Read SpaceCorp for Free Online Page B

with never a mishap. At apogee the shuttles would release their pods and tip over to glide back to Rogers Dry Lake on little stubby wings. Because they were suborbital, their reentry speeds were much slower than a vehicle returning from orbit, hence they had no need of heavy thermal protective tiles like the original shuttle did. That saved a lot of up-mass and weeks of maintenance. Suborbital shuttles could manage three launches per day with a night shift.
    The crewless cargo/passenger pod was a long cylinder with a small thermal protective heat shield in front and an apogee kick motor mounted aft. Inside it could carry cargo or mount passenger seats for 10 to 100 passengers. Once the shuttle and pod reached apogee at 250 kilometer, the pod separated from its shuttle and fired its nuclear kick motor to circularize its trajectory into a stable circular orbit. Once it had achieved stable orbit at 250 kilometer, a space-only shuttle would rendezvous with the pod to take it to its final altitude and orbital inclination. The pod could stay in orbit indefinitely but most often it simply emptied its contents and returned to Earth for reuse.
    The space-only shuttle was the king pin of the system. It was the only part of the system that was crewed and it never returned to Earth. Its role was to rendezvous with the pod and ferry it to whatever altitude and inclination were needed. It was nuclear powered and could carry a crew of ten although it could also be piloted by a single crewman. The extra crew was for infrequent EVA operations.  It had no need for wings or a thermal protective system. But it did have a need for a thick layer of ceramic armor to ward off the incessant swarms of space debris.
    *   *   *
    The initial fleet of Irwin Musk’s space stations consisted of six in polar orbits and four in equatorial orbits. Giant ring-like space stations, a kilometer in diameter and 250 meters thick, were the only way to survive the angry pecking of millions of bits of space debris traveling 25,000 kmph. Their outer hulls were made of large aluminum honeycomb bricks two meters long by a meter wide filled with fire-retardant, self-sealing foam. Built up in layers, the outer hull wall was six meters thick. Space debris could easily penetrate the thin aluminum shells but the sticky foam absorbed impacts from projectiles up to 10 cm in diameter.
    The stations rotated about their central hubs at a stately 1.34 RPM for a full g of artificial gravity. Artificial gravity made it possible for crews to survive and thrive in a space environment without fear of bone loss, muscle deterioration, loss of immune system effectiveness, or vision impairment. The thick hulls offered a modicum of shielding against radiation. Crews stayed on the stations their whole careers most cases, working their way up one tier at a time. If you got passed over for a tier jump, a small percentage could remain aboard to provide continuity to the succeeding tier. But for most, a pass-over meant a one-way ticket to rejoin the ‘groundies.’ A few groundies found meaningful jobs in SpaceCorp, more than a few just drifted. And a few that most folks preferred not to talk about decided they’d done everything worth doing in life. Crewing on a space station was more of a calling than a job.
    Today’s stations were constructed out of segments fashioned on the ground and hauled up to the SCS Pelican , the giant two kilometer construction space station where all other space stations were riveted together by robots. The Pelican’s orbit was designed for easy access to shuttles from Edwards. She flew at a relatively low 700 kilometer altitude—a balance between the need to facilitate frequent resupply missions to provide parts for space stations and the need for fuel for maintenance burns to keep her in orbit. Without the maintenance burns, the imperfect vacuum of low orbit would cause orbital decay and bring her down in a spectacular inferno.
    The Pelican had been in