Chapter 3

June 2207 - Launch Day Low Earth Orbit Mission Commander Rito Mori

I watched some of our thrusters end their burn as we moved away from the space elevator and orbital station. The flight checklist continued, “ ... Conestoga is past station safety perimeter. Drive containment GO, PLI GO, MRF 1 GO, MRF 2 GO, Navigation GO, AFS GO, Inertial dampers GO, Data link GO, ALL SYSTEMS GO FOR LAUNCH! Flight clock is running at minus one sixteen...”

In passable English, the Secretary General told me and the two billion people watching; “Crew of Conestoga, I know you will do best and take human to stars! Earth wish you happy and good fortune!”

I knew she was fluent in many other languages. Ops announced in the background, “Fuel flow begin, increase three percent per second to ninety. Activate inertial dampers. Forty-two, forty-one...”

I told the Secretary General and the world, “Building the Conestoga and preparing for this mission has taken half a million people more than a decade. All that work so the few of us aboard can carry humanity, and the human spirit, to a new home among the stars. We’re ready for the challenge! In the words of early astronaut Alan Sheppard, ‘LIGHT THIS CANDLE!’”

My timing was off, reducing the drama. Ops finished, “Fuel flow at ninety, clock at minus 5, 4, max fuel, 2, 1, IGNITION!”

For a few milliseconds, sixty of the most powerful lasers humanity could build shined into the center of the drive chamber. The ship’s five petawatt Zolachev drive FEROCIOUSLY ROARED to life, with a dozen times the power of everything on Earth combined. We were riding on a carefully controlled supernova.

The accelerometer instantly changed from zero to 627G. It quickly climbed to 781, 938, then eventually stabilized at 922G. Without the inertial dampers, a Zolachev drive ignition wouldn’t even be survivable. If both dampers failed while we were at high acceleration, everybody and everything aboard would be smashed into a chunky soup. A single damper failure might only kill us.

We were crushed into our seats, watching Earth fade away on our screens, propelled by the energy equivalent of eighty Hiroshima bombs per second. To people on the ground, our exhaust would be brighter than the sun for over ten seconds, and they would be able to see us with their naked eyes until we were farther away than Saturn.

We could move our arms a little, but only with great effort. We felt ‘only’ seven G’s. Nine was enough to put even the old-time fighter pilots unconscious. At ignition plus 30 seconds, with effort equal to lifting my whole body with one hand, I lowered fuel flow to ten percent. Five seconds later it would have changed automatically, but out of pride, I had to show I could do it.

Our actual acceleration gradually dropped to 236G, and we felt a much less arduous 1.8 for the next hour. As we passed Mars at T plus forty minutes, our velocity reached twenty percent of light speed. The stars slowly transformed from dots into short streaks of light.

I slowly dialed the fuel back until our actual acceleration dropped to 1.3 G and announced, “All systems nominal. Inertial dampers off. Engineering department start post-launch maintenance. Begin scheduled cold-sleep procedures.”

I got up and patted my second in command Johannes Lenk on the shoulder. “Hopefully, it’ll be a boring trip. See you in a year, Joe.”

I had scored one point higher than he did on the final exam, or our roles would have been reversed. Our running joke was that one point was the difference between a genius and a monkey. We were friends, but highly competitive.