Regardless of what the simulations said, the facts were here in front of them, in plain sight for the world to comment upon. The cable had strayed hundreds of miles off course, veering far into mainland Africa. When they had attempted to correct its course, they ended up doing too much, and the cable veered too far into the Atlantic Ocean, passing almost directly above the Nexus in the process. They had already lost several heavy helicopters, and one of their ships was entirely out of commission from the enormous stresses they experienced trying to stabilize the 18 ton cable winding down from space.
For the next two days, the cable swung from side-to-side. For two days, dozens of helicopters and boats sought to stabilize this swing, and slowly, the arc decreased and the cable stabilized. Finally, on the fourth day, the cable was localized over the island of Principe. It was late night on this day that the cable finally slowed down enough to be captured by the gigantic hooks on the Nexus. Over the next 48 hours, the cable was slowly pulled down into the belly of the Nexus, where it would be secured deep underground to solid rock, concrete, and a carbon nanofiber latticework. The end result would be an enormous, stable base to keep the cable in one spot.
As soon as the cable was stabilized, laser-powered crawlers were anchored to the cable. Thousands of them crawled up the cable and organized themselves the beginnings of a platform in space. The crawlers got successively larger, as the entire space elevator could sustain the weight without crashing down to Earth. After a certain point, a large crawler came to the nanofiber cable. Attached to it was another 22,300 mile long carbon nanofiber cable. This crawler would spend the next 24 hours crawling up the main nanofiber, weaving the second cable around it to increase the strength and lifting capacity of the entire elevator. As soon as the first crawler left, a second, and then a third, fourth, and fifth crawler lined up to do the same. Within a week, half a dozen cables had been woven together. Within two weeks, the entire space elevator was complete with 10 separate cables woven together.
The combined lifting power of the space elevator was 12,000 tons, more than sufficient to begin large scale engineering in space. It was at this point that the crawlers going up the space elevator became very different. All of a sudden, enormous crawlers carrying tens of thousands of miles of carbon nanofibers were traveling up the space elevator. The entire output from the dozens of factories on the island over the past two years was now traveling up the space elevator. Kent was increasing the length of the elevator from 22,300 miles to nearly 100,000 miles. The goal now was not just to carry things into geosynchronous orbit, but to make it possible to send material into outer space.
The rapid transit system was complete and operational by the time these large crawlers started to go up into space. However, instead of the trains being packed with people, they were carrying the maximum load of building material. This material was being used to design an orbital platform that would serve as a habitat for people, a factory to build new materials, and a processing plant to assimilate the resources gathered from asteroids. It would serve as a docking platform for a small flotilla of mining ships, and a research platform for scientists. Plans to develop large scale telescopes were well underway, with many of the world’s astrophysicists dedicating their lives to this project.
…
This was a unique time in Earth’s history. In the middle of so many things going the wrong direction - global warming, disease outbreaks, the energy crisis, heightened international tensions, and a general feeling of gloom, a new star was rising at the equator. There was a feeling that things were going to change - a hope that somehow, this elevator would help solve the world’s problems.
In no small part, Kent’s enormous public presence helped contribute to these positive feelings. Kent’s assets included news and media companies around the world. The combination of a positive spin in that media, plus carefully planned media announcements helped Kent control the way people were educated about his efforts. His communications people had been given enough time to foresee what the critics would likely say. The brilliant arguments the critics thought they were making were nullified almost from the start, with press releases and studies at the ready to countermand whatever points they wanted to make. Even the sternest critics were slowly coming around to seeing the benefits this undertaking could have on the world.
That is, all but the Earthers. It seemed that the more people believed in the space elevator, the more vocal the Earthers became. On more than one instance, Earther ships had crossed within a hundred miles of Principe. They had initially tried to use one of their larger ocean liners, but had to turn around when confronted by two heavily armed cruisers and several armed helicopters. Their next attempt was a series of small but fast boats, attempting to outflank the slower cruisers. They quickly turned around when several submarines surfaced directly in front of them, torpedoes ready to be launched. Then came the errant jet, crossing nearly 50 miles into Principe’s aerial border before fighter jets forced it to turn around.
No shots had yet been fired, but the tension was rising. The rhetoric against the space elevator was rising from the Earthers. Years of successes against governments around the world had won them a faithful group of followers, and regardless of how little media coverage they received these days, their movement remained strong. The social psychologists that worked for Kent knew that it was only a matter of time before something would happen.
This was the reason why the initial shipments to the Nexus were materials only. Kent’s goal was to make the orbital platform above self-sufficient and self-sustaining. He wanted to make sure that his grand plan was sufficiently well in motion to prevent even the worst catastrophe on Earth from stopping his effort. It is for this reason that hundreds of his people would be living in orbit before even the first passenger train came to Principe.
Sending materials into space was one thing, but sending people a very different affair. The initial stage of the trip took place within the troposphere, where all life on Earth lives. This was relatively easy and required only a moderate amount of pressurization and oxygenation to sustain life. The stratosphere was next, starting approximately 30 miles above the surface of the Earth at the equator. Ultraviolet light was a danger here, and the temperature progressively rose from about -50 degrees Celsius at the tropopause to 0 degrees Celsius at the stratopause. Passengers traveling through this region would need increasing protection from dangerous wavelengths and sufficient heating to make the journey comfortable. The mesosphere was the next part of the journey, approximately 40 miles above the Earth at the equator. Temperatures could drop as low as -100 degrees Celsius. This was the edge of space, and any human venturing into this area would require a craft capable of life support.
After the mesosphere came the thermosphere, a region where temperatures increased quickly. Starting approximately 50 miles above the ground, the thermosphere progressively increases in temperature the farther up one goes, with a maximum temperature of over 2,500 degrees Celsius. Thankfully, the density of gas was significant less at this point, thereby limiting the maximum heat stress to any craft in this region. The greatest danger was from radiation, as this same low density of gas could no longer protect any voyagers in this region from the disastrous effects of high energy cosmic radiation. Occupants in this region would pass through the Kármán line, the international standard of where outer space began. The thermosphere continues for nearly 200 miles, passing through the same region occupied by the now defunct International Space Station.
The exosphere came next, composed of only the lightest gases. Only a minimal amount of drag occurred here. This was the province of satellites, and this region continued until one reached 500 miles above the surface of the Earth. It was only here that one could truly say that they had entered the vacuum of space, with an overall pressure of only 1×10-11 Pa. From here, the passengers would travel through the Van Allen radiation belt up to a distance of 5,000 miles. The crawler would have to be insulated against this high-energy radiation to protect its occupants. Once past this last real danger, the trip would be relatively uneventful, as passengers would travel from the 500 mile marker to 22,237 miles away from Earth until they arrived at geosynchronous orbit. Though the space elevator would continue for an additional 80,000 miles, humans were not yet ready to venture into this part of the great void.
In fact, nearly a dozen years would pass before people would even step on an empyrean planet.
Circum-Terra was a great confused mass in the sky. It had been built, rebuilt, added to, and modified over the course of years for a dozen different purposes - weather observation station, astronomical observatory, meteor count station, television relay, guided missile control station, high-vacuum strain-free physics laboratory, strain-free germ-free biological experiment station, and many other uses.
But most importantly it was a freight and passenger transfer station in space, the place where short-range winged rockets from Earth met the space liners that plied between the planets. For this purpose, it had fueling tanks, machine shops, repair cages that could receive the largest liners and the smallest rockets, and a spinning, pressurized drum - “Goddard House” - which provided artificial gravity and Earth atmosphere for passengers and for the permanent staff of Circum-Terra.
- Robert Heinlein, Between Planets
