Blue Star Enterprises

DATE: 2399

"Test forty-three," Alexander called out. Everyone in the launcher control room let out a collective groan at that.

Getting the Low Orbit Launcher to even function had taken far longer than it took to install the rest of the orbital railguns around the facility. Had Alexander realized this before they attempted repairs, he would have stripped the entire thing out and started from scratch. That would have been far less work. It was too late to go back and do that now though.

The previous test, test forty-two, had resulted in the payload being shot out of the railgun like confetti. If he were trying to design a rail shotgun, he would have succeeded wonderfully. But he was trying to launch materials into orbit, so keeping it intact was sort of important.

He didn’t even want to talk about the tests before that. Most of those involved tracking down system faults. Eventually, he got so sick of trying to hunt them down that he disconnected the launcher from the station power to eliminate the broken power flow problems entirely. This required him to print a new power cell for the launcher, but that was probably a good thing. His battery slash capacitor bank was far more stable and allowed for a much more repeatable power draw compared to the ancient systems in place before anyway.

That eliminated the power issue.

He wished he could say that was the only problem. It wasn’t. The rails he had manufactured to replace the old worn-out ones, turned out to produce a far stronger electromagnetic current for the same amount of power draw. Normally that would be a good thing. It meant less power was needed to launch the payload. If they had realized that issue ahead of time, they might have been able to stop what happened. The first live test blew the entire top half of the launcher apart. There had been an undiscovered structural weakness in the frame.

Thank god for the command room being situated behind a thick reinforced concrete wall. That little accident set their testing back an entire week. And he was running short of time. Jasper was due to return any day now, assuming he wasn’t delayed in STO space. But more importantly, they needed to have materials in orbit for the Hawks to start assembling a working refueling and refining station before their contract ran out in five months.

That seemed like a lot of time, but it really wasn’t. He had underestimated the difficulty of building a station in zero gravity. The Hawks’ engineers were the ones who slapped some perspective into him. They estimated the station would take a full year to build, assuming materials were available and onsite. Alexander couldn’t even guarantee he would have any materials in orbit at the moment.

The Hawks had given an all-clear for Na and his crew to return to their ship. But they were still relaxing after their ordeal. It would take them months to gather materials anyway. That meant the initial materials to build the station needed to come from the planet. That was fine though because without the smelter inside the station, any ore they brought would be useless.

Alexander had tried talking Matthews into using his shuttles to lift materials into orbit, but the man declined. Not because they couldn’t do it, but because the wear and tear on the drop shuttles to carry stuff into orbit would require them to be down for maintenance once a week. That was far too often to make them an acceptable alternative.

He supposed he could understand that. He was lucky he got the man to agree to bring the smelter into orbit when it was time.

Losing the smelter was going to be a pretty big blow to his manufacturing capability planetside, but he had the designs to build a refinery. While not as good as a smelter, the material produced by the refinery would be plenty strong enough for rebuilding the facility. And to be honest, he wasn’t utilizing even a tenth of the smelter’s capacity with the mining being done planetside.

But he was getting ahead of himself. The smelter was still in place and turning out the material that would eventually turn into scaffolding that would go into orbit. The initial station plans were just a loose collection of exposed scaffolds along with some ion thrusters that would keep it from falling back into the atmosphere. The hollow rectangle design reminded Alexander of the types of stations built back when he was still human. All bare bones and utilitarian.

Before he got there, he needed to fix this stupid issue with the transport capsules. Having them come apart as they exited the launcher was not conducive to orbital manufacturing. The plastics that made up the majority of the capsules should have been more than enough to withstand the G-forces applied during launch. They were even stronger than what should have been available back when the original capsules were built. But something about his design was obviously not right.

Alexander walked out of the room and over to a nearby storage area where they had placed the old capsules until they could be recycled. He found the one that looked to be in the best condition and awkwardly carried it down the stairs and into the launch chamber.

The few local engineers that the Hawks had deemed passable were inspecting the launcher for damage from the previous test. The Hawks’ engineers were busy repairing Na’s ship and he needed the people living here to get familiar with the work anyway. If the rails were warped or damaged, they would need to replace them before continuing. That would set them back at least four hours.

He shoved the newly manufactured capsule off the loading platform and set the old-style one in its place. A few of the people looked at him as he did this, but nobody commented on the change. They were probably as sick of these tests as he was.

"Launcher is in working order, Alexander," one of the engineers called.

Alexander nodded to the man. He waited at the door to ensure everyone was clear before closing the blast door. Now that he had seen what happens when the launcher has a critical failure, he was glad the blast doors were there.

Everyone returned to the launch center. He nodded to Lucas – who had taken an active role as head of testing – and the man started the activation sequence for the launcher. A large holograph showing the inside of the chamber appeared on the blank concrete wall, almost making it look like it was see-through.

Everyone watched as the loader arm pushed the payload into the barrel along a set of rollers. Unlike his railguns, the launcher only had a set of locking lugs that prevented the payload from falling out the back as it raised its elevation.

Once it was loaded, it slowly started to rise. The gear-driven elevation system on the launcher was slow but it was accurate. Eventually, it stopped and the dome door slid open on the newly replaced concrete roof. Turns out the acid rain had severely weakened the concrete, which had caused it to break apart. The new concrete should be much more resistant to that, but it did make Alexander wonder about the structural integrity of the rest of the concrete encasing the facility.

With the door open, an alert blared through the room. Lucas pressed the launch button, and a five-second countdown began. He didn’t know why the countdown was necessary, but it was apparently part of the original system coding. Probably a failsafe in case they needed to abort the launch.

After five seconds, the launcher fired the capsule out of the barrel. The fact that it didn’t explode into tiny bits right away, both irked Alexander and made him extremely happy. The display immediately shifted to an external camera that watched the payload rapidly disappear into the distance. The zoom on the camera tried to keep up, but it wasn’t quite fast enough. After ten seconds of flight, the capsule collapsed upon itself and the drag of the air pulled it down.

"Follow the descent," Alexander stated. Whoever was controlling the camera, did their best until the thing vanished below the curvature of the planet.

"What was different about that capsule versus the new ones?" he asked, not expecting an answer.

"Did you see how it crumpled?" one man asked.

Alexander played back the video in his mind space. The man was right, it crumpled very strangely. "Does anyone have a saw or cutting tool handy?"

"Should be one down by the blast doors, why?" another engineer asked.

Instead of answering the man, Alexander strode out of the room and down the stairs to retrieve the power saw. Then he walked into the room where they were currently storing the old capsules. He took the saw and cut the capsule in half, then into quarters.

The group from the launch room, who had followed him, watched in silence.

Once Alexander had it cut apart, he separated the thick plastic parts, exposing a reinforcing mesh of metal hidden inside the thick plastic.

"Well," he said, spinning the piece around so everyone could see. "That explains why our capsules are falling apart. I’ll print up a new one. Take a break, we will come back for test forty-four in the morning."

He walked out of the storage room, annoyed with himself. He should have considered the possibility that the capsules were reinforced. His oversight had cost them a full day.

Alexander knew he shouldn’t be so harsh on himself, it wasn’t like he had ever built a launcher or these capsules before, but he couldn’t help it. A large portion of the success or failure of this project relied on him. One good thing to come out of this discovery was the fact he wanted to redesign the capsules anyway.

Their original design was meant to be picked up by a ship heading in the same orbital path as the capsule was on. That was fine for a ship leaving orbit. It was not fine for a station that was being built in orbit.

The ideal orbit for a station was significantly higher than the orbital launch capabilities of the launcher. That meant either a shuttle would need to be in place to rendezvous with the capsule, or for the capsule to maneuver to the correct location. Considering he couldn’t rely on the Hawks to be here to move the capsules after five months, he had decided to design ones with small maneuvering thrusters built into them.

This requirement reduced the usable space within the capsule by an additional ten percent, but it also allowed the capsules to be much more useful. So it was a fair trade-off in his mind.

After entering his workshop, Alexander pulled up the schematic of the capsule he had been working on. The entire exterior surface was covered by a flexible weave designed to collect solar energy. Over that weave was a thin ablative layer designed to flake away in the vacuum of space. It was added to protect the sensitive nature of the solar weave from the harsh passage through the atmosphere.

Alexander hadn’t designed the weave or ablative components. He had simply pulled them from other items he had worked on in the past. The ablative coating was a sort of hardened gel used in places that saw high temperatures for prolonged periods of time. The material canisters used by most printers utilized this gel to keep the canisters from melting as it turned the material inside malleable for printing. He just happened to remember the warning that this gel would break down if exposed to a vacuum and used that to his advantage.

The solar weave came from the few armor designs he had experience with. It was also used quite extensively in most vac-suits to ensure at least a trickle charge during spacewalks or emergencies. He exploded the view of the capsule on his program and added a metal mesh. Then he wrapped the plastic back around it. He did have to redesign a few components and move stuff around a bit to get everything to fit again but it all came together. When he was done, the design looked mostly the same on the outside. Eight tiny ion thrusters were molded into the top and bottom half of the design allowing the capsule to maneuver. As far as thrust went, the back of the capsule had two ion thrusters. One on the top half, one on the bottom half.

It wouldn’t be fast, but it would be enough to get the capsule where it needed to be eventually.

His changes did require additional space. But instead of further reducing the interior size by adding more padding, Alexander reduced the padding. It would mean he would have to reduce the size of any sensitive components he planned to launch. While not ideal, he couldn’t add more padding because his scaffolding was already designed to take up the entire space available to maximize each launch.

He sent it to the printer and groaned internally at the projected time it would take. Six hours per capsule wasn’t that bad, but the previous ones had only taken an hour each. He activated the rest of the printers that were large enough to print them and walked out of the room. There was nothing else he needed to do in the workshop as all the other machines were busy cranking out components for the facility, the station, or the automated defenses that were all still being worked on.

Alexander looked at his clock and realized it was almost time for the evening meal. He headed toward their apartment to make some food for Yulia. He hadn’t seen much of his daughter since her friends had arrived from Petrov. But what he did see warmed him. She was laughing and smiling much more now. And she seemed to really enjoy showing her friends around Eden’s End from what Zorina told him.

That was excellent news.

He had also heard a few families had expressed interest in adopting some of the children. Alexander left that to Headmaster Wong and Damien to figure out though.

There was a lot of work to complete before he could start building engines or ships, but things were starting to come together.