Solar Sailer Read online

  Solar Sailer

  Lightways Book 1

  by Stephan Besik

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 by Artiplex Publications

  Published by Artiplex Publications

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means with without prior express written permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief quotes used in reviews.

  Cover Art by Coverquill

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Table of Contents

  Characters

  Wallace Chung

  Aman Treble

  The Call

  The Treble Foundation

  The Plan

  Engineers and Businessmen

  Klaus the Fixer

  Getting There is Only Half the Fun

  Steam Turbines

  Aman Talks Politics

  Albert’s Bad News

  The Lunar Compact

  The Assembly Drones

  Drone Problems

  Fixing the Drones

  Moms and Dad for Alvin

  Building the Ship

  A Little Publicity

  Maiden Voyage

  To the Moon and Back

  The Competition

  The Old Man

  Characters

  Wallace Chung- inventor, builder, entrepreneur

  Aman Treble- entrepreneur, funding and political backer

  Charity Thompson- Aman’s executive assistant

  Albert Sanchez- chief engineer

  Klaus Erheim- Moonship project manager

  Suzette Girard- chief mathematician; orbital mechanics and trajectory specialist. Responsible for flight management software.

  Robbie Kay- pilot, systems programmer and AI liaison

  Lucy Chung- Wallace’s cousin, a programmer and one of the drone operators. Works closely with Suzette and Albert on software integration issues and drone operations.

  Secretary General of the U.N. (a woman)

  Alvin- ship’s navigational and engineering Artificial Intelligence

  The Construction Drones (4)

  The Explorer Drones (4)

  The Ship (Sunship I, christened Edison)

  1.2 megawatt solar sails

  60 percent overall energy conversion, including regeneration cooling vanes embedded in panels and engine cooling/regeneration

  80 percent energy conversion in solar panels

  46 metric tons gross weight

  - 3 ton control pod

  - 5 ton propulsion system

  - 6 ton sail structure

  - 10 tons of fuel (ammonia)

  - 22 ton cargo pod (4 tons empty)

  - 4- 250 kw plasma engines

  Wallace Chung

  Wallace had a hard time believing what he’d found at first. He was plowing through some online industry mags in the library when he came across some notes on materials advances.

  He was stalling on the work he was supposed to be doing for his doctoral dissertation. The topic he had chosen was boring, even though it would be an advance beyond current thought in his field of study. Wallace was not happy; the topic would get him a doctorate but other than that it was a complete loser. Dropping the topic would make his advisor (who thought his topic was ‘phenomenal’) really angry. He would probably have to find a new advisor and start all over again. He was stuck.

  Then he ran across the articles and suddenly his mind started churning. It wasn’t a field he was really familiar with but he was a solid hands-on engineer. Given a little time and commitment he felt he could pull together pretty much any kind of hardware implementation.

  He did some checking on the materials advances. He did a little exploration into various forms of electric rocket motors. He was disappointed when he found some old work that looked a lot like what he was planning, but it was never funded to completion. He looked further and realized the original project was likely to be impractical because the efficiencies weren’t high enough. He ran the new numbers through his head three times and then actually pulled some old physics books to check his basic formulas, dimensional conversions, and physical constants. After all that, he realized that while there were still some issues, the problems were much easier since the new materials had become available.

  The problems he came up with were conversion efficiency and heat dissipation. The stuff needed to build an efficient solar cell-driven ship hadn’t really been available until recently- as in just getting press now. Solar cells had only recently become ultra lightweight and highly efficient. Maybe that was why the idea had been shelved in the first place. If so, that meant he’d better move if he thought this would work. Soon enough others would have the same flash of insight and the race would be on.

  The heat problem was tougher, but he had some ideas that might give him a starting point of forty or fifty percent engine efficiency He thought about the lost fifty or sixty percent and thought there just might be ways to get the system efficiency up to perhaps sixty percent. It would take work but he thought it could be done.

  There might be one other stumbling block- politics. Maybe the issue of ownership at the destination was a far stickier problem than he thought. Well, first comes science and engineering; then comes politics. The other way round and nothing would ever get done. But to do the engineering and put together a working model, money was necessary. That was the real starting point- finding someone or some group to foot the startup costs. That might be the toughest thing to get done. Even if everything went swimmingly, building the ship would cost a lot of money.

  He thought he could do just enough on his dissertation to keep from pissing off his advisor while he started to look for backers. It was going to be a delicate process; the wrong few words in the wrong places and someone else might just figure out what he was up to. On the other hand, if he couldn’t find money he’d actually have to finish his dissertation. It was worth some time and extra effort to find an alternative to a purely academic fate.

  Aman Treble

  Aman Treble was a man without a purpose when he saw the proposal. After years of excitement in collegiate and pro basketball, a wild ride in commodities futures and leveraged buyouts of a startling number of successful technology companies, the shear amount of money he had piled up was making life a complete bore. So boring, in fact, that he was spending a significant amount of time on his foundation. A singularly uninteresting activity.

  He was leafing through a bunch of really boring funding requests that had been sent to his foundation. That was a true hallmark of his boredom.

  He had more money than could reasonably be spent by a middling-sized nation in any reasonable period of time and no idea what to do with it. It had been difficult, exciting, and ultimately a fair amount of fun to get where he was, but now he was at a dead end. All this cash and nowhere he wanted to go. He could get altruistic and just start dropping cash on struggling little goody-goody foundations everywhere, but that was a little too much like piling up bunches of paper money and putting matches to them all. He hadn’t put all that physical and mental sweat into getting where he was just to blow it all.

  At first the proposal looked like a complete loser. It was dry, didn’t seem to do much, and was difficult to read. He wasn’t sure why the chair of the review committee had sent it to him, but Chaz was a good friend. He also had an unnerving instinct for moneymakers, finding gems in the midst of useless rock. Aman went back and looked at the proposal again.

  Then he began to smell a rat. The goal of the proposal was a little too innocuous. Chaz m
ight have spotted something in it that would be interesting.

  “A Proposal to Investigate Technologies for Fine-Grained Motion and Orbital Control of Satellites”- talk about a way to put a review committee to sleep. The topic was rather silly, too. The technology in use worked perfectly fine. Not sexy, but workable.

  He decided to follow his nose and kept reading. He took a close look at what the guy was proposing. He started to read between the lines. He’d have to get one of his geeks to go over the math but his was good enough to think it might be right. On the other hand, the words were a little too vague and the bit of math was certainly not all that was necessary. If this proposal was what he thought it might be, it would open doors. Yes, indeed. Big doors. And with a wrinkle or two, it could cause a lot of trouble in the global political system. Now that might be fun.

  Aman thought the proposal was worth a serious look by some good tech eyes. It might be just the kind of fun that would make his day.

  The Call

  Wallace was not working on his dissertation when the call came. Instead he was working through some recent papers on plasma engines. So far he hadn’t gotten any ideas about how to take care of the heat problem in them.

  The waste heat from the sails turned out to be pretty easy. The efficiency of the newest solar cell materials was quite good, and there were a couple of decent technologies for conversion of the waste heat to electricity. Materials advances had come to the rescue again; there were now materials that absorbed heat and turned it into electricity at a reasonable rate. Not perfect, but a reasonable solution to getting more work out of the sunlight.

  He still had to fix the engine problem, though. Otherwise the engines wouldn’t last long enough to get to any place interesting. He needed a good start on a viable solution. He was gambling but it was still better than going back to the dissertation.

  He didn’t recognize the phone number but the caller was at the Treble Foundation. He was pretty sure they were one of the foundations he had sent a proposal. He crossed his fingers and answered the call.

  “Is this Mr. Wallace Chung? Hello, Mr. Chung. My name is Charity Thompson. I’m Mr. Aman Treble’s executive assistant. Mr. Treble would like you to meet with Dr. Chaz Delsun, Executive Director of the Treble Foundation and chair of the proposal review committee. Dr. Delsun would like to arrange an appointment to discuss your proposal. The address in the proposal, is that your current address? It’s actually quite close to us. He suggests that you plan on an hour. I will send you directions. When would be convenient?”

  For a minute he had a hard time understanding what the angelic voice on the other end of the line was telling him. Voices like that seldom called him. Then the fog cleared enough for him to fumble through the calendar on his phone and find a date to accept the appointment.

  Wallace hung up. He smiled, and the smile got bigger. Maybe he wouldn’t have to finish his dissertation after all.

  The Treble Foundation

  Wallace was a little surprised at Dr. Delsun’s office. It had a hint of stuffiness to it. It was only a hint, though. The desk was big, but the desk angled back a bit at one end and there were machine screens on the angled wing. The desk looked rather workmanlike, not what Wallace had expected. Not very corporate executive at all.

  “Please be seated, Mr. Chung. I’ll be with you in a moment.” Delsun looked at one of the screens for a while and then apparently shut down whatever he was doing. He turned toward Wallace and smiled. “There. All set. How was the trip here?”

  Wallace smiled tentatively. “Not bad. Traffic was a little heavy.”

  Delsun smiled back. “Isn’t it always. One of the disadvantages of a downtown office. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  Wallace shook his head. He was too nervous for coffee. “No, sir. I’m okay.”

  “Okay then. To business.” He opened a hard copy folder on his desk. He smiled apologetically. “Can’t get rid of a bad habit. Still like to read important things in hard copy.”

  He scanned something in the folder and then looked up. “You sent in an interesting proposal, Mr. Chung. We had a little trouble getting a grip on it at first. For a while I didn’t think there was anything there and the committee was prepared to turn it down.”

  For a half second Wallace was disappointed, but then realized that ‘for a while there’ definitely had potential. “Uh, I’d be more than happy to answer any questions you might have, sir.”

  “Call me Chaz, Wally. I think we’ve got the gist of your proposal, but I do have some questions. First, it looks like you were underselling your objective. Am I right?”

  “Uh, yes sir. Uh, please call me Wallace. I just thought- I wasn’t sure dumping the whole thing on someone’s desk would be a good thing. I thought something a little more practical sounding might sell better.”

  Delsun smiled and turned a page in the folder. He appeared to be scanning a copy of the proposal. “Yes. Well, Wallace, you were fortunate that you didn’t hide your intent entirely. You gave me and a couple of the committee members just enough to figure out where you wanted to go and how we could verify your concept. It also happens that your objective may fit nicely with something that we would like to do.”

  He looked up. “We do think it will work. How long do you think it will take to get a low acceleration prototype to the Moon?”

  Wallace looked a little shocked and then remembered to speak. “Um, I think about three years. There’s quite a bit to do. Just getting a team together will take three to six months.”

  “All right,” said Chaz. “This is what I have to offer. First, your annual funding is inadequate. We’re doubling it. As part of the deal you will be doing things differently from the usual grant review. To start, I expect a detailed report on progress regularly. Every quarter at least, more frequently if possible. And none of this ‘we’re here and working’ nonsense.

  I suggest you plan on spending about a third of the next three months doing prototype planning. Mostly, though, you should spend your time figuring out what you’re going to need and where you’re going to get what you need.

  I’d like position announcements for a startup team from you in two weeks. Include suggestions for candidates if you have them. The Foundation will post the announcements and provide you with space for interviews, etc. If we know of potential candidates we will refer them to you for consideration. Oh, by the way- you might want to apply a bit of your obfuscation skills to the job descriptions. We don’t want our objectives to become public until you’ve made quite a bit of progress. That will be tricky, but I think you can pull it off.

  We will provide you with office space here at the Foundation until we can find you a suitable facility. You should start thinking about what kind of space you will need to begin fabrication and ultimately assemble a prototype. You should also give a lot of thought to make or buy options; much of the hardware fabrication should be contracted. We aren’t much of a heavy industry or aerospace organization and you should try to buy more than make. What can you buy from someone versus what will your team have to build?

  One other thing. We are going to leave your requested salary as Principal Investigator at the rate in your current proposal. In essence you’re not getting a bump because of the doubling of the budget. If things look good at the end of the year, however, that is likely to change. Is that understood?”

  “Yes sir, that’s no problem. I just have to break it to my advisor. He’s not going to be happy if I’m dropping my dissertation work completely.”

  “I think I can help with that. We want you working full time on this project. That means you’re not likely to be able to get back to any kind of dissertation work for the next three years, maybe more. This will be a big step. Will you be okay with that?”

  Wallace smiled. “Yes, sir, not a problem. My topic wasn’t great, anyhow.” He hesitated for a minute, and then smiled again. “This sounds like a lot more fun.”

  Chaz smiled back and nodded. “Yes. Probably
for us all.”

  As Wallace left the Treble Foundation he was a mixture of happiness and trepidation. He had just agreed to a really big deal. For starters, he had just gotten a terrific bump in salary to do something that might turn out to be hugely important.

  There was a lot he didn’t know about what he was getting in to; a lot he had to learn. Contracting for space launches, for example. Things were pretty regular nowadays; there were satellites being sent up all the time. But what kind of lead-time was needed? How much would transport cost? He had no idea how many trips they would have to schedule. One thing was for sure; the ship itself had to be like a Lego set. Anything that could fit in a cargo pod should be pre-assembled on Earth. Parts had to fit together easily once in orbit. Could robots handle the assembly? If they had to send people up to do final assembly it would probably cost a bundle. He didn’t want to have to build a space station. Any way to keep the people on the ground for the build would keep the price down. One more unknown to toss on the pile.

  Walking back to his car he looked like a man possessed. Lots to do; lots to plan. Time to get moving.

  The Plan

  Wallace was working twelve-hour days on the project, having put his doctoral program on hold. That had been one of many things the Treble Foundation had helped with. His advisor had been none too happy to find Wallace working on another project entirely, but he was mollified somewhat by Mr. Treble’s interest in and commitment to the new project. It helped that Dr. Delsun used some of the funds from the grant to buy out Wallace’s position on the advisor’s project.