“Yes, bringing a hunk of metal that big from all the way out between Mars and Jupiter would have taken forever. Because we found it in an Earth-like orbit, it was a little easier.”
“And what do you mean by an Earth-like orbit?”
“These rocks all revolve around the sun just like the Earth. Some are a little inside Earth’s orbit, some a little outside of it, some cross the Earth’s orbit twice every time they go around the sun. We used to worry about those.”
“Now, not so much,” Tav put in.
Doc paused, and apparently thought better of acknowledging the joke. “Because we were worried about them, we made an effort to find them and to know their exact trajectories—their orbital parameters.”
Back to Doc and Tav, now walking across the pounded earth of the spaceport with a big truck in the background emblazoned with the Arjuna Expeditions logo.
“In recent years, companies like Arjuna Expeditions have mapped a whole lot more of those asteroids in the hopes of mining them. What we’re seeing in the last few weeks is a concerted effort by Arjuna, and an alliance of other private space companies, to throw those efforts into high gear.”
“What exactly is Sean Probst thinking, Doc?” Tav asked.
“He’s not telling us. But the science of orbital mechanics doesn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination. In Part Two of this video, you can learn more about the dance of orbiting bodies in space, and the intricate choreography needed to make an asteroid show up in the right place at the right time.”
Luisa’s finger hovered over the link that would play the next video, but before tapping it, she turned around to look at Dinah. “Just trying to figure out what you do for a living,” she said, in an accent that came from everywhere, but mostly from New York. “You’re with Arjuna, right?”
“Shh!” Dinah warned her jokingly. “I’m still trying to stay friends with the Russians.”
“What’s that about?” Luisa asked.
She was referring to a recent series of testy meetings, and sometimes out-and-out confrontations, between the Russians—still thinking and acting as a bloc under the leadership of Fyodor Antonovich Panteleimon—and the Arjuna contingent, which actually prided itself on being “disruptive.” This was a commonplace bit of biz jargon. But try explaining to a grizzled cosmonaut why being disruptive was a good thing.
Dinah was inclined to say something like “It’s cultural,” but she felt a little intimidated about using that sort of cocktail-party banter around someone with Luisa’s credentials.
“Look, surprises in space are almost always bad,” Dinah said. “Traditionally, every mission is planned out to the nth degree, and there’s a contingency plan for everything. You don’t improvise. You can’t improvise, because there’s nothing to improvise with.”
“I’m just remembering the duct tape in Apollo 13.”
“Yeah, that was one of the rare exceptions,” Dinah said, “and people are still talking about it decades later. So, to the Russians, the idea that someone can just show up unannounced, and make a claim on our resources—”
“What resources?” Luisa asked.
“They’re breathing our air,” Dinah said. “Taking up space, using bandwidth, you name it. Larz hitched a ride up here on the assumption he’d stay on Izzy and work for us—instead he’s taking off with Sean. And they are taking almost all of my robots.”
“But they’re sending more, yes?”
“Absolutely. Look, all I’m saying is that it was a surprise. And the sooner Sean and Larz get out of here, and on their way, the less likely it is that Fyodor is going to strangle them with his bare hands.”
“On their way to where?” Luisa asked.
“A different orbit.”
“Heliocentric or geocentric?” Luisa asked, deadpan, then gave Dinah a wink.
“Geocentric first. Then heliocentric,” Dinah answered with a trace of a smile.
“But I thought we were already in a geocentric orbit.”
“The wrong one, as far as Sean is concerned. Izzy’s orbit is angled with respect to the equator. It has to be that way so Baikonur can launch to it—Baikonur is as far north as Seattle. But when you are doing interplanetary stuff, which is what Sean has in mind—basically, whenever you want to get out of low Earth orbit—you want to be in an orbit that’s closer to the equator. Because that’s pretty much where the rest of the solar system is—including the big chunk of ice that Sean wants to grab and bring back here.”
“Ymir,” Luisa said, pronouncing it as she’d heard Sean do: ee-meer. A word from Norse mythology referring to primordial ice giants. Sean’s code name for a particular hunk of ice that his project had identified, and that he meant to bring back.
“Yeah. Not an official name. Sean doesn’t divulge much.”
“And how do you get from one to the other?” Luisa asked. “From a geocentric orbit—that’s what we’re in now, right?”
“Yes.”
“To a heliocentric one?”