AMERICA ONE (42 page)

Another six days were needed before
Ivan
’s onboard computers, working together with
Sierra Bravo I’
s computers, made
Ivan
a geostationary satellite, 22,497 miles above earth.

DX2014 - Asteroid Mining

A couple of days later and after the next shuttle had docked with the last supplies for their trip, Jonesy and VIN, now dressed comfortably in lower half space suits, slowly drifted away from
Ivan
in
Astermine One
. VIN could see the remaining crew through one of
Ivan
’s portals waving goodbye and, for once in his life he felt scared, and gulped at what he and Jonesy were going to attempt. In this small, cramped spacecraft, with a cockpit the size of a minivan’s interior, they were going to fly further than any man had ever flown from earth before. Three million miles further. DX2014 was currently 4,985,988 miles away, travelling at 3,020 miles an hour and getting closer to earth by 1,907 miles every hour.

Their flight would take twelve days;
Astermine One
would close in on the asteroid 4,490,000 miles from earth. Earth’s orbit around the sun was on a tangent to the asteroid, and the mining craft had to first accelerate out of its geostationary position to earth and turn back in the opposite direction from earth’s continuous orbit around the sun. In other words, they had to head out in nearly the opposite direction to earth’s sun orbit.

Jonesy didn’t have to worry much as the five computers aboard the space craft would automatically plot their course to the asteroid’s ever changing position. The computer showed that their destination was close to 500,000 miles in front of where the asteroid was currently located.

Their total mission was fifty-one days; twelve days out, thirty days mining, and nine days back to space station
Ivan
. The 51-day duration, gave Ryan the opportunity of six possible ten-day launches during that time; the first one was scheduled for the next day; its mission, to get enough panels into outer space to build the first cube.

The spiders needed thirty hours to weld two panels together and the sixth flight would bring up the last walls to complete
Cube One
, as Ryan called it. On the shuttle’s sixth return flight, the first four tons of the returning treasure from the asteroid would be taken to earth.

It had been impossible for Ryan’s team to figure out how to weigh the treasure on the asteroid. They had estimated a 20 percent maximum gravity to earth on the potentially all-metal piece of rock. The scientists had worked out that each aluminum canister full of heavy rock from the desert around the airfield would weigh 1,250 pounds on earth. The thirty empty canisters in the second, third and fourth compartments aboard
Astermine One
would return to earth with about twenty tons of rock.

In orbit, VIN moved the thirty canisters previously taken to
Ivan
into the three compartments in
Astermine One
; some were filled with liquid xenon fuel, some contained oxygen cylinders, food and water, and others held mining equipment.

The canisters were moved with a little help from the onboard 25-pound electromagnet. As Ryan had explained about the large electromagnets in his large space ship, each Astermine craft also had a smaller version placed under the skin in the lower belly area of the craft, in-between where its three one-foot legs would deploy for the spacecraft to land on the asteroid.

Made of neodymium, this magnet had two important reasons to be there other than to repel cosmic rays. The first reason was to aid the craft in landing on an asteroid covered, hopefully, with metal; the magnet would help bond the craft to the asteroid. The second reason was to give the crew aboard the craft 15-25 percent of earth’s gravity during their long journey into space. This artificial gravity would stop anything from floating about, and the pilots could sleep without restraints in the flight chairs—which were designed to extend into beds—and also allow them to use metal knives and forks on metal plates.

Since the magnet couldn’t be turned off, the craft’s hydrogen thrusters had to be more powerful than the pull of the magnet and any gravitational pull, to propel the craft off the asteroid for their return flight.

“So, where do we go from here, partner?” asked VIN as
Ivan
slowly floated away behind them.

“These ion thrusters, or drives, whatever Ryan wants to call them, sure wouldn’t win a drag race,” said Jonesy. Our speed has increased twenty miles an hour in the last thirty minutes. It’s going to take us two days to get up to speed. I still think liquid hydrogen is a far better bet at least for initial acceleration. This is plain boring. When is our first communication scheduled with earth?”

“Three hours,” replied VIN.

On board, all Ryan’s five spacecraft had the same Russian-designed communications system as was on
Ivan
, an old form of Morse code with which they could communicate secretly. Due to the long distance communications from DX2014, each message was expected to take four or more minutes for the signals to reach earth. No listening devices outside Ryan’s system could tell what the messages were, or where they came from; they would just sound like space static.

“Jonesy, we don’t need to drag race up here, liquid hydrogen usage is ten times more per hour than the Xenon fueled ion drives, and the liquid hydrogen is better for slowing down. So it doesn’t really matter how fast we are travelling, it looks all the same outside, and I think slowing down is far more important than accelerating. There is nothing to do, partner, so I’m going to catch some shut eye for a few hours. I wonder what it’s like on earth today; I seem to be forgetting what it was like living down there.”

Forty-eight hours later they passed the 240,000 mile mark; they were now further away from earth than the moon and, as Jonesy described to ground control, earth looked like a little blue and white volleyball.

All the men could do, apart from monitoring the readouts and their curve towards the incoming asteroid, was watch movies on their tablets, play chess, and watch the moon. Earth was behind them, now the size of a tennis ball, and just visible on their port side.

Astermine One
was a slow, extremely low-powered craft, compared to the shuttle. The two small, forward motion ion thrusters—the first thruster Ryan’s team had made—used minimum amounts of xenon gas. Jonesy did not believe that the Xenon motors were strong enough to actually make a piece of paper flutter if placed behind the motors, but in space they continuously propelled the craft forward, its acceleration always increasing.

The computers closed down the two ion drives seventy-two hours later at 23,360 miles an hour, five days into their mission. There was no need to go any faster; the ion drives had done their job. In another seventy-two hours, the craft’s computers would ignite one of the liquid-hydrogen side thrusters for the first time to begin the long sweeping curve aligning them into their rendezvous path with DX2014.

Slowly, the days passed; they did not have the comforts of the much larger space inside
Ivan
. They did have one of the bag-type baths in a closet on the rear wall between the rear of the pilot’s chair and the round wall of half of the round docking port which took up room on the flight deck. The other half was in the cargo compartment. With a pint of water, the crew managed to bathe themselves before putting the lower half of their space suits back on. Usually one of the two employed the bath-bag while the other slept. VIN left his new legs on while bathing; they were now a permanent part of his body. The connections to the remains of his real legs would be checked by the doctor only on his return. Due to the small gravity from the magnetic battery, there were no vertical beds in Astermine.

The space craft’s cockpit was a little shorter and narrower than the shuttle’s flight deck. The exact same connecting or docking port was in the usual position projecting out of the rear wall of the flight deck, which made the cockpit a tight place to live. On one side of the rear wall was the aft hatch to the storage compartment, which had their supplies. It was full of canisters and there was no way to get further into the craft’s belly, into the third compartment, as the wall was a solid fuel tank.

They were getting closer to their destination and outer wall doors to the hydrogen thrusters opened on each side of the craft for the first time. These two hydrogen thruster motors, each the size of a ten-pound electric motor, were automatically positioned on arms which extended them outside the craft on two-foot long struts. Now they faced forward, and once every hour, both burned for ten seconds reducing the craft’s speed by a few hundred miles an hour at a time.

These two maneuverable motors would be the only thrusters Jonesy would use to land and to take off from the asteroid, apart from the rear ion drives, which could only thrust the craft in a forward direction. He could turn the thrusters to face any direction: to the side, up, down, forward, or back, to change the trajectory or angle of the shuttle. Instead of the usual ailerons on the wings and tail of any atmospheric aircraft, these two hydrogen motors did the same job, and could point in any direction independently. One could even face the side of the craft and push it in a reverse-thrust type maneuver.

By this time, life aboard
Astermine One
was getting monotonous. There were only so many computer games one could play, seven games of chess was Jonesy’s limit for one week, and the movies on board were films both had already watched down on earth. Earth was now the size of a dime, a small blue planet in space. VIN and Jonesy looked through the portal often to see it. The blue planet was now stationary on the left side of their craft as they swung in on their long curve to connect up with the incoming asteroid.

The space radar screen, as Jonesy called it, was surprisingly similar to an atmospheric radar screen on earth. On day ten, they were approaching the asteroid, now showing up on the radar screen, only a few hundred thousand miles ahead. Earth was now ninety degrees to them outside their port or left portals, and the moon, slightly larger than an average star could be seen close to earth. The sun never seemed to change in the distance; a small round distant light about the size of a quarter that often gave them slight gray shadows in the cockpit.

Twenty-four hours later, the forward thrusters brought their speed down to 7,000 miles an hour; the craft was still in a left banking curve with earth now at a 120 degree angle to them in the left side forward portal. It looked like they were heading towards earth at a tangent, pretty close to the way they had headed away.

The computers were right on target, preparing to get them alongside the asteroid, now only 60,000 miles away. They would only be able to see it at a distance of twenty miles.

DX2014 was a small, oblong, hot dog-shaped asteroid, three miles long and a mile wide. Even if it entered earth’s atmosphere, ninety percent of it would burn up, and the rock wouldn’t cause a major catastrophe. The only importance DX2014 had to earth’s space watchers was that she passed within a million miles of earth every few decades. The current path into the vicinity was picked up around 2001 by a team at Kitt Observatory in Tucson Arizona, plotting every potentially dangerous piece of rock larger than a small-sized car in the solar system.

DX2014 had an elongated orbit around the sun, and several years earlier, had passed as close to Mars as it did earth. The asteroid was also slow moving, which made her less dangerous compared to others traveling a hundred times faster. Her speed was what interested Ryan; it would be slightly easier to land on a slow asteroid than one traveling at a 100,000 miles an hour, plus it spent more time close to earth, making it easier to connect with.

Over the next several hours the distance closed.
Astermine One
’s computers were curving her flight path towards the path of the asteroid, which was now moving at a slightly faster speed than the spacecraft. The asteroid would travel past the space craft’s right-hand side, about a mile away, and then
Astermine One
’s computers would blast its hydrogen thrusters to match its forward movement, and carefully position the craft within a mile of the rock for Jonesy to go into manual control. Then it would be Jonesy’s job to match her tumbling, and gently bring the craft down to where he thought was the best landing site.

Three hours later the asteroid was visible on the starboard bow, and Jonesy could study its rotating movements. Not only was it rotating slowly sideways at nearly two rotations an hour, it was very slowly rotating back over front, about once an hour.

“I’m going to feel sick on that thing for a whole month,” said VIN, once he had closed all compartments, cleaned up the cockpit and strapped himself down, fully suited. Jonesy wasn’t fully suited as Ryan and the scientists had ordered them to be. He needed total concentration and the experience of hundreds of hours in the simulator where he practiced landing on this small piece of rock. He didn’t want to be covered by the suit and, if something went wrong death would instantaneous. Nobody was coming out to rescue them anyway.

“VIN, get the signal off to Ryan that we are within three miles of the asteroid’s rear and we should be on the ground in a couple of hours. We will send the success signal once the “eagle has landed’.” VIN typed the message into the keyboard on the dash and, much like an email, the message was sent.

Jonesy had practiced this landing, certainly the hardest one he would ever attempt, with hundreds of landing simulations in the Astermine simulator. This time there was no opportunity for error. The artificial training certainly helped, but nothing was the same as the real thing. The asteroid was getting pretty large as Jonesy manually took them in closer.

“We must find a flat landing spot,” said Jonesy. “VIN, look through the side portals to see if you can find a rocky type outcrop we can land next to; maybe a flat piece of ground next to some sort of crater, cliff or incline. I’ll look forward. I don’t want just a flat piece of ground. The scientists said that there could be more chances of small rock accumulation in crevices, or by crater walls.”