Rocket Season - Chapter 2

 

Copyright © 2024 D.W. Patterson

All rights reserved.

First D2D Printing – July, 2024

Future Chron Publishing

Cover – Copyright © 2024 D.W. Patterson

Cover Image – Photo 115346712 / Rocket Launch © Nexusplexus | Dreamstime.com

Previously published as:

Rocket Summer

Rocket Fall

Rocket Winter

Rocket Spring

Contains added material.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission, except in the case of brief quotations for the purpose of review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author's imagination and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events and people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Hard Science Fiction – Old School

Human Generated Content

ROCKET FALL

CHAPTER 2

Williams' Farm

Hell's Hollow Road

North Georgia, USA

Jack was sure he would end up engineering rockets when he was grown and so he pursued all the necessary classes throughout high school to get into an aerospace engineering college. Shorter than the other kids, with dark brown hair and green eyes, he had just finished his junior year and was starting his summer plans when he read the Daily Space News:

The administration announced today a new goal in space. Speaking to reporters the President said, “We are going to make space a place for everyone, not just the well-to-do as it is now. Starting today, my administration is proposing a series of goals which will be pursued by the government. As each of these goals is reached, we believe that space will become a more democratic and diverse place. I am today instructing all departments of this government to review their programs and bring them into alignment with this important initiative.”

After taking a few questions from reporters, the President continued, “We are also calling on all foreign governments as well as commercial space entities to sign on to the Space First Initiative. You can expect more details in the days ahead.”

With that the President boarded Marine One to begin his vacation.

Whenever Jack didn't understand something, he would turn to his dad.

“I don't understand dad, what does it mean for space flight?”

“Jack, it's hard to say at this point. From what I've read I would say it will make it more expensive for aerospace companies to launch. They have to meet work force goals, environmental engineering goals, and there is a goal for international cooperation.”

“But dad, this country is almost the only one still pushing space exploration. They're going to stop it completely.”

“I know son, it looks that way. Since globalism fell apart a lot of what we thought would happen in space by now, hasn't happened. But even with this new initiative I think a lot of companies will still be determined to make their space dreams a reality.”

“I'm determined too dad,” said Jack.

Jack's plans for the summer were to research rockets and think. He wanted to find out why many of the dreams people had dreamt about space were still just dreams.

Men were on the Moon and well, not much more. After the first commercial mission to Mars failed when Jack was nine, no one had gone back, although the government was still talking about it. Jack wondered, was the cause technical, or political, or economical, or all the above? He suspected it might be all the above.

Technically, space was still hard to do and still dangerous. Chemical rockets were the old workhorses, although some testing of nuclear rockets had occurred, but no one seemed interested in developing that technology beyond the prototype stage.

“Probably,” Jack thought, “because it was too politically fraught and economically expensive. One failure could put a company into bankruptcy.”

Something new was needed. Safe, environmentally sound, and economical.

Home was surrounded by hills on three sides. Jack's dad, Jose, was still working as an engineer in his own company and also spent time raising cattle and horses. His mom, Mildred, had raised his three sisters, all of whom were out of the house now. Jack's room was as much a shrine to rocketry as a bedroom.

One day when he wasn't feeling particularly resourceful, Jack stumbled across some information on the net that he couldn't understand. It seemed to have something to do with using inertia for propulsion, but he wasn't sure. His reading sent him in search of something called the Mach Principle.

Ernst Mach had been a physicist/philosopher in the nineteenth century. He had proposed the curious idea that inertia, that is a body's resistance to a change in velocity, wasn't just related to the amount of mass it contained but was also related to the amount of mass in the rest of the universe. In other words, the inertia of a single mass was related to all the other masses in the universe.

Jack thought it sounded a little bit like quantum entanglement which can correlate some property of a particle here with some other particle across the universe and if a property of one of the particles is measured, it will cause that property in the distant particle to take a correlative value. A form of action-at-a-distance which the physicist Albert Einstein called “spooky.” But at the time Mach proposed his principle, quantum mechanics hadn't even been discovered. Maybe Mach was ahead of his time, and maybe it was an example of action-at-a-distance.

“If the inertia of a body was caused by all the other masses in the universe, then how did Mach suggest that the effect could be communicated?” Jack wondered.

That, he couldn't discover, but he did discover something called the Mach thruster, and that piqued his interest.