CHAPTER 6
Paul Gesling and Bill Stetson were on their final approach to the Space Excursions Nevada spaceport three days after they departed from the Moon. Despite Gesling’s precarious mental state, being extremely preoccupied and worried about his wife’s health after being shot, the flight controllers allowed him to pilot the Dreamscape back to the ground from interplanetary space. Stetson, having trained for most of his career with NASA prior to joining Space Excursions, was on standby to take the stick and land the craft if he or anyone in the control room had been concerned about Gesling’s ability to perform the job. Truth be told, the ship’s autopilot could have controlled the landing without any human input. Machines may not yet have been intelligent, but they were certainly capable of doing jobs like this extremely well.
The Dreamscape, a reusable winged spacecraft, was able to land at the Nevada facility with little fanfare. Landing and taking off, it resembled a conventional jet airplane. After attaining some altitude, the resemblance to a jet became vanishingly small as the ship’s hypersonic scramjet engines propelled it to several times the speed of sound and the aft rocket engine kicked in to give the ship the final acceleration it needed to attain Earth orbit. On this trip, the Dreamscape arrived on a trajectory from the Moon that shot it directly into the atmosphere, allowing it to use friction to slow down and bleed off energy rapidly. The thermal protection system on the bottom of the craft glowed brightly and created a shell of ionized particles around the vehicle that prevented conventional radio transmissions from working at this critical time. After reaching subsonic speeds, the Dreamscape again resembled an airplane as it made its final approach for landing.
On schedule, and after the transition to subsonic, the landing gear on the Dreamscape deployed. Despite his worry and concern for his wife, Paul Gesling was in his element as he controlled the ship in its final moments of flight. The blackness of space was behind them and the beautiful blue of the Earth’s atmosphere was ahead. Below was the eternal brown of the Nevada desert and to both Gesling and Stetson, under the circumstances, it was time to be home.
Moments later the landing gear made contact with the runway and the Dreamscape was home.
The irony of his and Stetson’s safe return from the Moon was not lost on Gesling as they rapidly worked through their checklists so they could soon disembark from the Dreamscape and get to the hospital. If anyone had asked who would be at greater risk of death at the beginning to the mission just barely a week before, who would have considered Carolyn to be the one at risk? Everyone thought Paul was the one who would be more likely to die. Everyone, except, of course, the shooter. Gesling had been wondering for days if the police had any leads or had perhaps already captured the shooter.
The ground crew, led by Hami Kunda, met Stetson and Gesling as they opened the door and came down the stairs that had been rolled up to the front side door of the Dreamscape.
“Hami, is there any news about my wife or Mr. Childers?” asked Paul as he rushed down the stairs and started walking toward the waiting SUV that he had been told would take him to the hospital to visit his wife for the first time since the shooting. Gesling knew that Hami had been at the scene of the shooting and was thankful that it was he who had been in the ground crew and designated to meet and take him to the airport.
“Paul, there’s been no change. Carolyn is still unconscious, but her overall status appears to be stable. Mr. Childers is awake, eating and generally making a nuisance of himself,” Hami replied.
Kunda and Gesling got into the SUV while Stetson hung back.
“Are you coming, Bill?” asked Gesling.
“No, not yet. One of us has to work the paperwork and make sure the ship is properly stored for the next time. I’ll do that and then come down to the hospital later. Okay?”
“Okay by me,” Paul replied.
He quickly got into the vehicle and closed the door. But he didn’t do it so quickly as to avoid looking and marveling at the beauty of the Dreamscape.
“Look at her,” he muttered to himself. “She’s a beauty and I am going to take my wife with me to space in her before this is all said and done. Carolyn, I promise you that.”
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REUTERS—PRIVATE COMPANY LAUNCHES CRAFT TO DIVERT ASTEROID FOR MINING
(kourou, french guiana) The European company, Asteroid Ores, Inc., today launched a spaceship that will divert an asteroid so as to allow it to be mined, company executives announced today. The asteroid, designated 2018 HM5, is thought to contain thousands of tons of rare elements, including platinum, and weighs well over two billion tons. Once the asteroid is in its new orbit, the company has a fleet of robotic miners it plans to launch in order to extract the platinum and other elements for a return to Earth and the commercial market. The company’s CEO, Anacleto Rosalez, says the company’s long-term strategy is to “make space mined minerals price competitive to those mined on Earth” so as to make them a “viable alternative to mining techniques that are destroying the planet.”