“OK, so, my thing is, if we figure this out once, we might as well build us a fleet of starships if we're doing it.”
16-year-old Tom Stepforth III chose his moment to wade in on the discussion his younger brother Vertran (9), their Trent cousin Milton (9) and their Ludlow friends Lil' Robert (5), Grayson (6), George (9), Glendella (10), and Andrew (10).
“I already told them there are not enough horses and horsepower in this whole world,” Milton's eight-year-old sister Gracie said to their sister Velma (11), “so I'm not saying it again. We can go get lemonade with Edwina, Amanda, and Eleanor instead.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Velma said. “Sometimes, Gracie, it just pays to let people figure things out on their own. Tom actually is doing well in physics, so, I think they will figure it out.”
“I mean, we kinda have fleets of ships,” Tom said, “like, if you sent all the Space Shuttles there ever were up at the same time, or, all the Soyuz capsules, and, we have an International Space Station to send them to, so, we're making progress.”
“Wait, what – really?” George said.
“Yeah – y'all hold on – I have a book I can show y'all about space travel as it exists today,” Tom said, and went to his room in the Trent home and got it.
“Now we're getting somewhere,” Milton said. “We just shoulda asked Tom in the first place – he's a big news guy and knows what is going on.”
“Yeah, don't sleep on my big brother,” Vertran said. “Just because he likes to deep fry frozen chickens doesn't mean he's not on top of everything else.”
“Actually, if you deep fry a chicken, frozen, you probably know more about physics than most people who have never tried that,” Andrew said. “That's a way to learn about extreme cold meeting extreme hot.”
“Yep,” Vertran said. “Also about the process of seeking asylum, but, that's too much for right now.”
Tom came back with a big hardback book with lots of pictures, and the younger children oohed and aahed as he explained the history of space travel to 2020.
“So, here's the thing,” Tom said. “Right now, we are limited to building basically bigger and better versions of the engines that power things on Earth, and fuels that power things on Earth, and the hardest part about all that is how hot engines get and how much payload they can push before they blow up or melt, because if you can't get to 17,000 miles or 28,000 kilometers an hour, you can't even get into orbit. The second hardest thing is how to land back on Earth without the heat of coming through the atmosphere melting everything.”
“So, really, it's a heat thing,” Grayson said. “Air conditioners are heavy, too.”
“Yep – they're called coolant systems in engineering,” Tom said. “You gotta find a way to keep your engines cool enough to function.”
“Wait – how fast is 17,000 miles an hour?” George said. “I mean, is it faster than a race car?”
“Like, 800 times faster than a race car,” Tom said.
“OK, then, all we gotta do is get a race car up to speed and we are good!” George said. “We can do a fleet of race cars!”
“Uh, no,” Andrew said, “because planes are out here going between 600 and 2,000 miles an hour, and you don't see them going into space, and they are way faster than race cars.”
“But they are not as fun!” George said.
“And Grayson and I are blond, and blonds are supposed to have more fun, so, we want the fun,” Lil' Robert said.
“Yeah, no,” Grayson said. “A car does car things. A plane does plane things. I'm not trying to go to space on either one of those.”
“Spoken like a true engineer,” Tom said. “And, really, that's the problem. We really don't understand how to do the engineering for a spaceship that is going to keep Earthlings alive for long trips away from Earth, given what we have to work with. We can get into orbit and be there quite some time, but, astronauts from the ISS always come back sick and weak after a few months. A car is engineered for car things, and a plane is engineered for plane things … and Earth things and Earthlings are engineered for Earth. Once we get too far past that, we're stumped right now – but if we could do it once, we might as well build a bunch of them, like when we figured out cars and planes, we built a lot of them.”
“Wait,” Andrew said. “I'm trying to make sure I understand wheat you are saying. It's not that it can't be done. It's not even that we don't know how it could be done, because Miguel Alcubierre worked out a plan for a warp drive in 1994. We just can't do the engineering?”
“Yep,” Tom said. “All our materials come from Earth. All our people come from Earth. All the things that we know how to do are things that work on Earth. We understand physics well enough to know that some things work everywhere and even how they would work, but we don't know how to engineer to meet the conditions successfully for us to be safe out there.”
“Well, Grayson, that sounds like job security,” George said.
“No,” Grayson said. “Where we live we got people having neighborhoods falling in and using cotton balls and stuff that will kill you when you breath it, in buildings for kids to go to school. I don't care about going to space. I care about stuff being built right here.”
“And, you've got a point, Grayson,” Tom said. “Imagine bad builders, building a fleet of spaceships.”
“Oh, everybody would just die!” George said.
“I'm not going for it!” Lil' Robert said.
“But it says in that book that going to space helps us build stuff better on Earth, so why don't we just do that?” Glendella said. “I mean, you wouldn't put cotton balls in the wall of a space shuttle if you want to get to orbit and back, so, why don't we just bring those blueprints over here?”
“Now that's it, right there,” Grayson said.
“Well, there was a case like that – basically used the quality of washers for plumbing down here on O-Rings up there, and that's how the Columbia was lost,” Tom said. “Bad engineering is everywhere, but, the best engineering to get to space has helped us build better on Earth, too.”
“There seems to be a pattern here,” Andrew said. “Even in trying to get to space, we literally keep coming back to Earth.”
The other children considered this.
“Yep,” Tom said. “And that may be why we never do get a warp drive … in our imaginations, we can go anywhere, but when we try to get our imagination into the real world, that real world may always be just Earth.”
“We can get to the moon, though,” George said.
“Yep, but the moon orbits what?” Tom said.
“Oh,” George said. “The moon orbits Earth, so still, it's still all about Earth.”
“They are building a probe to check on things on the sun,” Tom said, “but still, what does Earth orbit?”
“The sun,” Glendella said, “and the info is going to get sent back here, because learning about the sun helps us live better on Earth.”
“Yep,” Tom said. “In the end, although we love thinking about going into space, it is still all about life on Earth.”