David Brin: Tank Farm Dynamo

I smiled as I looked out on the fleecy clouds of home and the tanks in a row, like presents waiting to be opened. I felt Susan come up beside me. “ Pacifica ’s gone,” she said, grinning. “And our acceleration’s climbed to three microgees, Ralph.”

I nodded. “Have Don ease back a bit for now. We don’t want to push the motor too hard on its first day. I’ll check in later.”

“Where are you going?”

I caught a rung by the hatch. “I’m going to go unwind by spending some time puttering in my garden.”

Susan shook her head and muttered “Yuck” under her breath.

I pretended I didn’t hear.

I have had the great privilege of working as postdoctoral fellow with Dr. James Arnold and the California Space Institute… ecotopia’s mini-micro version of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. At Calspace we performed NASA-contracted studies of space station automation, space industrialization, and potential uses of tethers and external tanks .

Ironically, what we thought would be obvious—the need to find ways to use external tanks in space—has met with substantial resistance by the aero-space community. Tethers on the other hand, an idea we thought would be seen as “California freaky” have been taken up with enthusiasm as an important future component in space transportation .

Calspace’s Joseph Carroll (one of the brightest fellows I know) has carried the work of the late Italian physicist Guiseppe Colombo into the field of tether dynamics. Experiments will be flown aboard the shuttle in the near future .

The technological fix has been a mainstay of science fiction since the “golden age” of the thirties. There is still room for fiction whose purpose is to elucidate some point of science. Often this can be done while still maintaining a mix of art, characterization, and drama, but for this propaganda piece, I make no such claim .

Next, we move on to a very special subgenre, a tale about a parallel world in which evil has gained an unfair advantage. First, a warning: never judge a story by its title .