“Yes, I agree with you again,” Tom said. “The big question is, are you going to accept my offer? One more thing you need to know before you answer. There will be no salaries. Everyone will work to ensure that the trip succeeds. If you think about it, there will be no banks on the ship and no banks on the new planet.”
Dr. Sato laughed. “I was wondering about that. What would I do with all the money I made? I guess there won’t be any. Ok, now am I going to accept your offer?”
She stood up with her hands behind her back and looked out the window of her office. Then, she turned back to Tom. He thought for sure she was going to turn him down. Instead she turned the question on him, “Why should I accept your offer, Dr. Burns, and what makes you think others will also accept your offer when I recruit them?”
Dr. Burns was actually ready for that specific question. “I will get right to the point. Your research and the research of other famed scientists may never be successful if you remain on Earth. Most of you will probably die before your research is completed. By coming with me, you will all be able to see firsthand where your research leads and all the good things that can be accomplished with it. After all, we know that no human being has been cloned on Earth yet. Red tape by governments all over the world has forced issues like this to be permanently postponed all too frequently.”
“Dr. Burns, I am so flattered that you would consider me as your choice to head up the medical research facilities. It is going to be difficult for me to give up my research here in Chicago. We have a series of breakthroughs that will be important in the years to come that I may need to still participate in before we leave in order to benefit from their potential application and results. Yet, I too have noticed the changes in the environment and do wonder how long this planet can sustain life. For that reason, I am going to accept your offer as long as I can select my colleagues and they can take their families on board.”
He reached out to shake her hand. They shook hands warmly. He told her to keep in touch and let him know the names of the people she selected as well as her designs for her labs so they could incorporate them into our building plans. She agreed that six months should be sufficient time to do this.
Tom felt relieved.
“By the way, you may thank me for not including you in one of our recent meetings. You are more than welcome to participate in future meetings. I’ll always include you so you can stay informed. But I bet you are happy that we didn’t have this conversation before meeting with the president twice. We were hoping to at least get his moral support, and try to reverse his stance on the environment and climate change but it was fruitless to say the least. Almost lost an investor over it, but he came around.”
“Yes, you’re right. Thanks for not including me. I’d rather deal with the protestors like I did that day at the symposium. It’s just been one troubling policy or rant or rally after another.”
Chapter 9 – Propulsion
Tom Burns, Rocky Mountains
Tom was in better spirits knowing that Dr. Sato was willing to believe in the project and become part of the effort. It was one less pressing issue to handle in making the launch a reality. Now, he needed to focus on some of the technical matters.
He wasn’t a man of creature comforts, but he sat down in his father’s comfortable recliner momentarily. He’d never appreciated it when his father was around. He’d recoiled from it. Its significance to a bomber pilot escaped him, until now. Sitting in the chair, he felt an overwhelming desire to weep. Visions of his father’s suffering engulfed him. The comfort of the armchair served as a safe place, a place on Earth that hadn’t been shattered by bombs, by Agent Orange, by reckless political ambitions and coverups. He imagined for a moment what it would feel like to bring this chair to space. He imagined keeping it as a place where he could think and remember the life he once had and passing the recliner on to Sam for those moments of comfort that he would someday need. He’d try to make it happen.
Sam’s face, when he’d returned home from the second meeting at the Oval Office, and this chair were two things he’d never forget when he looked back at how they ever managed to move forward with these plans. Despite how traumatized he felt by his experience at the Oval Office, he knew that Sam would always recall that it hadn’t stopped him. Tom laughed momentarily, recalling that Sam had looked at his dad like a space oddity—one of the blobs from a 1950s movie, a wishy-washy sequence that was more corny than frightening. Now, he felt like he was standing on firmer ground. His team was coming together despite the sustained effort from the Oval Office to revert everyone to comfortable beliefs of an unexamined life framed solely within the context of stock markets, buried facts and unbridled bandits. These were unbelievable times.
The spaceship was going to be the largest ever produced, and it was imperative that the propulsion system and engines were capable of transporting them wherever they wanted to go. As soon as they decided to build the spaceship in Colorado, Tom and Bob agreed that they needed to find the best experts available to develop a propulsion and fuel system that would allow for interstellar travel. They decided to interview Carson Newman and Dorothy Sullivan after reviewing the work of about fifty top propulsion experts.
Carson came highly recommended. He was a graduate of Cal Tech and had worked in NASA and in the private industry developing three generations of rocket propulsion systems. Dorothy had graduated number one in her class from MIT in Boston and had spent several years working for NASA.
Tom would be meeting with them in a few hours. He got up from his father’s recliner and sent off a few emails before heading out the door for the two-hour drive. He arrived ten minutes early. When Bob, Carson and Dorothy showed up, he introduced everyone.
Tom said, “First of all, we really value your expertise in undertaking this huge project. We need to hear your ideas on how to proceed to do what is necessary to ensure the success of this project. We are talking about a huge spaceship, which has never been built before in history. You should know three other spaceships are being built in different locations in the world. At this moment I cannot divulge their locations. If you are hired, you will get this information. As I am sure you know, previously the largest spaceship seated under ten people and they were on the ship for a limited amount of time. We are going to need a spaceship for a thousand people who may have to be traveling in space for over one hundred years. Certainly, no one has seen a ship like this. This means we are going to need to build the largest, most powerful and best propulsion system ever. It also means that we probably have to work around the clock with various crews if we want to launch by 2030. I would like to hear some of your ideas about accomplishing this.”
Carson said, “Thank you for inviting us to meet with you. This project sounds fascinating. We will need several different propulsion systems or one that can be adjusted for various conditions. This will include the most powerful system ever made to get the spacecraft into orbit. It will need to overcome all the gravitational forces attempting to pull us back to Earth. To do this, I suggest we may need to build many rockets that will be attached to the main ship. At a certain point after we take off, these rockets will be detached and probably remain in orbit or fall back to Earth. The rockets will only be used to get us into orbit.
“Once we are in orbit, we have to rely on our propulsion systems to get us to the next galaxy. On the main ship, the propulsion systems would have to be adjustable. We need the spacecraft to be able to navigate through gravitation fields, magnetic fields, electromagnetic waves, solar wind, and solar radiation. We need to build a spaceship that can change velocity at a moment’s notice. This is going to be very difficult with such a massive spacecraft. We will also need to be able to create enough momentum to speed up the spacecraft. Then, our goal, once we have left the solar system, is to be able to create a ship that will have a sustained impulse.”