1.

Arrival

 

Will Elliott glanced at the screen of his attaché. A new video message had just arrived from his friend Sebastian Langlais, Director of the Lunar Commission, which coordinated operations on the moon. He wanted to listen to it, but the Mars shuttle Pavonis had landed a dozen minutes ago and he had to get to Joseph Hall to greet Sebastian’s son, Helmut. He stared out the window at the great northern escarpment of Valles Marineris, which rent the horizon a mere dozen kilometers away, and wondered whether he had time. The risk of being late seemed less than the risk of missing something Sebastian wanted him to say to Helmut; after all, it took a half hour or more to unload the passengers and transport them to Joseph. He pushed the play icon on the screen with his finger.

“Good sol, Will. I’m glad to see you had good weather this sol for the landing; or maybe I should say I’m glad tomorrow’s weather was good for the landing, since it’s already October 18 at Aurorae Outpost. Pretty soon you’re going to need not to drop an extra day at the end of the month to get Martian and terrestrial calendars aligned better!

“But I didn’t call to complain about your calendar, just to express relief that Helmut’s shuttle has landed safely. Give him a hug for me, please. He’s a good boy—well, he’s a young man now, but I tend to forget—you’ll get a lot of work out of him, and I think he’ll be a creative addition as well. In short, he’s what you need up there. His loyalties are in the right place as well; he’s devoted to space flight and already has an attachment to Mars. That formed when I videomailed him daily from Aurorae ten years ago, back in ’23 and ’24, and of course after that we moved to Houston so that I could carry out my new lunar duties and he had summer jobs with both the Lunar and Mars Commissions. Space flight’s practically in his blood.

“I know how persuasive you can be in getting people to stay there, settle, and start families. Please don’t be so persuasive with Helmut! I want to see my boy again. Actually, I doubt you’ll be able to keep him there anyway because he wants to ride the new wave of exploration that appears to be on the horizon. I have no idea whether his family will be on Mars, the Earth, or maybe even Mercury, some asteroid, Callisto, or God knows where. He’s living in a pretty interesting time.

“The news here is pretty good. Have you seen the new report about the LOX-Augmented Nuclear Thermal Rocket engine? It’s on a NASA internal website, but they say it’ll be released to the media in a few days, since it’s leaking anyway. The last two months of tests on the semimonthly lunar run have been very, very good. The specific impulse has been consistently 680. The report recommends switching all passenger traffic and some cargo traffic between the Earth and moon permanently to LANTR propulsion. It uses twice as much propellant for cargo launches than the solar ion engines, but the cargo arrives in three days instead of six months, and propellant costs are decreasing anyway. The report also recommends shifting the rendezvous node from Gateway to low lunar orbit; the scenery will be more dramatic for our tourists and fuel efficiency is improved markedly. I’m bracing myself because it probably means that in a year or two the cost of flying to the moon will drop by a third and the tourist flow may very well double. Watch out; Dusty Red will be on the tourist horizon soon enough!

“God, I switch to business awfully fast; sorry about that. Tell Helmut that I love him and I would ask you to kiss him for me, but you Americans don’t do that sort of thing. You keep in touch, and make sure he does as well. Bye.” Sebastian smiled and his picture faded from the screen.

Will stared out the window, contemplating Sebastian’s words. The LANTR engine used a solid core nuclear reactor to heat hydrogen gas to 3,000 degrees Centigrade, then injected oxygen into the exhaust stream. The resulting super-hot water vapor exited the engine bell at an average velocity of 25,000 kilometers per hour, which was fifty percent faster than the exhaust of hydrogen-oxygen engines and 1.8 times faster than the Mars shuttles’ methane-oxygen propulsion system. It was only 2/3 the exhaust velocity of a standard solid core nuclear engine, but it had one advantage: the moon and Phobos produced water at about $500 per kilogram, or half a million bucks per tonne, and since water was only 1/9^th hydrogen by weight, a solid core nuclear engine required nine times as much water production as a standard chemical rocket to make sufficient hydrogen. If the oxygen was of no use—and no one could use that much oxygen—most had to be vented to space. The hydrogen thus cost $4,500 per kilogram; prohibitively expensive. Even the Swift shuttle, which was now lifting cargo from the Earth’s surface to low earth orbit at $500 per kilogram, lifted hydrogen to low earth orbit at $2,000 per kilogram, because hydrogen was low density and the Swift shuttle couldn’t carry a full load.

Will had to wonder about the impact of this new engine. It had been very reliable so far. The trip to the moon was an excellent test because the vehicle could always use the moon to slingshot it back to Earth if the engine failed at the other end. That was not true on a trip to Mars, so the engine had to be highly reliable and vehicles had to fly in pairs so that one engine could do double duty if the other failed. The next opposition in 2035 was the closest one since Will had arrived on Mars on Columbus 1 in 2020. A LANTR-powered vehicle could dash to Mars in about four months, remain a month, and fly back to Earth via Venus in nine months. Tourists would be possible, though the tickets would be forty to sixty million bucks each. Earth was getting rich, however; there were people who would spend the money.

He glanced at his watch; he was late! There was no time to reply. He’d tape a videomail to Sebastian after greeting Helmut. He jumped up from behind his desk and headed for Joseph Hall.

It was a quick walk. He had been in Habitat 1, the inflatable module twelve meters in diameter that Columbus 1 had set up after arrival. It was their administrative center, though administration was slated to move soon. It was connected by a transparent plastic tunnel to the Geology Building, their first construction of Martian iron and duricrete, which was now used for storage. It connected to Renfrew Hall, their second construction, now used to house new arrivals. It connected to Joseph Hall, their third construction, which had their garage and plastic fabrication area on the first floor and the steel fabrication area on the second floor. The route took him past a dozen old greenhouses that still raised a considerable portion of their food, though some had now been cleared and sterilized to serve as starter biomes for the Bio-Archive project, a plan to set up ten replicas of ecosystems from across the full range of climatic zones in the United States.

Much to his disappointment, the two rangers bearing eight arrivals from the Pavonis had already arrived. The new passengers were milling around, collecting their personal possessions and piling them on small carts to move them to their new housing, and talking to their “buddies,” the local persons assigned to greet and guide them for the next few sols. Will had seen a picture of Helmut Langlais—a bit tall, blonde, 26 years old—but wasn’t sure where the young man was. Then he spotted someone who met the description standing and talking to a little boy: Will’s eight and a half year old son Marshall, who had promised to meet his father in Joseph.

He was about to speak when someone to his right spoke. “Commander Elliott! I’m over here!” Will turned and saw a man who was in his late thirties, also blond but balding, and slightly built. “Thank you for coming to greet me, I’m very grateful!”

“Oh; Mr. Carson! Skip Carson. It’s very good to meet you. Welcome to Mars.”

“Thank you.” Skip approached and held out his hand. Will shook. “Greg was very apologetic when he called just before we approached the atmosphere and said he couldn’t greet me; some sort of personal emergency, he said. I’m glad you were able to substitute.”

“Well, Father Greg is one of our psychologists; he can have emergencies at odd times.”

“Father Greg?”

“He’s a former Catholic priest, though he functions as one here, so we call him Father Greg. I’m honored to greet you. How was—”

“Dad, where have you been?” Marshall said, interrupting. The little boy had walked over. “Helmut has been waiting twenty minutes!”

“No, more like five,” Helmut replied quietly to Marshall. His English had the standard accent of an American-raised kid; quite unlike his father’s.

The situation was suddenly getting complicated. “Skip, this is my son, Marshall,” Will said. “And I suppose you’ve already met Helmut.”

“Oh, yes; an excellent zero-gee volleyball player.”

“You’re pretty good yourself, Mr. Carson,” Helmut replied with a smile.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t shake the hand of the son of an old friend,” Will said. He shook Helmut hand. “Actually, your father said I should give you a hug for him.” So he hugged Helmut. “He then added he wanted me to kiss you on his behalf, but said he knew Americans don’t do that.”

“No, they don’t! That’s one difference with us Europeans. Thank you, Commander.”

“Dad, he wants to see the biomes,” said Marshall impatiently, interrupting. “He told me.”

“Well, perhaps we can all go; would you like a tour, Mr. Carson?”

“Yes, that would be quite nice. Thank you.”

“We can leave the luggage here; no one will disturb it,” said Will.

“Dad, I want to tell Helmut about the biomes,” persisted Marshall.

“Alright; you lead the tour.” Will looked at the two arrivals. “I gather it was a pretty good flight?”

Helmut nodded. “The landing was exhilarating; or maybe I should say bumpy and frightening. In other words, everything went as expected.”

“I like your way of phrasing things, Helmut,” added Skip. “Quite a ride. Same with the aerobraking. Deimos was quite interesting and I’m grateful I got to go.”

“They selected part of the team at random, so many wanted to go,” noted Will. “Helmut, did you get to a moon?”

“Phobos. I was amazed how every hundred meters or so, there were footprints. It was pretty hard to find an unexplored spot.”

They moved their luggage carts to a corner and began to follow Marshall, who had already walked to an exit.

“And the flight from Earth went pretty well, too?” added Will.

Helmut shrugged. “It was crowded, as you know, but we kept ourselves busy.”

“His team won the intramural volleyball championship,” added Skip. “I stayed in my stateroom much of the first half of the flight writing a novel, but when I came out I found the rivalry between two teams was hot. I joined the wrong one, too.”

“Y’all were pretty good, though,” replied Helmut, lapsing into a southern accent, as would be expected of a teenager raised in Houston.

“How were the two inflatable Interplanetary Transit Annexes?” asked Will.

Helmut nodded. “Fabulous. They really increased our living space. Of course, getting them back in their storage boxes afterward was tedious and slow.”

“We almost had to jettison one of them,” added Skip. “It wouldn’t fold back up. Once they’re inflated, they’re fifty percent larger than an Interplanetary Transit Vehicle. It works pretty well to cruise between the planets in a large space, then convert the ITVs into something more like an airplane cabin before arrival. It’s a pain having to change rooms, though.”

“You changed rooms?” asked Will. “Oh, of course. The staterooms in the ITV are surrounded by cargo and thus are a much lower radiation environment.”

“Exactly. I came out of my room in midvoyage because I had to move into the annex,” replied Skip.

Marshall listened to the adult conversation, a bit irritated that he was being ignored. He pushed a button and the door opened for them. “This is the plastics fabrication area,” he said. “We make our plastics here, for a little while longer, anyway.”

“A little while?” asked Skip.

“We’re getting lots of new plastics making and chemical synthesis equipment on this flight,” replied Will. “So this area will be added to the garage and we’ll build a new structure for plastics fabrication.”

Marshall led them across the space, to the building’s northern airlock. They crossed the airlock and entered a tunnel with a junction a few meters in front of them. Marshall pointed westward, to the left, instead of straight ahead. “Let’s start with Riviera biome first.”

“Okay,” replied Helmut. They turned westward. “This is a really wide tunnel,” he noted. “It must be what; five meters?”

“Yes,” said Will. “This is the Outpost’s main axis. It was built to accommodate rangers, though right now we use it for storage. Under the metal floor is a crawl space for cables and pipes. The tunnel runs along the southern sides of Yalta and Riviera and will be extended westward when we build the next pair of biomes. The biomes will always be in pairs north of the tunnel, with other structures—biomes, industrial buildings, work areas—to the south. Eventually we’ll build a parallel tunnel north of the biomes as well.”

“For public transportation?” asked Skip.

Will nodded. They walked along the tunnel. He looked at Helmut. “Did you follow the exploration work of the Olympus?”

Helmut had to smile. “Oh yes, very closely. I would have loved to explore 2009XV for a month. But there was no way I would have qualified.”

“I suppose; young, just a Master’s in geology, no asteroid experience, and an employee of Muller Mining to boot. It sounds like they had a great time. I’m looking forward to hearing the entire story when the Olympus arrives in two weeks. They must have walked on every square meter of the thing, since it was only 500 meters across.”

“And being able to detach a chunk of nickel-iron eleven meters across and anchor it firmly to an ion engine; that’s a real coup for the Commission,” added Skip. “Who would have thought the Mars Commission would get into the asteroid mining business first.”

“It’s controversial, as you know. We may have to divert the chunk to Venus or Mars because of fears that there’s one chance in ten million we might drop it accidentally on a terrestrial city and incinerate it. I think legislation will limit the diversion of asteroids to earth orbit to under ten meters in diameter, and this piece is just a bit too large.”

“It’d be a shame,” said Skip.

“Was the voyage a good inspiration for your writing?” Will asked.

“Yes, I think so. I’ve outlined all sorts of possible plots and recorded incidents I could use as is or with some rewriting,” replied Skip. “But after my experience on the flight out, I plan to avoid writing a novel or screenplay now; I need the total experience first.”

“I understand,” said Will. “We’re excited to have our first tourist here. You are very welcome. We’ve planned quite a six-week tour for you.”

“Thank you, Commander. I’ve got camera equipment and I plan to record as much of it as I can.”

“Maybe we’ll be stars in your next movie!” said Marshall.

Skip laughed. “I’ll record some things, so who knows?”

They walked almost one hundred meters until they reached the far end of the tunnel. They turned into a side tunnel that was also five meters wide and high that ran seventy-five meters southward. A third of the way down the tunnel was an airlock in the right wall; they stopped and said “Open Sesame!” and it opened.

They passed through an airlock and suddenly they were in Riviera. After the dim artificial light of the tunnel, the daylight was blinding for a moment. They were entering the western side of the biome and the sun was high in the eastern sky, shining straight at them. “Riviera Biome is forty meters in diameter,” explained Marshall, taking on the tone of a tour guide. “It’s the southern member of our second pair of biomes. Shikoku’s that way—” Marshall pointed northward. “And it’s pretty much identical to Riviera, except it has a Japanese garden instead of a lot of flowers. Riviera has two buildings, one on the northern side and one on the southern side. Each has three main levels, then a smaller fourth level. The roofs are covered by two meters of soil for radiation protection and for agriculture. The gardens are tended by robots or sometimes by kids like Sammie and me; picking vegetables is our main chore, now.  This straight middle area between the buildings is called ‘the yard’ and it’s designed so that the sun shines into it all day as it crosses the sky. The yard’s full of fruit trees, flowers, vegetables, grass, and clover for the honey bees; when we play on it we have to be careful not to get a bee mad at us! I got stung a few months ago in Yalta, where we live. Riviera’s the prettiest of our biomes because instead of a patio or swimming pool or basketball court or zen garden it has flower gardens. People like to get married in here.”

“I can see why,” said Skip.

“My dad’s new office is up there.” Marshall pointed to the top of the northern building.

“The Commission offices aren’t moved in yet, though,” added Will. “Everything’s ready in Riviera for people to live and work here except one thing; we’ve run out of wireless communications nodes as a result of a power surge six months ago that burned out more of them than we had spares for. The first flight this morning brought replacements as well as spare parts to repair the broken units, so we should have this placed wired up in a few sols.”

Helmut grabbed his attaché hanging from his belt. Like Will, he favored the device, which looked a bit like a thick clip board. He could give it oral commands, push icons along the edge of the screen with his fingers, or handwrite on the screen with a stylus. It served as a videophone as well; sound was routed to Helmut’s earpiece. Almost everyone on Mars wore an earpiece constantly, since it monitored respiration, cardiac functioning, and oxygenation of the blood as well as providing audio straight to the ear. Helmut glanced at the screen. “Ah, hah. We’re on self-networking mode; audio communications, no video.”

“Exactly. We have two attachés set up near the eastern airlock with their antennas extending through to Yalta, where their signals are picked up. They serve as network relays for the entire biome, so that really limits things in here.”

“But it’s really pretty in here,” said Helmut, looked around. “I’m not quartered in here, I gather.”

They all started to walk across the biome toward the airlock on the other side, which led them into Yalta Biome. “No, though Skip is; I think your suite is in the southern building, Skip.” Will pointed; Carson nodded. “Helmut, because you’re going to Cassini Outpost next week, you’re staying in temporary housing in Renfrew.”

“You’re not remaining here?” asked Marshall, disappointed.

“No, I’m working for Muller Mining, so I have to go to Cassini to recover gold.”

“Oh, darn!”

“Why Muller?” asked Will.

“A combination of reasons. First, I really wanted to come here, and it appeared that my chances of being accepted were better if I applied to work for a private operation. Second, I soon found that the money had a lot of advantages. For one thing, I was able to buy a bigger personal property allotment.”

“Muller’s generous about personal property, and they gave two million dollar signing bonuses to their workers who agreed to stay another columbiad.”

“I know. My plan is to work for them two columbiads. Then maybe I’ll stay here and settle down.”

“Your father hinted to me that you’d like to go elsewhere.”

Helmut nodded. “It looks like we’re about to open a lot of the solar system to manned exploration. The long-term space power and life support systems are pretty well developed, and radiation reduction systems are taking shape fairly well. Propulsion is still the weak link, but LANTR helps. We’ve got human operations on the moon, Mars, and in Venus orbit. Europe will land a crew on Mercury in the next decade in partnership with the Russians and maybe with NASA. NASA has started an ambitious asteroid exploration program. India and Brazil may do the same. The Chinese are hinting they may consider establishing a station on Callisto by 2050, so NASA will probably feel compelled to do the same. There could be humans in the Saturn system in the 2060s, which is only thirty years from now.” He tossled Marshall’s hair. “This guy could be exploring Titan.”

“Especially if he works harder on his arithmetic,” added Will.

“A mining company is a pretty unusual route into the astronaut corps,” said Skip.

“Maybe not. Competition’s heating up; it’ll be easy to be admitted if I have spaceflight experience, and even easier if I’m already here!”

Will laughed. “Yes, that pretty much guarantees the Mars Commission will hire you. You could probably transfer to other operations later.” They stopped to pass through an airlock, then another airlock that opened into Yalta.

“This is Yalta, and you can see it’s much older than Riviera,” exclaimed Marshall. “The trees are a lot bigger.”

“Yes, you’re right.” Skip looked at the swimming pool in front of them. At the moment two people were rolling a deck rolled over it and locking it into place so that a basketball game could take place on top of it. They nodded to Will, who nodded back. The three of them started across the biome.

“Of course, you may not have to leave Dusty Red in order to have some pretty interesting exploration opportunities,” noted Will to Helmut. “With Columbus 7’s arrival, we now have six Mars shuttles here for the next eighteen months. Until Columbus 6, we only had four here, so we couldn’t spare any, and their technology was still being tested. But thanks to Columbus 7’s visits to Phobos and Deimos, each moon can now produce 150 tonnes of methane and oxygen propellant per year, and last year we outfitted them with the tanks to store that much fuel as well. That means Mars has the ability to send two or three shuttles out on asteroid exploration missions of six to twelve months duration.”

“Commander, do you really plan to send out missions?” asked Skip. “It strikes me as pretty ambitious, for a small population.”

 “An asteroid fifty meters in diameter flies within five million kilometers of Mars every few weeks; half kilometer objects are available about once a year. We have a possible target in December of this year and two more in 2034. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t fly an unmanned probe to one of them, using leftover equipment, then follow up with two shuttles and a crew to another one. We’ve got plenty of mission support here, now.”

“I’d love to do that, Commander, in a few years,” said Helmut.

“And a few years it’ll have to be, since you owe your soul to Muller Mining for the upcoming columbiad! Mars presents a lot of opportunities.”

“So I see.” Helmut smiled. “I can imagine that I’m going to like this place.”

“I hope you’ll still feel that way after Muller works you to death,” replied Will. He laughed. “Your father asked me not to try to persuade you to stay, and I’m afraid I’ve slipped into my old habits!”

“Oh, don’t worry about it.”

They walked through an airlock and left Yalta. It led them into the tunnel they would have entered if they had continued northward from Joseph, rather than turning into the westward tunnel. In another half minute they were back in the garage.

“Marshall can show you to Renfrew 208,” Will said to Helmut. “I’ll help Skip. Do you remember your room number?”

“Riviera 306S.”

“We’ll have the video communications working by tomorrow morning. Let me help you get your stuff there.” Will grabbed the handle to the luggage cart, but Skip put his hands on it instead.

“Thank you Commander, but I can at least push my own luggage. I didn’t spend some enormous undisclosed amount to be waited on hand and foot. If that had been my desire, I could have gotten much better service on Earth.”

“Alright. But let me help you get it over the edges of the airlock doors and other rough spots.”

“That’s fine.” They began to head back to Riviera. “Commander, I understand there was some opposition to my coming here. I assure you I don’t want to be a problem. I’ve paid for a service, but I’m not one to push for every detail. I want to learn while I’m here; I want to experience.”

“I wouldn’t call it ‘opposition’ Mr. Carson—”

“Please call me Skip.”

“Alright, then please call me Will. Almost no one refers to me as ‘Commander’ in informal conversation. I wouldn’t call it ‘opposition.’ We have a core of scientists here who regard Mars primarily as an object of science. They are concerned about commercialization—the gold recovery efforts—and about tourism. They are not opposed to either, they just want those efforts set in a larger scientific context.”

“I understand; I encountered that when I was on the moon.”

“It’s similar here. The moon has a lot more tourists to deal with, but we have a lot more myth and fantasy to deal with.”

“A good point. Dusty Red has excited the human imagination in a way no other world has. I attended a Mars Exploration Society annual meeting a few years ago; my, it can attract the weirdos! But there is also a lot of solid science to do here.”

“Exactly. Some of those weirdos are landowners here and we interact with them. I’m curious, Skip; what motivated you to spend an undisclosed large sum of money to fly here and become our first tourist?”

“Well, I completed the two Empire Wars science fiction movies four years ago, and they were huge hits; they made me a very large amount of money. But they didn’t make me happy. I love science fiction, but I’m actually a frustrated scientist; I have a Master’s degree in planetary geology.”

“Really?”

Carson nodded. “Yes indeed, from Cornell. I’m not going to go back into the field, though, because I love film making too much. I’m a writer at heart. So I went to the moon for a month and that was fascinating, but no movie plot immediately jumped out at me. So I contacted the Mars Commission about flying to Mars and got nowhere, but shortly thereafter there was the decision to fly two annexes as an experiment on Columbus 7, and suddenly there were a few vacancies on the flight, so I was accepted to go out and head right back on the Venus gravity assist return flight; it made the trip more practical, since I’ll only be away 15 months or so. I have no personal ties that prevent the trip, I have the money, communications allow me to get almost as much done from here as from my house in Malibu; so why not?”

“It puts a big hiatus into your movie making career.”

Carson shrugged. “You don’t have to make a movie every year or two. Besides, this trip is for me. And maybe it’ll result in a movie plot or two; who knows. Maybe the plots will have nothing to do with Mars. I’m learning a lot about human nature. On Earth I have to live in a fishbowl, with a public intruding into my privacy and papparazzi constantly snapping pictures. Here, I’m free.”

“I never thought of that.”

They reached Riviera Biome and entered it, then entered the south building. Another arrival was there; Skip struck up a conversation with her. Will excused himself and headed for his office in Habitat 1.

On arrival, he saw a rather stocky, short, dark-haired, prematurely balding man waiting for him. “Brian Stark, I presume,” said Will.

“Correct, Commander. I presume you received my message?”

Will reached down, lifted up the attaché hanging from his belt, and scrutinized the screen. “So it would seem. I have a message in my in-box. But I’ve been showing someone around the outpost.”

“I was asking for an 11 a.m. appointment; is that possible?”

“Well, it’s 11:12 a.m. right now, so I suppose an 11:12 a.m. appointment is possible.”

“Thank you.” Stark’s voice betrayed irritation; but then, so had Will’s voice. He followed Will into his office, then closed the door. They sat in two comfortable chairs in front of Will’s desk, around a small circular table.

“How can I help you, Colonel? Welcome to Mars. We’re delighted to have you here. We could use your nuclear expertise. As you know, our reactors are getting a bit old and cranky.”

“Indeed. My experience is with new systems, not used ones, but I’ll do what I can.” Stark leaned closer. “But I wanted to talk to you about another matter; the main reason I’m here, you might say.”

“And what’s that?”

“As you know, environmentalists are making the launch of uranium and other radioactive materials from Earth extremely complicated, and therefore expensive. The last launch was tied up in court five months; it greatly delayed the last round of LANTR engine tests. The emergency plan cost twenty million bucks to implement, twice as much as the actual launch of the materials into low earth orbit. We haven’t had a serious radiation problem in sixty years of launching radioactives to low earth orbit, but the protests and court challenges continue. Perhaps the time has come to obtain the uranium for space flight from Mars instead.”

Will raised his eyebrows, surprised. “Why wasn’t I told about this idea?”

“You’re being told about it right now, face to face. Even with encryption of interplanetary communications, there was no guarantee they’d be secure. The United States Department of Energy and the U.S. Navy have been engaged in talks with Douglas Morgan for the last two years. Once we had his support and had a feel for the sort of organization the Mars Commission was, the next step was to send someone here to be the agent for the project up here. Here I am. My objectives are to get a sense whether Mars can support a project of this sort. If so, I’ll stay and manage it. If not, I’ll head home on Columbus 8.”

“I see. This is quite a surprise. What sort of support are you talking about?”

“The technical side is relatively straightforward. The new uranium isotope centrifuge technology is fairly compact and its energy consumption is manageable. We can import equipment to fashion uranium carbide spheres from the enriched U-235 coming out of the centrifuges. We’d want to build a facility a few kilometers from here so that people could go back and forth easily, security is absolutely guaranteed, and of course there’s environmental protection of the outpost. The preliminary estimate is that we’d have to fly fifty tonnes of equipment here, and about 150 tonnes of equipment would have to be made locally. The new level of automation that is possible means the plant would require eight or ten personnel to operate. Those folks would build everything over a two or three year period.”

“To produce how much U-235?”

Stark hesitated. “It would meet the entire demand for LANTR and solid-core engines and lunar reactors, which is about one hundred kilograms per year.”

“What about Martian demand?”

Stark was surprised. “Actually, we didn’t take that into account.”

“You probably should. We need nuclear supplementation of solar and wind energy.”

He nodded. “Actually, the bigger issue is not technical, but social and political. There will be a lot of political resistance to the idea of building a uranium enrichment facility on Mars. There will be anti-nuclear fanatics among the Mars utopians with whom you will have to deal. There will be a lot of fear on Earth that maybe we are equipping a couple hundred people on another planet to throw nukes at someone. Nations will oppose this effort. The automation that has already been achieved in uranium enrichment will no doubt be pushed farther here because of your shortages of personnel and power; that means the technological improvements could make it easier for a rogue state to make a bomb if the technology is leaked. We will have to consider a lot of security issues here, and I don’t just mean lots of cameras pointing at enrichment equipment and broadcasting their pictures back to Earth twice a second. We have to be able to assure everyone that the Martian population is trustworthy.”

Will nodded. “I understand your point. This is a fascinating and complicated challenge.”

“I gather you like a challenge, too.”

“I do, Colonel.”

 

© 2004 Robert H. Stockman

All rights reserved

 

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