The Bridge to Space

Bruce Franklin was an extremely bright, brown-haired seventeen year old who had just been seized by an optimistic vision of tomorrow. He had finished reading Gerard O'Neill's "The High Frontier" and now his young mind was ablaze with visions of giant space habitats housing thousands of humans, solar power satellites beaming cheap, clean, plentiful, eternal energy to the Earth, and mines on the Moon and the asteroids, relieving the Earth of humanity's voracious need for resources.

Bruce, like the author, had been getting bugged lately by all the persistent talk about "limits to growth", and how over-population would inevitably result in shortages of energy and material resources. A teenager living in the '80's does not want to hear about how the standard of living is doomed to sink lower and lower beginning in the next century. The proposals in the book not only seemed to provide an alternative to this miserable future, but also fitted in neatly with Bruce's own personal philosophy that to every problem there lies a solution, and that it was no heresy at all to look for that solution in the world of technology.

He was particularly fascinated by a piece of technology called a mass-driver which the book described. It was a kind of stretched out electric motor, a linear electric catapult. The book had outlined two uses for this device. One was as a reaction engine which could literally use anything for fuel (it was even proposed that ground-up pieces of Space Shuttle external tanks could be used). The other was as a catapult to launch ore off of the moon. Since the moon had no atmosphere and low gravity, it was suggested that ore mined from the moon be simply launched from the surface into space through the mass-driver instead of burning up rocket fuel to lift it.

Bruce was intrigued by the design. The ore was loaded into a "bucket" which was ringed with super-conducting magnetic coils. The mass-driver itself consisted of a series of electromagnetic coils. Electric-eye devices sensed the position of the bucket and controlled the pulsing of current through each driver coil so as to continuously accelerate the bucket down the mass-driver. Accelerations of well over 1000 gravities were possible. Toward the end of the mass-driver, the coils begin to decelerate the bucket, allowing the ore to fly out. The bucket re-circulates back to the beginning of the mass-driver and the process begins again.

Bruce was not only very bright, but inventive as well. He was always taking things apart, tinkering, and building things from construction kits. He was invariably referred to as a "gifted student", and his future career direction toward some kind of engineering profession was already well established. It occurred to him to actually attempt building some sort of model illustrating the principle of the mass-driver.

Mass-driver Model Mark 1 consisted of a glass tube with small coils of wire wrapped around it at regular intervals. The wires led off to a nine-volt battery and a disk with short lengths of bare wire exposed around the circumference, like the numbers on a clock face. By running another wire around the edge of the disk, he could sequentially energize each coil. A penny nail placed in one end of the glass tube could be accelerated down its length, flying out the far end. He learned how to most efficiently sweep the wire around the contacts with an accelerating movement until he could make nails hit the wall with a most impressive whack. Sometimes they would even stick. His father teased him that he had invented the world's most complicated hammer.

Mass-driver Model Mark 2 was a much larger, sturdier affair built in the backyard. The framework was made out of three old plumbing pipes Bruce had scrounged from behind the tool shed. He wound each electromagnetic coil by hand from varnished wire unwound from almost a dozen transformers. There was no way he could recreate the electric-eye bucket position sensing mechanism, nor could he equip his bucket with superconducting coils. However, he had an idea that would make use of two electric starter brushes he had pulled from a car in the junkyard. He arranged two dotted lines of electrical contact strips down the inside of his mass-driver. When the bucket was placed in one end, the starter brushes would connect a circuit, creating current flow not only in the bucket coil, but in the mass-driver coil ahead of it. The one magnetic field would attract the other and the bucket would move. As soon as the bucket came abreast of that coil, that circuit was interrupted and it was the next coil pulling. There would be no deceleration and re-circulation of the bucket, so it was more like an electric cannon. Bruce was interested to see how far he could shoot the bucket through the air.

Bruce hooked up his connectors to three fully-charged car batteries and, with a pause for drama's sake, placed the bucket into his model. The model promptly spit the bucket back out at him. To his chagrin, he realized he had wound the bucket coils the wrong way such that the two magnetic fields being produced were repelling each other, not attracting. Wanting desperately to avoid laboriously re-winding the bucket coils, he hit on the idea of remounting the starter brushes angled the other way, so he could essentially turn the bucket around and use it backwards. With high anticipation, he once again placed the bucket in.

There was a THUMP as the contraption recoiled. The bucket made an audible WHOOSH as it sailed away. He had inclined his mass-driver less than ten degrees from the horizontal, but was astonished to see the bucket disappear from view.

After taking a few seconds to get a fix on landmarks near the horizon, Bruce turned and hopped onto his rusting bicycle to scour the cattle fields and highway birms where his electrically launched payload must have come down. He looked until the daylight began to fail his eyes, but to no avail. He supposed that the bucket may have simply crashed into some dense weeds out of sight, or may have rolled beneath something which it hadn't occurred to him to look under. Perhaps he had badly misjudged the direction his projectile had taken. But he couldn't shake the rather awe-inspiring feeling that the bucket had gone much, much farther than he had ever thought possible.

"Man," he thought to himself as he pedaled homeward to a cold supper, "A guy could do things with this."

Chapter

1

Evacuation

November of 2000 found Jacob Tanner nearing the fulfillment of a childhood dream. For as long as he could remember, he had fantisized about flying into space. He had taken NASA's advice to all aspiring astronauts: stay in school, study math, study science. He threw himself into his class work, resolving to excel at everything he did, so that he might be worthy. After two unsuccessful tries, Jacob finally made it into the Space Shuttle Astronaut Corp. Seven years of intensive training later, and here he was at last: lying on his back in the orbiter mid-deck, waiting to thunder off into the heavens.

This was the most exciting moment in his life. But in a way, his present location was a bit on the dull side. There were no windows to see out of from the shuttle's mid-deck. Nothing much to look at but storage lockers. He had to admit that Ruby' presence sure improved the scenery down here, though. The thirty-five-year-old mission specialist sat to his right, a bit above his position. She had delicate, pixieish features and the most adorable dimples. When they were all suiting up, Jacob was amused to note she had not tied up her long, scarlet hair into a ponytail. Soon they would all be in zero gravity, which meant Ruby's lovely, flowing red tresses had that "Brillo-pad" look in store. It would be just the thing for some good-natured ribbing later on.

Jacob then realized he shouldn't be too hard on his fellow astronaut. During the months this shuttle crew had trained together, Ruby and he seemed to connect in a very special way. They were both the "space rookies" of the crew, and this had started the close bond between them. For some time now he had been planning to wait until the mission was completed, and then see if the relationship could be advanced to a new, more intimate level.

They were about fifteen minutes from launch when Jacob began hearing disturbing things through the earphones in the flight cap he wore under his helmet. CapCom was advising the flight crew of a sudden drop in hydrogen fuel pressure. That certainly didn't sound good. Their pilot, Commander Chapman, was convinced thermal stresses from the fuel loading had caused the External Tank to split a seam. Jacob got a sinking feeling none of them were going anywhere today.

Then there was a sudden cry from the Commander. "Evacuate! C'mon! We've got to get out of here!!"

Almost immediately, Chapman and his co-pilot were dashing in from the flight deck, and over to the hatch. It was dawning on Jacob that the fuel leak must be serious enough for there to be a danger of fire. A feeling of unreality gripped him as he unfastened his restraint and joined the rest of the crew at the hatch. Ruby glanced at him, concern on her face. Jacob tried to give her a reassuring look.

The hatch was open, but the "white room" was not yet back to the orbiter. It swung toward them on its long arm, ponderously, agonizingly slow. As they looked downward, they could plainly tell where the split seam in the External Tank was located, as it billowed out heavy, white vapors. The rupture was below them, fairly close to the orbiter.

The white room still had not reached them. Ruby began to dance up and down with impatience. "Hurry...hurry...hurry...hurry..."

She trailed off, and placed a hand over her mouth, eyes wide. Her voice had a ridiculous elfin quality to it. Ruby sounded like a chipmunk. Jacob tried to think when he had heard a human voice with that peculiar resonance before. Then he knew: the last time he had been around a prankster who had put a helium balloon to his lips, inhaled, and then spoke with the light gas passing over his vocal cords.

What could be causing it? At the same time, each member of the crew realized the air around them was filled with odorless hydrogen gas. It was the one gas lighter than helium, even less of it would produce the same munchkin voice. Lighter than air, it was rising upward to where they stood. A chill went through Jacob which was unrelated to the spill of super-cold fuel. If the surrounding air was that saturated with hydrogen, the slightest spark would touch off an inferno of Hindenberg proportions.

The white room arrived at last, and the crew leapt into it. They scrambled through the walkway and into the gantry tower. Soon they were at a cage hanging from a pulley on a cable which lead down to the distant ground below. This sliding cage had been conceived by NASA as the quickest way for a shuttle crew to get away from the launch pad in an emergency. If they could only slide away down the cable, they would be deposited near a sturdily-armored vehicle which could take them even further away. The crew piled into the cage.

Jacob had trained on this procedure, but it had seemed like a silly amusement ride at the time. Now, hopefully, it was going to save everyone's butts. Chapman threw the brake lever up, and they began to soar down away from the gantry.

The cage descended on the cable with increasing speed, but the Commander was not about to apply brake just yet. Suddenly, the space shuttle behind them transformed itself into a blazing fireball. They all looked back in shocked astonishment as the concussion dashed the gigantic brown fuel tank open. Tons of liquefied hydrogen and oxygen mingled, vaporized, and then ignited. Pent up energy sufficient to hurl a multi-ton vehicle into space was released all at once.

The shock wave struck their bodies. The sensation was akin to the peculiar feeling one gets in the middle of one's chest when standing near a parade when the big bass drums come by, only a hundred times more severe. Jacob felt his heart was going to burst. The astronaut's bodies jerked with the motion of the passing concussion like marionettes being yanked by some spiteful puppeteer.

Now a vast, pale wall of nearly-invisible blue flame was bearing down on them. When it touched them, everything and everyone instantly burst into blazes. Their orange flight suits only prolonged the torment. Man and woman alike erupted with high-pitched shrieks of agony. Then the flame silenced them all forever.

By the time the cage crashed into a barrier on the ground, there were no survivors in it. Only gruesome remains for a miserable pathologist to study in an attempt to make sense of it all for a nation seeking answers to yet another Space Shuttle disaster.

Chapter

2

A general dissatisfaction
with the current state of affairs

Now it was January of 2001, and the "end of the millennium" hysteria was beginning to die down somewhat. It was so unfair; the world had had to go through it twice. Despite no shortage of experts lecturing on television talk shows and in Sunday supplement articles, there were still many who believed 1999 was the last year of the Twentieth century. December of 1999 had been even more tumultuous than last month, as every "end of the world" fanatic crawled out from whatever place such kooks resided. When 2000 dawned on the world and Judgment day was clearly not yet at hand, the devotees of Armageddon explained that there had merely been a slight error, and December 31st, 2000, the truly last day of the millennium, was the day of dread. This date came and passed free of global doom also, and the Earth, except for the much more minor social tremors which occur at the end of each century, could be relatively peaceful until the year 3000 AD. Not that even the most skeptical thought humanity could possibly go on that much longer.

Bruce Franklin had just completed what many considered to be the crowning achievement of his career: a magnetic levitation mass transit system connecting New York with Chicago. This engineering feat was possible thanks to Bruce's development of the first practical nuclear drilling machine. Looking like a giant sharpened pencil with tank treads jutting out at five different angles, the device did not so much drill as melt its way through the earth. The conical nose of the machine was the world's hottest operating nuclear reactor, and glowed yellow-hot when activated. Soil and rock were liquefied, pushed aside, and left to cool, forming a very strong tunnel wall of solidified magma.

Once a tunnel was created from New York to Chicago, the acceleration and deceleration portions were mounted with magnetic coils nearly as big around as the tunnel itself. This was really no different from the mass-driver technology which was Bruce's engineering forte. For the entire distance, the floor of the tunnel was covered with an electrically conducting aluminum trough. Then all of the air in the entire tunnel was pumped out, leaving a vacuum.

The maglev vehicles, equipped with the latest superconducting coils which operated at liquid nitrogen temperatures, were accelerated well above the speed of sound by the acceleration coils. A principle called dynamic magnetic levitation caused a repulsion between the vehicle magnets and the curved aluminum trough, generating lift.

Since there was no airdrag and no friction due to wheels or sliding surfaces of any kind, it had proved to be the most energy-efficient method of transportation ever devised. The energy cost of a maglev trip was less than one-fifth of the cost for any other form of transportation. To top it all off, most of the energy put into accelerating the vehicles was recovered at the end during the deceleration phase. Acceleration Inc., the new multinational corporation which had funded the venture, was able to undersell planes, trains, and automobiles by a substantial amount. There was simply no other means of moving people so quickly, quietly, comfortably, and energy efficiently on Earth.

Bruce had worked long and hard on the project, and now considered his part of it to be over. There were already ambitious plans to make another tunnel from Chicago to Los Angeles, along with a vast, arcing bypass south of Chicago, so both coasts could be linked non-stop by maglevs. But the construction principles were already well established, and Bruce would leave them to it.

He needed to unwind, and decided taking in a movie would be just the thing. Inevitably, "2001: A Space Odyssey" was in re-release this year. Bruce had fond childhood memories of this movie, and promptly went.

He sat in the theater, and once again became immersed in Kubrick and Clarke's vision of the dawn of the 21st Century. The giant, rotating, Space Station 5. The Aries shuttle, making a trip to the moon seem no more incredible than an international air flight. The sprawling Clavius moonbase. The expedition to Jupiter. And of course HAL, the conversant Artificial Intelligence.

Prior to coming to this film, Bruce had watched a number of news stories comparing the 2001 of the movie with the real 2001. The reality was far from being so grand. There were only a couple of spindly space stations, and they were nothing like the colossal spinning wheel of this venerable cinema classic. If anything, the world seemed even further away from a future in space than it did in the late sixties when 2001 premiered. With last month's destruction of a shuttle orbiter and the launch pad, and the loss of all crew, it was now obvious that the American space effort was stuck in yet another hiatus which could easily prove as lengthy as the one which followed the Challenger disaster of 1986.

The questions were asked and re-asked; Why no moonbases, Why no Jupiter expeditions, Why no PCs which could speak like a human, and not just parrot programmed phrases. There were theories put forth: Lack of funding, Lack of quality education, Lack of will.

Bruce walked out of the theater surrounded by a dozen conversations on the meaning of the film's ending, and stepped into the night air. He glanced upward at a nearly full moon which had not been touched by humans in thirty years, and asked "Why?" himself.

Then, he resolved to do something about it.

Chapter

3

Selling the crazy idea

Bruce was sitting with his co-worker and best friend Reggie Deitrich in the foyer to the office of Elisabeth Anderson, president of Acceleration Inc. Reggie had jet black hair and eyes, was of medium height and build, and had a cleft in his chin so deep it made everyone wonder if he had to Q-tip it out every morning.

Bruce knew he would only key himself up by mentally rehearsing a presentation which he already knew by heart, so he instead tried to relax himself by studying the Acceleration logo on the wall. It was one of those three-inch-thick backlit affairs with a halo of light surrounding each heavily back-slanted letter. The slant of the corporate logo was, he supposed, intended to convey a feeling of rapid acceleration. People get paid to come up with stuff like this, he mused to himself.

Bruce was mildly nervous, but otherwise quite chipper despite the early hour. Reggie hated that about him. Bruce was, as they say, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed even before the crack of dawn. It always took time and massive doses of caffeine for Reggie to get started in the morning. Bruce wouldn't even touch a cup of coffee, simply bouncing out of bed fully alert and ready for his day. Bruce attributed the difference between them to their differing lifestyles.

It was interesting to compare these two men: Reggie the reveler who never missed a party, Bruce the type-A personality who accumulated vacation time until his employer would kick him out the front door. Not that Reggie wasn't a crack engineer in his own right. Merely that he saw it as a means to an end. For Bruce, building new things was his reason for living. The contrast between the pair, between the cut-up and the straight-lace, was remarkable. More remarkable still was that not only did the two work together effectively, they genuinely liked each other as well.

In addition to still being groggy at this time of morning, Reggie was also pessimistic about the presentation ahead of them. Although he had worked with Bruce on every detail, the scale of their proposal still staggered him. He was afraid it would stagger Elisabeth too, to no good affect. Still, Bruce was the darling boy of Acceleration right now. His innovations had made the Chicago to New York maglev route possible. Acceleration Inc. would not exist in its present form if not for that. If there was anyone who could successfully get this through, it might be Bruce.

Brent, Elisabeth's male-model-perfect secretary, ushered them into the office. The decor was chrome and glass. Elisabeth greeted them both warmly. She had a wide face surrounded by dense blonde curls. It was obvious from her hairstyle and outfit that she rejected the notion a female had to be man-like to succeed in corporate America.

"Well, Bruce, word is you have a proposal even bigger, and doubtless more expensive too, than the New York to Chicago run. OK. Make your pitch, and make it a good one."

While Bruce moved to the wall-sized monitor at the side of the office, Reggie settled down on a couch. The couch was one of those ghastly creations of white vinyl which did not so much support you as surround you. Sinking into its shapeless mass, Reggie felt like a foreign body being engulfed by a white blood cell.

The monitor came to life with an illustration of a slightly curved horizon with a long, straight line hovering over it. Two short vertical lines connected the ends with the land beneath. Bruce began his presentation.

"Acceleration Inc. has successfully used magnetic flight to reduce the cost of traveling across America to a small percentage of its former value. Our proposal is to now apply the same technology to space travel.

"We are still waiting for a space transportation system capable of sending people and cargo into low Earth orbit for a price per kilogram which would make space development economically feasible. We have taken rocket technology about as far as it can go and it's simply not the answer. If rockets can't do it, then what?

"If we relate the cost in energy of lifting a kilogram into orbit to the cost of the electricity required for an electric motor to do the job, the requirement would only be about 9 kilowatt hours. Even subtracting for efficiency losses, the price for a ticket into space would still be less than a dollar per kilogram. For comparison, there has not been a rocket built yet which has achieved less than five thousand dollars per kilogram."

Bruce paused at this point and became somber. "Issues of efficiency and cost aside, I think the events of last November drive home the point that rockets are not only a very expensive way of getting into space, they're a very dangerous way, too. It's asking a lot to expect someone sit on top of several hundred tons of high-energy explosives while you light it up.

"The most perfect space transportation system would be an elevator which could lift you into space. This theoretical structure has been called an orbital skyhook. A satellite in geosynchronous orbit would play out cable in two directions: one towards the Earth, and the other away from it."

A small window at the upper right of the monitor began to illustrate the principle with a graphic. "As long as the masses being reeled out from both ends were equivalent, the entire structure would continue to move with the Earth. You keep unwinding cable until one end reaches the ground. Secure it, and now you can ride an elevator car to geosynchronous orbit. In addition to that, you can launch yourself to other planets by going beyond the orbit level to where centrifugal force would sling you off when you let go. Now this may sound suspiciously like getting something for nothing, but what you are really doing is tapping into the angular momentum of the Earth. But we could launch payloads for hundreds of thousands of years before detecting even the slightest slow-down in the Earth's rotation rate. Or perhaps forever. Returning ships could save themselves from having to burn up fuel by rendezvousing with a point on the cable matching their velocity, and then riding down, giving up their momentum to the Earth.

"This would be the most ideal means of accessing space. There's just one minor flaw: It can't be built with any engineering material known or theorized. There is nothing we have from which we can make a cable capable of supporting its own weight, let alone anything else, for the many thousands of kilometers necessary. However, there is a way to build a system that can be made with existing materials and which would launch payloads with electricity, not rocket fuels.

"Our proposal is to build a high-altitude hot-air balloon borne space launcher on the coast of Brazil near the equator. It may seem beyond belief that we can build such a massive structure in the upper atmosphere, but I assure you our computer simulations indicate it is possible."

Bruce put his finger on the wall-sized monitor and dragged it downward diagonally. His moving finger-tip drew a "rubber band" box in red. When he pulled his finger back, the box and its contents expanded to fill the screen. The thin, dimensionless line paralleling the Earth could now be seen to have close, evenly spaced dots at the top. He repeated the process and the dots were resolved into spheres, each of which was one-half transparent, the other half white. The globes were all tilted at the same angle, and one could look through the transparent hemisphere to see that the interior of the other half was dark. A V-shaped support, almost edge-on in this view, was mounted on the horizontal axis of each sphere to suspend a thin line at the bottom. Bruce chose one of the half-opaque bubbles, and enlarged it further.

"The key to the enterprise is these supporting balloons. They are basically solar-powered hot-air balloons about a mile in diameter." Elisabeth raised her brows at this, but Bruce continued.

"One side is transparent, allowing sunlight into the interior. The other is black on the inside so as to absorb the light and convert it into heat with the greatest efficiency. This light-absorbing hemisphere is white on the exterior. This minimizes infra-red radiation, again to maximize the heat in the interior. Each balloon rotates once every 24 hours, tracking the sun." The balloon began to rotate like a wheel on the V-shaped support. "Thus the transparent side faces towards the Earth at night. This reduces the loss of heat due to infra-red as there is a certain amount of IR flux coming up from the Earth. Don't get me wrong: thermally, the system will still lose ground at night, but not as bad as if the clear portion was pointing at the cold of space. There is also a thin disk of aluminized mylar less than a kilometer in diameter suspended underneath each balloon. This reflects a certain portion of the infra-red back into the balloon when it is pointed downward. At night, there will be a certain amount of slack in the anchoring tethers at both ends, but the system will definitely stay aloft."

Bruce now drew a small red box on the thin line beneath the balloon. The view inside the window exploded to fill the screen. The mass-driver could now be seen as an open framework supported by suspension cables coming down from the balloon pivot points. Magnetic coils, about the same proportions as a man's wedding band, were spaced at regular intervals.

"The mass-driver is about three meters in diameter and boosts small vehicles to orbital velocity with an acceleration of ten G's. I know that sounds like a lot, but any reasonably healthy individual can easily tolerate ten G's for the minute and a half it would take for a launch. I would eventually like to double the length of the launcher, reducing the acceleration to five G's in order to open up the service to the elderly, and those with heart conditions. But that's a long term projection."

Reggie squirmed uncomfortably in the embrace of the couch. Bruce seemed to have side-stepped any specific mention of the linear dimensions. It might be better to just hit the subject head on than to save it for last.

"Launcher altitude is twenty four kilometers. In terms of air density, that puts it above 15/16ths of the atmosphere. Air pressure is down to less than one pound per square inch. Air drag is going to be extremely low. At this altitude the sonic booms produced by accelerating vehicles will be very mild, even for cities directly beneath the launcher. Cities near military bases carrying out artillery training have had to contend with far worse.

"These are the chief advantages of this system against any ground-based mass-driver launcher. With a ground-based system, you have the problems of sea-level sonic booms and punching your way through the densest part of the atmosphere. Energy loss would be very high, and the payloads would even require an ablative heat shield. The launch capsules would be like a meteor in reverse. By placing our launcher near the top of the atmosphere, we avoid all these difficulties."

He pointed at the display, and now the point of view soared back and upward. The display became a map.

"Ideally, any space launcher should be built as close to the equator as possible. This is in order to take maximum advantage of the Earth's rotation. We believe the best location would be here in southern Brazil. Brazil has the best industrial infrastructure in South America, and a good resource base. We would anchor the far end of the launcher on the peak of Pico da Bandeira, one of the mountains of the Great Escarpment on Brazil's south-east coast. Pico da Bandeira is almost three kilometers high, so it would save us that much length in anchoring tether. Placing the exit of the launcher over a mountain which slopes down to the seashore is also ideal for sonic boom dissipation. The starting end would be less than four hundred kilometers north of Rio de Janeiro, a little over 400 kilometers north east of São Paulo (that's the tenth largest city in the world by the way) and around 700 Km from Brasília, the national capital. All of these cities have excellent international airports.

"Launcher operations could be carried out from Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais state capital and the nearest major city. In 1999, Belo Horizonte overtook Rio as the nation's second-most powerful economy (after São Paulo). Other favorable factors include a large bauxite mine located midway between Rio and São Paulo. That's a critical factor, as aluminum is a major component of the mass-driver coils, structural members, and also the anchoring tethers. Hydro-electric dams at the Furnas Reservoir and other nearby water works provide abundant electricity to the region."

Now the monitor displayed a rotating graphic of a bullet-shaped vehicle. It had short, stubby fins which projected back from the flat rear of the craft.

"We have designed three vehicle models. One is a fuel tanker. The other is for cargo which would include satellites, and consumables for space station Alpha. The third is a passenger vehicle capable of life-support for the less-than-an-hour trip to Alpha. Our current design is a two-seater, but we have long range plans for four and six seaters which are simply stretches of the original design. Now, let's step through the process of sending passengers into orbit."

The monitor continued to illustrate Bruce's concepts. "Passengers would ride an elevator car up the tether cable at the launch end to the boarding station." The boarding station was a pressurized globe about four stories tall. At the base was a receiving station with large grapplers for transferring launch vehicles from the tether to a storage garage on the lowest level of the globe. The elevator linked up to a docking ring not unlike that of a space station. There was a lobby, an airlock leading out to the mass-driver, a depot for the "buckets" that the launch vehicles fit into, and on the top level, an observation lounge with windows.

"There they would board a launch vehicle. The launch vehicle would back up into a bucket, latch in, and then cycle out through the airlock." The lip of the bucket which now surrounded the bullet-shaped craft slanted, extending the curve of the nose backward. It was a flush, aerodynamic fit. "The bucket and vehicle are accelerated at 10 G's to orbital velocity. Once the proper speed is attained, the last few coils of the launcher apply a decelerating force, and the bucket is yanked back and away from the vehicle. By the way, when we do this, we retrieve most of the energy put into accelerating the bucket in the first place. The vehicle exits the launcher. The bucket travels back up the mass-driver to the station, is serviced, recharged with more liquid nitrogen, and stored for a future launch. By now, the launch vehicle is most of the way into low Earth orbit. Forty five minutes later, 180° around the Earth, four small hydrogen/oxygen rocket motors fire, and circularize the orbit. The ship then rendezvous with a low orbit space station.

"On the return leg, the same vehicle is lowered from the station on a tether. The lower it goes, the greater the gravity on it vs. the station, and the tether comes to be under tension. At a well-timed point, the cable attachment releases the capsule, and it heads into a new, lower orbit which grazes the upper atmosphere. The station, on the other hand, gains the orbital energy the capsule has lost. This will help the space station save on orbital maintenance fuel. The vehicle re-enters the upper atmosphere, decelerating like the space shuttle. Incidentally, the belly of the craft is composed of titanium: a very high temperature alloy. No messy silica heat tiles. At a certain altitude, a steerable parachute deploys. Under computer control, the craft is guided to the landing field, and the landing gears drop. The landing field is circular. Runways run radially in all directions, so approaching craft can always land into the wind. Passengers or cargo are offloaded. The vehicle is towed to the tether at the beginning of the launcher. It's then re-fueled, sent back up the tether, and the whole process begins again."

Bruce turned around from the monitor to face Elisabeth. "I'm convinced this new century will see a mass migration off of the Earth into free space. This is the transportation system which will make it possible."

Chapter

4

Potshots

Elisabeth was obviously very impressed. "This is a pretty staggering concept. Let me play Devil's advocate, and try to shoot it down. Lord knows I would sooner have it all come tumbling down in theory than in actuality. I don't much like the idea of this gigantic space launcher crashing down on the heads of several hundred Brazilians." Bruce smiled encouragingly.

"OK, what about weather?" she began. "If the balloons are solar heated, then what about cloudy days?"

"The mass-driver and its support balloons will be above the Troposphere, above the cloud layer, and above storms," Bruce replied. "The only part of the system down in the weather is the support tethers at both ends, and they have a very low cross-sectional area. Winds will push them around some, but not a lot. Remember we are building fairly close to the equator, an area known as the "doldrums", so there are no hurricanes."

"How about lightning strikes, then?" Elisabeth held a hand up in front of her. "I know, I know, it's above the weather. Actually, I was thinking more about strikes on the tether cables."

"It's interesting: no lightning will be possible in the presence of an electrical conductor linking the cloud layer with the land. The cloud layer will literally be grounded. So the areas immediately around the tethers will be the only places on Earth where you can stand and be one hundred percent safe from lightning."

"Meteors?"

"Well, there're not much more odds of the launcher being struck than a shopping mall, and you certainly wouldn't hesitate to build a mall over the possibility. I know it's in the upper atmosphere, but most meteors begin to disintegrate at even higher altitudes. It's not as big a target as one might think."

"How will the launcher stay straight?" Elisabeth wanted to know.

"There will be lasers running down its length for data communication. Those lasers will also be used for guidance," Bruce answered. "Sensors will detect deviations from straight and correct them by signaling the yardarms to apply the appropriate forces. It's not a major problem. There is some wind at this altitude, but remember air pressure is one sixteenth sea-level. So a sixteen kilometer per hour wind would apply no more force than a one kilometer per hour wind here at the surface."

"What if an airplane crashes into it?"

"Private aircraft don't fly this high, and we can certainly control local commercial jet traffic. A jet would be more likely to hit a balloon than any other part. Balloon repair is viewed as ongoing maintenance. Some will fail anyway due to age or defects.

"Earlier I showed you the schematics for three launch vehicles. We have designed a fourth vehicle for repairs. A repairman would ride the vehicle out on the launcher to the area of the deflated balloon, and repair it on-site. Oh, that assumes the balloon has folded itself evenly over the mass-driver. Our simulations indicated that as a balloon deflates, it could either fall pretty much evenly over both sides of the mass-driver, or slip over to one side and hang straight down from the bottom. If it does the former, then the weight is distributed rather uniformly along a substantial length of the mass-driver, and the stress loads are tolerable. If the balloon hangs straight down from its supports, on the other hand, then the load stress is too concentrated in one area. Explosive bolts will fire, and the balloon is jettisoned rather than risking structural damage to the mass-driver.

"But let's assume for the sake of argument," Bruce continued, "that against all odds, an aircraft plowed right into the mass-driver itself. The launcher would not crash into the ground. The entire structure is at neutral buoyancy. Even if the launcher were severed, the two ends would merely drift around close by. Jet engines would be used to maneuver the ends back together so repairs could be implemented. A plane severing a tether would be the worst-case scenario, but extremely unlikely. The tethers have lots of "give", and present a very narrow target. A wing strike would certainly bring down the plane, but not the launcher. I'm not sure even a direct strike would sever the cable, and I doubt if a pilot could manage that even if he were deliberately trying."

"Let's talk about that, then. What about terrorism?"

"There's a lot of redundancy built into this design. A terrorist would have to destroy major portions of the launcher in order to bring it down. Any one bomb (or half a dozen bombs for that matter) wouldn't do any damage which couldn't be fixed. We can certainly institute the same kinds of precautions with regard to luggage as is common in any air terminal. Besides, bombs are not very effective at high altitudes. Still, assuming he could somehow smuggle a bomb aboard, an insane individual could certainly blow up a vehicle, himself, and anyone else riding with him. But operations would only be halted temporarily for repairs, and then resumed, probably within a week. The very worst terrorist scenario my staff was able to come up with involved a group with access to a cruise missile. They off-load the explosives and send it straight down the line, puncturing most or all of the balloons simultaneously. I suppose we could always put an installation of Patriot missiles at either end of the launcher. In the long run, maybe even particle or laser beams. Personally, I don't give the cruise missile scenario much credence. I don't see the missile staying on course for very long after slamming into the first five or six balloons."

"What you said about lasers got me thinking. What about fanatics armed with a high-powered laser?"

Bruce paused for thought. "Even a really high-wattage laser would only punch small holes in the balloons. To really do any real damage, terrorists would have to sweep the laser down the row. It would have to be a very slow sweep, a fast one would not put enough heat into any one spot to burn through. Yeah, a sweep slow enough to deflate any balloons would take many hours. A daylight attack would be rather fruitless. The white sides of the balloons would face towards the Earth, and the white color would reflect away much of the energy. A nighttime attack would be highly visible.

"It's a safe investment," Bruce insisted, "and a very profitable one as well. Our projections are, in the short term, to under-sell Ariane by a factor of two and the Space Shuttle by a factor of three. The space-launching world will beat a path to Acceleration's door. Once we have launched an amount of people and payload equal to around ninety Space Shuttle launches (and we can do that surprisingly fast), we will have reached the break-even point. Everything from that point on is pure profit."

Elisabeth was leaning forward in her chair. "What you are proposing is pretty incredible. You say each of these balloons is a mile in diameter. There seem to be an awful lot of them. Just how long is this thing supposed to be?"

Reggie could hear a stock sound-effect in his head. It was the one of the dropping bomb whistling down lower and lower. Next would come the stock explosion sound-effect.

Bruce hesitated only briefly. "A little over three hundred and ten kilometers," he answered. Elisabeth's eyebrows shot up. "I know, it's a lot, but the elements are just the same components endlessly repeated. This makes it well suited to automation. I foresee factories with no human workers whatsoever. In one end goes bauxite ore and energy, and out the other comes mass-driver components and tether cable day in and out."

"And how much is this little enterprise going to set me back?"

Thin-lipped, Bruce gave her the answer. "Forty-five billion."

Boom.

Elisabeth sagged back into her chair and blanched noticeably. "There's no way. There's simply no way."

"Oh come on, Elisabeth," Bruce implored, "This is the biggest, highest stake venture there can be in the world. You can't expect it to come cheap."

"No way. I mean there is physically no way to get that kind of venture capital together." Elisabeth was shaking her head solemnly.

Reggie was ready to leave the office to start work on something a little bit more doable. Bruce, however, was standing there, thinking furiously. Suddenly, he strode over to the giant monitor and stabbed his finger at the end of the launcher. A small, red, two-sided arrow appeared above his fingertip. He pushed in on the end of the launcher graphic, and it telescoped. He pushed it down to two thirds of its former length.

"OK. The length is now a little over two hundred kilometers. Call it about thirty billion. In order to still achieve orbital velocity, acceleration will now have to be twenty G's. You can still launch supplies, fuel, and satellites. And I suppose you could still launch people if they were young, in good health, and specially trained and conditioned."

"Still can't do it."

Bruce whirled back to the screen, and savagely crushed the launcher down further still. "There. Length is one hundred kilometers with a price tag just a hair over fifteen billion. Acceleration is now thirty G's. You can still launch raw materials and fuel. I guess you could also launch specially-made satellites with circuitry and components hardened to withstand the G forces."

Elisabeth looked at the display thoughtfully. She appreciated that the one single biggest cost of any major space activity was the fuel. If Acceleration Inc. could provide fuel to low Earth orbit at a lower cost, it could be quite a coup. The communications satellite launch industry was quite lucrative also.

"It would be tempting if the money could be raised, but it can't," she explained. "Not even a multinational corporation like Acceleration could raise that kind of capital. A combination of multinationals might, but that would get us in trouble with the anti-trust laws. We could try to seek some kind of special exemption from the government, but...I just don't know."

"OK, Liz, I'm going to try to scare you with the standard boogie man: The Japanese. After beating our pants off in steel, automobiles and electronics, they are now merrily trashing our aerospace industry. It is so typical that we make plans, abandon them, then they pick them up and follow through. Then, when we belatedly decide we did want the technology after all, we buy it from them. And we wonder why we have a trade imbalance. One of the best things Acceleration has done is to wrest leadership in magnetic flight back from the Japanese and the Germans. The Japanese still have much expertise in magnetic flight, though. They also have absorbed every American study ever published on moon bases, Solar Power Satellites, and space habitats. They sit poised and ready to spring into action as soon as the price for a pound of cargo to orbit declines to a certain critical level. The Japanese may chose to try pushing it to that level with some scheme very similar to the one I have just outlined."

Elisabeth stared thoughtfully at the image of the launcher, hovering at the edge of the atmosphere. "I'm sitting here feeling like Queen Isabella listening to Columbus explain why she should part with her jewels. But then I remember what came after, what she was remembered for financing." She paused, turning to look at Bruce who was looking back hopefully. "I've always thought of myself as a CEO with vision. Maybe I've got just enough vision to say YES.

"It also occurs to me that now I have to buy that vacation home in Rio which I keep trying to talk myself into, just so I can watch the first launch for myself," she added with a smile.

Later, as Bruce and Reggie were making their way out of Elisabeth's office, Reggie was clapping Bruce on the back jubilantly. Reggie was stoked for the first time that morning, but Bruce by contrast appeared sullen.

"Man, I can't believe you pulled that one off. We're going to South America! And I sure can't fault you for the location you picked. Have you looked at that map? Every weekend," Reggie fell into a sign-song rhythm, "we can goooo to Riooo de Janeiroooo...."

"You can if you want to," Bruce replied morosely. "I'm the one who wants to live long enough to retire in high Earth orbit, remember?"

"You seem pretty glum for a guy who just sweet-talked a pretty lady out of fifteen billion dollars!"

Bruce turned to look at his friend. "I wanted to build something which would launch humankind out into space, not just machines."

"They can ride the space shuttle, or maybe that aerospace plane they keep talking about," Reggie said encouragingly. "A whole lot is going to be done in space that wouldn't have been done without the cheap fuel and re-supply we're going to provide."

"True. But I still want this launcher to be for the people. So anyone who wants to go can go. I can only hope that once we've started this project it's something which I can fight for later on and win."

Chapter

5

The christening

Bruce was sitting at his CAD/CAM station working out the final details of the balloon structure. They had a press conference set for the next day and Bruce didn't want even the tiniest detail to be undeveloped.

Specifically, he was finalizing the design of a critical link in the system: the rotating anchoring structures at the axis of each balloon which the mass-driver was supported by. The balloons were composed of hexagonal panels of a highly durable fabric, each one a little over a football field in size. At each "pole", the center hexagon was made of aluminum, not the fabric the rest of the balloon was composed of. The stress loads on the pivot points amounted to the weight of over a mile of mass-driver, too much for even the tough balloon fabric to withstand. But Bruce was still concerned. He feared the stress would cause tears in the seams between the aluminum hexagonal panel and the surrounding fabric panels. Now he was expanding the aluminum portion of the "poles" with a dozen additional hexagonal panels in an outward branching "snowflake" pattern. This had the effect of increasing the length of the aluminum-to-fabric seam many times over, distributing the load evenly over a much wider area.

Satisfied with the new stress projections, Bruce began to move his finger up to the "save" button when he felt a small, hard object hit him in the back of the neck.

"Bulls-eye!"

Bruce spun around, and saw Reggie. He was standing a short distance down the hallway leading into the lab, holding an elaborate, home-made model of the launcher which was poking all the way into the room. It was an eight meter long assemblage of plastic soda straws, tape, and toy balloons. It was obvious the balloons had at least a certain amount of helium in them. Reggie did not so much support the model as push it around. The entire length hung suspended more or less straight in the air.

The balloons were the kind which were white, but became almost transparent when inflated. Reggie had even gone to the bother of dipping each inflated balloon into some kind of ink, so that one half was jet black. All in all, it was a very impressive simulation of the real thing.

"That is absolutely incredible! How many hours did you spend on this?"

"Oh, less than a hundred," Reggie casually replied, and then carefully guided his model the rest of the way into the CAD/CAM lab. "You like it? I built it mostly for fun, but partly for the press conference tomorrow. Computer simulations are fine, but this will get the concept across in a very concrete way that something on a monitor just can't. The hardest part was achieving neutral buoyancy. I used the electronic scales in the Calibration Lab to weigh lengths of straw, bits of Scotch tape and an empty balloon before I came up with a formula of three quarters helium to one quarter air. Still wasn't very even at first, though. You'll find a dime or penny taped here and there along its length. Oh, but here's the best part."

Reggie produced a small length of red crayon minus the surrounding paper. It was just under a centimeter long, and well sharpened. It also looked like a bit of the diameter had been shaved off by carefully honing. Reggie slowly swung the ponderous length of his model around until it pointed at the far wall. He inserted the crayon segment into the first soda straw, placed the end to his lips, and blew. With a whoosh and a thwack, the projectile shot out and hit a poster on the wall which said "K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple, Stupid". The wax bullet fragmented, and left an ugly scarlet smear. Bruce started to comment that he hoped this demonstration was not a premonition of things to come, but then thought better of it.

"A definite crowd pleaser," Bruce enthused. "You'll surely steal the show at the press conference tomorrow."

"Hey, speaking of which, have you come up with a name for this contraption yet?" Reggie asked.

"Name?" Bruce blinked. "I hadn't really stopped to think about giving it a name. I've just been calling it the space launcher."

"That's the problem with you die-hard engineering types: no imagination, no show-business sense. That's why you have to surround yourselves with creative types like myself to bail you out any situation requiring poetic inspiration. Let's see," Reggie perched on the edge of a desk and rolled his eyes upward, "a name......Space gun?"

"A gun is a weapon."

"Star-shooter, then?"

"Still has gun-type connotations."

"Space rifle!"

"You know, this all illustrates perfectly that sex fixation I've been warning you about."

Reggie paused briefly enough to shoot him a quick dirty look, and then resumed his musings. "Well, what is this thing really going to wind up looking like once it's up there?"

Bruce stopped to visualize. "A gigantic pearl necklace, strung across the sky."

"Well 'sky pearls' is not going to cut it. Think."

"It will span the very heavens itself," Bruce supplied grandly.

"Span......bridge......Sky Bridge? No, I think there's a resort called that."

"I don't care, I like it!" Bruce said eagerly. "I like the associations with the word 'bridge'. A bridge is what gets you from here to...there," he intoned reverently.

"The Sky Bridge it is, then. You're welcome," Reggie added.

"So tell me," Bruce asked with a smile, "which one of those prima-donna network anchors are you going to shoot with one of your little red crayons tomorrow?"

"Well, that all depends."

"On what?"

"On whether or not you can put me in touch with a curare supplier."

* * *

Then next morning saw Bruce and Reggie heading down the hallway towards the conference room where the reporters lay in wait. Bruce carried his speech notes. Reggie had his lengthy Sky Bridge model in tow. As Bruce rounded a corner, he saw into the room and could hear the buzz of conversation from the crowd of journalists and photographers packed within. He felt his stomach begin to clench. Then he heard a sharp exclamation from behind him.

"Ghuy' cha' !"

Bruce had heard this phrase out of Reggie before, and recognized it as a Klingon curse. However, it was usually spat out venomously at errant electrons in a circuit, rebellious code in a program, or feuding metals which would not alloy properly. This was more like a wail of despair.

Bruce turned around to see Reggie standing there holding his eight meter long model, and looking with dismay at a right angle turn in the hallway with less than two meters clearance.

Chapter

6

Try not to slouch in front of the cameras,
OK?

Reggie's model was still a big hit with the reporters, even though they had to crowd out into the hallway to see it. First, however, came the multimedia presentation.

Unlike Elisabeth Anderson, Bruce was now dealing with an audience not intimately familiar with the technology of magnetic acceleration. So it was necessary to start at the very beginning. He lectured briefly on mass-driver theory, and then started an old movie showing Gerard O'Neill's first attempt to demonstrate his mass-driver model. The model was about two yards long. The grad students assisting O'Neill dipped the bucket into the liquid helium which they used to achieve superconductivity in those days. The bucket was then pulled out and, still trailing heavy mists, placed into the mass-driver model. After a brief delay, the switch was thrown to energize the mass-driver coils. The bucket...

Did nothing.

There was a small explosion of laughter from the gathering in the movie. It was a laughter induced by high expectations followed by an anti-climax. The audience watching the movie chuckled along with them.

"Oh, that's Freeman Dyson laughing the hardest, by the way," Bruce interjected. This provoked additional chuckles from the more scientifically literate members of the gathered press. Indeed, the image of the tall, homely father of the Dyson Sphere could be seen laughing good-naturedly at his friend and colleague.

"As soon as the bucket was taken out of the liquid helium, it immediately began freezing ice crystals out of the moisture in the air due to its extreme cold. That process continued after it was placed in the mass-driver, essentially freezing the bucket in place."

Reggie shifted self-consciously in his seat on the stage. Why the hell was Bruce showing footage of the mass-driver model failing? Was he trying to jinx the public acceptance of this project which was so desperately needed?

By now the assistants in the movie were setting up for the next try. The bucket was in place. The model was energized and the bucket...

Was at the other end of the mass-driver. There had been no motion detectable to anyone in the audience. The workers and attendees in the movie broke into applause.

"Now this is interesting, watch this." Bruce used his hand control, and the movie backed up to a point before the firing and froze. A small indicator at the lower left of the screen flashed the word 'bookmark'. "This is the frame immediately prior to the firing. Now I'm going to advance to the very next frame." In the next still image, the bucket was at the end of the model. There was no intervening blur showing the bucket actually moving from the one point to the other. "As you can see, the acceleration and deceleration of the bucket took place between the taking of one frame of film and the other, a process which takes only one twenty-forth of a second." There was an impressed murmur from the audience.

Bruce then outlined the Sky Bridge concept, using the same multi-media show as he used in Elisabeth Anderson's office. He then took questions from the press. They posed all of the same questions that Elisabeth did, plus a few more she had been too intelligent to ask:

"Dr. Franklin, what about collisions between vehicles flying out of this launcher and flocks of birds?" asked a young video journalist.

"Birds don't fly this high. Remember, this is the upper atmosphere we're talking about."

"Won't all these launches in the upper atmosphere contribute to the destruction of the ozone layer?" an Asian female wanted to know.

"No. In fact, this will be the only space transportation system in the world that won't. There are no rockets involved in the escape from the Earth's atmosphere. It's all done with magnetic fields."

"What about earthquakes?" came from a portly newspaperman.

Bruce couldn't help but chuckle a little at this one. "Well, it's hard to see how vibrations on the ground can effect a structure residing in the upper atmosphere. The only connection with the ground is the anchoring tethers. I suppose an earthquake would induce some wave motion in the cables, but those waves would dampen out well before traveling twenty four kilometers straight up."

"Dr. Franklin, will the balloons completely eclipse the sun?" asked a silver haired woman.

"Hmmm. With a diameter of one mile, and at a distance of twenty four kilometers, each balloon will subtend...," Bruce pecked at his notebook-sized PC on the podium, and began to mutter of arctangents, "Ummm...call it a degree. The sun is like, what, one half a degree? So I guess it will. Now keep in mind that's only for certain areas directly below the launcher. There are no major cities to speak of lying directly beneath. And that would only be for certain times of day, and certain seasons. I think the effect would be much like a partly cloudy day. Remember," Bruce added with a smile, "this is equatorial South America. I don't think any of the residents will complain about a spot of shade every so often."

"Still, some would view this structure as an eye-sore," she persisted.

"I don't think so, not personally. I've described the outside of the absorbing hemisphere of each balloon as being bright white, but please bear in mind that this is the side which will always be turned away from the sun. So visualize it more like the gray underbelly of a cumulus cloud. Even from relatively nearby Belo Horizonte, Sky Bridge will be close to the horizon, and fairly well hidden by haze even on a clear day. I just don't see most people having a problem with it."

The "eye-sore" issue did raise its head several times once the project was set in motion. Some inhabitants of the few minor towns and villages which did lay directly beneath the future site of the launcher took exception to Bruce's "no major cities to speak of" remark. It was an unfortunate coincidence that Belo Horizonte was Portuguese for "Beautiful Horizon". Demonstrators with placards saying "Don't spoil our Beautiful Horizon" lay ahead.

* * *

After the conference, Reggie button-holed Bruce. "Why did you show them that part of that movie footage where the mass-driver didn't work right at first?"

"Because I don't want the public to have unreasonable expectations. The simple fact of the matter is that anything which is new never works right the first time!"

Chapter

7

Building the mammoth thing

There were some minor demonstrations against the Sky Bridge project. But the nation of Brazil in general, and the city of Belo Horizonte in particular, realized this project would make their home a hub of travel. Just the money being spent on the way into and out of the country could amount to billions in the long run. The government was only too happy to smooth the way, financially, legally, and socially. The land grants were generous and inexpensive.

As on any construction project, it started with the laying of the foundation. In this case, however, the foundation was balloon number one, sent aloft with the first tether trailing under it late in the year of 2001. The first and last balloons, the ones supporting the anchoring tethers, would both be filled with helium. It would not have been economically feasible to have filled all of the balloons with helium. But for the first and last ones, the helium provided the extra buoyancy needed to support the weight of the tethering cables. The first balloon also had to support the additional weight of the boarding station.

Sky Bridge was built in sections ten balloons long. That made each segment over ten miles in length. On a clear sunny day, the balloons on a completed section would be half-filled with air from enormous banks of ducted fans. As the solar heating began, each balloon would expand somewhat further, and begin to haul the segment aloft. As it ascended, and the surrounding air pressure dropped, each balloon expanded completely. In fact, each had to bleed off large volumes of air in order to avoid over-expansion. Small vehicles mounted with eight jet engines pointing in various directions guided each section into place. Metal arms controlled via telepresence made the necessary connections, and Sky Bridge grew.

The sight of a section lifting off of its skinny, ten mile long concrete pad, and climbing into the heavens was awe inspiring. The scale of the spectacle was simply beyond human grasp. Bruce never tired of going up to the roof of the many-storied automated balloon manufacturing plant to witness the event.

Even before Sky Bridge was completed, Acceleration Inc. began to see additional business opportunities come out of the project. Astronomers were interested in using the boarding platform for making observations. Those who studied the infra-red spectrum were especially keen on the idea. IR was absorbed by water vapor in the atmosphere. The astronomers were already building their observatories on mountain peaks to get above as much of the wetter parts of the atmosphere as possible, but had taken that about as far as they could.

Local providers of data via microwave links asked if they could mount microwave reflectors on the bottom of the mass-driver. It was a cheaper location than on a satellite, and much higher than any mountain.

A variety of meteorologists wanted to do studies of the upper atmosphere from the boarding station.

One entrepreneur proposed the building of an entire pleasure resort in the upper atmosphere using the solar balloon technology. He would enthuse grandly about how spectacular the view would be from the window in each room. He did have to admit no one would be able to step outside to enjoy this view, however. He was largely regarded as a crackpot, and pretty much ignored by Acceleration Inc.

Bruce's creation continued to grow. The sight of Sky Bridge overhead was impressive from any nearby location, but none more so than near the middle of the structure where it seemed to bisect the vault of heaven. If one was directly underneath, each balloon was almost twice the apparent diameter of the sun or moon. It was easily visible in the daytime, though it looked washed-out with blue mist, much like the daytime moon or very distant mountains. But Bruce most enjoyed looking at it shortly after dusk or before dawn. Then, when the land was darkened, and the sky was a deep blue-black, Sky Bridge would glow in the rays coming from the sun beyond the horizon. At various times, the atmospheric filtering of the sunlight would color the launcher gold or rose. At night, as the tension in the anchoring tethers eased and they would start to bow slightly, the crew would run the aircraft warning lights up each cable. It was interesting to watch the red flashes of light arcing upward, seemingly to infinity.

It was also interesting to climb up onto one of the two enormous concrete anchoring slabs, lean over the guardrail surrounding the pit leading down to the massive take-up reel, and place one's ear to the anchoring tether. The sounds that unceasingly echoed up and down the twenty four kilometer length of cable could soon create a most eerie mood.

By the winter of 2003, Sky Bridge was complete.

Chapter

8

Launcher Control

It was the day of the first launch of cargo from Sky Bridge. They had performed numerous tests which involved accelerating an empty bucket, decelerating it, and bringing it back to the boarding station, but this would be their first acceleration of cargo into low Earth orbit, and they had a paying customer. NASA was purchasing their launching services for the lofting of a load of carbon granules to space station Alpha. The carbon would supply their air filters for over a year. The next launch the following week would be fuel. But the fuel would be a very high-mass launch. It had been decided that this first test launch should be the much lower-mass raw carbon. After careful data analysis of both launches, the schedule called for daily launches, and ultimately, hourly launches. But they had to prove the mammoth thing worked first.

Reggie and Bruce walked out of the fierce South American sun, and into the air conditioned coolness of Acceleration's Launcher Control in Belo Horizonte. Many people were erroneously calling it Launch Control. It was impossible to keep some of the old space program vocabulary from slipping into their lexicon. The popular press seemed to enjoy the resonances between this enterprise and the space program as it was in its earlier days. This "Mission Control room" was quite a bit smaller than NASA's in Houston, and required only a tiny fraction of the controllers. But it was built along the same lines, and seemed no less impressive.

They were introduced to Casandra Morris, Director of Operations for Launcher Control. She was a small woman with large, round glasses, and long, dark-brown hair which she kept wound in a pony tail down her back.

"The Cargo Bullet has been backed into the Bucket and latched in. The combined vehicle is now cycling through the air lock," announced one of the technicians seated at a nearby console.

Bruce frowned with annoyance. After arguing with Reggie on the subject of avoiding gun-derived terminology, he was now dismayed to see the term "bullet" come into universal use among press and staff alike when referring to the launch vehicles. It was, he supposed, inevitable. The launch capsules resembled nothing so much as a rifle bullet. Similar function leads to similar form. He realized he just had to accept it.

The countdown began. The press, kept in a room behind large picture windows which overlooked the control room, began to stir. Bruce was tempted to step outside and look up at the launcher, then realized this was a silly impulse. The bucket and bullet would be quite invisible from this distance. All the facts were here in front of him on the giant computerized displays, and the remote camera feeds.

Before he hardly realized it, they had reached the end of the countdown. The mass-driver coils were firing sequentially, and the bucket with its carbon laden bullet inside was accelerating down the length of the launcher. The velocity indicator showed it approaching and then exceeding mach one with astonishing swiftness...

* * *

Juscelino was on his knees working in his backyard garden when he heard a distance-muffled, but very distinct <whump> from above. He had heard a sound like it before, the sound made when a military jet breaks the sound barrier. But it was a sound he had never heard here, so far from any military air base. Then he remembered today was the day of the first launch. He glanced upward at the offending object, almost straight overhead here. The realization sank in that it was a sound he would eventually have to hear day in and out, and which he would have to get used to if he wanted to remain in this house which he loved so.

"Oh well," he wearily thought to himself, "I suppose one can get used to almost anything with time". It was better than living next to the airport like his idiot brother Alvares.

* * *

In Launcher Control there was much shouting and back-clapping. The bucket had been snapped back, and the bullet had continued on its path out of the launcher and into space. The technology had performed flawlessly.

Reggie grabbed Bruce by the back of his collar and pulled him close to shout in his ear so as to be heard over the jubilant cries. "Hey, buddy! What was that you were saying about nothing new working right the first time?"

Bruce could only grin, and then duck away from a nearby champagne bottle which had just launched a projectile of its own.

* * *

The next day's launch payload was fuel. Although to be exact, it was nothing more than a tanker bullet loaded down with plain water. A company called Orbital Fuels Inc. had created an ingenious fuel depot in low Earth orbit. There, they had a Space Shuttle External Tank which had been donated to them by NASA. To this, OFI had added a large solar cell array. The array always faced the sun, and was arranged so as to permanently shadow the tank. The ET was outfitted with two compressors and many square meters of heat radiators which were also eternally shaded from the sun's warming rays.

The plan was for the tanker bullet to dock with the depot, and disgorge its contents into a small holding tank. The water was then electrolisized into hydrogen and oxygen. These gases were run through separate compressors and heat radiators until they liquefied. The resulting cryogenic fuel was then routed to the two separate tanks inside the ET for storage.

As things progressed, more and more space shuttles would stop at this depot, and drop off space craft attached to boosters with empty fuel tanks. The boosters would gas up, and then lift their payloads to their destinations. It was considered much safer than having large amounts of volatile liquid rocket fuel in the cargo bay of the shuttle, or inside the tanker bullet. Water did not require elaborate cryonic systems in order to keep it from vaporizing while in transit. It was also cheaper in the sense that the water was much denser than the resulting hydrogen/oxygen fuel. A ton of H2O molecules could be delivered to orbit with less tankage than if they were separated from the start, and every pound saved was money earned. But what made the entire project most appealing to Bruce was that it tapped the energy of the sun in space in order to make the fuel. He saw it as the first step towards using the resources of space in order to further space development.

The first tanker-bullet launch was also without flaw. The stresses on the mass-driver had been as high as predicted, but well within spec. OFI enjoyed a thriving business, and eventually expanded, building a second depot in geosynchronous orbit. There, the twenty-four-hour-a-day sunlight permitted fuel manufacture around the clock. Ships at GEO could fuel up for the return leg back down to lower orbits, while other ships would re-fuel and head upwards for points beyond.

Consumables and raw material supply to Alpha and a host of other new stations now being built continued to provide big business. A renaissance of space activities began as projects too expensive to mount before suddenly became affordable.

Bruce waited until after a particularly favorable consortium stock report meeting to press Elisabeth on the subject of expanding Skybridge. There was some launching of satellites taking place, but only those which had been specifically designed from the start for high G-loads. Bruce successfully seduced her with the market for a much broader range of satellite designs.

Sky Bridge began to grow once again.

Chapter

9

Spiderman

Mark Fairbanks sat in the repair bullet and waited for the airlock to finish its cycle. His hand came up and bumped against the clear faceplate of his pressure-suit helmet. Mark had a long beard and a bad habit of stroking it when distracted. The helmet always frustrated this mannerism. Not that he disliked his pressure suit, mind you. It was visually indistinguishable from the space suits the astronauts wore, a fact he took great pleasure in.

It was only slightly less complicated than the NASA suits. Temperature control was required. Although there was one small pressurized oxygen tank for emergency use, the back pack was primarily an air compressor. Its function was to pull in the thin air at Sky Bridge altitude, and bring it up closer to sea-level pressure so it was much more breathable. Although some CO2 scrubbing did take place, stale air was, for the most part, simply pushed out of the suit. The pressure suit was not quite hermetic, but in appearance was no different looking than an actual space suit.

When alone in the suiting-up room, Mark would sometimes admire how he looked in the mirror, encased in the white purity of his suit. He would pose with helmet thrown jauntily under one arm, and his long, curly hair framed by the enormous collar seal. Mark had always wanted to be an astronaut, and this was as close as he was going to get. Closer than most dare devils without a physics degree, anyway.

His legs were beginning to ache. He was tall, gangly in fact, and the camped cockpit of the repair vehicle he sat in did not seem to have enough room for his long, slender legs. His single seat was crowded on both sides by equipment lockers and massive tool boxes.

Finally the outer door swung open, and the repair bullet plus its surrounding bucket began to roll out of the airlock. An endless expanse of three silvery levitation strips and dull-gray driver coils now lay before him. For a short moment his craft sat there, poised at the beginning of the mass-driver. Then the magnetic fields from the first driver coil gripped the bucket's fields, and the capsule began to accelerate.

Mark's vehicle repeatedly interrupted light beams aimed at photo sensitive cells, causing the coils ahead to continuously urge the craft forward. It was a modest acceleration: scarcely more than half a G. But he didn't have far to go. The hoops of the driver coils ahead expanded and whipped past him at an increasing rate. He moved in and out of shadows as the tiny vessel passed beneath the giant balloons. As he gradually picked up speed, the eddy-current-induced magnetic fields in the three aluminum levitation strips near the bottom of the mass-driver began to repel, lifting the vehicle. Soon after, the deceleration cut in. The bullet landing gear had no sooner retracted through the slots in the bottom of the bucket than they had to drop back downward again to touch down on the curved levitation strips. Now the repair bullet was gliding into the darkness under a deflated balloon which was draped limply over the mass-driver. This balloon was his destination. The vehicle slowly came to a stop.

Mark watched the canopy rise about two and a half feet. Then the nose of the craft swung out and downward on a hinge. Repair bullets were the only Sky Bridge vehicles with this design feature. Constrained by the surrounding mass-driver, the canopy was not able to rise fully, and the lowering of the nose facilitated the repairman exiting the vehicle. Mark lifted his toolbox, and clambered out.

He casually stood upon a narrow strip of aluminum not much more than half a meter wide, twenty four kilometers above the ground. After a brief stretch, he began to shine his wrist light around to illuminate the dark, flaccid fabric surrounding him. The only other light came up from the thin strip of the Earth which could barely be glimpsed between the shifting folds of material hanging for hundreds of meters below. He spoke the computer commands which would instruct a compressor to pump air into the balloon. He did this not in a vain attempt to inflate it, but merely to locate the tear.

He snapped the infra red goggles onto his helmet and peered downward, hoping that the leak would be on the inside. Those on the outside of a draped balloon were a real bitch to fix. It could almost never be done on-site.

His scans were rewarded. There, in IR, was the unmistakable plume of solar-heated air gushing out from a gash in the fabric. The tear didn't look to be more than five hundred meters down, and was probably no more than a meter long. A cinch to fix. He issued the verbal command to the repair bullet's computer which instructed it to back up a bit. He followed his vehicle, walking along the curved trough of the levitation strip, and then stopped it directly above the tear. Mark then fastened his safety line to the cable attachment just below the nose of his craft.

Next came the part that always made him feel like a spider. He leaned back on his line while touching a control. An enormous spool inside the repair bullet reeled out line, lowering him from the mass-driver. He went down, down, between the slowly undulating walls of fabric. This was where his rappelling experience came in handy. As he approached the wound in the balloon he slowed his descent and stopped level with it.

In no time at all the tear was patched, and he was being reeled back up on the line. Once on the mass-driver, he sat on a coil and waited for the balloon to re-inflate. It always took a long time.

Eventually, the balloon became an enormous deformed spheroid, but this was enough for solar heating to begin to create buoyancy. The mile-wide clear-and-white mass began to lift up and off of the driver. The thin aluminized-mylar disk beneath the balloon was in tatters. Repairing it was generally not deemed worth the risk to the repairman. Even in a torn state, it still helped to reflect some heat back into the balloon at night.

With the raising of the balloon, surrounding vistas were revealed for the first time since Mark had exited the vehicle. The mass-driver was a fairly open framework composed of only a few slender girders, so there was little to obstruct the surrounding view. The repair had gone by quickly. So, as he often did, Mark took some time out to enjoy the scenery.

It was like the view from a high-flying passenger jet, only instead of being constrained by a tiny porthole it was panoramic. A bluish cast covered the distant Earth, not just on the horizon, but directly underneath as well. Mark could see sinuous rivers which sometimes caught the sun's light and shone dazzlingly. Cities revealed themselves as geometrically perfect crystals. Farmlands also had a kind of patchwork perfection. The clouds welling up beneath him were those puffy kind which looked as solid as sculpted marble. It was interesting to think that as the inhabitants of the remote land below looked upward at the underbellies of these clouds, he was looking downward upon their tops.

He began to daydream of flying among those brilliantly white clouds. In addition to rappelling, base jumping, and skydiving, he also enjoyed hang gliding. He had brought his hang glider (here called an asa delta) with him to Brazil, and occasionally took it to Rio De Janeiro over the weekends in order to leap off of the giant granite slab mountains which overlooked that sprawling metropolis. How Mark would have loved to leap from here with his trusty hang glider overhead! It seemed like it would surely take him days to glide back down to the distant land. Alas, it could never be. There was no way his glider could fit into the repair bullet, even when disassembled.

Then he was suddenly struck with a vision of himself skydiving off of Sky Bridge. Or would it be base jumping? Whatever, it might come close to the world record. He would have to look up the facts on the skydive of Captain Joseph Kittinger who had jumped from a high-altitude helium balloon in a pressure suit of his own. Even if it was no good for getting into Guinness, it would still be a unique experience. His pressure suit was, after all, equipped with a parachute behind the backpack. It was a contingency for any misstep sans safety line.

How would he do it? His first visualization was a swan dive. Then he re-thought that. It would be better to jump off backwards. It would be interesting to see Sky Bridge soar away above him. There would be plenty of time to turn around and look at the ground, for sure.

He was halfway tempted to do it now, and just say he had slipped, that's all. But in a short while he stood up and began to make his way back to the repair bullet.

Perhaps another time.

Chapter

10

A plea for ten G's

By the middle of 2005 the Earth was ringed with uncountable communication satellites in a variety of orbits. Most all of them had been built from components and materials delivered into space cheaply and reliably by Sky Bridge. Now everyone had those wrist communicators which they had been promised for so many years. The wristcoms were made possible by satellites which were giants compared to those launched back in the days of crackling rockets roaring off of launch pads. The long-prophesied picture phones were also in every home, and would soon be on the wristcoms as well.

The consortium's profits were growing almost embarrassingly huge, and Acceleration Inc.'s share of it was not small. Now Bruce was pressing Elisabeth to extend Sky Bridge to the originally designed length of three hundred and twenty kilometers. This would permit orbital speeds to be obtained with no more than ten G's of acceleration. Most humans would find this gravity level tolerable for the eighty seconds required. Then Acceleration could bring the passenger bullets on-line, and begin launching people, not just fuel and cargo.

"We're doing just fine with the current market," Elisabeth insisted. "I know our cash flow is rather enormous at the moment. But the only way you could convince me to sink more money into expansion is if you could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the passenger market is going to be bigger than all the markets we have now put together."

"It will, Liz," Bruce said with determination.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Franklin. Your thousands of emigrants heading out for the new frontier are not terribly real for me. I'm sorry. It's a beautiful dream. It may even come true some day in the far future. But I cannot convince the consortium to sink yet another fifteen billion into Sky Bridge over anything not in the very near future."

This remark stung Bruce, even though Elisabeth had delivered it as tactfully as she knew how. Bruce could respect her position. He realized that not everyone was consumed by the same dream he was, nor felt the urgency about it which he did.

It was, strangely enough, Bruce's 'standard boogie man' who came to his rescue. The Japanese were keenly interested in building resort hotels in Earth orbit. Their market projections indicated it as a potential multi-billion dollar industry. The venture could get off to a limited start with nothing more than one, small, zero-G station dedicated to lodging. This was by virtue of the fact that there was a market of extremely wealthy people willing to spend millions in order to be among the first to vacation in space. For the venture to succeed, however, they had to follow on a few years later with a more mass market; say anyone who could presently afford a trip to Australia, or an African safari.

The attractions of a holiday in space were easy to see. Zero gravity afforded an amusement which could not be bought on Earth for any price. The view certainly couldn't be beat. And none could deny that the prestige associated with having actually done it would be a significant factor.

The Japanese had firm designs for these space resorts. They even had a heavy lift launch vehicle in development which would haul the station components up. But they hoped to send paying customers up on Sky Bridge, saving themselves from the additional expense of developing some kind of aerospace plane. They had the money, and the guaranteed market to convince the consortium the expansion was worth doing.

Sky Bridge continued to grow...

Chapter

11

Man-rating: First attempt

It was the fall of 2006. The day of the first test launching of a manned passenger bullet broke clear and sunny. This suited Bruce just fine. He always seemed even more chipper on a sunny day.

The first two humans up would be Doctors Reggie Deitrich and Bruce Franklin, of course. They met that morning in the suiting-up room. The suiting up room was an area of the Launcher Control building normally used by the Sky Bridge repairmen for getting into their pressure suits when called up for a repair job. This morning, Bruce and Reggie used it to climb into their space suits.

Bruce leaned in close to his friend so as not to be overheard by the surrounding reporters and whispered, "You sure look like hell, I must say."

"Uughhh." Reggie blinked bleary red eyes, and murmured, "Blame it on Rio."

True to his word, Reggie had not missed a single weekend without hopping a jet to Rio De Janeiro. Reggie had always lived to party, but at the rate he was now going, Bruce didn't give him much odds on making it past fifty.

The space suits they were squirming into were nearly identical to the ones used by NASA. The press was eating this up. For the older members of the press corps, this whole affair was like the glory days of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo all over again. In no time, Reggie was whistling the theme to "The Right Stuff" for their benefit.

Bruce had argued vigorously against wearing space suits. No paying passengers would be wearing space suits, he insisted. Casandra had then made an attempt to appeal to his sense of logic. She now described the suits as a contingency against a possible malfunction on the mass-driver which Reggie and Bruce might possibly repair without having to come back down again. Bruce was unsure about the logic of this argument, but finally relented.

Bruce went along with Casandra more often than not because over the past several months he had come to have the greatest respect for her abilities. She had a quick mind which grasped and retained all of the details, missing nothing.

Both men picked up the portable PC's they would use to monitor launcher functions, and then walked from the room. They were loaded into a van and driven to the elevator boarding platform.

The elevators which rode up the first tether on Sky Bridge looked a great deal like the larger and fancier cable cars found at ritzy ski resorts. There were some differences. An air compressor mounted underneath maintained internal pressure while the car ascended. The heaters were more elaborate. There were places to stand and admire the view, but also places to sit down.

Bruce, Reggie, and four cameramen boarded the elevator car. The door swung down on its rubber gaskets. In short order the car began to climb the twenty four kilometer cable to their destination.

The engineers both appreciated that the view afforded by this ascent would be part of the attractiveness of launching from Sky Bridge. It had even been seriously proposed that Acceleration offer bargain-rate tickets merely for the ride up to the boarding station and back.

As the group was lofted upwards, nearby features dropped away, and more distant vistas came into view. In time, the surrounding hills and valleys took on the appearance of some elaborately sculpted model covered with fine green velvet. Soon the land below began to take on a bluish color, and still they climbed.

The colossal balloons of Sky Bridge were now growing more rapidly in the tinted windows overhead. In time, the mass-driver itself could be seen. The elevator car now began to slow as it approached the spherical boarding station suspended at the beginning of the launcher. A tiny communications dish jutted out from the side of the globe, pointing downwards. The bottom of the station was a mass of giant grapplers and pipes leading away from the massive air compressor.

With a muffled bump and a clang, the car docked with the belly of the boarding station. The passengers now ascended a corkscrew stair-case, and headed in.

There was a dome-shaped observation lounge on the top level complete with binocular telescopes and muzak. Someday soon, passengers waiting for their scheduled bullet would sit there in comfort. But Reggie and Bruce had already enjoyed the view of the impossibly-distant horizon from those panoramic windows, and headed without detour to the passenger boarding level.

After a short wait, their passenger bullet slid out of the tunnel leading out from the storage garage. The two-man craft was silver on the nose and belly. These surfaces on the hull were where the highest temperatures would be experienced on re-entry and were left bare, unpainted metal in order to aid in heat dissipation. The rest of the capsule was painted glossy white except for a black, triangular area leading from the base of the window to a point near the nose.

The vehicle glided to a stop next to them as its transparent canopy hissed up. The cameramen shot the two space-suited figures as they climbed into the needle-nosed craft. The canopy swung back down and sealed. As the two passengers buckled in, the bullet began to move off on its three small landing gear and left the boarding platform.

They entered the area where the buckets were stored and prepped. Now moving backwards on a spur track, the bullet climbed up into one. As they backed in, each landing gear folded forward as it rolled up the short ramp leading to the lip of the bucket. Then the wheels dropped back down again through openings in the bottom. Contact points at the rear of the bullet mated together with those in the bucket. The gear now extended fully once again, and the entire affair raised up into the air a couple of centimeters. The combination of bullet and bucket then moved forward towards the open inner-door of the airlock.

Once they were stopped inside the lock, the inner-door dropped and latched. The sea-level-pressure air inside was slowly spewed out into the surrounding thinness. Reggie opened his laptop PC. When the small screen was raised, the PC always played the opening bars of the original Star Trek theme. Reggie was also using an unusual screen saver. It was not the extremely popular, full-motion-video, three hundred and sixty degree pan through the forest with the babbling brook, nor was it any one of an infinity of rotating three dimensional fractals. It looked like nothing better than the old moving starfield of the last century until one watched it long enough to catch the USS Enterprise whooshing by at random intervals.

"We're nearly equalized now," Reggie began a running commentary for the controllers down at Belo Horizonte. "OK, now the outer door is opening."

The vehicle rolled out into the launcher and stopped. The mass-driver formed a pattern of converging straight lines and repeating hoops stretching out before them far beyond the range of human vision. The accelerating coils were spaced fairly far apart, but created the illusion of a solid tunnel beyond several hundred meters. It was hard to see more than the first balloon which lie ahead.

Bruce tried to analyze his feelings at this historic moment. He was a bit nervous certainly, but more than anything else, he felt ready. Ready to prove that his creation could indeed launch men into space. Safely, that is.

Casandra's voice came to them over their helmet speakers. "Bullet One, this is Belo Horizonte. All diagnostics read green for launch."

"Roger that," Reggie replied. "All systems green for launch". Bruce had to smile. Reggie was in his glory.

Bruce recited the very short countdown. "...3...2...1...energize!"

Reggie glanced at his companion quizzically, but returned his gaze forward almost immediately as they went off. The men were pressed back into their seats by ten times the normal force of gravity. The coils of the mass-driver soared past at a constantly increasing tempo until they blurred into invisibility.

They heard a whir and a thump which indicated that the landing gear had retracted. Now they were riding solely on magnetic fields. It was for the good: any kind of wheel would soon fly apart at the speeds they were approaching.

A faint roar began to build as air, even as thin as at this altitude, protested at being rent through. Now there was a distant whining sound, increasing in pitch. Bruce searched for an explanation, and finally decided it might be the magnetic tugs of each passing driver coil, now raised in frequency to where they produced waves of audible sound.

The mass-driver was now a ghostly, shimmering gray tunnel around them through which they could easily see the supporting balloons flying by overhead. The balloons' passage also had an ever-accelerating rhythm, like the coils before. The sunlight streaming in through the clear canopy strobed madly as mile-long shadows passed by too quickly to count.

"Acceleration profile nominal," Reggie struggled to get out. "All systems functioning normally."

Although they could not yet see the end of the launcher, they knew bucket-vehicle separation was near. Then a powerful decelerating force was on them with a shocking brutality. As both men were thrown against their restraining harnesses with almost unbearable pressure, they realized something was horribly wrong. Some sensation of deceleration was expected at this point, as the bullet pushed its way through the thin air and was slowed somewhat as a result. But nothing like this. Their heads were bent forward at an extremely painful angle and their arms stood grotesquely straight out in front of them. A dark tunnel of ebony sparkles was flowing in front of their eyes when suddenly the crushing forces were gone.

Under normal circumstances, an imaginary observer suspended in mid-air near the end of the launcher could never hope to see a bullet come soaring out. The vehicle would pass and be gone before the image could register on any retina. Such an observer today, however, would have witnessed the craft exit the mouth of the launcher no faster than a car on the freeway, and then almost immediately begin to plummet towards the craggy slopes of Pico da Bandeira far below.

"Jesus, what happened?" Reggie asked groggily. The bullet was in a slow tumble. Shafts of sunlight and shadow swung sickeningly through the tiny cockpit.

Bruce tried to shake the dark flashes from his eyes. Then a popping in his ears made him realize the roaring sound which he heard was not blood rushing through his ears as he had first thought, but an escape of air from somewhere in the craft. "Visors down!" he barked, already sounding faint in the thinning air. Both men slapped their helmet faceplates down.

The head engineer grabbed his laptop PC from its new location wedged under the front of the canopy, and scanned the system read-outs. None of the indicators were flashing red. Then he noticed that the display which should have shown the bucket being pulled back up the length of the launcher was static. The bucket should now be getting recalled back towards the boarding station, but there was no indicator showing its location on Sky Bridge. He looked up and saw, to his mortification, that the bucket was still with them.

The view in the extreme left and right parts of the window should by now have been unblocked. But there instead was the lip of the bucket, still tightly gripping their vehicle. Reggie was now looking at it too with dazed disbelief. Somehow, the contact points must have jammed.

"Launcher Control, the bucket is still with us," Reggie reported, "I say again: we have exited the launcher with the bucket still attached".

In Belo Horizonte, Casandra came out of her seat, and felt herself walking with dream-like slowness to the station directly ahead of her position. There she stood, stiffly erect, looking over the shoulder of the seated console operator at every reading. The Head Controller finally decided there was nothing she could do but continue to claw at the top of the chair in front of her, and await the outcome.

Bruce seized the manual control stick which he had insisted be installed for the man-rating tests. He carefully watched Earth and sky pass across the windshield, and then fired control jets to stop the dizzying tumble they were in. That done, he then pitched the nose of the craft straight up. He hit the engines full blast, then almost immediately cut the thrust. He did this again and again, pounding the throttle, snapping it back and then pounding again.

"What the hell are you trying to do?" Reggie demanded loudly. "Afraid we haven't had about enough already?"

"You don't understand. With this bucket all over us, we can't deploy the chute." He turned to look at his friend. "If I can't shake this thing loose, we're going to hit the water like a brick...and then sink like one too."

The Bridge to Space

by Mike Combs

Table of Contents

Prologue

1981: A hopeful view of the future

Chapter

1

Evacuation

Chapter

2

A general dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs

Chapter

3

Selling the crazy idea

Chapter

4

Potshots

Chapter

5

The christening

Chapter

6

Try not to slouch in front of the cameras, OK?

Chapter

7

Building the mammoth thing

Chapter

8

Launcher Control

Chapter

9

Spiderman

Chapter

10

A plea for ten G's

Chapter

11

Man-rating: First attempt

Chapter

12

Highway encounter

A general dissatisfaction
with the current state of affairs

Try not to slouch in front of the cameras,
OK?