Launch: Chapter 1

  "Please secure your belongings sir; we'll be departing in a few minutes," the drone pleasantly requested as it floated down the aisle of the shuttle.   The voice synthesizing was pretty good, but he thought he could tell by the sound that it was artificial; it had a slightly hollow quality to it.  He wondered if it might just be his imagination, if knowing that it was an artificial voice made him project that quality onto what he was hearing.

  "Oh don't worry, I'll be ready," Marcus Bowland replied back with a warm smile.  He knew enough to know that mechanoids neither required nor appreciated his kindness, but it made him feel like a kind person to behave in a kind way.  He imagined that if he allowed himself to be mean and dismissive towards them, he might find himself behaving the same way towards humans.  The white spheroid drone moved on to make the same request of the other passengers, with cartoonish facial features displayed on its side.  On Earth it was kept aloft by a powerful central fan which allowed it to hover, and whether hovering on Earth or maneuvering weightlessly in orbit, it propelled itself about with puffs of compressed air.

  Although orbital insertions, (or 'orb-ups' as they'd come to be known) were quite common these days, accidents still did happen.  The drones were charged with the endless task of ensuring that all safety protocols were being properly observed, just in case.  This particular orb-line had the best safety rating in the business to show for their efforts, and it was for this very reason that Markus always chose to orb with this company.  As a general rule, he liked to leave as little to chance as possible.

  “Nervous?” his best friend Hugh Nye asked him.  Hugh was much thinner than Markus, but they were both tall, about a decimeter shy of two meters.  They were both of European descent but Markus was even paler than Hugh was.  His lighter skin accentuated his light freckling and short auburn hair that darkened in the winter and lightened in the summer sun.   Hugh also kept his hair short, but his was more of a darker dirty blonde.

  “Oh no,” he replied.  “I’ve done this dozens of times… so have you.”   Hugh had a warm climate body and was the kind of person who could eat as much as he wished and never gain any weight at all.  The trade-off was that he was perpetually cold since he didn’t have the insulation Markus did, who by comparison was something of a bear and often overheated.   Neither had ever been particularly athletically inclined, but if they’d been raised as athletes, Markus could have best been conditioned for short term bursts of incredible strengths while Hugh would be much better suited to endurance training.

  “No, I mean… about where you’re going?  About not coming back this time…”

  He took a moment to contemplate that these really were his last moments on Earth.  Never again would he breathe free Terran air, or feel a gravity which was just right in that indescribable way.  These thoughts left him a little sad, which he hadn't really anticipated.  It was a sharp feeling, and it left him thinking about all that he was going to miss.   There were people, products, and indulgences he would miss, but that is not what stung the most.  It was the sense of leaving one's home, one's very locus of existence… it was something he hadn’t felt in so succinct a way before.

  “You should be excited!  I’m certainly excited for you.  I’m jealous…”   Hugh had always been the more adventurous spirit, a little thin on the follow through but he thought big, which was a welcome counterpoint to Markus’ perpetual seriousness and passivity.   “You’re like one of those early European pioneers setting sail for the unknown lands of the Americas.  They knew they’d never see their home again either, never breath air that was quite the same as home ever again…”  The analogy could only be taken so far.  In any case, joining the New Horizon’s mission had always been Hugh’s idea.  On a lark and only with Hugh’s urging, Markus had applied along with him to one of the fifty available ‘wildcard’ positions.  Markus had been accepted but Hugh had not been.  It had taken some work for Hugh to convince Markus to agree to go without him, insisting that the opportunity was too precious to deny.   Markus still didn’t really understand, but Hugh had been very persuasive.

  They had already begun moving, but it was only now beginning to be detectable.  Modern electromagnetic accelerators increased speed so subtly that it was often difficult to nail down exactly when the acceleration begins without a highly sensitive accelerometer. The bulky twin craft lumbered down the massive underground corridor towards a distant point of light.  Imperceptibly, powerful electric magnets rapidly switched on and off, imparting acceleration onto the joined craft which steadily gained appreciable momentum.  Metal strips down the side of the mother craft’s fuselage remained in contact with the launching apparatus down the launch tube, giving the accelerators something to act against.

  The eight mighty jet engines hanging under the long wings of the aircraft were already at full throttle.   The linear magnetic accelerators alone had the capacity to launch the crafts at sufficient velocity for flight, but with safety always in mind, the engines were throttled up in time to both conserve energy by increasing overall launch velocity, but also giving the computers a chance to detect any anomalies in the engine and related systems.  If such anomalies were found, the magnetic accelerators could be reversed, clamping down on the ship and aborting the launch.  

  Both craft were completely reusable and nothing was wasted, which is why this system was so popular and had become the standard mode of passenger orb-up service for over a century.  Most modern terrestrial and atmospheric transportation relied on batteries alone for smaller applications.  Larger vehicles and more demanding applications though, required mass produced small fusion cores which while compact, were very powerful.   Jet engines and liquid fueled rockets were some of the few applications for which an electric alternative had yet to be found, and for which volatile fuels were still a necessity.

  Electricity based engines on Earth could in principle be as powerful as they were required to be, as long as they were appropriately engineered and had a solid, liquid, or gas to work against, but all three were effectively absent in the vacuum of space.  Ion engines were most commonly used once up there, but they were too weak to work inside the atmosphere.  As a result, both stages of the orb-up process still required the burning of liquid fuel.  Most terrestrial aircraft used battery and propeller systems, but no configuration of this method was able to generate speeds significant enough to achieve orbital velocity.  For that, ultra-powerful jet engines were required, which burned a synthetic petroleum substitute.  While these engines still emitted carbon dioxide, the amount was only a fraction of that produced from the use of conventional jet fuel.  For the final orbital insertion, just as the original NASA shuttles were nearly two hundred years earlier, the final orbital insertion was powered by carbon free liquid hydrogen and oxygen rockets.

  The mother aircraft component which carried the smaller shuttle up to its launching altitude simply glided back down to Earth unpowered after releasing its daughter craft, usually landing back at the same orb-port to promptly be paired with a new orbiter.   After the two craft separated at the appropriate altitude, the three liquid rocket engines protruding from the rear of the orbiter would take over, only igniting once the mother aircraft was clear.  

  The shuttle served as a de-orbiter as well, and it had the requisite ablative tiles on the underside of its hull to take advantage of atmospheric braking, usually coming down as an unpowered glider. Sometimes weather conditions would require them to light their engines on a de-orb though, in which case the emergency fuel given them in orbit could several times launch them into a much higher altitude so they could abort to an alternate orb-port, or attempt another glide down to the same one.   The atmospheric braking method used by the de-orbers was such an energy efficient and reliable form of returning to Earth, that it had been used for centuries since the very beginning of the Space Age.

  Orb-liners operated both the orb-up and de-orb services, which provided a generally reliable two-way commuter service available to the public.  While daily commuting to orbit wasn’t exactly practical if only for the travel time involved, it was convenient enough for people to work days or weeks in orbit, and then return to Earth for their days or weeks off.    

  Their acceleration within the launch tube was very smooth, and the best indicator of it was not his sense of motion, but the lights on the side of the launch tunnel passing by his window with gradually increasing speed.  Just at the point where it was hard for him to distinguish between the individual lights and what increasingly appeared to be a continuous stream of light, the cabin became bathed in a much more powerful kind of light, the unadulterated brightness of the midday sun.  Markus was momentarily blinded and disoriented by the sudden explosion of sunlight as the orb-Upper erupted from the launch tube and continued accelerating, turning skyward in preparation for separation and orbital insertion.

  "Fuck."  Marcus muttered to himself while rubbing both of his eyes with his right hand’s thumb and forefinger , "every fucking time..."

  “Got you again did it?” Hugh asked.

  Markus didn’t answer.  He really should have known better, after all he was no stranger to orb-ups, in fact he’d already been up several times this year.  Try as he might to remember not to, he seemed to manage to blind himself every single time, or so he bitterly imagined.  He blinked furiously, and his eyes eventually adjusted so that he could see the blue sky above them and the outline of the Vancouver lower mainland coastline beneath them, gradually getting smaller.

  It was twenty five years ago to the day that the first generational starship had launched, but the idea only truly materialized after the initial deep space planetary surveys in the 2010s and 20s, pioneered by NASA's Kepler mission and then later the follow up Terrestrial Planet Finder mission.  Before this time there was no way to detect planets around other stars but when they did, they discovered a galaxy littered with planets.  In time some nearby planets were identified as likely to be habitable, and it didn’t take long for the first G.S.S. mission to launch.

  The idea was a pretty old and simple one really, and one that would seem to be built pretty deeply into human instincts; the place you're from isn't working out for you for one reason or another, so you move somewhere new and wild where neither law, nor traditions, nor any other aspect of home can reach you.  From the earliest human migrations out of Africa in our distant prehistory, to the seafaring explorers of the great European Age of Exploration, one thing or another has always compelled some humans over the horizon.   All of the Earth had been explored now, and with no undiscovered country left, human attention turned to its local neighborhood, from the burning, cooking, crushing, and crunching atmosphere of Venus, to the thin aired and thoroughly irradiated barren red wasteland of Mars, and to all of the comets, asteroids, and moons which littering the Solar System.

  On these bodies, humanity found a near infinite wealth of material resources… but no new home.  Small permanent settlements could be found on places like Earth’s moon Luna or on Mars, and more recently even some of the moons around the outer gas giants.  While there was a human presence in these places, these facilities were typically either research stations, tourist destinations, or Peacekeeper bases and they were all either sub-terranean or under a dome structure on the surface.  These settlements were littered all over the Solar System and were supported by the Trade Corp’s efficient and reliable shipping network across the system.  True off world self-sustainability though, appeared to remain an unrealizable dream anywhere in Earth’s own Solar System.   This also helped to set the stage for the first generational starship mission.

  “Attention Passengers:  Please be prepared for final separation.  Please secure yourself as well as your belongings.  We are approaching the point of separation.”

  Markus and Hugh sat up straight in preparation.  Coming up was the most physically demanding part of orb-ups, but it was not usually too traumatic in and of itself.  The swarm of flight attendant drones quickly made their rounds looking for possible projectile hazards and double checking that everyone was properly strapped in.   They then puffed their way to the front and docked themselves in their alcoves.