Page 18 - Unlikely Stories 5

On His Own Petard

counterweight beyond that to keep the elevator taut as it swings
around in space. It would function like a funicular railway, with as
many vehicles going up or down, all taking advantage of both the
earth’s gravitational pull and the centrifugal push of angular velocity
created by the counterweight’s motion. Energy would be provided by
solar-generated electricity. Stations going beyond the midpoint, where
gravity ceased to exert any force, would be the new launching sites
for interplanetary travel. Ground launches would become obsolete.
Minsk had bet the store on the space elevator remaining pie in the
sky. His latest rocket, the Corsair 7, represented the state of the art in
rocket design. He intended it to become the standard vehicle for
transport to Mars. It had a reusable first stage and the most powerful
engines yet developed. He had pulled out all the stops to get it
demonstrated before interest could be diverted to Tetsubashi’s
project. It was on the gantry at his new launch facility, Earthport,
receiving a final shakedown. He’d had to borrow heavily to get to this
point. If he couldn’t land a huge contract for the rockets, he would
lose control of the company to a consortium of bankers.
Over the years of planning and plotting, Minsk had watched the
lines on three graphs: one was the cost of his rocket launches, as their
mechanical efficiency peaked and fuel prices continued to rise,
obliterating the efficiencies of scale he had achieved with Corsair 3
and destroying the profits from his long-term satellite contracts. The
second was improvements in the tensile strength of double-walled
carbon nanotubes, measured in gigapascals, and the cost per
kilometer of their production. The third showed the payload cost per
ton to Low Earth Orbit of the two systems. If the elevator could be
built, it would be cheaper than Minsk’s Corsair fleet by a factor of
ten, and growing. It would become the conveyor belt to the future he
had so ardently promoted over ecological reclamation, his rockets a
new rust belt in the interplanetary transport landscape. He had to
stop the elevator before it go into operation.
Questions had always been raised about the sturdiness and
vulnerability of the tens of thousands of miles of ribbon: what if it
were hit by space debris? Low Earth Orbit was filled with millions of
pieces of space junk hurtling around the globe at tremendous speeds.
Tetsubashi apparently had satisfied those doubters with its safety and

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