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Dancing With Moons
© 2023 Norman Sperling, all rights reserved.
27,000-word fiction novella
SUMMARY
Overcrowded satellites crash into one another. Solve satellite crowding for profit and fun! Robots, in orbit, net dead satellites … harvest their parts … recombine them into useful and cool spacecraft … and race them! The clean-up crew sport avatars, so envision each character however you please. Hopeful, witty, realistic hard-science fiction: the science is right, the technology would work. Explore what humans can accomplish.
To be notified when these become available, email normsperling@gmail.com. Buy the Print-on-Demand paperback 978-0913399-20-0; hardback/custom 978-0913399-21-7; Ebook 978-0913399-22-4; audiobook 978-0913399-23-1
CHAPTERS AND EXCERPTS
A man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? — Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto, 1855.
Kessler’s Cascade
By J. R. Venkataloraman, Global Satellite Arbiter
“That’s the third collision this year!” I shouted as the bulletins flew in. “And this one blasted 2 live satellites, not just dead hulks. 2 more orbits shrapneled to shreds! 20 satellites threatened by the debris clouds!” I was at my wits’ end. My job is to fit satellites in so they all work, but orbits became too jammed. Satellites crashed into one another, splattering thousands of shards that destroy other satellites. That also made it hard to find the right time and angle for launching rockets.
Man’s reach had exceeded his grasp.
My staff under-estimated the fragments’ scatter. Several pieces were quite massive. Impact not only broke up satellites, it left wildly jagged edges whirling every which way.
The biggest fragment was as big as a tractor-trailer. Its new orbit plowed through a wide range of heavily-used altitudes. Frantic calculations predicted that, a day and a half later, it would come dangerously close to a large spy satellite, an hour after sunset, over Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Sure enough, more that 10,000,000 witnesses watched the 2 silent spots of light converge, flash, and strew vast numbers of big and small pieces, like flickering fireworks. Most pieces continued at least vaguely in the directions their parent satellites had gone in, but a startling variety splattered and scattered.
Technology had no way to track that many pieces, then compute their orbits, and then survey for more collisions down-path. I warned the world that jagged debris would fall for months. The flare of pieces burning up in the atmosphere put on a vivid show. (A pea-sized piece hits the air so fast that the air shines like a bright star for a few seconds.) Everybody who watched the sky the next few nights saw “artificial meteors”. Most fragments fell over the oceans that cover most of Earth. Most of the rest fell on sparsely-populated areas, because most of Earth’s land is deserts, mountains, icecaps, jungles, forests, and grasslands.
Areas with dense populations only take up a couple percent of Earth’s surface. That’s where higher value has built up, so problems there cause more damage, expense, and disruption.
Clouds gloomed over America’s midwest the next day, so the only people who saw the streaking light were a few high-flying pilots. The light looked … different, going out for a couple seconds, then back on again.
This incoming piece was the big glass mirror from the spy satellite. Being a thin disc, when it first touched the atmosphere, it tumbled, and rotated like a weakly-spun frisbee. Then denser atmosphere pushed it to flatten out, whereupon it skipped off the air, like a flat stone skips over water. Dipping deeper into the air, it tilted a bit, causing more air resistance on one side than the other, nudging it to a new direction. As different pockets and currents of air blew on the disc, it spun, flipped, twirled, sailed, and coasted.
The first ground contact buckled cables that held up the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. Overstressed, the wires snapped, the tower unbalanced, tottered this way and that, and plunged onto its bridge, slapping it all the way to the river bottom, dragging under a tourist boat too.
The cable diverted and flung the wobbling, frisbing satellite mirror, which within a few seconds got the ultimate close-up for a spy satellite. It sliced sloppily through the top tower of Renaissance Center. The detached top slid sideways, shoving a secondary tower to splatter across the I-375 freeway. Impact debris from the building, plus thousands of sharp shattered shards from the mirror, bombarded Detroit.
From first contact with the bridge cable, to collapse of the Renaissance tower across the freeway, took a single minute. Thousands of people were killed immediately, dozens died slowly, and thousands more were injured.
Emergency responders were utterly overwhelmed. Catastrophe sites plotted by police, media, the National Guard, radio hams, and the Red Cross, progressed from first aid, to stabilization, and then workarounds.
News flashes began very confused, but within the first hour major media figured out that this was from space debris, probably from the Rio de Janeiro crash.
Eventually FEMA brought in support supplies. Detroit was a disaster area for months … begging the rejoinder that Detroit had been a disaster area for decades. Telescope splinters became gruesome souvenirs, “Detroitus”. Shattered though it was, the telescope mirror focused political finger-pointing … which made the region feel almost normal. To symbolize or criticize the finger-pointing, artists or vandals added a straight-out digit to the middle knuckle of the Joe Louis “Fist” sculpture. The mayor ordered the Public Works Department to remove the disrespectful digit … within the next 100 years.
OGSAC
The Exceptionals
Nitty Gritty
Leo Clarke Molniya Presents the Geography of Orbits
Quick Grab
On Second Thought
Guidelines and Tasks
Task One: Cocoons and Bundles
The Net Force
Highly Hazardous
It Wasn’t from Dyson
Natural Moons
Dancing With Nets
Task Two: Parting Such Sweets
^ZZZinggg v. <Grinn>
Task Three: Mash Up Components On-Orbit
To Grasp the Heavens You Cannot Reach
Astronomers set up several observing protocols.
Shiny Objects: Top priority transient events — a supernova, a variable star dimming, a planet with a storm, whatever.
Zodiac Patrol: Along the Ecliptic, scanning the ever-changing planets, moons, comets, and asteroids.
HotSpot Patrol: Examine directions in the sky, such as around delta Geminorum, where major numbers of discoveries have been made.
Pinafore Patrol: Examine directions in the sky that other projects never (well, hardly ever) look at, just in case they’re missing something.
Messier Patrol: The hundred most prominent deep-sky objects.
Silhouette Patrol: With very-long-focal-length telescopes, watch asteroids cross in front of bright nebulae and galaxies. Time occultations among the myriads of stars in Baade’s Window and the Scutum Star Cloud and globular clusters. Track individual stars there. What non-stars lurk?
Disc Patrol: Endlessly scan where most stuff happens along the Milky Way.
Highly Charged
Historic Heritage Spacecraft
The International Space Station was the largest artificial structure in space. It could be updated by discarding outdated modules as new ones replaced them. This would keep the ISS modern, and supply used components to orbiting museum collections.
Over decades, they could reconstruct the ISS by the method of Ancient Greece’s Ship of Theseus. That heroic wooden ship was replaced, a plank at a time, as individual pieces of wood weathered. Collect the discarded planks, and after the last one is replaced, the (heavily weathered) original Ship of Theseus could be reconstructed separate from the (replacement parts) display model. ^Promo commissioned a nice animation of Space Station Theseus. If SS Theseus lurked far enough from ISS to prevent collision and interference, but close enough to reach by escape pod as an emergency haven, it would retain safety as well as historical value.
Keepsakes
A distinctive resource which was infinitely abundant in Space, and likely to be a popular souvenir and educational material on Earth, was Space itself. Little containers of its vacuum. “Own a Piece of Outer Space.” … They commissioned hollow spheres made of strong clear glass, each fitted with an air-tight vacuum valve. … Where they were made on Earth, the spheres were naturally “full” of air. … Once rocketed up, with their valves open, spheres out-gassed quickly … then every valve was sealed shut.
Returned to Earth, the empty spheres were auctioned “For the person who has everything: nothing … absolutely nothing.” Hoover and Dyson and Thermos just had to buy some vacuum.
Tax authorities said the money spent told its value. But tax codes implied that if nothing was involved, there was nothing to tax.
Let’s Race
They could reach targets in any order:
Capture one dead spacecraft that does not orbit Earth. Pass within 10,000 kilometers of Deimos, Mercury, any moon of Jupiter, and any asteroid. Speed scored 100 points. Skills up to 70, Public Service up to 50, Coolth up to 200.
The Sum of Some of Their Parts
Annnnd They’rrrre Offfff!!
Fast Tracks to Far Planets
Rounding the Far Turn
Wave As You Pass By
The Finish Lines
Winners
Endless Orbit
Recipes
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Fandom and Crowd-Sourcery
Fan illustrations are welcome! Especially craved: showing how to wrap a satellite with a net in Task One; salvaging parts in Task Two; crafting new spacecraft from old parts in Task Three; and key events in the Race in Space: The Kiss, The Wave, and The Ooof. Also welcome are avatars, either for characters described, or wild cards. Accepted submissions may be used for printings of the book from then on. Artists receive by-line credits, and their choice of 3 free paperbacks using their pictures, or 10 free Ebooks using their pictures.
Dancing With Moons would make splendid videos, articles, podcasts, etc. Who would be the right producer or the right author? Describe what you propose and offer, in an email to normsperling@gmail.com .
Describe what you propose and offer in an email to normsperling@gmail.com .