Les Johnson is a husband, father, NASA physicist, and author. Publishers Weekly noted that “The spirit of Arthur C. Clarke and his contemporaries is alive and well . . .” when describing his 2018 novel, Mission to Methone. His 2018 non-fiction book (with co-author, Joe Meany, Graphene: The Superstrong, Superthin, and Superversatile Material That Will Revolutionize the World was reviewed in the journal Nature, excerpted in American Scientist and on Salon.com. His latest anthology, Stellaris: People of the Stars, coedited with Robert Hampson, was released by Baen Books in 2019. You may learn more about Les on his website: www.lesjohnsonauthor.com
The countdown was going according to plan, which shouldn’t be unusual, but Elaine had been involved in too many space projects to believe that any countdown, no matter how well the engineers planned, could proceed to launch without a hitch on the first try. But she had to admit, this one was going very smoothly.
Elaine scanned the status displays and saw that the first twenty chipsats were deployed from the seeder ship with their 10-square feet reflective graphene sails fully unfurled. Each of the tiny chipsats weighed less than a gram, about the same as a dollar bill. Each sail was attached by three tiny buckytubes that, if all went well, would soon be pushed to the limits of what materials science could do to protect them from the hellish environment that was about to be unleashed upon them.
When the countdown clock reached zero, a series of events beginning in the Andes mountains would send the chipsats on their way to a flyby of the Alpha Centauri star system in about twenty-five years—on the scale of true interstellar travel, this was practically the next day.
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