me, for saying that on somebody else’s show.”

  I don’t know whether my mother actually went after him for having given such a great quote to someone else, but she was certainly right about trouble with his bosses at NASA.

  It was the biggest fiasco since one of the talk show hosts had asked Aunt Lori to share her fear and let out all the stress of her job on television, and Aunt Lori had said, “I wasn’t afraid because I was too busy. Stress is what you get when your job is worthwhile and interesting, and if you can’t handle fear and stress you ought to eliminate yourself from the breeding pool and spare us all the burden of caring for your worthless offspring.” After that one she had been relegated to talking to carefully selected audiences, generally where no reporters could be expected.

  But Dad was always competitive, and maybe he just had to outdo Aunt Lori. They pulled him out of the “Presidential Commission Roadshow” for a couple of weeks, and he stomped angrily around the house, calling NASA or taking calls from them several times a day, not liking what he heard, clearly not pleasing them with what he said. He seemed to be particularly angry and disgusted at Sig Jarlsbourg; I asked him once why he was so mad and what upset him so much about Sig, and he said, “Because the SOB is going to make space just like everywhere else, where money counts for everything, when it could have been the one place where you could really just do science without having money people crap all over it.”

  As an astronaut’s son, even at five I knew that acronyms were often the most important part of communication, so I asked him what “SOB” meant and he wouldn’t tell me. Neither would Mom.

  In my memory, anyway, it was only a few days later that the first big fight between them happened; she came home and said, “I have to do something extremely important for my career and you’re not going to like it but I need to do it anyway because opportunities like this don’t come along very often.” Just like that, without any pauses, as if she had been rehearsing it all the way home, an hour on the freeway.

  Dad prided himself on his reasonableness, so he sat down and looked at her in a very reasonable way, and said, “Well, okay, Amber, tell me.”

  “I’ve got an interview and tour with Sig Jarlsbourg for tomorrow.”

  “Just ask him reasonable questions and report what he says,” Dad said.

  “I don’t think you’re going
to think my questions are reasonable,” she said, a little sadly. “I can’t storm in and demand that he tell me why he’s spoiling space for the real scientists.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve got to give him the chance to tell his own story in his own words, Chris; it’s part of my job. And that includes giving him questions he can answer that way.”

  Right around then was when Grandma abruptly came in and whisked me off to a movie. I knew something was wrong, but they sure weren’t going to let me see what, not just yet anyway.

  Mom’s interview with Sig solidified her growing reputation; it was regarded as a masterpiece, revealing the human, interesting side of a complex and brilliant man. It greatly enhanced his popularity, and there’s little doubt that it also aided in the passage of the President’s Space Initiative (the legislative embodiment of the commission’s recommendations) later that week, which carried by two votes in the Senate and about twenty in the House.

  Another way to tell that something was wrong was that we had the party to celebrate the passage of the bill at our house, and although there were plenty of astronauts and scientists around Dad, none of the NASA administrators did more than say “Hi.” And even I, at five years old, could see that for a guy who had worked so hard to get the bill passed, Dad didn’t look happy at all. He spent a lot of time at the punch bowl and kind of scowled; later, when I wandered outside I found him sitting on the chaise longue, just looking up at the Moon, and sat down next to him. He didn’t look at me, but he put his arm around my shoulders; we stayed out there till practically everyone had left the party, and I kept hearing my mother’s nervous laugh as she explained, over and over, that her husband seemed to have disappeared but she knew he really appreciated that they had come to the party. Finally he fell asleep, and then I climbed up next to him and fell asleep, too; I only sort of woke up when Mom and Grandma came out and got us. By that time, the full Moon had almost set.