Station Breaker

59 State of the Art

The Alicorn rocket used to send the Unicorn spacecraft into orbit consists of two stages: The upper and the lower stage.

The lower stage is the big cylinder on the bottom that uses nine engines to send the upper stage to the edge of the atmosphere, disengaging at about Mach 10 then falling back to Earth where it uses the carefully calculated fuel left onboard to land on a platform at the far end of the iCosmos assembly bay.

The second stage pushes the Unicorn into orbit, reaching 17,500 miles per hour, then heads back down to Earth top first, using a heat shield to slow it down before it does a somersault and lands like the first stage on another pad adjacent to the assembly bay.

There's a third landing pad for the Unicorn to land on, but I have no personal experience because I decided to take a side trip to Rio.

After landing, each component of the rocket is pulled into the iCosmos assembly bay where they're inspected for damage and any parts that need refurbishing are replaced.

The entire rocket, all three sections, are designed to be reused like a passenger jet. This reusability is why iCosmos, SpaceX and Blue Origin have been able to radically change space travel.

It hasn't come easily or cheaply. These companies were the pet projects of some of the richest men in the world who had a grand vision about the future of space.

Several years into this era, the improvements and changes are still happening. The iCosmos assembly building is like one huge machine. Rockets go out one side, come back used through another, and are carried along on tracks as robot arms inspect the surface. AI diagnostic software checks the internal systems and the engines are X-rayed for stress.

Before this period, the most expensive part of a rocket launch was the cost of the rocket itself — even the Space Shuttle. Its side boosters were dumped into the salty ocean making them more costly to reuse than just buying new ones — although you'd never know that from the magic of government contractor accounting. The main tank burned up on reentry and the shuttle itself had to have the engines rebuilt after every launch and the tiles resurfaced. All of this added up to a billion-dollar price tag per launch.

The contractors who worked on the shuttle and its successor, the SLS, really didn't have much interest in solving the problem they were paid handsomely to solve — that was until the upstarts came along and changed the game.

Now the single biggest cost to getting into space is fuel. It takes roughly the same amount of fuel to put the Unicorn and its payload into orbit as it does to send a 727 around the world.

On the bigger rockets they're using to send materials to the US/iCosmos station, the cost per pound is much less.

All of which leads to the current state of affairs where rocket launches are cool, but they're no big deal, to the point that while security is extremely tight around the iCosmos facility — it's still located on an Air Force base — this isn't anything like an Apollo launch of yesteryear.

After thousands of launches, we have a humongous data-set that tells the AI that supervises the launch what's going on at any given time. While there's somebody with their finger over an abort button, it's mostly ceremonial.

In the old days the abort button was just a trigger to make the thing explode. Now there are a dozen different scenarios, from exploding the first two sections after the crew section ejects, to a slightly more graceful abort that splits the sections apart and allows them to all land back on the pad.

While this hasn't made us complacent, everything has become more routine, like commercial air travel. There are ground crews to inspect the engines and fuselage and checks and balances in place to make sure they did their job.

The biggest variable now is the payload. While you can predict what kind of stress an engine will go through and the wear on related systems, if someone stowed a cylinder of acetylene gas in the cargo section and used a valve that wasn't rated for the degree of vibration you'll encounter on take off, your perfectly fine rocket will explode because someone goofed.

Every rocket has a launch supervisor and a payload master. For my mission, the supervisor was Renata. The payload master was an engineer named Greene, who supervised all the things loaded into the Unicorn and made sure the variables wouldn't cause the whole thing to crash.

We've already got an insider with iCosmos who will change the launch profile for the upper stage, making it possible for us to get the DarkStar into a trajectory that will bring it to the K1 without it looking like we're trying to actually aim for the Russian space station.

The most difficult part about getting Prescott into space is going to be on the ground — getting the iCosmos payload master to sign off on the fake-Unicorn capsule.

Markov's trick for that is to get an Air Force payload master to commandeer the launch while not letting it be publicly known that's what's going on.

As Laney and I try to cram everything else we can into Prescott's über-man brain, our Russian strategist is working diligently to make sure that when we load our payload onto the truck and drive it up the road, through the iCosmos security gate and into the assembly building, nobody pops the hatch and spots a Navy SEAL hiding inside our mystery rocket.

The obvious solution would be to ask our CEO, Vin Amin, the man who has the keys, permission to do this, but he's an unpredictable risk. If he says "no" and goes public, we're screwed. If he says "Let me think about," and asks one of his government contacts, we run the risk of Silverback finding out and the K1 going boom.

He's already dealing with the fallout of my shenanigans.

We're in a classic ask for forgiveness later scenario. He'll either love us or hate us. Right now we have to make sure we don't get caught.