CHAPTER 5
It was difficult for CEO Anacleto Rosalez to contain his excitement. Rosalez, called AR by his family and close personal friends, watched the launch of the Ariane V rocket take his baby, the spacecraft and payload he’d been working on for almost a decade, into the clear blue sky from the Guiana Space Centre near Kourou, French Guiana. The Ariane, towering over one hundred fifty feet tall as it blasted into the sky using its cryogenic main engines and environmentally unfriendly solid-fuel rocket motors, was the workhorse rocket of the European Space Agency and the industries in Europe that needed access to space. Ariane had proven itself to be a very capable and reliable rocket, and its predominantly French operators had shown themselves to be equally reliable and, in this instance, discreet.
Rosalez was CEO or on the board for multiple companies and his personal wealth was estimated at over five billion dollars, making him a rival of the wealthiest men in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Dubai. Today, he was enduring the heat in coastal French Guiana to see the launch into space of his latest project. A project that, if successful, would change forever the way Europe viewed itself as a world power, how people on Earth viewed the use of space, and how his investors would feel about their ten-year, high-risk investment paying off. The spacecraft on the rocket belonged to Asteroid Ores, Inc., and he was not only the company’s CEO, but also its number one shareholder.
“Monsieur Rosalez, the controllers are telling me that the rocket is working perfectly and that we should be off and on our way within the hour,” said his personal assistant, Maurice Aubuchon. Maurice was very French, speaking in English only when the job required him to do so—as it did here when he was speaking with his boss. Rosalez, being Spanish, spoke English as his second language. Which, unfortunately for both of them meant that they would have to communicate with each other speaking that language that most Europeans quite object to having become the world’s lingua franca—English. Despite their preferences for their respective native tongues, both spoke English rather well.
“Maurice, can you believe we’re almost there? Once we get into space and on our way, it’ll only be another year before we start mining and selling almost ten thousand tons of platinum, let alone the literal mountains of other elements that’ll come back with it. Even with the inevitable drop in prices that’ll come with us flooding the market with the stuff, we’ll be able to return our investors’ money a thousand times.”
That put a smile on the otherwise always-worried Maurice’s face.
“You make it sound so easy. There’s a lot that has to happen between now and then before we can start building that platinum-fueled vacation villa in Hawaii. The spacecraft has to separate from the rocket and get itself out of Earth orbit, coast for nine months and then dock with asteroid 2018HM5. And that doesn’t even take into account the maneuvers required to stop the asteroid from spinning and getting its orbit changed to include the Moon at perihelion.”
“Maurice, you worry too much. But then again, that’s why I hired you—to worry so I won’t have to. I’m sure you have things well under your control.” Rosalez smiled as he made the comment, quite sure that his assistant had matters as under control as was humanly possible and equally sure that Maurice didn’t believe that he did. Maurice was borderline obsessive compulsive and that was a trait that Rosalez needed in the person running the asteroid mining operation. It was rocket science, after all, and how anyone in the space business could survive without being or having access to someone with obsessive compulsive disorder was a mystery to him. Plus, it was just plain fun to tweak Maurice and make him nervous—something Rosalez did with alacrity.
The rocket was now completely out of Rosalez’s sight and from what he knew of the mission profile, the spacecraft that would soon make him and his company a household name, was about to separate from the rocket and ignite its electric propulsion system so that it could reach the target asteroid on only one tank of fuel.
As Rosalez gazed wistfully at the rocket plume that was now being dissipated by the winds blowing off the Atlantic Ocean, he noticed out of the corner of his eye that another of his staff was approaching, the only Brit on the team, Jonathan Price. Price was his attorney. Rosalez wouldn’t have ordinarily thought it important to have his personal attorney at the launch site, but this was a far from ordinary day.
“Monsieur Rosalez, may I have a word with you?” Asked Price, like Maurice, he looked worried. For Price, this was unusual, though not unprecedented.
“Certainly, Jonathan. Maurice and I were just enjoying the moment. Well, one of us was anyway,” Rosalez replied, hoping that he was overheard by Maurice. He noted that Maurice grunted quietly when he heard the remark, which means he had been overheard.
“Monsieur Rosalez, now that the rocket is on its way, we need to come clean about what we’re doing.” Price was young and, according to conventional wisdom, might grow into a great attorney someday once he had some experience. Today, however, he sounded a lot like Rosalez’s assistant, Maurice. He wondered if they’d been talking among themselves and quickly dismissed the thought. It didn’t matter. This was not a new issue for Jonathan to raise; it was just an annoying one.
“Yes, yes, I know. We need to tell the world about our company, the rocket launch and our plan to divert an asteroid so that we can mine it. You’ve been telling me that for years, Jonathan.”
“Yes, Monsieur Rosalez, I have been saying for years that we need to make our plans public. We’ve followed every applicable law and made sure we’re not violating any space treaty, but nonetheless, we need to let the world know what we’ve done and what we’re about to do. We’re not only launching a rocket into space, but we’re launching a rocket that will alter the trajectory of an asteroid and place it on a near-Earth orbit. That might make a few people more than a little nervous, and if I didn’t know the people in this company and the lengths you’ve gone to make sure this all goes correctly, I would be nervous as well.”
“Alright, alright already. We’ll issue the press release tonight after the spacecraft successfully starts its engines and is on its way to 2018HM5. I know you’ve already had a chance to review it; are there any last-minute changes we need to make?”
“None. I’ve been reviewing it almost daily, hoping that you’d go public sooner and I wanted to make sure I was ready when you did. It’s good to go.”
“I was rather hoping that we could dispense with the boring ‘2018HM5’ moniker and use the name I proposed to the International Astronomical Union. Have you heard from them?”
“No. Not a word since we submitted the paperwork last March.”
“No matter, get the press release ready to go and hit send at six o’clock this evening. That way we’ll inform the world of what we’re doing on the same day we launched and began escaping Earth orbit so no one will be able to stop us, especially those tree huggers in Brussels.”
“Yes, sir,” said Price as he walked away from Rosalez and back toward the air-conditioned control room.
Rosalez was sweating, yet he didn’t seem to notice it until now. The excitement of seeing the rocket launch and his dreams finally starting to be fulfilled had caused him to totally ignore his own physical discomfort. He resumed speaking, this time to himself, out loud, but without anyone else being close enough to overhear.
“Sutter’s Mill. I really wanted to be able to call it Sutter’s Mill.” Rosalez was an American history buff. Because of this, he had long ago decided to call the asteroid they were going to mine Sutter’s Mill in honor of the discovery of gold in California’s Sierra Madre mountains near Sutter’s Mill that spawned the gold rush of the 1840s. He, too, dreamed of starting a gold rush of sorts—this time leading to the capability of humanity settling the solar system by tapping the nearly infinite resources of space beyond mother Earth. He’d dreamed of this since he was a kid and was now using his fortune to make it happen.
Time until Asteroid 2018HM5 “Sutter’s Mill” reaches near Earth: 609 days.