“Worth all the hoops you had to jump through to get up here, sir?” Gonzo asked.
“I’d do it a hundred times over just to get the chance,” the passenger said. “It’s extraordinary! Damn, I’m running out of adjectives!”
“Then this is a good time to get back to work,” Boomer said, “because things will be getting a little busy here. Take a look.”
The passenger looked . . . and saw their destination in astonishing splendor. It was almost thirty years old, mostly built of 1970s technology, and even to an untrained eye it was starting to show signs of age despite minor but fairly consistent upgrading, but it still looked amazing.
“Armstrong Space Station, named after the late Neil Armstrong, of course, the first man to step foot on the surface of the moon, but everyone who’s anyone calls it Silver Tower,” Boomer said. “It started out as a semiclassified Air Force program, combining and improving on the Skylab space-station project and President Ronald Reagan’s Space Station Freedom project. Freedom eventually became the American contribution to the International Space Station, and Skylab was abandoned and allowed to reenter and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, but the military-funded space-station program kept going in relative secrecy—as secret as you can keep a three-billion-dollar monstrosity like this that orbits the earth. It’s basically four Skylabs connected together and attached to a central truss, with enlarged solar arrays and improved docking, sensors, and maneuvering systems, tailored more to military applications than to scientific research.”
“It looks fragile—kinda spindly, like those modules will fall off any second.”
“It’s as strong as it needs to be up here in free fall,” Boomer said. “It’s certainly not as sturdy as a building that size on Earth, but then again, it doesn’t need to be. All of the modules have small computer-controlled thrusters that move all the pieces together, because station revolves around its axis to keep antennas pointed toward Earth.”
“The silver coating is really supposed to protect against ground-based lasers?” the passenger asked. “Has it ever been hit by a laser? I’ve heard Russia hits it with a laser every chance they get.”
“It gets hit all the time, and not just from Russia,” Boomer said. “So far it doesn’t seem to have done any damage; the Russians claim they are just using lasers to monitor station’s orbit. Turns out the silver material—aluminized spray-on polyimide—is good protection against micrometeorites, solar wind, and cosmic particles as well as lasers, and it’s a good insulator. But the best part for me is being able to see station from Earth when the sun hits it just right—it’s the brightest object in the sky except for the sun and moon, and can sometimes be seen in daytime, and can sometimes even produce shadows at night.”
“Why do you call it ‘station’ instead of ‘the station’?” the passenger asked. “I’ve heard a lot of you guys say it that way.”
Boomer shrugged against his seat harness. “I don’t know—someone started saying it that way in the first months of Skylab, and it stuck,” he said. “I know most of us think of it as more than just a collection of modules or even as a workplace—it’s more like an important or favorite destination. It’s like I might say, ‘I’m going to Tahoe.’ ‘I’m going to station’ or ‘I’m going to Armstrong’ just sounds . . . right.”
As they got closer to the station, the passenger motioned toward the station. “What are those round things on each of the modules?” he asked.
“Lifeboats,” Boomer replied. “Simple aluminum spheres that can be sealed up and jettisoned away from station in case of an accident. Each holds five persons and has enough air and water to last about a week. They can’t reenter the atmosphere, but they’re designed to fit inside the cargo bay of any of the spaceplanes, or they can be towed to the International Space Station and the survivors transferred. Every module has one; the Galaxy module, which is the combination galley, exercise room, entertainment room, and medical clinic, has two lifeboats.”
He pointed to the lowermost center module, smaller than the others and attached to the “bottom” of the lower center module, pointing Earthward. “So that’s Vice President Page’s creation, eh?”
“That’s it, sir: the XSL-5 ‘Skybolt,’?” Boomer said. “A free-electron laser with a klystron, or electron amplifier, powered by a magnetohydrodynamic generator.”