super luminous velocity

paper experiment

the dawn of Corporate Space Cowboys.

It all seems so simple now, in retrospect. All the tools and the technology had been sitting around for ages, rusting in wait. Old fuel tanks had rusted out, instead of being lived in by thousands. The change that took place could have been much faster too, had the people stopped to think and confront their fear. Their fear was an ancient one, one that slowed history, made heroes of explorers and made holidays for pilgrims. Society was afraid of change, of motion, of space. All signs pointed up and out, but few would admit to believing something so audacious. For them, in comparison to the past, this was a step far greater, a gap far larger, a shift so unparalleled, and they were right. Early in the 21st century the believers convinced enough entrepreneurs and a door was opened. At this point, nothing can close it.

Certain companies (mostly Japanese ones) had been gearing up for space by directing their attention towards advanced high technology at affordable prices. The result of projects like Honda's and Toyota’s robot program was a significant step up. Millions of humanoid robots (androids) that were easy to communicate with and could learn tasks by explanation and demonstration infiltrated the world workplace, and then the homes of the middle to upper-class. Even the lower class became accustomed to interacting with the androids, as robots did everything from garbage pick-up to big band (very big and perfectly synchronized) concerts. Toyota released their first line of androids with the ability to play percussion and wind instruments in 2006. Even after a huge expo demonstrating their abilities, the world was shocked and awed when androids actually started to become a common fact of modernization. It was as if society wasn’t listening because it didn’t really want to hear. Friendly interfaced robots helped smooth the transition into the world of the Jetsons because they gave people a face to look into and confront their fears of being dependent on technology; something that had been left up to extremists and luddites previously.

Revolution began with the Anasari X-Prize. In 1995 Diamandis dropped the cheese into the middle of the maze, a prize for whichever non-governmental agency or corporation that could create and use a reusable space-craft capable of exiting the atmosphere with a crew. Additionally, they were required to do it again within 2 weeks and using the same craft. Burt Rutan succeeded.

[SpaceShipOne Wins X-Prize - Breaks X-15 altitude record
Mojave, CA: On October 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne rocketed into history, becoming the first private manned spacecraft to exceed an altitude of 328,000 feet twice within the span of a 14 day period, thus claiming the ten million dollar Ansari X-Prize. (READ MORE) Multimedia: Video Photos (new!)
]
WEBCLIP 2005 (http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/)

SpaceshipOne was a radical shift in aerospace engineering: a hybrid of jet and rocket, a slingshot and a Samaras (Winged paired seeds, found in maple trees and resemble a helicopter when falling from the tree). All of those analogies have been taught in colleges in the decades since. The project was funded by Paul G. Allen and the design work was done by Burt Rutan, a living throw-back from the days of fly by wire engineering. Shortly after the end of the competition, Richard Branson's Virgin stepped in to purchase the rights and plans to the craft. Virgin Galactic had the plans scaled up and a business model in place in 4 years. Space tourism was born a rock star’s birth in the hands of eccentric billionaires and brilliant engineering. With initial tickets set at US$200,000 (about the cost of a very expensive car) they sold like crazy. Millions of people had spent their lives dreaming of seeing space, and for that much, they actually could afford it.

[In 1995 small surveys were carried out in Toronto and Berlin, followed by a nation-wide telephone survey of 1020 people in Canada and USA. These surveys all found that the idea of space tourism is massively popular, and the results are described in other papers (S Abitzsch ,P Collins et al). ]
WEB CLIP 2003 (http://www.spacefuture.com/tourism/market.shtml )

The industry was born. In 2017, the Space Island Group exploded onto the scene with a wheel shaped space hotel, built of leftover fuel tanks from the good ole’ NASA days. Space Island brought a few other toys to the table, including weather control satellites.

[The Space Island Group will make it possible for companies, nations and organizations to begin worldwide reductions of these harmful conditions by 2012.]
WEBCLIP 2005 (http://www.spaceislandgroup.com/solarsat.html)

Entire countries paid insurance for the ability to steer and dissipate tornados and hurricanes. The technology was simple: if one side of the storm’s path is heated with a beam of energy, the tornado falls into the path of negative pressure zone created. For a short while, religious fanatics declared that Space Island had gone too far and was playing God. In 2019 hurricane Jeb was dissipated using Space Island technology employed by the US government for insurance purposes. Most of the fanatics began to believe new things; technology can change beliefs. Once the Island opened, others followed suite shortly, including the Hilton Luna, and other small space cabins and time-shares. Time-shares moved into the Space age with the advent of Bigelow Aerospace Inflatable Space Habitats. A project bought from NASA after it was abandoned, the inflatable habitat quickly became an industry standard for its convenience and relative safety.

In the early days there were essentially three methods of lifting a craft into space. Conventional (the cheapest method initially) involved exploding lots of fuel under whatever payload required space delivery. Pulse Detonation Engines (PDE’s) were roughly the same idea, except that it involved far less fuel and a process known as detonation rather then deflagration, which yielded roughly 60% better energy and fuel efficiency ( In other words, they use less fuel and move much faster). In 2004, the US Air force tested a prototype they built out of a motorcycle engine at roughly mach 4 mounted to a two person craft. Needless to say the convenience of this design lends it to being utilized as a pre-rocket launch engine. Nuclear was the ultimate in propulsion, but the risk involved made it an unattractive launch method. The effects of a large scale catastrophic failure would be cataclysmic.

[The Whitney Aero nuclear rocket explosion has left the population of the entire county of Almagordo New Mexico has been irradiated. Farmers Space Insurance (FI-Space) will be covering most of the damages, but there are countless legal battles and moral riots for Whitney Aero CEO and head engineer Thomas Yomoto yet to deal with.]
WEB CLIP 2034(http://www.cnn.com/massclaims/blog)

The incident was small and the company crumbled. The warning was out. Nuclear propulsion was only for orbital and further out of the well (a gravity well is an Einsteinian physics effect described by chwarzschild Geometry, in which spacetime can be thought of as being bent by the presence of mass).

Revolution struck again in the form of the lifter.

[The Lifter works without moving parts, flies silently, uses only electrical energy and is able to lift its own weight plus an additional payload. The Lifter uses the Biefeld-Brown effect discovered by Thomas Townsend Brown in 1928. The basic design of the Lifter has been fully described in the Townsend Brown US Patent N°2949550 filed on Aug 16, 1960 and titled "Elektrokinetic Apparatus", you will find in this patent the full description of the main principle used in the Lifter devices.]
WEB CLIP 2004 (http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/main.htm)

When the need for a reactionless thruster became glaringly apparent, money was immediately put into research on the most likely rising technology to fill the niche. After a painful reworking of the fundamental laws of physics to include a truly unified theory of space-time, the electromagnetic wave effect and light, apparent levitation became simple and inexpensive to implement. This was done using the Bifeild-Brown (BB) effect.

[“It’s like someone flipped the future is now switch, and cars shoes and skateboards started floating on their own.�]
WEB CLIP 2005 (http://blog.case.edu/epn1 )

Needless to say this immediately became the standard, coupled with high detonating reaction thrusters for reaching orbit. When this happened, businesses began to find it cheaper to do business in space where they could govern themselves, much in the same way as cyberpunks of the early 21st century were able to make their own rules in cyberspace. This was the dawn of Corporate Space Cowboys.
Even after lifters changed the way we jumped off, it was still cheaper to build in space due to gravitational and governmental reasons. Governments (mainly US and Japanese) gave tax breaks to anyone willing to go space-bound in an attempt to curb the rapidly encroaching population problem. Companies like Bigelow Aerospace and Toyota joined resources to create factories in space that operated off solar power and produced little waste. Many of them were essentially unmanned.

The Moon Base 2060 plan proposed by president Hetton in 2050 became a reality when a large step for man was taken and a city on the moon was established around US port Aldrin. This legal action made it a requirement for the postal service to be able to ship to Luna. Virtually all representation of the US for colonists came in the form of supply shipments, and the presence of the USPostal.

[Ebay Insures In Space:

eBay wants to ensure that everyone who participates in the eBay community has a safe and enjoyable experience. Now that USPostal ships to Luna, we can connect you directly to their new space delivery insurance and postage service. Now anyone can eBay in space!]
WEB CLIP 2062 (http://www.ebay.com )

According to the legal standing of the time, legal precedence for certain issues were set and maintained by the founder of a colony. Some lunar parents went so far as to declare separate laws for the child of each outSuit, which they would obviously need to ever leave the house. In a LunaLife US Japan UK Eura poll the most commonly requested add on (above swimming pool and sauna) was a large greenhouse to simulate Earth life. Due to remnant legal loopholes leftover from Berkeley battles and cannabis clubs, the legality of drugs could also be established by colonial settlers. Immediately colonies began popping up.

[Why would anyone want to live on the moon? It’s not quite as nice as here, but all I wanted was a greenhouse.]
WEB CLIP 2065 (http://blog.bloj.lun )

Lunar drug cartels followed suit shortly thereafter. Luna began as an anarchic society, but rapidly grew into many tribal villages with different laws. The laws left up in the air by the US for colonies were drugs, abortion, and bio-ethics. Earth’s moon essentially became a social and corporate test bed for all the things not easy or legal to do on earth. Many of the more radical Lunatics made their living as scientific researchers, others as being scientific research. Great scientific progress and social experimentation became the mainstays of lunar life. There were huge risks involved, as there were in any exploration, but the potential was astronomical.

The first major “Gold Rush� was for the hydrogen stored in lunar ice deposits. Having a much shallower gravity well, Luna was far more economical for jumping off, all Luna lacked in order to be a self economically sufficient port was a fuel source.

[About 128,000 lbs (58,000 kg) of hydrogen, or about how much is embedded in the top 10 cm of a square kilometer of regolith at 1 part in 10,000. To extract that hydrogen, however, one would have to process 580 kilotons of regolith. In that regolith, one would also find very roughly 60 tons of nitrogen, 120 tons of carbon, 10 tons of helium, 2.5 kilograms of helium-3, and 500 kg each of neon, argon, krypton, and xenon.]
WEB CLIP 2004( http://www.asi.org/adb/02/02/polar-hydrogen-value.html )

Chevron and Peperdine realized this first and began mining the Lunar north-pole.

[A Shell-Exxon merger yielded ExxSel Fuels who are joining the Lunar fuel industry later next year with a more efficient process for mining.]
WEB CLIP 2078 ( http://www.energyBar.lun )

Booming fuel industry was exactly the required stimulant to supply the curiosity of the explorers of space, industry, and life. Energy information and materials formed the trifecta backbone of goods and services of the non-tourist space economy. Meanwhile Earth-bound industry was approaching a limit of incrementally slower progress caused by gradually dissipating resources despite efforts to balance consumption with eco-production.

Mars was the next target of colonization by space-bound culture. Mars provided a far more habitable environment in which to live and work than did Luna. More Earth-like gravity, atmosphere, and sky appearance made it a far better location for the average space family. Only Luna’s proximity to Earth made it a better contestant for first colonization. After the success of LunaLife, transport to Mars quickly and efficiently became the hot product to build. Conventional rockets take 2 years for the Earth-Mars traverse but were prohibitively expensive; primitive solar sails were slower than that but far cheaper. Ships large enough to house the necessary safety equipment used anti-mater reactions.

[(1) Antimatter

(a) Upon annihilation with matter, antimatter offers the highest energy density of any material currently found on Earth.

(b) Simply put, it would take only 100 milligrams of antimatter to equal the propulsive energy of the Space Shuttle.]
WEB CLIP 2005 (http://www.engr.psu.edu/antimatter/introduction.html )

In 2104 Toyota and Chevron tackled both sides of a problem by simultaneously opening mining facilities on the asteroid belt, and in very shallow space (near the sun Sol). Antimatter harvesting from solar flares required large amounts of strong metals in order to be cost- effective, and asteroid mining required fast transport to the belt that separates inner from outer Sol orbital Space. This extremely large investment paid off as the hybrid company became the material supplier for everyone in the solar system, and anyone who was competing had to buy Chevron antimatter anyway. Chevron purchased Toyota in 2109 to form the conglomerate Zeus Industries. Rising antitrust sentiment in 2118 eventually lead to Zeus to sell its Earth-bound assets and declare its independence as a nation of the body Luna with a basic ethos and legal system centered around promoting space travel, and thusly its own business. There was little to be done to prevent it because the US was an equal if not inferior power to ZI in the Sol system at the time. With their success strongly tied to the success of humanity in the stars, Zeus Industries Interplanetary Nation (ZIIN) was benevolent.

About This Work:
The story contains a combination of real and invented sources. One of the “WEB CLIPS� is actually a citation to the posting of the Dawn of Corporate Space Cowboys online at my blog. This is an article citing itself. The true version of this paper can be viewed using a web tool called Liquid Information.

Comments

Check it out in its current version here.

Posted by neuman on July 28, 2005 05:24 AM

Thats incredible

Posted by Mojave real estate on August 24, 2005 09:10 PM

Ummmm...HFS Neuman.

What a completely inspiring vision for the human race.

Posted by Ian on June 30, 2006 09:16 PM