I found Al in the lab conference room doing simulations and analyses of what looked like several of the Shuttle's External Tanks stuck together along with several other older mothballed spacecraft fuselages. "Al, I thought you said you had finished the MWM hardware design?" I blurted at him. He seemed surprised by my obvious anger.
"I . . . uh . . . did." He replied reluctantly.
"Well why then—" I paused, "—have you not designed the attachment hardpoints for the MWMs to interface with a launch vehicle?"
"Why do we need them?" He looked confused.
"'Why do we need them?' he asks. Well, how do you propose we get them to orbit?"
"The same way you get them down from orbit I guess." Al looked smug.
"What the hell are you talking abou— Well, son of a bitch dog in heat." It hit me like an uppercut to the chin. "Of course we don't need a launch system. We raise them to orbit with the warp drive. Hell, I can't believe I didn't think of that. Al hold on a minute—" I ran to the door and poked my head out. "Tabitha!" I yelled. "Tabitha I need you for a second." A moment passed and Tabitha didn't show. Anne Marie bounced up instead, looking as perky and young as ever. God, was I ever that young?
"Mom heard your, uh, page. She couldn't leave what she was doing just yet. She sent me to find out what the hubbub was all about."
I looked at her and smiled. She always makes me smile. I took her by the hand and said, "Come with me." I led her back to the conference table where Al still sat. He was looking at me as though I were nuts.
"Annie, do me a favor and kiss him." Annie just shrugged her shoulders and planted a wet one right on Al's lips. "Thanks." I said.
"Uh, yeah, thanks." Al said shyly, as he turned four shades of taupe, maroon, red, and pale all at once.
"Okay," Annie said. "Now you might want to tell Al and me why you just had me give him mono." Al looked startled. "Just kidding Al."
"Well, I wanted your mother to do it, but you worked out better. Al here has just given us a rapid strike capability and no need for launch vehicles." I explained the idea of not having to use rockets to launch and that we could use the warp system for main propulsion for any application. Just because space is warped by the device doesn't mean that the thing has to travel faster than light. Heck, Tabitha and I probably didn't do that on our first warp ride. But, we did go very, very, very, very fast. The warp drive could be used for slower speeds and even just for offsetting other forces, like gravity, for levitation. The speed is proportional to the amplitude of the poles and zeroes of the Alcubierre warp. The amplitudes of the warp are also proportional to the energy required to make the poles and zeroes. The slower speed would mean less amplitude on the warp, which in turn means less energy. In fact, the ECCs running at only a couple of percent capacity could gain the amount of energy to counter the Earth's gravitational well.
The concept of designing the warp drive as the main propulsion system had immediate useful applications. Imagine using the devices as a crane or safe transportation. The road to the Moon and the planets within our solar system was now at least graveled. With a little bit of systems engineering, testing, and manufacturing, we would have the road paved. And for the immediate problem, our Secret War with China, I was beginning to roll some ideas around.
I called an all hands meeting of our crew. That meant the general, the Doctors Daniel (Jim and Rebecca), Al, Sara, Anne Marie, and myself. We sat down over sandwiches and "cocolas" in the conference room and had an old fashioned brainstorming session. Some people might call it a "think tank."
"Al here has kluged together some concepts as to get us to the far side of the Moon near term." I said kicking off the meeting. "What I want to do today is for us to figure out just how we could get there, get enough stuff there to support at least fifty people and to live comfortably, and sustain a research, development and engineering laboratory plus a manufacturing facility. I want to emphasize that we would want to be taking low-gee strolls on the lunar surface in less than four months. Is it not just possible, but also doable?"
Al turned the projector on and clicked on his presentation file on his laptop. "My idea is to take as many space-rated pieces of hardware as we can get our hands on and just warp them to the moon. We could live in a Shuttle Orbiter with the old Spacelab module in the payload bay while we integrated the pieces via EVAs. My list shows some possible hardware. There are several External Tanks we could grab, we could appropriate at least one Shuttle and the Spacelab module, there are several commercial airframes we could use. Jim and I think it could be done with a warp drive powered by three of the ECCs. Jim."
Jim nodded. "That's right, Al. I've run the simulations a couple of times. The mass requirements that we're talking about and the size of the warp field that we'd need to maintain would require three of the mini ECCs that we're currently building. One modified warp coil will suffice though."
"What about lifting these things? How do we attach to them?" Sara asked.
I explained, "Well Sara, as Tabitha and I found, you don't have to be attached to the warp drive to make travel possible. You just need to be within the bubble. Anything in the flat spacetime region of the bubble will travel with it. So we just put these things near the warp drive and away we go." I explained.
"Anson," Tabitha interrupted. "What about the construction on the moon? There could be a lot of EVA time there. All of this hardware would need to be mated with airlocks and tubes to connect them. We would need to weld and God knows what else. These are things that haven't been done in space before."
"I understand that Tab--but can we do it? You are the expert astronaut here." I put the ball back in her court.
"Well, I suppose we would have to live like cosmonauts. We better bring a shitload of duct tape." She laughed.
I felt in my pocket and found the small flattened roll that I've kept with me since the incident in Florida. I vowed then that I would never leave home without duct tape. I pulled it out and grinned, "Never leave home without it." She laughed.
"Why do we need all of these extra airframes and things?" Sara asked "Why don't we just use the warp bubble to make a big underground dome or something?"
I did a double-take on that one. Again, an application with the warp technology that I had missed. I must be getting old and slow. From the look on Jim's face as he slapped his own forehead, I wasn't alone.
"Of course," Jim said. "We slowly poke a small hole down about fifty meters or so by having the warp bubble force its way downward. The Moon couldn't resist that. Then we slowly expand the bubble to a size we decide we need and then oscillate the diameter of the outer Van den Broeck bubble by millimeters back and forth and very fast. The oscillations would turn the lunar rocks or dirt or whatever it is to a molten material. When we turn off the field we have a huge ball-shaped cave with hardened magma walls."
"Excellent, Jim!" I was thrilled by these new concepts. "How about we do some quick analyses to decide the volume that we would need and the most stable diameter for such a cave. If we need to, we will build multiple caves and tie them together. These caves could be built in a matter of minutes or hours I think."