Boyle grabbed a stanchion. Let’s show you around.
I’ve got work, said Sergei.
Join us later, Sergei, said Pace. I brought some goodies from Earth.
He had indeed. The six of them gathered in what Boyle quaintly called the “mess hall,” a multifunction common space packed with gear on every surface—left, right, up, down. The “mess hall” housed some hydrator nozzles and a fold-down table with bungees and velcro to secure plates and feet. It was seldom used. They tended to dine separately.
Pace had brought Kobe beef tournedos in vacuum pouches and a bottle of wine. Sergei would have preferred fresh vegetables.
2013 Napa cabernet sauvignon, Pace said. Heitz Cellar, Martha’s Vineyard. A wine like this you don’t want to suck out of a bulb.
His pilot passed a case, and Pace drew out six glasses and an opener. As he applied the opener to the bottle he let the glasses float. Their cross-section was tear-shaped.
An old NASA guy designed these glasses. The shape creates surface tension to hold the liquid in. Neat, huh?
Pace held one of the glasses while a trigger on the opener let compressed nitrogen into the bottle and forced wine out the spout. The wine sloshed but stayed put in the glass. He drifted glasses one by one to their recipients, lifted his own to his nose, let it twirl slowly while he inhaled. Sergei guessed he’d practiced all this in suborbital.
Enjoy. I want to thank you all for the incredible job you’re doing up here. NSLAM is now the most trusted actor in near-Earth space. It’s all because we stepped up to do something about the Kessler Effect, and you’ve all executed flawlessly.
Sergei wasn’t sure he believed in the Kessler Effect, that a cascade of debris could destroy satellites to produce more debris to destroy more, et cetera. Noisy disaster movies had been made about it, but if it was truly happening, it was proceeding so slowly that only spreadsheets detected it.
The oven chimed. They all bungeed in and began to eat. Sergei had to admit it was pretty good.
So let me tell you why I’m here. It’s not just to sightsee. I want Sergei to do me a favor.
Hm?
You know Vanguard 1?
No idea.
Launched by the U.S. in 1958. Still in orbit, though long defunct. It’s the oldest human thing in space.
And?
I want it for my collection. I’d like you to steal it for me. He smiled at the others.
Why not use drone?
I don’t want to wait for a drone. I want to take it home with me tomorrow.
Sergei shrugged. Let me run numbers. He returned to his tournedos.
Pace was crazy, but that didn’t bother him. Everyone in the world was crazy, no exceptions. One managed one’s condition in more or less socially acceptable ways, according to one’s capacities and resources. He’d once blamed the situation on the overwhelming complexity of modernity, yadda yadda, but he’d come to believe the condition was ancient and fundamental.
His own way of coping involved these long months off-Earth. Pace’s, well, who could say. He knew Pace was a believer in the Singularity—the omega point at which machine intelligence was supposed to reach a critical mass and become self-sustaining and independent of humans. To Sergei that was bonus crazy. But Sergei had a parallel notion about what happened to money, when you put enough of it in one place. These guys were as separate from normal humanity, and as alien, as AIs were supposed to be. But they weren’t the intelligence: the money ran them.
The mission looked doable. A Hohmann Transfer would take a little over an hour to reach Vanguard’s orbit at its apogee. Changing orbital planes was, as always, the bitch; the delta-v budget for that alone was almost four kilometers per second each way. That’s why they almost never ran crewed missions like this.
Kestrel One was the only vehicle with enough thrust. It was scarily minimal, about three meters in diameter and four meters long. The forward half tapered to a blunt point. The rear half was for fuel. It would never have passed a design review at any national space agency. Among other shortcuts, it had no life support, relying on the astronaut’s spacesuit instead. Sergei figured the suit’s eight hours would be enough, but he’d take extra oxygen, in case. Kestrel was docked at the propellant depot orbiting behind them. He programmed it to dock with Port Two after fueling itself.
The tricky bit would be locating his tiny target once he got into its orbit. He had its orbital data, but in TLEs, two-line element sets. The format was archaic. Futile editorials periodically appeared in Orbital Debris News calling for an overhaul of the system, but it was too entrenched.
The TLEs were tailored to a general perturbation model that was accurate to a kilometer at best. He’d have to get in the neighborhood, scan with radar, then grab it. That’d take how long?
He wanted sunlight for that, so he adjusted his start time. Coming back, the two orbits weren’t so good for rendezvous. He’d have some stay time.
There were other, non-orbital considerations, but they weren’t really his. Kestrel would be picked up by ground radars, but the radars were almost all managed by NSLAM, and the company’s manifests were private. If anyone happened to ask what he’d been doing out there, which was unlikely, the company would make something up.
OK. What does this thing look like? How big?
I’ll show you.
Pace popped the latches of a Pelican case. The released force spun the case in the air. Pace steadied himself against the wall and got hold of it. From die-cut black foam he drew a small metal sphere, then plucked six thin rods about half a meter long from the case and screwed them into the object’s threaded bushings. Finally he drew his hands away and let the small thing float between them. He tapped a vane and the model slowly spun, a silvery seedpod.
Very small.
Pace gazed past it and his eyes twitched. Six and a half inches in diameter, three and a half pounds. Khrushchev called it the grapefruit. It was the first of four Vanguards, sent mainly to test the launch vehicle. It’s the only one still in orbit, brave little guy.
Why is this grapefruit so important to you?
You kidding? It’s historic.
How so?
Know anything about space law? Once upon a time, the sky was “free.” After aircraft came along, it was said that a nation “controlled” its “airspace.” Then satellites came along. They crossed all airspaces. There was no legal regime. The U.S. knew the Soviets would object to a military satellite, so they crafted Vanguard, a very public “scientific” mission with no military objectives. Except for establishing the precedent that space was beyond national boundaries. I want this little guy hanging in my office to remind me how elegant that strategy was.
There was a lot Sergei could have replied to that but he controlled himself, and said, I need to launch in twenty-four hours, when Vanguard is in best position relative to us.
Pace reached out and stopped the model’s slow spin.
Take this with you. When you’ve got the real thing, insert this back into its orbit.
They were over Australia in daylight when Kiyoshi stuck his head in.
Dobroe utro, Sergei.
Ohayou gozaimasu, Yoshisan.
English was the lingua franca, but they’d each learned a few words of the other’s tongue as a formality, to show respect. It didn’t hurt that Sergei had already picked up some Japanese from Izumi.
Sheila and I need a flight plan to Hab Two. They’ve got some problem with their water recycler. We need to bring a spare.