2025-09-25, 07:47 PM
Prologue
Gustav Mueller stood ramrod straight with his hands behind his back looking out the floor to ceiling observation window in his office. He had been working on this project his entire fifty eight year professional career and that didn't count the twenty two years it took to bring the asteroid to Lagrange Point 5, the stable gravitational point following the Earth in its orbit around the sun.
He had been an eager young engineer just out of university back then as they mined the thirty eight kilometer diameter asteroid for the materials needed to build a huge generation ship to send humanity to the stars. Despite all their efforts, however, a mere two years after launch, that ship was lost with all hands, a victim of more hazards in the space just beyond the heliosphere than anticipated or the ship could handle.
Naturally, all work came to an immediate halt, with only the barest beginning of a frame of the second ship visible. Countless hours of meetings, discussions, repercussions and finger pointing ensued, with nothing getting done.
Using all of his off hours, Gustav worked on an alternative proposition, one that was totally outside the box of conventional thinking and, at the same time, the solution right in front of all their eyes. It took him a few months but when he made his proposal, he had seemingly every question answered and every detail worked out.
Gustav simply suggested using the asteroid itself as the next vehicle.
With a kilometers thick nickle iron shell, it would withstand almost any conceivable collision hazard, although some defensive measures could easily be built on the outer surface just in case anyway. There was still plenty of unmined materials for the elements the crew couldn't reclaim and sufficient interior room for a large enough traveling party to establish a viable colony.
The single massive engine planted on one side of the asteroid that brought it to the Lagrange Point couldn't be reused but the data from its flight provided Gustav all the information needed to propose five much more massive engines that could propel the ship away from Earth.
After more months of countless meetings, discussions, computer simulations, endless arguments and one or two fist fights, his proposal was not only accepted but Gustav was made the Project Manager at the age of thirty one.
Then the real work began.
An army of engineers tended to the task of hollowing out the inner core to a thirty kilometer diameter sphere and then converting the ninety four kilometer circumference inside surface to slightly more than 2,800 square kilometers of livable area to house the crew leaving behind everything and the generations of their descendants who would ride to their final destination two hundred light years distant. A fusion powered artificial sun was suspended at the exact center of the huge cavern by five massive columns, provided light and heat as it shone and dimmed in the same twenty four hour day and night cycle the colonists left behind.
To create gravity in the core and elsewhere on the asteroid, it spun counterclockwise to the direction of travel on its equator, giving the inner surface of the core the equivalent of 0.8 Earth gravity. On the other levels, the artificial gravity gradually increased slightly until the surface was about 1.1g of Earth.
An inner one half kilometer thick shell was the last defense for the core. Massive tunnels, each protected by three ten meter thick blast doors led from the core to the next level, which was another half kilometer wide, with recycling facilities, factories, workshops, offices, hydroponic farms and the all important four redundant flight control centers and four equally redundant server areas for the artificial intelligence, CLARE, that contained a copy of every item of data, updated in real time, on the planet and could process trillions of data transactions per second.
CLARE would manage every aspect of the ship's operations once underway.
Despite any number of requests for clarifications and countless guesses what the acronym stood for, Gustav never revealed his secret. He named the AI for his long lost first love, the girl in his first year at university who took his virginity as she gave hers to him.
That area was not completely open like the core. Rather every ten kilometers, there was a two hundred meter thick wall, again with two massive blast doors, that were left in place when area was hollowed out. Like the inner core, maglev trains looped on both surfaces at regular intervals to move people, supplies and equipment where needed and back to their homes.
Another kilometer thick shell of the original nickle iron and granite composition protected the work area. It too was penetrated where need by massive tunnels and thick blast doors that led to the engine and tanks level, another half kilometer wide area that contained a series of huge storage spaces. Some were deliberately open to the cold of space to maintain the millions of frozen eggs and sperm of animals and seeds of plants that might thrive in their new environment.
In addition, massive tanks stored the fuel and other resources the ship processed from hundred kilometer scoops extending perpendicular to their direction of travel. An elaborate magnetic field both directed the bits of material, some as small as a single atom, between the stars to automatic processing facilities manned for the most part by self replicating robots. In the event an object was too large to deflect, lasers and rail guns would blow then to suitably sized pieces.
•••••
Gustav Mueller stood ramrod straight with his hands behind his back looking out the floor to ceiling observation window in his office. He had been working on this project his entire fifty eight year professional career and that didn't count the twenty two years it took to bring the asteroid to Lagrange Point 5, the stable gravitational point following the Earth in its orbit around the sun.
He had been an eager young engineer just out of university back then as they mined the thirty eight kilometer diameter asteroid for the materials needed to build a huge generation ship to send humanity to the stars. Despite all their efforts, however, a mere two years after launch, that ship was lost with all hands, a victim of more hazards in the space just beyond the heliosphere than anticipated or the ship could handle.
Naturally, all work came to an immediate halt, with only the barest beginning of a frame of the second ship visible. Countless hours of meetings, discussions, repercussions and finger pointing ensued, with nothing getting done.
Using all of his off hours, Gustav worked on an alternative proposition, one that was totally outside the box of conventional thinking and, at the same time, the solution right in front of all their eyes. It took him a few months but when he made his proposal, he had seemingly every question answered and every detail worked out.
Gustav simply suggested using the asteroid itself as the next vehicle.
With a kilometers thick nickle iron shell, it would withstand almost any conceivable collision hazard, although some defensive measures could easily be built on the outer surface just in case anyway. There was still plenty of unmined materials for the elements the crew couldn't reclaim and sufficient interior room for a large enough traveling party to establish a viable colony.
The single massive engine planted on one side of the asteroid that brought it to the Lagrange Point couldn't be reused but the data from its flight provided Gustav all the information needed to propose five much more massive engines that could propel the ship away from Earth.
After more months of countless meetings, discussions, computer simulations, endless arguments and one or two fist fights, his proposal was not only accepted but Gustav was made the Project Manager at the age of thirty one.
Then the real work began.
An army of engineers tended to the task of hollowing out the inner core to a thirty kilometer diameter sphere and then converting the ninety four kilometer circumference inside surface to slightly more than 2,800 square kilometers of livable area to house the crew leaving behind everything and the generations of their descendants who would ride to their final destination two hundred light years distant. A fusion powered artificial sun was suspended at the exact center of the huge cavern by five massive columns, provided light and heat as it shone and dimmed in the same twenty four hour day and night cycle the colonists left behind.
To create gravity in the core and elsewhere on the asteroid, it spun counterclockwise to the direction of travel on its equator, giving the inner surface of the core the equivalent of 0.8 Earth gravity. On the other levels, the artificial gravity gradually increased slightly until the surface was about 1.1g of Earth.
An inner one half kilometer thick shell was the last defense for the core. Massive tunnels, each protected by three ten meter thick blast doors led from the core to the next level, which was another half kilometer wide, with recycling facilities, factories, workshops, offices, hydroponic farms and the all important four redundant flight control centers and four equally redundant server areas for the artificial intelligence, CLARE, that contained a copy of every item of data, updated in real time, on the planet and could process trillions of data transactions per second.
CLARE would manage every aspect of the ship's operations once underway.
Despite any number of requests for clarifications and countless guesses what the acronym stood for, Gustav never revealed his secret. He named the AI for his long lost first love, the girl in his first year at university who took his virginity as she gave hers to him.
That area was not completely open like the core. Rather every ten kilometers, there was a two hundred meter thick wall, again with two massive blast doors, that were left in place when area was hollowed out. Like the inner core, maglev trains looped on both surfaces at regular intervals to move people, supplies and equipment where needed and back to their homes.
Another kilometer thick shell of the original nickle iron and granite composition protected the work area. It too was penetrated where need by massive tunnels and thick blast doors that led to the engine and tanks level, another half kilometer wide area that contained a series of huge storage spaces. Some were deliberately open to the cold of space to maintain the millions of frozen eggs and sperm of animals and seeds of plants that might thrive in their new environment.
In addition, massive tanks stored the fuel and other resources the ship processed from hundred kilometer scoops extending perpendicular to their direction of travel. An elaborate magnetic field both directed the bits of material, some as small as a single atom, between the stars to automatic processing facilities manned for the most part by self replicating robots. In the event an object was too large to deflect, lasers and rail guns would blow then to suitably sized pieces.
•••••