Other things to launch with a Starship Booster

It might have been thirty years ago, I heard this story, maybe from one of my college professors.  Basically, Edison tried over a thousand materials as filaments for his light bulb before he found one that worked.  And a reporter asked him what it felt like to fail a thousand times, and Edison said he never failed once.  He just found over a thousand things that didn’t work.  I have no idea how true that story is, but it is a perfect example of how science is supposed to work. 

I was thinking about this after the eighth example of how Starship didn’t work.  I do believe it is possible to build a fully reuseable rocket.  If we have the technology and understanding to do it now, remains to be seen.  I’m not dismissing Starship as a total failure, but I do agree that it is not living up to the hype.  And I increasingly feel that it likely needs a redesign. 

As I said, I was thinking about all this after Flight 8, and I realized that the booster seems to work.  It’s not launching and landing perfectly, but how many attempts did it take to land the Falcon 9 first stage?  A couple months ago, I wrote up a post with my Thoughts on Starship, and I had a section on how I would have done things differently if I had been in charge, and one of them was to start with an expendable second stage.  That way you could start putting stuff into orbit, while also running experiments on reentry to get some data before trying to build a reusable upper stage.  And I started wondering what kind of missions could be launched with a Starship Booster and an expendable second stage.  Here are the three ideas I came up with.

A space station

Decades ago, I heard about an idea to make some changes to the Space Shuttle so that the External Tank – normally left to burn up in the atmosphere – would be left in orbit.  Crews could then go to it and turn it into a space station.  I started thinking about doing that with an expendable second stage, but the more I thought about it, the more issues came up.  For example, since rockets are designed to be as light as possible and aren’t meant to spend long periods of time in space, they don’t have shielding for micrometeors.  So to shield a second stage turned space station, you’d either have to have some shielding that would go on the outside once it is in orbit – which I image would be a huge pain – or you’d build it with the added shielding.  But if there’s more shielding, you’d have smaller fuel tanks and part of the idea for this space station stage would be to have it built alongside the reuseable stages to minimize costs, but needing smaller fuel tanks would mean a different assembly line.  And then there’s the issue of hatches.  Fuel tanks have holes in them for the fuel to get in and go out, but they’re not two meters in diameter to allow a human with cargo to get through.  So you’d either have to spend all the time and effort into building tanks with such large hatches that don’t leak during launch, or just use normal tanks and cut the hatches into them once the stage is in orbit.  But how do you cut through a fuel tank in orbit in a manner that doesn’t create problems, such as igniting leftover fuel, or filling the space with metal filings?  And then you get into stuff like power cables.  The ideal thing would be to build this station stage with all the power cables and ventilation ducts outside the fuel tanks.  But then you either need premade access points for these, or there would be additional spots in the tank that need cut.  And what about the space inside the tank?  Do you leave it one big open space, or do you put a bunch of anchor points so that you can attach wall pieces to make rooms?

It seems for every issue you can either solve it on the ground, meaning a lot of work to make sure you don’t make things worse like making the fuel tanks too weak by putting a bunch of hatches in them, or you solve them in orbit, meaning a lot of work because you have to be extra, extra, extra, extra certain things are safe.  In the end, I’d say it would probably be faster and safer to launch a Starship Booster with an expendable second stage that just puts as big as possible modules into orbit.  Link a couple of these up, and you have a space station.

Space junk remover craft

I have … an interest, I guess, about removing space junk.  A few years ago, I even wrote about A Space Junk Prize I would start if I had billions of dollars I didn’t know what else to do with.  So I definitely wondered what space junk remover thing could be launched with a Starship with expendable second stage.

What I came up with, looks a bit like the ship from You Only Live Twice, or Rocket Lab’s Neutron.  Basically, the fairing wouldn’t be jettisoned, but would remain attached to the craft for the whole mission.  Once in orbit, the fairing would open, but other than some cubesats, there probably wouldn’t be a satellite.  With the extra mass of the fairings – as large as they can make – there wouldn’t be much extra mass for a satellite.  With the fairings open, the craft would approach a dead satellite, or maybe some upper stage left in orbit.  The craft would slowly close the distance, and then some robotic hands would grab hold of the space junk.  Then the fairings would close and lock shut.  The craft would then deorbit to burn up in the atmosphere.  The reasons for the fairings, is that there could be paint flecks or other small pieces that could come off during the deorbit, and the fairings would stop them from getting loose.  Also, most satellites and upper stages aren’t designed to be grappled by something, so these robotic hands would have to take hold of thrusters, or an antenna or something that may not be that strong, especially after decades in space.  The deorbit burn would be very gentle, but there’s still the possibility the junk could break loose, and hopefully the fairing would be able to hold everything in.

The real idea of this system, is that after testing it a few times in low Earth orbit, you could send one out to geosynchronous orbit to grab hold of a defunct satellite.  But instead of bringing it all the way back down to burn up in the atmosphere, the craft would just go out to a graveyard orbit.  This would open up a slot for a new satellite. 

Of course, satellites can fit in the fairing of a small rocket to launch because the solar panels and antenna are usually folded up.  But once they unfurl in space, there might not be a way to build a fairing large enough to contain them.  So while there are some situations where this space junk remover craft would be great, to really clean up the orbits around Earth will require other things.

Atmospheric drag test

I did a series of posts about space missions I’d fund if I had the money to burn, and in one I discussed an idea of putting a bunch of cubesats into very low orbits so they can observe how things like paint flecks interact with the tenuous upper atmosphere.  This would be an extension of that.

The idea is to launch, I don’t know, a thousand cubesats on one mission.  The most basic idea, is if you had two cubesats that had the same mass, but one was more aerodynamic than the other, and you released them in the same orbit, would the less aerodynamic one deorbit sooner.  The knee-jerk answer is yes, but how much sooner?  That’s what this mission would test.  The way you test it, is you have six or seven designs for cubesats, and you build a hundred or so of each.  You then release ten of each at an altitude where they’d likely deorbit and burn up in about a month.  And then you release ten more a few kilometers higher, and so on until the last batch will likely stay in orbit for about a year.  And then you monitor when they deorbit.  And I’m sure there would be other cubesats that could hitch a ride to such orbits. 

The point of this mission would be to get some real-world data on how things behave as they’re deorbiting.  One possibility – either a mission launched on a smaller rocket, but it could also be part of this mission – would be to have a bunch of dummy cubesats set to immediately deorbit.  These dummy cubesats wouldn’t have batteries or anything dense or hazardous.  But they might have containers of various substances that burn in distinct colors.  These would be set to deorbit and burn up somewhere over, say, the continental US.  I’m sure people have seen cubesats burning up in the atmosphere, but nobody knew it was happening and so had instruments set up to record it.  Besides the science, I’d love to see ten bright meteors within a few minutes. 

***

So those are my ideas.  Are they the greatest of ideas?  No.  But if they keep blowing up Starships, they may need some backup ideas for the booster.  Just saying.

Thoughts on Starship

Of the three big American rockets – SLS, Starship, and New Glenn – New Glenn is probably my favorite.  Yes, it’s behind schedule and probably over budget, but that can be said about all of them.  But that’s about the end of the bad stuff about New Glenn.  I’m sure if we knew all the details about it, there would be other bad stuff, but so far so good.  As to the SLS, I do want humans to return to the moon, but I want to do it sustainably.  A multi-billion dollar rocket that launches every two years (maybe) isn’t how you do that.

And then there’s Starship.  The basic idea of Starship – big rocket, go space – isn’t that bad.  But there’s so much bad or weird stuff around it.  Like, all the talk of using Starship to transport people or goods to any point on the globe in under an hour.  Which is stupid for a multitude of reasons.  For example, you’re going to take off from some place in the middle of nowhere an hour from some big city, fly for an hour, then land in the middle of nowhere an hour from some other big city on the other side of the planet.  Okay, but people wouldn’t just fly into a spaceport and walk onto a rocket.  There would need to be technicians loading and securing all the baggage, as well as a flight crew securing all the passengers.  (You don’t just have a seat belt on a rocket.)  And then all the extra personnel have to get clear of the rocket, and assuming there’s no delay in fueling, or weather, or an aircraft/boat in the launch/landing area, this “anywhere in an hour” is more like five or six.  Which would be cool, but is the demand for that enough to warrant a massive rocket? 

Anyway, what about the Starship taking stuff to orbit.  How do I feel about that?  It seems with each launch I’m becoming more … dubious?  Like, I’m starting to wonder how many more test flights will be needed for Starship to do what it is supposed to do.  Five?  Ten?  Fifty?  So in this post I’m going to give my concerns for the Booster, and the Starship, as well as a section on what I would have done if I had been in charge of Starship development.

Booster concerns.

The Booster I’m mostly fine with.  It goes up, then comes back down, like the first stage of Falcon 9.  Great.  My issue is the landing, or lack thereof.  I understand the idea of catching a rocket means you save mass on landing equipment, so you can have more fuel to get more into space.  I understand that.  But a rocket landing on a concrete pad with landing legs is far simpler than what they’re doing.  Being simpler, it’s probably also a lot safer.  First off, I heard the reason they didn’t catch the Booster on Flight 6, is because there was a communication error with the tower.  So basically, any software glitch at the tower turns this reusable rocket booster into an expendable rocket booster.  There’s no other chance of recovery.  Well, that’s why they want to build a second tower.  Okay.  But if there’s an accident on a concrete pad, it can probably be cleaned up and repaired pretty quickly so you can get back to landing rockets.  But an accident at a tower could mean months of disassembly and rebuilding before you get back to landing rockets, not to mention launching them.  If they can make the catch work, great, but it almost feels like they’re skipping some intermediate versions where they would have learned how to precisely land this huge rocket on legs before moving over to catching it.

Starship concerns.

Was it Flight 4 that had the one flap nearly burn off?  While all the Musk-Bros were cheering about how tough Starship was, I was wondering how do you make this a quickly reusable craft if you have to do major repairs after every mission?  And while there has been less damage with each test flight, there’s still been damage.  This next flight is with an updated Starship, and if there is obvious damage to it during reentry, then I will officially become concerned that this Starship – as pitched – doesn’t work.  The whole point of Starship was that it could launch, land, and then be reloaded and launched again very quickly.  But if it needs to be refurbished after every flight, then you can’t do that.  I’m not saying that Starship should then be scrapped, but if it can’t be quickly reuseable, then all of its supporters need to adjust how they present it and how it is to be used.

And then there’s the … not landing.  Again, I understand that without the weight of landing legs/gear you can get more stuff into space.  But for any eventual cargo that complains, you better enjoy roller coasters for that last second pitch up for the landing.  That’s why any cargo – living and non-living – would need to be very secure in any passenger version.

If I were designing this

If I were designing the booster, it would have landing legs.  At first that’s how we’d land it.  But once we were sure we could hit a target precise enough to try catching it, there’d still be landing legs.  These could be less massive emergency ones that could only survive one use.  The point would be if there was a last-minute issue with the tower, we could divert to a landing pad and save the booster instead of just ditching it in the ocean.  Then maybe once we have a 95% success rate in catching, we can scrap the legs altogether.

The first big change for the Starship, is I’d start with an expendable second stage.  This way you could start carrying space stations or other big satellites to orbit while still working out the whole reentry thing.  Once the satellites were deployed, these second stages could then basically do the reentry tests that have been done, just without the flip at the end.

As to the flip to land vertically, I understand that that will be needed for a Starship to land on Mars.  But to land back on Earth, we have countless runways already built.  Why not land on one of them?  But the weight of landing gear would mean less stuff to put into orbit.  Maybe.  But if Starship only needed rocket engines in space, then you’d only need the vacuum engines.  If you followed the Space Shuttle route and made it an unpowered glider, you also wouldn’t need any extra fuel.  But it’s likely you want to save some fuel and have a small engine to have some landing range.

But the whole point of Starship is to land on Mars, and there aren’t runways there.  Yeah, but they’re not going to build a Starship, then flip a coin to see if it will land on the moon, or go to Mars, or stay here on Earth.  Each version of Starship will be different, so why not build the Earth version to take advantage of all the runways we already have built?  The whole flip and catch for the Starship seems needlessly complicated.  But the point of catching it is so it can just be stacked on top of another booster and launched quickly.  Assuming there isn’t massive damage to the heat tiles during reentry.  If – as seems increasingly likely unless they’ve somehow managed to fix all the problems – a Starship needs to be refurbished before it can be launched again, then what difference does it make to how quickly it can be turned around if it lands on a runway or is caught?   

The Starship program is a bold new approach to rockets that faces numerous challenges.  My concern is that while I feel it is likely these challenges can be overcome, they can’t be overcome as quickly or easily as is being hyped.  Basically, we were promised a wunderrocket today that I don’t think we’ll see for a couple of years.  I know it is rocket science and it’s not like a new phone that comes out every year, but this rocket is supposed to be part of our return to the moon.  And I’m starting to be concerned that even with all the delays and issues with the SLS and Orion, Artemis III will be delayed – or even cancelled – because Starship won’t be able to deliver.  So maybe, they should have tried a less bold approach like what I outlined to get a Starship delivering stuff to orbit and then worked out how to make the bolder step instead of trying to do it all at once.

The Fall of SpaceX?

I’ve been a big supporter of space for as long as I can remember.  In 2009 I was thrilled when SpaceX became the first private company to put a satellite into orbit with a private rocket.  It seemed like we were on the verge of the real Space Age.  But in the last few years, it just seems like we’ve lost our way. 

After some thought, I figured out part of the problem.  If you went back twenty years to 2004 and found the 28-year-old me and told him, “There’s this company, SpaceX, I don’t know if you’ve heard anything of them yet, but in a few years they’ll build a small rocket that will be the first private rocket to put a satellite into orbit.  They’ll build a bigger rocket, which by 2024 will be a workhorse, launching over 100 times in 2024 alone.  Part of the reason for the high launch cadence is the first stage is reusable, as in it lands and can be reflown at least twenty some times.  And they have a capsule capable of putting humans into orbit, either as a taxi for NASA astronauts, or just private astronauts.  From all of that, what do you think they’re doing in 2024?”

2004 me would think for a bit, and then would probably answer, “Space stations.  Maybe just two or three module ones.  Some would be hotels, while others would be labs, either general or dedicated to biological research or materials testing.  And there might even be … garages that would send out robotic or crewed craft to bring back damaged satellites for repair.  I mean, that’s what I’d be doing.  What’s this SpaceX doing?”

“They’ve launched thousands upon thousands of satellites to give internet service to people.”

2004 me.  “That’s … cool, I guess.  Do they have any plans?”

“Oh, they’re working on an even larger rocket that will not only have a reuseable first stage, but a reuseable second stage.”

2004 me.  “Oh, will they use that to launch space stations, sort of a Skylab thing?”

“No, they’re mainly focused on starting a Mars Colony.”

2004 me, slightly confused.  “But, if you had a space station, you could test the life support systems needed for the months long voyage to Mars.  Not to mention, it would be a good idea to have plenty of private astronauts with some space experience to be the command crew on a colony ship.  Especially to do spacewalks in case something needs repaired.”

“No, I think the plan is to just fling them to Mars and hope for the best.”

2004 me, really confused.  “That’s … all they’re doing?”

“Well, they’re contracted with NASA for a lunar lander version to land crew on the moon, but who knows if anything will come of it.  Like, in the original timeline by 2024 they should have had an uncrewed test flight, which would involve putting the lander in orbit, and then launching like fifteen refueling missions to refuel it to fly to the moon.  But so far, they’ve had six test flights, and while they have recovered one first stage, none of the second stages – that are to be rapidly reuseable – have survived reentry in any shape to be reused.  But the owner recently said they’d fly a couple cargo missions to Mars in 2026, although you’d think such missions would also have rovers but I’ve not heard anything about them, even though they’d take a few years to build.”

2004 me.  “What?”

I think this is why 2024 me is starting to worry that SpaceX will … crash and burn.  A few years ago, I wrote a post about how if you were serious about building a Mars Colony, you’d probably want some orbiters to map out certain resources or look for hazards to plan where to put this colony, or to put a bunch of weather, or communications satellites around Mars, or maybe do some reentry tests to get some information before going all out.  But that would require money, and knowledge of building satellites, and rockets powerful enough to send them to Mars.  I mean, it’s not like Elon Musk and SpaceX have had all these things for years.

I fully support the scientific exploration of Mars, but I maintain that the challenges of a Mars Colony far exceed the benefits.  We can mine metals from the asteroids and build rotating colonies that we can fill with life from Earth without worrying about destroying any alien life on Mars.  We could even put rockets on these stations and send them outside the solar system.  If we go to Mars, we get a planet.  If we go to the asteroids, we get the galaxy.

It seems like SpaceX is passing up on what 2004 me would consider as the “next logical steps” to making humanity a spacefaring civilization, for an all or nothing Mars Colony that, almost certainly, will not happen as quickly or glamorously as Musk and his cheerleaders say it will.  It almost reminds me of some observations I heard about a year ago about this car company.  A decade ago, Tesla was The Electric Car Company.  But over the last decade or so, they haven’t done much.  Instead of expanding their market with more affordable cars, they seem to be just doing crazier and crazier publicity stunts.  And while they’re doing that, other car companies have started making their own electric cars, maybe not as exciting as Teslas, but actually available to the average car buyer.  A decade ago, Tesla was King, but no more.  Right now, SpaceX is King.  But by focusing on some grand vision, will their competitors be able to move into the “next logical steps?” A decade from now, will other rocket companies be taking us to the moon, while SpaceX is left doing stunts to stay in the news?

Thoughts on Starship

I typed this up and scheduled it to post just before Starship’s second test flight.

My thoughts on Starship?  Meh.

I was extremely excited in 2008 when SpaceX became the first private company to put a payload into orbit on their Falcon 1 rocket.  As a big space supporter, I saw this as the first step on the road to the space future I’d been dreaming about.  I figured it was just a matter of maybe a decade or so before we’d see private rockets launching private astronauts to private space stations.  I was super excited for the future.

I was a bit bummed when the Falcon 1 was retired, but the Falcon 9 would be a better rocket to launch people on.  And the first fights were of the cargo Dragon capsules which would lead the way to crewed Dragons.  So I was still super excited.

Now, I know that the space business isn’t known for speed.  That it takes years to design, and build, and test craft long before they even launch.  But even knowing that, there were some unnerving things with SpaceX.  At some point, I read that they had contracts to launch 60 satellites in the next five years, which works out to a launch a month.  At the time, that was a pretty tough launch cadence.  But at the time, they had launched only five or six times in a year.  And sometime in this “They need to speed things up” thinking, they started making changes to the booster and the fueling.  Which is great, but for awhile it seemed about every mission was delayed because they had issues with the densified fuel.  As an armchair rocket person, I wondered why they didn’t just build five or six of the boosters they knew worked to keep launching satellites to get through their backlog, and to give them some time to work on their new boosters on the side.  And I’m sure there are a hundred reasons not to have done it that way, but from the outside looking in it seemed like a missed opportunity to keep the launch cadence up while still experimenting.

Still, these experiments lead to boosters being recovered and launched again, and again.  Reusable rockets are fantastic.  They are a clear necessity to the space future I want.  And yes, now it’s a slow week if only one Falcon 9 launches, but most of the flights are for Starlink.  Don’t get me wrong, space internet is a great idea, but far from the private space stations and moon bases and stuff I’ve been waiting for for … over a decade now. 

And yes, the cargo Dragon got upgraded to a Crew Dragon, and they are flying astronauts to the ISS and to orbit, but I read they stopped building Crew Dragons.  Which I don’t understand.  There are people who will pay to orbit the Earth, and I’m sure there are friendly nations who would love to have missions with their astronauts, and someday there will be private space stations needing craft to carry crew to.  And again, as someone from the outside looking in, it’s like, “You have something that’s working, why aren’t you continuing with it?”

To step back a bit, there’s the Falcon Heavy.  Which, when it was announced, I was thrilled by.  I’m a Return to the Moon person, and surely the Falcon Heavy could land rovers or cargo to start building up a moon base.  But then, it will launch next year.  It will launch next year.  It will launch next year.  And it finally launched, but then we only had like four launches in five years.  Now, I understand it’s a bit like putting the cart before the horse of why build a satellite needing this much lift if a rocket capable of that lift isn’t flying yet.  But we’re coming up on six years since Elon’s car was launched.  And yes, we’ve had four flights this year, with one more scheduled.  But it almost feels like they spent all this time to build this big rocket, and then found it hard to find things to launch with it.  Which seems like a bit of a misstep. 

And now to Starship.  After years of waiting for the Falcon Heavy, I knew not to get too excited for this even bigger, more complex rocket.  And after all this time, I don’t really care.  Like, either it will be like the Falcon Heavy and start to hit its stride four or five years from now, in which case I might be more excited, or it will hit its stride in a year or two by launching Starlinks.  What would get me excited is if they announced a plan to launch Starship with an expendable upper stage so they could put this Skylab type space station up.  That I would like.  But nothing else about Starship seems that exciting.  Yes, there’s the Human Landing System for Artemis 3 and 4, but what happens beyond that?  Will it just be for those missions, or will there be more to build up a private moon base?  You’d think, if they had the systems to land people on the moon, why not continue to do that?  But I’ll point out, they apparently stopped building Crew Dragons.

What is the future of Starship, and of SpaceX?  They’ve pretty much stopped talking about Mars, which I always found annoying.  (I mean, I am the author of The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars.) But is their future just … Starlink?  It’s tough to get excited for this big rocket if I don’t really care what it will be used for.  It’s like, even though I’m a Return to the Moon person, I don’t really care for the SLS.  Because I want a continual, sustained presence on the moon, and a billion-dollar rocket that launches once a year, maybe, isn’t how you do that.  And I don’t know if Starship will do that.  Honestly, at this point I’m more excited for New Glenn, only because, while I don’t know what they’ll do with it, it doesn’t have as much baggage as Starship or SLS. 

I think all of this comes down to me being tired of waiting.  I think there are to be fourteen missions that will go to or flyby the moon in 2024.  Seven of these will launch on Falcon 9s, two on Falcon Heavies, and one on Starship.  And even though I’m a Return to the Moon person, I’m not overly excited.  Probably because for decades I’ve heard plans on moon bases, but all have fallen through.  When the next humans land on the moon, I will be happy, but there will a bit of dread in the back of my mind that it will be another Apollo Program where we stop going after a couple of missions.  I don’t think I’ll feel like the future is finally here until there is a permanently crewed Lunar base.  Will Starship play a role in that?  Who knows.

More ideas for space missions

I’ve done a few posts – A fun idea for a moon mission and A Space Junk Prize – about space missions I would fund if I had a few billion dollars I didn’t know what else to do with.  The point of these missions – printing bricks on the moon and putting up satellites as targets for companies to attempt to deorbit them – wouldn’t be to have some big flashy mission that gets all the news, but would do the boring groundwork to help further humanity into becoming a spacefaring civilization.  I was wondering what other missions I could think of, and this is what I came up with.

Solar shield

There is an idea, that if we can’t get enough greenhouse gases out of our atmosphere soon enough, we could put a giant mirror in space to reflect enough of the sunlight to cool the Earth.  One version is for one giant mirror, while another is for thousands of smaller mirrors working together.  My idea is a test for the second.

I figure there would be at least three small spacecraft – launched on different rockets so if there is a launch failure you can still test with two – that would each fly out to the L1 point and deploy a ten-meter shield.  Possibly, each spacecraft would have different shield materials or deploying patterns so we can test what works best.  The whole point of the test would be how these solar shields react and if we can control several spacecraft flying in close formation.  These wouldn’t be big enough to make any effect combating climate change, but if we ever needed to do this then we’d have some real-world data. 

This whole idea of climate engineering is very contentious, with some saying we need to be doing something now, to others saying we need to conduct tests so that if we do decide we need to do something we’ll have some idea of what to do, and still others saying we shouldn’t even do any tests.  As a complex issue, there isn’t a simple answer.  And if it’s any help, the data we’d get – formation flying, unfolding techniques, whatever – could easily be applied to other space activities that don’t have anything to do with climate engineering so it wouldn’t be solely a climate engineering mission.  Although that probably wouldn’t matter.

More space junk ideas

I thought of the solar shield idea, but I didn’t think that was enough for a blog.  So I wondered what else I could do, and I went back to thinking about space junk and wondered if there was another project that would help us combat that.  What I came up with would be a mission that would give us some real-world data on the smallest of space junk.

The mission would be a cubesat put into a very low orbit, one likely to only last six months or so.  This cubesat would have a telescoping rod twenty, or thirty centimeters long.  The end of this rod would be an electromagnet.  Attached to the magnet – by a small bit of metal – would be a fleck of paint one centimeter square with some design on it.  The rod would telescope out, then wait twenty or so minutes to make sure any vibration had damped out.  Then the electromagnet would be turned off and the rod retracted. 

On the cubesat would be a camera with a flash, that would take a photo every five minutes or so.  All this depends on how much memory the cubesat has and how often it can downlink the data.  The onboard computer would use the design on the fleck to figure out the distance to it and it would have tiny gas thrusters to try to stay within so many meters of the fleck.

The point of all this would be to see how flecks of paint actually interact with the near-vacuum of the upper atmosphere.  We probably don’t have much data on this.  Ideally, the cubesat could stay close enough to see if the fleck just disintegrates when the air density gets so high, if it burns up like a meteor, or if it slows down gradually enough that it just falls out of orbit.  But in reality, with the different drag between a fleck of paint and a cubesat, the cubesat might run out of fuel trying to stay close enough to see what happens.  In that case, and if the cubesat will still be in orbit for a month or two, then maybe it could be used as a target for the more aggressive methods of deorbiting satellites: ways that might cause the satellite to break up.  In higher orbits that would just make the space junk problem worse, but hopefully any debris resulting from the test would deorbit within a few weeks. 

At first, I figured such a mission could be jettisoned by a Cygnus as it was getting ready to deorbit, because I figured it wouldn’t be worth it to use a rocket to put such a small satellite into such a low orbit, but then I realized that one of the main things of science is repeating experiments to see if we get the same results.  So instead of a rocket putting one cubesat in a low orbit, it could put ten or however many will fit.  Some of these could have identical paint flecks, to see if similar things happen, or maybe thicker flecks, or maybe instead of a fleck of paint it could be a screw or some other random bit of junk the cubesat may have a better chance of staying close to.

Some would say this would just be me burning money, but hopefully we’d get some interesting data out of it.

Short story – “Dust to Dust”

Warning, while not graphic, this story does contain content that many will find disturbing.

“Dust to Dust”

Three juvenile delinquents stood in the small waiting room when Maria Cuevas walked in carrying three small buckets.  She walked up to the nearest boy whose name tag read “Cyril Motlanthe” and handed him a bucket.

“What’s this for?” Cyril asked, not taking the bucket.

“Did you eat breakfast this morning?” Maria asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then this is for when you puke.” When Cyril still didn’t take the bucket, Maria said, “You either puke in the bucket, or stay and mop the floor.”

Cyril glanced at the other two kids with a smirk before snatching the offered bucket. 

Maria then handed buckets to Soad Kaya and Vladimir Kopacz who only grinned when they took theirs.

Maria stepped back and looked at them.  “My name is Maria Cuevas.  I’m the Assistant Plant Manager here.  Now I don’t care how you screwed up to get sent to the Pedogenesis Department, or as we call it PedDep, on Career Day.  Instead of going to the hydroponic farms, or to Apollo to study governance, or one of the spaceports to watch a launch, you were sent to the department you’ve probably never heard of before.  But PedDep is one of the most important departments on Mercury.  It’s also the shittiest.  Which makes it the perfect place to punish those convicted of minor offenses.”

“So why are you here?” Soad asked, to grins from her compatriots.

Maria chuckled.  She had lost track of how many such youngsters had stood before her, thinking they had asked such an original question.  “Oh,” she replied, “I guess I’m a bit of a sadist.” She paused to let that sink in a bit, before adding, “I don’t know how many kids I’ve seen standing there thinking they’re so tough and important, only to watch them leave with their shoes squishing with vomit.”

That wasn’t the kind of response they had expected.  It knocked some of the arrogant glow from their faces, replacing it with the slightest touch of green.

“Now,” Maria continued, “when you discovered you were being sent to the Pedogenesis Department, did any of you bother finding out what we do here?”

“You make dirt,” Vladimir said.

Maria stepped forward and glared down at him, even though he was only a few centimeters shorter.  “How old are you?”

Vladimir glanced at the other two then replied, “63 Revs.”

“If you were an adult I would slap you.” Stepping back she told all of them, “We do not use the ‘D-word’ here because it is too base.  In PedDep we create soil.”

Maria watched the three share confused looks with one another, then said, “Follow me,” and led them into the Main Shredding Room.  The room was ten meters by five with double doors on each of the short sides.  Along the long wall opposite of the door they entered, was a metal panel that could slide up and down.  It was up and blocked the view of the shredder and what was to be shredded. 

Maria let the kids look around the nearly bare room before beginning, “In simplest terms, soil is a combination of minerals from rocks and organic matter.  Every day, over a kilometer’s worth of tunnels are excavated around the planet.  Any metal or mineral useful for industry are extracted from the debris, we collect what we want, and the rest is dumped up on the surface.  So we have plenty of rock minerals, but very little organic matter.  It wasn’t much of a problem for the first colonists because they set up hydroponic greenhouses which don’t need soil.  While most of our food is still grown hydroponically, it’s hard to make a hydroponic football pitch.  So all the public parkland on Mercury is planted in soil we make here.  As well as all the potted plants people have in their homes, since soil for them is just easier than a bunch of little hydroponic systems.

“At first, soil was made using ground up rocks mixed with composted sewage and plant wastes; those being the only sources of excess organic material in the early days.  But humans weren’t the only animals to come to Mercury.  Early colonists brought chickens, rabbits, even goats.  Their manure is also used to make soil, but what were we to do when those animals died, or were butchered for meat?  All those bones and organs like brains and lungs became a new stream of organic material to create soil.”

Maria pointed to one of the double doors.  “Through there,” she explained, “is the Receiving Room where material to be processed is loaded onto a conveyor belt.  The belt comes in to here,” she patted the metal cover and continued, “where it comes to our first shredder.  The shredders are a series of rotating drums with diamond coated teeth.  In a couple of minutes this first one can chop a truckload of animal carcasses into chunks no bigger than ten centimeters by two.  Further drums breaks things down into pieces only a few millimeters in size.  These are the first steps of turning waste organic material into soil.” As Maria had spoken, the kid’s faces had lit up.  It was somewhat disturbing how the Career Day kids always seemed interested in watching stuff be shredded.  But she knew they would quickly change their minds.

“Every few days we process a truckload of animal carcasses from the various farms and butcher shops around the planet.   We also handle animals from the zoo as well as pets.  But there is one other item we process which you’ll see today.

“Some people,” Maria explained, “usually for religious reasons, request that when they die they be put out onto the surface.  When the sun rises, it incinerates their body and their atoms can be carried away by the solar wind across the solar system, even out into interstellar space.  Other people, knowing of our constant shortage of organic matter for soil, choose another option.”

Maria pushed a button and the metal panel dropped away.  Behind thick safety glass was a conveyor belt leading to the two massive drums, all motionless.  On the belt lay three naked, human corpses.  The youngest was over eighty Earth years old. 

“You’ve got to be joking,” Soad said.

“Why would I joke about such a solemn business?”

“They’re people,” Soad said.

Maria waited for a moment, then stated, “They were people.  Now, they’re just several hundred kilos of dead, organic matter.”

Maria turned away from the kids and explained, “Their families have already said their goodbyes, so we can get started.” She hit another button and the two drums began spinning.  Despite the thick glass, a low whine came into the room.

Once the drums got up to speed, the conveyor belt began carrying the corpses towards them.  Maria was watching the conveyor belt and seconds before the first body went in she heard the distinctive sound of someone vomiting behind her.  This was quickly followed by two more.

Maria waited until the three bodies had gone through before turning around.  All three kids were standing at the opposite wall with their backs turned.  Maria frowned when she saw several splashes of vomit that had missed the buckets.

With a sigh, she went to a storage cupboard and grabbed three new buckets.  She told them to set their buckets down and take a new one.  While Soad and Vladimir didn’t look anywhere near the Shredder, Cyril just glanced at it and retched into his new bucket.  That almost made Soad and Vladimir vomit into theirs.  Maria rolled her eyes and went back to the cupboard and got three more buckets.  Maria had learned long ago it was better to leave even partially filled buckets with their odors behind. 

She led the kids into the next room.  Here, the smaller shredders made smaller pieces, but they were set close enough together that one couldn’t really see what was being shredded.  Not that the kids even looked.

“At this stage of the process,” Maria explained, “water is added to the material stream creating a slurry.  This makes further processing easier.”

Something about that made Vladimir retch. 

After grabbing a new bucket from another cabinet, Maria led them down a flight of stairs to the next room.  “Here the slurry comes to series a settlement pools,” she explained.  “In this first one, bits of bone, teeth, beaks, hoofs, whatever fall to the bottom where they are recovered.  There really isn’t much we can do with them – any minerals that we could extract we already have plenty of from excavating tunnels – so they are ground into a powder which is then usually mixed in with cement for use in general construction.”

Before leading them to the next stage of the process, she said, “If it makes things easier, from this point on you’ll just being seeing material from earlier runs.  The last load we ran yesterday came from a chicken farm.”

In the next room there were a couple of technicians checking some equipment.  They shared a brief smile with Maria about the look of the kids.  While they still looked a tad green, they’d apparently already vomited everything in their stomachs. 

Maria pointed through a thick window at a five meter long cylinder.  It was on a slant, with the bottom a meter lower than the top.  “That’s the Solid Separator Cylinder.  Inside is a smaller cylinder with walls made of a very fine mesh.  The remaining material from the settling tanks it pumped in at the top, and the inner cylinder rotates at a high speed.  The centrifugal force squeezes most of the fluids through the mesh and into the outer cylinder where it’s collected.  The remaining material – or pulp – falls out of the bottom onto a conveyor belt.”

Maria pointed to a technician working near the cylinder, but she wasn’t sure if any of the kids even looked.  “Do you see that technician?  They’re wearing ear protection because the Separator is very loud when it’s running.  The reason we can’t hear it is because,” here she tapped the window, “this isn’t just one window.  The Separator is actually in its own room that’s surrounded by a two centimeter vacuum gap.  A vacuum is the best sound proofer in the universe.”

Vladimir actually chuckled at that, which brought a slight smile to Maria.

“The fluid that is collected,” she continued, “is pumped into huge storage tanks.  Its processing is pretty interesting, but can only be done when the sun’s in the sky.  Up on the surface, we’re still some two weeks from dawn, and I doubt you want to wait that long.  But once the sun rises, the fluid will be pumped under pressure through specialized pipes on the surface.  Inside the pipes, the fluid will be heated to several hundred degrees.  The intense heat breaks apart most of the chemical bonds of the complex molecules.  In goes a mix of blood, fats, even microbes, and out comes a stream of carbon dioxide, methanol and other smaller molecules.  They’re sorted and collected to be used however they are needed.  Even the iron from the hemoglobin in blood is collected, but more as a way to keep it from contamination other processes than for industrial use.

“Our next stop is to view some of the composting rooms.” Maria led them down another flight of stairs and along a short hallway.  The room they entered was five by twenty meters.  Along one long wall were five observation windows, each looking into a circular room.  Each contained a mound of dark material.  In one room, a slowly rotating blade was turning over and mixing the mound, while water was being sprayed onto another.

“Like with the Solid Separator Cylinder, the composting rooms are separated from the rest of the facility with vacuum gaps.  But it’s not for sound insulation, but odor insulation.  You may think your stomachs are empty now, but if you caught a whiff from any of those rooms you’d be surprised what you’d dredge up.” Over the last few minutes, the kids had been starting to look better, but that comment checked that.

“In the Composting Rooms we mix three streams of materials.  There’s the pulp from our Separator, there’s plant wastes from either the parks or hydroponic gardens, and there’s partially treated sewage.  The sewage plants take part of the sewage stream and send it to the hydroponic gardens and we get the rest.  But we don’t just throw everything we have together.  Soil to be used to grow grass on a playground is different than that needed to grow grass for a pasture, or soil used to grow trees.  There are different nutrients in the three material streams, so we adjust the amounts of each depending on what type of soil we need to make.

“Into the pile we add various bacteria which start to break down, or decompose, the material.  This turns complex structures like plant stems or flesh into small bits plants can use to grow.  The decomposition process releases heat which helps to kill off any pathogens that arrive through any of the streams.  The rooms are monitored to make sure the piles are at a temperature and oxygen level to the bacteria’s liking so they keep working.”

Maria pointed at the mound being watered.  “That pile started a week ago.  In less than a Rev, it will be turned into a rich compost.  Once it’s fully composted, it will be baked just to be sure no pathogens survived.  Then it can be used to help fertilize what’s already been planted, or it can be mixed with rocks ground up in a separate processing stream.  We then have a basic soil ready to fill in the parkland of new tunnels.”

Maria shrugged.  “That’s a quick overview of Soil Creation 101.  I could show you all of the various processes, but I’m sure you’ve seen more than you care to.  If you’ll follow me, I’ll take you where you can clean up and I’ll answer any questions you have.”

Five minutes later, they all sat in a small conference room.  The kids had washed their faces, and Maria had gotten herself a cup of coffee.  Taking a sip, she asked, “Now, do you have any questions?”

None of the three had been looking at her, but now Soad did and asked, “Why did you show us that?”

Maria took another sip of coffee before answering.  “For most of human history, humans lived in small bands of usually related individuals.  These tribes only survived if all the members knew that they could trust and rely upon one another.  That was also true for the early space colonies where one idiot screwing around could have killed everyone.  You three,” Maria’s finger swept passed all of them, “are idiots screwing around.  I don’t know the details of your cases, but the usual reason kids are sent here are for bullying the other students, selling narcotics, disorderly conduct, shit like that.  While stuff like that won’t kill everyone on the planet, it’s still thought best to nip such actions in the bud.  The reason we hold on to some bodies to run through on Career Day is to show screw-ups like you that some people – even in death – are doing more to advance life on this planet than you are.”

“All I did was cheat on a test,” Cyril said.

Vladimir barked out a laugh.  “You hacked the system to change your grades.”

After a moment, Cyril explained, “That’s a kind of cheating.  But being forced to watch someone be … shredded for that seems a tad cruel and unusual.”

“I thought you all turned away,” Maria said.  “Nobody was forcing you to watch.”

“Semantics,” Soad said.

Maria shrugged.  “True.” She looked at Cyril and said, “So, instead of just facing the consequences of not studying, you decided that the rules shouldn’t apply to you.  Back in the tribal days, someone like that was usually banished.”

“So seeing people being turned into … soil is supposed to keep me from hacking?”

“No.” Maria let the kids look confused while she took another sip of coffee.

“Then what was the point?” Soad asked.

Maria smiled.  “All three of you are from the Celaeno Corridor, yes?” After the three nodded, Maria continued, “The central park of Celaeno was planted about ninety Revs ago.  I can’t be certain, but it’s most likely that some of the first people to set foot on Mercury went into the soil there.  In life they opened up a new world.  In death, they gave us a way to make oxygen, and flowers, and a place for children to run and play.”

Pointing in a random direction, Maria said, “The majority of adults in the tunnels know what we do here, but they don’t want to think about it.  They want to think that soil is … just something that happens.  They don’t want to think about what, or who, goes into the soil because it reminds them of their mortality.  Thinking about one’s mortality makes one wonder what mark they’ll leave on the world.  At some point growing up, most people realize that their only bit of immortality will be in how they are remembered.  There are few Shakespeares and Gandhis who will be remembered for thousands of years, but even they will fade away in time.  Most of us just have to do our best with our families and friends and try to leave the world better than we found it. 

“So why show you people being shredded when you’re not yet adults?  In the hopes a large dose of mortality will make you reconsider your lives.  Just remember that one day – sooner than you would like – you’ll die.  Will you be remembered as a jerk who didn’t play by the rules, or will people actually miss you?”

Maria pointed at the door.  “Go out that door and turn to the left and you’ll be back at the entrance.  Whether you go and make the world a better place or not is all up to you.  Choose wisely, for you only get one shot at it.”