F3 The Interview

            Nina sat awkwardly, trying to figure out what to do with her hands while the sound technician wordlessly adjusted the boom microphone in front of her.

            “Live in three, two, one,” the man in the sound booth said.

            “And welcome to Science Talk. This is Linda Heinz, your host. We’ve got a good show lined up for all of you, today. We’ve got Duncan Thomas, an astrophysics professor from Columbia, who will explain how the Tyson deep space array is able to capture not just images of other stars, but allow us to peer back to the origins of the universe in ways that the James Webb telescope could only dream of. But before we get to Professor Thomas, we have here Dr. Nina Elsbeth who works for ISA’s Extra Solar Conditions Group. Welcome, Doctor.”

F3 Retirement Party

            On the ten year anniversary of Zhen He’slaunch, Jim Macomber retired. He smiled at the party they threw for him, but mostly he was relieved. The cajoling with Congress, the endless meetings, and, most importantly, the nail-biting stress over satellites light years away, were someone else’s problems.

            “So, Jim,” Walker asked, “how are you going to spend your retirement?”

            “Golf,” he grinned.

            “Really?”

            “No. Can’t stand the sport. No, I’ve got my grandkids a lot of the time, now.” He patted Alicia’s hand on his arm. “And I’m going to just enjoy. Catch up on my reading. There’s a lot of good sci-fi out there.”

            “Not as good as the real thing, though,” Peterson said with his characteristic scowl.

            “That’s the fun, at least for me. I get to lose myself in it instead of worry about logistics and funding. That’s someone else’s problem, now.”

            Nina Elsbeth sighed. “Speaking of which. . . .”

            “Go get ‘em, tiger,” Jim smiled.

            “You’re not out of this yet, old man,” she grinned.

            She set aside her drink, then went to the front of the conference room.

            “What did she mean by that?”

            “You’ll see,” Walker smiled into his drink.

            Peterson had the exact same, smile. “Nothing less than you deserve, Jim.”

            “What’s this about?” he asked his wife.

            “No idea, dear.”

            “Can I have everyone’s attention, please?” Nina said.

            After a few moments, the din of the room subsided, all eyes on Nina.

            “Thank you. We are here to honor Jim Macomber, the pioneer who helped us realize the dream of faster-than-light exploration. We have expanded our reach beyond our solar system, though we don’t fully understand how everything works, yet. But we’ve got one more way to honor Jim before he leaves for retirement.”

            Nina touched the screen on the wall, which flared to life and displayed a large animation of a probe with sails. The animation showed its projected mission out of the solar system to target Alpha Centauri.

            “I’ve just gotten budgetary approval for our latest probe, an exploration of Alpha Centauri. This will be our largest probe ever built, with an expected mission duration of twenty years to survey the entire star system.”

            Applause erupted and some cheers, but Nina held up her hands for more quiet.

            “It gets better. We’ve gotten approval for the name.” It flashed up on the screen now, with Nina reading it out. “The James Macomber Deep Space probe!”

            More applause and cheers, and Jim felt a tightness in his chest. He smiled and sniffed as tears rolled down his cheeks.

F3 Sandbars

            Nina, Jenny, Walker, and Charlie sat at the conference table. The projector, which had at first displayed the galactic map with positions of the stuck nanosats—there were fifteen, total, in different parts of the galaxy—now displayed a picture of the Incredible Hulk punching the shockwave of a supernova, which somehow worked and saved the spaceship he was standing on.

            “See, because the Hulk is powered by gamma rays,” Walker was saying, “the supernova’s gamma rays actually served to power him up way beyond normal, so he—”

F3 Run Aground

            Nina stared at the spreadsheet. Many people envisioned that astrophysics was all about gazing through the eye pieces of telescopes, or looking at images downloaded from satellites. To be fair, that made up a bit, but it wasn’t the bulk of everything. Most of astrophysics came down to spreadsheets and numbers.

            Radio, x-ray, and microwave telescopes worked more by data than images. The numbers could be applied to images, and even the radio signals could be hooked up to speakers to produce sounds, but a lot of it was number-crunching data through spreadsheets and databases.

F3 Galactic Weather

            “Congratulations on your promotion, Dr. Nichols,” Jim Macomber said as Jennifer walked into the conference room.

            “Thank you, sir. What promotion?”

            The others from the Hermes, Odyssey, and Frontier satellite control teams were already there. Nina, Walker, and Charlie all grinned. Peterson, as usual, looked sour, but it was less sour than his normal expression. Interns and others lined the walls.

            “You are now the Director of Extra Solar Conditions,” Macomber said.

            “Wow, that’s, um, what does that mean?”

            “You’re the galactic weather girl,” Walker said.

F3 Power Problems

            Peterson glowered. The group of engineers he met with—he hadn’t bothered learning their names, instead calling them by names from The Fellowship of The Ring—had brought him power calculations for various batteries, none of which would meet the power requirements necessary for what Jim Macomber wanted from the nanosats.

            “It can’t be done,” Boromir said. “We could probably get a battery that could meet the power requirements for half an hour, and hour at most, but to get in the four to six hour range that you need, is going to mean more cells. More cells means more mass and a bigger form factor. And if the director wants an entire day’s worth of transmitting power, over those distances, we’re talking about another New Horizons probe.”

F3 The New Frontier

            Walker Andrews looked at the data from Frontier’s nanosats in his presentation one last time. It was phenomenal, to say the least, and it really resembled a map of wind patterns across the globe, spread out over the galaxy. Well, a very small part of the galaxy, anyway.

            The nanosats had quickly gotten out of range to transmit their data back in a timely manner, if the signal even could make it back to earth among all the galactic interference. But what they had discovered was impressive.

F3 The Fight for More Funding

            Virginia Meyer scrunched her forehead as she pored over the pages, feeling a migraine whenever she tried to understand the words. Next to her, Terry Sandhurst, the Chairman of their committee, did the same. Finally, she closed the 300 page proposal for Frontier.

            “Just tell us, Jim, why do you need a second Argo launch?”

F3 Frontier Specs

            “What do you mean it’s bigger, now?” Jim Macomber scratched irritably at his grey beard. “We don’t have the budget for bigger. Frontier is already pushing the boundaries of everything we’ve got. We already scrapped Icarus to merge it into Frontier by using the gravity engine. Bigger means more mass, more mass means more fuel, and . . . you know this already. The elevator won’t be done for ten more years, and you don’t want to wait on this.”

F3 Appropriations

            “Director Macomber,” Senator Benson said with his trademark Southern drawl. He was from Newfoundland, but fancied himself a Texan. “You are asking for a substantial appropriation from this committee, money—frankly, and I’m sure my colleagues would agree—that could be spent on more concrete matters. How can you ask this august body to throw money on research that will never benefit the human race?”

F3 Wrong Assumptions

            “Okay, I’m ready for the explanation,” Macomber said.

            Ed Carr stood and threw his slate’s display to the table’s projection system. The simulation of Odyssey 1’s voyage went up, Ed’s revised version instead of the one they had sold to Congress.

            “Okay. Odyssey 1 established contact on Day 112, instead of the 30 days we had expected. According to the system dump and Odyssey’s own logs of what happened, all systems deployed as normal. The sail was jettisoned exactly on schedule. All sensors, including the gravimeters registered almost exactly as Hermes did.”

F3 Phone Home

            The plan had been simple, send up the Odyssey satellite. As it crossed through the bow shock, it would deploy a simple, square sail made from the same platinum and cobalt metal as the mesh on the Hermes. After one hour, it would cut the sail free, which the team expected would drop the Odyssey back to normal speeds.

F3 Reduction

            Peter Lee tapped his foot nervously while Jim Macomber and the rest of his team looked at the design on their slates.

            Jim let out a sigh and scratched his nose.

            Peter swallowed hard.

            Charlie Nichols, across the table, caught his eye, gave a brief nod, and a smile.

            Easy for him, his expertise is navigation. But then, this whole thing was his idea.

            Macomber cleared his throat. “So, it’s about the size of a microwave oven?”

F3 Design Problems

            Charlie Nichols was getting tired of the current argument.

“We need power,” Peterson said.

            “Too much mass,” Walker shook his head, pointing at the fusion reactor.

            “The fuel to mass ratio is the best we’re going to get for the size,” Nina said.

            “But we’re talking about one of the largest vehicles we’ve ever sent out. To encompass a fusion reactor, we’re talking bigger than an Apollo module, and you want to send it out of the solar system,” Walker said.

F3 Selling the Idea

            Edward Carr sat two rows behind Macomber as Walker, Nina, and Jennifer went through their presentation. Unlike Peterson, Carr had never been vocal one way or the other about the theories thrown about. Macomber watched all in silence, and Ed was content to wait until the end, despite Peterson’s frequent interruptions.

            Ed lazily sketched on his slate, occasionally looking at the simulation of Hermes crossing the threshold of the heliopause and into interstellar space.

            “We believe this is the point of acceleration,” Jennifer was saying. “Hermes was caught up by dark energy winds—” Ed sat forward at that. “—at a velocity of 1.4 light years per hour. It kind of tumbled through space, buffeted by these winds, and then the mesh was torn loose after 14 minutes, when it lost its superluminal speed.”

F3 Wild Hypothesis

            Jennifer Nichols pinched the bridge of her nose as she looked over the latest figures from Walker and Nina.

            “I’ve gone over the numbers again and again,” Nina said via webcam conference call. “I can’t find any kind of relativistic or Newtonian effect in what we have. Hermes didn’t accelerate or decelerate. It . . . transitioned to superluminal speed, then when the mesh was torn loose, it fell back to sublight.”

F3 Revised Timeframe

            Dr. Nina Elsbeth swallowed hard as she followed Edward Carr to the conference room. She wondered if she had spoken out of turn at the open announcement regarding Hermes. It had been a struggle to fit in with the “good old boys” of ISA, despite all claims that any kind of sexism had long been eliminated. Sure, she hadn’t had to endure any kind of hazing beyond math proofs, which any graduate student could handle. But in general she kept to herself and tried to do her job to the best of her ability, calculating orbital paths for the Helios flybys of Venus and Mercury on the way to the Sun. Helios would test a radical type of magnetic particle shield to deflect radiation and heat away from the satellite.

F3 The Joke's on Them

            Jim Macomber sat in the conference room, waiting for his team to straggle in. Just prior to the general announcement, Jim had sent out emails with copies of the findings to all departments, including the director. His email alerts started to chime in, all with variations of, “Nice one,” “try harder next year,” “Ha ha,” and “Not falling for it this time.” Next came the message from Tom Paulson, the Secretary of Space Affairs.

F3 New Theory

            “Okay, everyone, settle down,” Macomber addressed the auditorium.

            The auditorium’s buzz of conversation faded into the unlimbering of data slates, audio recorders, and old-school paper notebooks.

            “Shen-Yu has agreed to run tests as to whether or not tachyons can interact with the platinum-cobalt mesh from Hermes’ ion engine. But I don’t want to just leave it in their hands, especially since they don’t have much that’s confirmable. I want more theories, and better information. I have to brief the Secretary in four hours, and I don’t want to tell her that it’s all in the hands of a Chinese facility that has yet to scientifically validate its findings. So, let the theories fly.”

F3 Competition

            Macomber adjusted his glasses as cover to rub his temple to stave off the impending migraine. Andrews and Peterson were at it again, not ten slides into Andrews’ presentation.

            “The ion drive’s mesh? That’s what you’ve come up with? What could the mesh possibly have to do with anything? It’s a simple weave of metal held on by four small screws.”

            “Yes, and it’s missing. I’ve combed through everything else, and there’s nothing out of place.”

            “Could a micrometeoroid have struck it?” Carr asked.

            “Unlikely—” began Andrews.

            “Are you out of your mind?” Peterson broke in. “Any impact would have hit the vehicle itself. To hit the mesh, and only the mesh, it would have to have exactly the right velocity, the right angle, all lined up with Hermes perfectly in order to avoid leaving any other trace.”