Time. Stephen Baxter

Flying Mountain Society. Screw them.

      And screw Reid Malenfant. Malenfant is a wimp.

      Yes, he got his bird off the ground. But to continue to launch with 1940s-style chemical rockets is at best a diversion, at worst a catastrophic error.

      People, you can’t lift diddley into space by burning chemicals.

      There has been a solution on the drawing boards since the 1960s. Project Orion.

      You take a big plate, attach it by shock-absorbers to a large capsule, and throw an atomic bomb underneath.

      Your ship will move, believe me.

      Then you throw another bomb, and another.

      For an expenditure of a small part of the world’s nuclear stockpile you could place several million pounds in orbit.

      I believe in the dream. I believe we should aim to lift a billion people into space by the end of the century. This is the only way to establish a population significant enough to build a genuine spacegoing industry infrastructure – and, incidentally, the only way to lift off enough people to make a dent in the planet’s population problem.

      Yes, this will cause some fallout. But not much, compared to what we already added to the background radiation. What’s the big deal?

      Malenfant is right; we are facing a crisis over the survival of the species. Hard times make for hard choices. Omelettes and eggs, people.

      Anyhow, those bombs aren’t going to go away. If America doesn’t use them, somebody else will …

      Art Morris:

      My name is Art Morris and I am forty years old. I am a Marine, or used to be until I got disabled out.

      My most prized possession is a snapshot of my daughter, Leanne.

      In the snap she’s at her last birthday party, just five years old, in a splash of Florida sunshine. The snap’s one of those fancy modern ones that can show you movement, and it cycles through a few seconds of Leanne blowing at her cake. And it has a soundtrack. If you listen under the clapping and whoops of the family and the other kids, you can just hear her wheeze as she took her big breath. What you can’t see off the edge of the picture is me, just behind Leanne’s shoulder, taking a blow myself to make sure those damn candles did what she wanted them to do, making sure that something in her world worked, just once.

      It wasn’t long after that that we had to put her into the ground. I didn’t understand half of what the doctors told me was wrong with her, but I got the headline.

      She was a yellow baby, a space baby, a rocket baby.

      Maybe by now she would have been one of these smart kids the news is full of. But she never got the chance.

      I rejoiced when they shut down the space program. But now those assholes in the desert have started firing off their damn rockets again, regardless.

      I keep Leanne’s picture taped to the dash of my car, or in my pocket.

      Look what you did, Reid Malenfant.

      Reid Malenfant:

      Madame Chairman, this is not some wacko stunt. It is a sound business venture.

      Here’s the plan from here on in.

      Cruithne is a ball of loosely aggregated dirt: probably eighty per cent silicates, sixteen per cent water, two per cent carbon, two per cent metals. This is an extraordinarily rich resource.

      Our strategy is to aim for the simplest technologies, fast return, fast payback.

      The first thing we’re going to make up on Cruithne is rocket fuel. The fuel will be a methane-oxygen bipropellant.

      Then we’ll start bagging up permafrost water from the asteroid, along with a little unprocessed asteroid material. We’ll use the propellant to start firing water back to Earth orbit – specifically, a type of orbit called HEEO, a highly eccentric Earth orbit, which in terms of accessibility is a good compromise place to store extraterrestrial materials.

      Thus we will build a pipeline from Cruithne to Earth orbit.

      This will not be a complex operation. The methane rockets are based on tried and trusted Pratt and Whitney designs. The cargo carriers will be little more than plastic bags wrapped around big dirty ice cubes.

      But in HEEO this water will become unimaginably precious. We can use it for life support and to make rocket fuel. We think Nautilus should be able to return enough water to fuel a further twenty to fifty NEO exploration missions, at minimal incremental cost. This is one measure of the payback we’re intending to achieve. Also we can sell surplus fuel to NASA.

      But we are also intending to trial more complex extraction technologies on this first flight. With suitable engineering, we can extract not just water but also carbon dioxide, nitrogen, sulphur, ammonia, phosphates – all the requirements of a life support system. We will also be able to use the asteroid dirt to make glass, fibreglass, ceramics, concrete, dirt to grow things in.

      We are already preparing a crewed follow-up mission to Cruithne which will leverage this technology to establish a colony, the first colony off the planet. This will be self-sufficient, almost from day one.

      And the colonists will pay their way by further processing the Cruithne dirt to extract its metals. The result will be around ninety per cent iron, seven per cent nickel, one per cent cobalt, and traces. The trace, however, includes platinum, which may be the first resource returned to the surface of the Earth; nickel and cobalt will probably follow.

      (Incidentally I’m often asked why I’m going to the asteroids first, rather than the Moon. The Moon seems easier to get to, and is much bigger than any asteroid besides. Well, the slag that is left over after we extract the water and volatiles and metals from asteroid ore – the stuff we’d throw away – that slag is about equivalent to the richest Moon rocks. That’s why I ain’t going to the Moon.)

      Later we’ll start the construction of a solar power plant in Earth orbit. The high-technology components of the plant, such as guidance, control, communications, power conversion and microwave transmission systems, will be assembled on Earth. The massive low-tech components – wires, cables, girders, bolts, fixtures, station-keeping propellants and solar cells – will all be manufactured in space from asteroid materials. This plan reduces the mass that will have to be lifted into Earth orbit several-fold. This plant will produce energy – safe, clean, pollution-free – we can sell back to Earth.