Powersat (The Grand Tour) Read online

  “But without the spaceplane his project can’t possibly succeed,” the Egyptian countered. “It will be too expensive to service the satellite, to send crews up to repair and maintain it. He nearly went bankrupt merely assembling it in space with ordinary rockets”

  “True, the spaceplane is the key to operating the power satellite profitably,” al-Bashir admitted. “But the satellite itself is worth several billion dollars, is it not? That is a considerable bargaining chip for a man with Randolph’s talents of persuasion.”

  “Then we’ll blow it up,” said the Saudi, slapping the tabletop with one long-fingered hand. “That will finish him for good and all.”

  “That will finish us,” al-Bashir snapped.

  The others stared at him, almost openly hostile.

  “Let me point out that each of our peoples’ victories against America has come at a very high price. September eleventh was followed by the destruction of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein’s intransigence led to the invasion and humiliation of Iraq. Even our greatest victory, the Day of the Bridges, has brought nothing but devastation and the Americans’ permanent ‘protection’ of the Persian Gulf oil fields.”

  “They have not occupied Iran’s fields!” the mullah snapped.

  “Nor Arabia’s,” added the Saudi.

  “That will come,” al-Bashir warned, “if we strike openly again.”

  “But they don’t know that we are responsible for the spaceplane’s failure,” the general pointed out. “The entire idea of such a plane has been discredited by the crash.”

  “That is all to the good,” said al-Bashir. “But if we blow up the power satellite, what retribution will the furious Americans take upon our people?”

  The room went silent once again. At length, the general spoke up. “What do you recommend, then?”

  Al-Bashir suppressed an urge to smile. I have them now, he knew. Keeping his face perfectly serious, he replied, “I recommend that we use the power satellite. For our own purposes.”

  SOLAR POWER SATELLITE

  It floats in silent emptiness twenty-two thousand three hundred miles above the equator, a mammoth flat square two and a half miles long on each side. At that precise altitude over the equator its orbit is exactly the same as Earth’s daily rotation: the power satellite remains over the same spot above the Earth’s surface always. From Texas it appears as a bright star in the south, almost halfway between the horizon and zenith. If you know precisely where to look, often you can see it in full daylight.

  To the crews working on the powersat it looks like a big square island. The side facing the Sun glitters darkly, its panels of solar cells greedily drinking in the sunlight’s energy and silently converting it to electricity. The satellite’s underside, the side facing Earth, is studded with microwave antennas and pods that house power converters and magnetron tubes, as well as temporary shelters for the workers. Dwarfed by the sheer size of the powersat, the spacesuited workers buzz around the huge structure on broomsticklike flitters, little more than a small rocket motor and sets of stirrups to anchor their booted feet.

  Far below, on empty desert land leased from the state of New Mexico, stands a five-mile-wide field of receiving antennas, looking like thousands of metal clothes poles set into the ground. The rectennas, as the engineers call them, wait for the microwave beam that the powersat will someday transmit.

  In 1968 Dr. Peter S. Glaser, an engineer with Arthur D. Little, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts, invented the Solar Power Satellite.

  Glaser’s concept was simple. Solar cells convert sunlight into electricity; they had been used on spacecraft since the original Vanguard satellite of 1958. Why not build a satellite specifically to generate electricity from the uninterrupted sunlight in space and beam it to receiving stations on Earth? The basic technologies were already in existence: solar cells, such as those used to power pocket calculators, to generate the electricity; and microwave transmitters, which are the heart of microwave ovens, to transmit the energy to the ground. Receiving antennas on the ground would convert the microwave energy back into electricity.

  The one technical drawback was that Solar Power Satellites would have to be big: several miles across. But they could generate thousands of megawatts of electrical power and beam it to Earth. With no pollution, because a power satellite burns no fuel. The system’s power plant is the Sun, some ninety-three million miles from Earth.

  In the 1970s NASA and the Department of Energy conducted a joint study of the feasibility of Solar Power Satellites, and concluded that such an orbiting power plant would cost many billions of dollars. The SPS idea was quietly put aside by the American government.

  Not so in Japan. In February 1993 Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science conducted the first experiment in space in which microwave power was beamed from one spacecraft to another. The power level was only 900 watts and the experiment took less than a minute. But that was the first step in Japan’s Sunsat program, aimed at building an experimental Solar Power Satellite capable of beaming ten megawatts of electrical power to the ground.

  By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the global electrical power market had grown to more than one trillion dollars per year. Most of that energy was supplied by fossil fuels: coal, natural gas, and oil that came principally from the Middle East. In Japan, where private corporations and the national government are intimately intertwined, the Sunsat program was quietly handed over to the newly formed Yamagata Industries Corporation, which constructed the demonstration solar power satellite in low Earth orbit. It delivered twelve megawatts to a receiving station built in the Gobi Desert. Yamagata’s program was international in scope; the corporation employed engineers and technicians from many nations, including Daniel Hamilton Randolph, a newly graduated electrical engineer from Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

  Despite the fact that a Solar Power Satellite uses neither fossil fuels nor radioactives such as uranium or plutonium, many environmentalists objected to transmitting a powerful beam of microwaves through the atmosphere. They drew pictures of birds being roasted alive as they flew through the beam and claimed there would be damaging effects on the long-term climate. Thus the original Japanese receiving station was placed in remote, sparsely settled Mongolia. And the microwave beam was kept so diffuse that horses could graze amid the receiving antennas without harmful effect.

  Once the demonstration satellite was operating successfully, Dan Randolph flew back to his native United States and founded Astro Manufacturing Corporation. Pointing to the success of the Japanese, he convinced a consortium of American and Western European financiers to back his company’s effort to build a full-scale SPS, capable of delivering ten thousand megawatts to the ground. He hammered home to them that while the capital costs of building the orbital power station would be some four or five times the cost of a nuclear power plant, the operating costs would be so low that the power satellite would begin showing a profit within three years of its start-up. And once the first full-scale power satellite was operational, capital costs for the next ones would go down appreciably.

  Saito Yamagata’s supporters in the Japanese government told him that the American’s betrayal was what he should have expected from a foreigner. Yamagata held his tongue and his patience. In silence he watched Randolph driving his fledgling corporation at a breakneck pace to produce a practical solar power satellite, while his own efforts proceeded much more slowly.

  Carefully avoiding funding from any governmental entity and the crippling regulations that came with it, Randolph hired hundreds of workers. He rented time and expertise from NASA to train his team, and convinced aerospace giants such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin to mass-produce rocket boosters that lifted construction crews and equipment into orbit. Even with the benefits of mass production, the costs of the operation drove Astro Corporation to the edge of insolvency.

  While the massive power satellite took shape several hundred miles above the Earth, and
then was boosted to its final orbital position above the equator, Randolph pushed an elite team of engineers to perfect a spaceplane, a vehicle that lifted off on a rocket booster and then could land like an airplane at any major airport, capable of carrying a small payload or half a dozen workers into orbit. That was the key to operating the solar power satellite economically, profitably. Without it, servicing the huge powersat with human repair and maintenance teams would be too expensive to be practical.

  Now Randolph had his solar power satellite. Its construction was almost complete. But the spaceplane project was in a shambles, and he had run out of sources for more funding.

  Except for Yamagata’s offer.

  TAOS, NEW MEXICO

  Dan sat across the aisle from Joe Tenny, his chief engineer, while Gerry Adair flew the aging twin-jet Cessna Citation to New Mexico and Hannah Aarons’s funeral. Tenny busied himself with his laptop computer, content to let his boss work out his feelings in silence.

  At last Dan asked, “Who’s watching the store?”

  “Lynn Van Buren,” said Joe. “She’ll keep everything under control until we get back.”

  “She was a friend of Hannah’s, too, wasn’t she?”

  “Hell, Dan, ninety-nine and a half percent of the staff was a friend of Hannah’s. We can’t have ’em all trooping out to New Mexico for the funeral.”

  The chief legal counsel of NASA had regretfully turned down Dan’s request to have Hannah Aarons honored with other fallen astronauts. “She wasn’t a NASA employee,” he explained reluctantly. In the telephone screen Dan could see the pained expression on the man’s face and decided not to press the issue. Aarons’s alma mater, the Naval Academy, suggested she could be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. But her family wanted her with them, so Dan flew to Hannah’s hometown of Taos, above Santa Fe, for her funeral.

  The ceremony was brief and dignified. The Aarons’s rabbi spoke of Hannah’s unquenchable spirit. A high school choir sang the sailor’s hymn, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” adding the verse written for fliers:

  Lord, guard and guide all those who fly

  Through the great spaces of the sky.

  Be with them always in the air,

  In darkening storms or sunlight fair;

  Oh, hear us when we lift our prayer,

  For those in peril in the air!

  Standing in the crisp morning breeze beneath a warming Sun, Dan noticed that Hannah would be buried not far from the grave of Kit Carson. Not bad, kid, he said to her silently. You’ll be with another frontier scout. Good company.

  The sky was bright and clear. The sunshine felt good, comforting, on his shoulders. Dan thought of all the energy that the Sun beamed out continually for billions of years. If we could convert even a tenth of 1 percent of that sunlight into electricity, the world would never have a power shortage. Ever. And we could turn off all the fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants on Earth.

  Adair spoke haltingly of his admiration for Hannah and promised he would finish the work that she had started. Then it was Dan’s turn to say a few words, and he wondered if he could do it without breaking up. He walked up to the grave, murmured his regrets and condolences to Hannah’s husband, her ten-year-old daughter, and her wheelchair-bound mother. Crumpling the speech his public relations man had written for him, Dan said simply:

  “Home is the sailor, home from the sea. And the hunter, home from the hill.”

  He couldn’t say more. Not without bawling like a baby.

  When it was all finished and Hannah lay beneath the freshly turned earth, Dan, Tenny, and Adair started toward the cemetery’s gate, following the Aarons family. A cluster of news reporters and camera crews were hovering outside the cemetery like a humming swarm of bees. Only a few close friends and coworkers and Hannah’s immediate family had been allowed past the steady-eyed Native American men who guarded the cemetery gates with loaded shotguns.

  Dan knew he would have to face the reporters. There was no way around it.

  “You want me to run interference for you?” Tenny asked gruffly as they trudged toward the iron gates.

  Dan almost grinned. Tenny was built like a football guard, not all that big but just as burly. Dan pictured the engineer knocking down reporters like a bowling ball going through tenpins.

  “No,” he answered, looking at the little crowd waiting on the other side of the gates. “Time for me to try to put some positive spin on this.”

  Tenny grunted. “Lotsa luck.”

  As soon as the guards swung the gates open the reporters swarmed around him. Dan knew what their questions would be, they were always the same after an accident:

  Do you know what caused the crash?

  Does this mean your project is finished?

  What are you going to do next?

  He spread his arms to quiet them, then said in his clearest, most authoritative voice, “We have the best investigators in the world working to determine what went wrong with the spaceplane. At this point in time, all I can tell you is that there might have been a fault in the control system.”

  “Will Astro Corporation be able to continue the solar power satellite project?”

  “We intend to.”

  “But our information is that you’re broke.”

  “Not quite.” Dan gave them a rueful grin. “In fact, we’ve already had an offer of funding to carry us through the next couple of years.”

  “An offer of funding? From who?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say,” Dan replied, silently asking Sai Yamagata to forgive him.

  The questions went on, many of them repetitious. Dan thought of himself as a swimmer in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by sharks who were circling, circling, smelling his blood in the water.

  At last Tenny broke in. “Hey, we’ve got a plane to catch, boss.”

  Dan nodded vigorously. “That’s right. Sorry, people. If you need anything more you can call my office at Matagorda.”

  The reporters grudgingly backed away while Dan, with Tenny and Adair at his side, half-sprinted to the rental car they had picked up at the Taos airport.

  When they arrived at the airport, though, Dan was surprised to see another reporter waiting for him on the concrete apron where their plane was parked.

  “I’m Vicki Lee,” she said, sticking out her hand before Dan could say a word. “Global Video News.”

  She was almost Dan’s height, with a generous figure that edged close to being plump. What do the Jews call it? he asked himself. Zaftig. Not quite voluptuous, but good-looking enough to be a news anchor some day, Dan thought. If she skinnies down a little. Not as young as she dresses, though, he told himself as he took in her snug jeans and loose-fitting pullover sweater. Heart-shaped face that dimpled nicely when she smiled. Chestnut hair cut short and spiky; eyes the color of sweet sherry wine.

  “How’d you get out here before us?” Dan asked as he took her extended hand. Her grip was firm. She’s been practicing, he decided.

  Vicki Lee smiled brightly. “I ducked out of the crowd at the cemetery early. Their questions and your answers were pretty predictable, actually.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Dan. He saw Adair and Tenny clamber up the ladder and disappear inside the Cessna.

  “I figured I could get better information out of you by myself, without the rest of those twinkies and bozos pushing at you.”

  Despite himself, Dan grinned. “Okay, here I am. You’ve got about ten minutes, max.”

  Her eyes flashed, but she quickly reached into her handbag and pulled out a miniaturized video camera. Dan unconsciously squared his shoulders and tugged at his jacket to make certain it didn’t gap. I must look pretty ragged, he thought, but what the hell—I’ve just come back from a good friend’s funeral.

  “Mr. Randolph,” Vicki began, looking at him through the camera’s eyepiece, “is there any truth to the rumor that you and Hannah Aarons were having an affair?”

  Dan felt as if she’d hit him in the gut with a mon
key wrench. “What is this, a tabloid smear job?”

  She put the camera down. “Actually, I’m on the utterly boring financial news desk.”

  “Then what the hell are you trying to do?”

  Perfectly calm, she replied, “I’m trying to get a story, Mr. Randolph. My boss thinks Astro’s about to collapse. But I’ve heard that you and your test pilot were sleeping together.”

  “Well you’ve heard dead wrong,” he snapped angrily. “Hannah was a married woman with a ten-year-old daughter, for double-damn sake. She and her husband had a fine marriage and she didn’t sleep with me or anybody else except her husband.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. And what kind of an idiot do you think I am, sleeping with an employee?”

  She shrugged. “But the rumor is out there, Mr. Randolph. Maybe you should allow me to put it to rest.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not going to dignify a piece of crap like that. No comment at all.”

  Her expression turned impish. “Not even to deny it?”

  Dan stared at her. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “Righteous indignation always tickles me.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Randolph muttered.

  “You may have noticed,” Vicki said, “that I turned off the camera several moments ago.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m not here to smear you or Mrs. Aarons or anyone else. I’m merely trying to get a story.”

  He planted his fists on his hips and told himself to calm down. Play her right or she’ll do a hatchet job on you.

  Adair stuck his head out of the Citation’s cockpit window “Should I start crankin’ her up?” he called.

  Dan gestured for him to wait without taking his eyes off Vicki Lee. “What kind of a story are you looking for?” he asked her.

  She didn’t hesitate an eyeblink. “One that can get me off the damned financial desk. I’d really love to work for Aviation Week.”

  “That’s setting your sights pretty high.”