CostLess Cosmos

There was one place I wanted to go before anyone did that to me. Well, two places, but one would be a nice start.

Upwards I went, pulling 2 g's, one from Earth, one from my craft. That seemed kind of meager, so I pushed it to 3 g's, heavy, but not debilitating. My controls were such that if I passed out, it would return to 1 g and hover level, so I was comfortable with the small effort of breathing under a medium g-load.

My altitude climbed, with the number of thousand-feet turning increasingly meaningless. At five thousand feet to the mile, I started at 60 / 5 = 12 miles. I had to get up to 62 miles to be an astronaut. As much as I didn't like risks, what I liked MORE was joining the Astronaut club.

Air traffic control radar would give me some proof that I'd done it, too.

My ship seemed unperturbed by the ascent. Outside, though, at 100k ft/20 miles, the stars were out very brightly. I let my speed increase, now, the 'wind' being nothing of any force on the airframe anymore.

I noticed the temperature in the cabin was getting cooler, and that made a lot of sense in that the outside air was way-sub-freezing. I had a set of electric baseboard heaters (I had to lean over to turn on, damnit) and a small oscillating fan to keep the air moving, but it took a while to warm up.

Ten minutes later, I slowed down to a hover at 390k feet, 72 miles up, well over the 100 km carmen-line, but low enough I wasn't going to run into anything.

I was officially an astronaut!!!

I gave a little 'Yay!' to my empty cabin, which sounded just the same as it normally did.

Laughing to myself with glee, I keyed the mike, "Vancouver, N1203. Request altitude check, over."

The voice came back quite clearly, but it wasn't the same guy. "N1203, Altitude is sufficient. Canadian Military and United States Military request you turn to frequency 1-2-5-point-8, Vancouver, over."

"Vancouver, N1203, taking handoff, switching to frequency 1-2-5-point-8. Thank you, sirs, like to buy you a beer sometime. Out."

I changed my radio ALMOST over, to 125.0, but didn't key the mike. I had to decide what to do, if I wanted to listen. If I didn't listen, I couldn't be seen as disobeying an order of any kind. If I listened to them, they'd probably be threatening, or convince me to answer in some way. The only way to win was not to play.

Chapter: Grocery Run

I was pretty sure that if I landed where they wanted me to, they'd impound my aircraft. I wasn't quite ready for that yet. I had a crazy idea, but... Early on, it'd been in the back of my mind, lurking as a glimmer of a thought about a notion... Enough to research the wild what-if, but not something I obsessed over.

Since I DID obsess over things, though, it bubbled up as a fun what-if and I added enough info to my flight info binder to give myself options with a few waypoints and alternate scenarios.

I thought: Hell! I'm going for it!

The transponder's 'off' switch isn't hard to find.

Angling the craft horizontally and accelerating so I wasn't tugged sideways, turning towards a due-south heading, I pushed the acceleration to 4 g's. I didn't want to go orbital, but I did want to Get a Move On.

Eventually, I had to slow down and drop, then arc east.

They had to have some big radars on me, I was thinking, so I would aim for a place I wasn't going, and change, and they'd have stuff in the wrong place.

So, I sort-of had a plan. I'd done some look-see and had printed out some paper maps since I figured my phone wouldn't work at high altitudes. It was all contingency stuff, I hadn't really planned this out too far, but sometimes the best plans include the chance to be spontaneous within a framework.

Close enough, I decelerated, then dropped like a rock, decelerating and dropping to just over the waves, then came ashore over some nice beach in western Santa Cruz, California, a strip-mall laden town with a bunch of hills and (by the looks of things) far more bike shops than necessary.

Coming inland, I stayed above the hills and flew north, keeping my altitude and speed reasonable for a 152.

Eventually, I got near Mountain View, then over to Menlo Park, the Stanford campus, then over and northwest to a KostLess Superstore.

I had no way of knowing if anyone was chasing me, but I was pretty sure there were some wide-eyed fighter pilots back up north near Vancouver trying to figure out how to catch up with something suborbital and changing altitude, direction, and velocity.

I also knew, the military couldn't steal my ship and throw me away if I had an audience. There would be an audience at a KostLess parking lot.

Luckily, they were still open - it was late, but not that late. I came down, then circled the parking lot, and saw people stop and look up at me. The noise from my craft had to be attracting some attention, and the containers being bright yellow probably helped.

Big Yellow-Orange shipping containers with six drone motors don't just hang in the air without getting noticed.

I drifted down near the auto-shop entrance to a big empty spot and set down.

Looking around through my windscreen, I think I melted the asphalt. It did that on my first hop, too, my real sort-of maiden flight. I'd gone just down the road from my farmhouse and landed on the empty highway. The asphalt even caught fire from my jets as I lifted, so to keep things low-key I went out and spilled some gravel to the holes before someone crashed and got hurt. I didn't need people asking questions why there were six evenly spaced 1-meter deep holes in a highway.

Here, the parking lot would have to suffer.

I opened the air vents to allow atmospheric air back in, keeping the airflow moving slightly just in case I wanted to throttle up quickly. The exhaust was just a warm breeze so not really a danger to passers-by.

People were gathered around, staring, holding up their cameras.

Very soon, a police car rolled up, lights and siren, right at the edge of the crowd. I turned on my cockpit lights and waved, then got up and came out the side hatch, the warm California air hitting me after a cold winter and cool Canadian spring.

There were lots of shouts as I came out. I waved. Seeing the cop, I waved and motioned him over, and set out walking towards him.

He looked at me oddly, nervous.

I said, "Hello!!!" I almost had to shout from the engine's wind noise.

He nodded, "Yeah?"

"I don't believe I've violated any laws, but if I have, I'm happy to answer for them. I have to admit, though, I'm kind of in the middle of a big event, thing, here."

"I can see that."

Walking in closer, I said, "I'll be out of your hair in a little while. It'd be safer for everyone. I just need a couple of things at the KostLess, here. I'm not a member, though. Here's what I want to do..."

He listened to my plan, started grinning his ass off, and said, "I think I can help!"

Radio'ing for backup, soon there were several police cars all around, and they got the place guarded and a rope line set up. I told him that the engines were super-hot and would melt anything, so to keep people back, and they got it sorted. It wasn't strictly true, but better that they kept their distance.

People were all around me, some coming out of the auto-shop doors, some from around to the front and just walking up to us, but keeping a bit of distance.

EVERYONE had their cellphone cameras on.

Turning to them, we moved over closer to them. The cop stood by my side. I was amazed he was going along with this, but I guessed that not every day did someone land in a parking lot and ask politely for help. I was wearing a Canadian flag jumpsuit.

I called out loudly to them, "Hello? Your attention, please? Sorry to be a bother. I just made my first flight in this, it's actually a spaceship. I'm here to do a sort of grocery run? I'm going to drop off some groceries at the international space station. The thing is, I'm not a KostLess member. I'd like to deliver them a bunch of pop-tarts, cereal, snack food, all room temperature stuff. They don't have a good oven up there. And, trash bags, and water bottles. Can any of you people fill my hold with stuff you want to donate, and I'll deliver it?"

People obviously thought I was crazy. But, soon, this lady said, "You can take this cereal."

"Great! -- I'll open the door, you put whatever, inside. Gotta be in tied-shut bags, though, if it floats off into space, they'll be in trouble, and we don't need pop-tarts in orbit!"

People laughed, like it was a gag, but then got into the fun aspect of it.

The lady walked over and put her cereal boxes in the container, and then a bunch of other people came over, too.

Some of them ran into the store, and soon there was a line of people bringing food out. I opened the back of the mostly-empty cargo-side container (the one without my cockpit and reactors in it), and people made a line bringing stuff in.

Apparently, people were running out of the store carrying things and not paying for it. I'd have to fix that later, I thought.

Eventually, I had what I considered enough, including quite a lot of scotch, tequila and wine, which was very funny for the shoppers and myself.

Just about that time, a lot more cops showed up, and the onlookers were getting close, pressing in. I let the last people out of the "hold", closed up the outside container hatch with my extra lockdowns for airtightness, and walked around to face the giant crowd now assembled.

People quieted down. One of the officers had a bullhorn, and I got him to give it to me.

"Attention. Attention, please." The murmurs died.

"First, I'd like to have everyone give these police officers a round of applause for helping out in this situation. It's totally not easy out there keeping people safe, and we owe them all a respectful atta-boy clap!"

I started clapping at them, and sure enough, for some reason, everyone around me started clapping, too.

"Second. I'm going to take off here in a minute, and it's going to make a lot of dust and very, very hot flames. That might hurt people if you're too close. Soooo, I need to ask you to back up, past, oh, where that girl's standing on the top of that pickup, at least.... But one thing before that..."

This was a place where I'd probably totally fail, but, hey, I thought, give it a try.

I asked, reasonably, "Are there any aerospace engineers in this crowd? Mechanical, chemical engineers? Military? I would really like a co-pilot, if anyone wants to come. Everyone else, back up, okay? I don't want to hurt you."

Several people ran forwards. I looked at the crowd, "Okay. I have a seat for one other person, lots of you. Raise your hands, all of you, if you want to go."

All up, maybe 50 people.

"Engineers only."

All hands remained up.

I laughed, "How the hell do I decide? Might get sweaty in there... Uh, okay, who's going to smell nice... Uh, how about... women under 30 only?"

They laughed at me, all but 3 hands went down. "Come on up."

We talked, the 3 women engineers and I, only a moment, and I went with the Stanford graduate student. She said her name was Ellen. She looked to be in her early 20's and gorgeous.

I said, loudly, grinning my ass off and shaking my finger at her, "No hanky-panky. This is just a joy-ride into space, not a long-term commitment!"

They all laughed.

I motioned for her to go inside, then held up the megaphone again. People weren't quite back enough. "Back a little farther, please, or you'll get rocks thrown in your face, too. Okay... Lastly, thank you to KostLess for the merchandise, and to all the people who helped just now. If you're recording this, someone, please tell NASA we're coming, we're not going to stay long, we don't have space suits but we do have an airlock. Bye-bye!"

She had been waiting at the door, so we went in, I closed and latched it firmly, and we went into the cockpit.

I held out my hand, "Kevin. Kevin Rand."

"Ellen Clayton." We shook. I was frank, and all business, only smiling a little as I led her forward past the equipment. "You're gorgeous. I hope you're as good an engineer."

She smiled, "I'm better than that."

"Pardon the organization here. I designed it to be functional, not beautiful."

"You built this?"

"Took about 4 years."

"Looks like it." She was looking around. I didn't know what to make of that statement.

"There's the second seat. You'll be able to see out the windscreen. It's made out of ALON, I've tested it a bunch, cycling pressure up and down. Instruments are there...

I pointed and named what was what.

"Mostly I'd love to have someone watch the gauges just in case. That's where I was sitting when I ran engine tests -- there's a lot of instrumentation but everything has 'normal' and 'high' marked in pen on it."

She nodded, "Makeshift monitoring systems. Huh. Kinda steampunk."

I laughed, "I'll explain design principles and details as we go. I think if we don't take off soon, we'll have someone swoop down and say we're in bad airspace, or pointing guns or something."

My straps were on, and she squatted over my shoulder to hold on and see better.

I just moved up the engine power lever and felt us shift upwards, taking the load off the motorcycle-front-wheels landing gear I'd welded on. Like I said before, this craft was 'good enough'.

The hum rose, and we rose above the lot with barely any shifting. I could see the people shifting backwards as the wind blew at them. Really, they were plenty far away, but I wanted a safety margin since the exhausts were seriously violet-flamey but in an almost invisible way, not much smoke to accompany them.

Ellen asked a bunch of questions, like where was the power coming from, what the drives did, what all the gauges were, and I told her as I ran through my checklist, meager as it was since I hadn't really powered down any systems besides thruster output.

Just about then, there was a roar, and overhead a set of jets flew by, military ones, it looked like. "We might get escorted to a military base. In that case, I think this spacecraft will be disassembled and I will be put in a small cage and 'debriefed'. I'd rather keep my briefs on, so, yeah, no, but I don't want to break the law, either."

"You invited me in here to commit felonies?"

She was only half-joking.

I reassured her, "Let's just keep going straight up. They probably won't have a way to follow that easily besides circling us. Plus, they can't really stop us without shooting us down into a crowd of people, and with all that cell phone coverage, it'll be obvious I'm not trying to hurt anyone."

She nodded.

Pushing the power output up, we rose farther in the air, slowly at first, then faster as I angled us out towards the ocean and upwards at about a 45-degree angle.

She was busy saying "What do you want me to do?"

"Whatever you want, really. Ideally, you could watch the gauges somewhat, make sure they all stay in the green. Otherwise, feel free to sightsee. There will be more, later, when we get up there, probably, I designed this to fail-to-safe, failsafe, just be generally okay without much help, since I knew it'd mostly be just me flying. So, back there, I just figured, better safe than sorry."

"You're not taking me away to an alien mothership, are you?"

I laughed, "I haven't seen any so far, not saying they aren't there, but I've only been up to 100 km, haven't been in orbit yet."

She chuckled, "Okay. I'll guess I have to accept that."

"You have a cellphone? Can you take some pics of me and stuff?"

"Sure."

She got out the phone and started recording video, explaining things and pointing, asking what things were, and I named them as she pointed.

"Why haven't we heard of you before?"

"I tried to patent my Lithium-6 reactors, as a power source. Compact, huge output, all electrical energy with very low heat. No radioactivity beyond some neutrinos - not neutrons, neutrinos! - and let's just say that's not a problem. But, even in initial research, the patent office, this was in Canada, they said no power sources could get a patent without working prototypes. I knew that if I made them a prototype, it'll get classified and stolen by the military and I'd get squat. So, the best way to make sure it can't get classified is to give a demo, with a working model, and then once I have a patent, they can't hide it."

"But... the thrusters?"

"Oh, yeah. MHD. Magnetohydrodynamic. Mostly. Microwave and spark ionization, railgun acceleration. I can't turn it up too high, acceleration would crush us. If we tried it, and even then, our corpses would be irradiated with either Bremsstrahlung or Cherenkov radiation. We're perfectly safe if we keep accelerations below 15 G's, and I'm in no hurries."

"Wow."

"Yeah. Damned efficient, too. Hard to talk about the system on this video, here, but I think the specific impulse on this thing is lower with onboard fuel, outboard, it's infinite since I'm just hovering forever. So, yeah, onboard reaction mass, it's about 8,500."

I didn't know if she'd know what specific impulse was. She whistled, so she did know.

Smiling with pride, I said, "Well, you know. You get lucky sometimes."

"No shit."

I grinned, "The engineering term of art for thrust here, I think, is 'metric shit-tons'. That's 2.2 times the size of an imperial shit-ton."

She laughed, and I laughed too. I was kind of giddy. This was pretty world changing, and I'd put my life's energies into this project for a long, long time.

We were going up at only about 1.5 g's and she was still taking pictures out the windows, and of the gauges, and a few of me.

"Outside pressure is near zero, now. Altimeter is 90 km, I'm switching to aim sideways so we pick up speed to get to orbit."

"You know where the ISS is now?"

"Is there an app for that?"

"Uh..."

"Right. Doesn't matter. I'll get up there and we'll figure it out. I'm just going to head into a 51.6 degree orbit at 400 km, and figure we'll get close. Maybe we can roll down the window and ask for directions."

We passed through 100 km, and we high-fived. She was now an astronaut, too!

Once I got near 400 km, I angled northeast at 50 degrees and started accelerating that way. I didn't have an efficient way to do it, so I just aimed and hoped I was close.

Instruments showed we were at orbital velocity, over Greenland, then it would be the Arctic Ocean and central asia, maybe Siberia.

I wasn't totally unprepared. There was table of ephemeris data that I'd put together to ensure I could find the ISS if I was looking. It would be over This spot at This time, etc.

"When are you going to call NASA?"

"Oh, I thought I'd give them time to wake up. That video feed probably will be all over the web in about an hour, and by then everyone will be awake and reporting into HQ in Houston asking what the hell is going on."

She laughed a little, still recording video, "This is fun for you, isn't it."

"Culmination of... lots of years of work. I had the idea as an undergrad, proved it as a master's student but couldn't publish because then my secret would be out and not patented. I wanted to do more than just that. So, changed my thesis to a minor subset of what I did, got my master's, created something else that made a bunch of money, and plowed it all into design-and-build on this."

"The landing wheels -- they're... motorcycle front wheels?"

"Yep. Great shock absorption, inexpensive to buy used off crashed bikes, too. I only needed 10, and they're simple to weld on. Reliable in cold weather, too -- good pressure range."

"Why?"

"At sea level, the tire is at 33 psi. But, up here, vacuum, so pressure is 33 plus 14 makes 47 psi. They need to not burst in orbit. I let out some air so they're at 22 PSI on the ground, and 36 on orbit, so it isn't dangerous. Worst case, they pop, I can only land once. We don't glide down like a plane, it's just a soft set-down. On my worry-list, it's a noncritical 'B' system, about 15 down the list. That said, I've been up and down once this evening already so I know they're okay."