"Publicity," Jackie said. "This project is going to get rammed through no matter what people think, but the better we can make it look, the better it will go over. And the ship itself is going to be one of our biggest advertisements. We want everyone who's got a shred of imagination to be able to visualize themselves aboard her. And . . . well, some of them would balk at a spaceship that looked like it was put together with an Erector set, even if it was perfectly safe and practical."
Ken looked up. "Believe me, I'm not complaining. That, my friends, is a ship. We've been sending out little rowboats up until now, but this time we are going in style. Does she have to be quite that large, and can she be that large—that is, can she be built that large fast enough?"
"Well, like we said, diameterwise the living quarters have to go out that far. The rest of the body is actually—relatively speaking— easy to build. It's going to be mostly storage space for equipment and consumables, and of course the main drive systems. Currently we have plans for one reusable orbiter/lander to be carried along, depending on our cargo capacity—we're going to want to bring a hell of a lot of instrumentation and analysis equipment to Phobos, so I don't know how much spare capacity we'll have."
She pointed to another part of the image. "The habitat ring will have some small attitude drives on it. The leverage advantage will allow you to adjust direction, or spin up the ship, efficiently from that point. But most of the drives, both main and secondary, will be on the main body. It's not something you can whip up in your garage, no, but the real complexities will be in designing the living spaces to hold the people, give us all lots of flexibility in what we see and do and where we can go during months in space. Even after we get to Phobos, it's going to be quite a while before we can live there. So I figure we've got to have living space that'll be comfortable for at least a year or two. Even with the rotation shuttle idea."
Ares' engineers, following up on their own designs, had pointed out that once they got several return modules sitting on Mars, they could easily set them up to return to Phobos and then continue to Earth. That would make it possible to literally keep up a rotation of people on Phobos Base, with people spending a few months to a year on Phobos and then ending up back on Earth in a few months. The returning launches of supplies could be alternated with replacement personnel, keeping Phobos Base fully staffed.
This was a far preferable alternative than to have to use Nike to go back and forth. Nike's vast power and resources were much more likely to be needed at Phobos. NASA had agreed with the basic concept, but added that the proper design approach should allow them to have reusable vessels which could act as orbital ferries. The first of these would be produced for Nike to take with her to Phobos; others would follow.
"Six engines? Are we talking about six like the prototype? Six million pounds of thrust?"
"And with a delta-vee of about twelve KPS."
"Holy . . ."
"That makes her mass ratio about four to one—3.89 and a smidge, actually," Jackie continued smugly. "Basically, if we take the trajectory we intend to, you'll be starting with about two KPS extra delta-vee. We wanted a lot of safety margin in there. Until we get safely established and the Ares processes kick in, there's no refueling for us."
"But why the hell so overpowered? I'd think a tenth that thrust would be enough. More than enough."
"Oh, undoubtedly." Jackie laughed. "It's overkill, sure—if our purpose was simply to move Nike from Point A to Point B. But this is also another political maneuver to satisfy at least three different purposes."
"Three . . ." Ken studied the design. "I get it. The five exterior engines and reactors can be unshipped, can't they?"
"Give the man a cookie. Exactly. Take them all off and Nike still has one big-ass engine that's a bit of overkill, but a little extra power never hurt anyone. The NERVA fanboys and fangirls, of which I confess to being one, wanted to play around with possible nuclear rocket landers. With Mars' weaker gravity and no real environment to worry about, it's an ideal test location for things like that. More importantly, separate nuclear reactors of that size offer the chance to have a lot of power—and even redundant power—available on Mars or Phobos. It's also a showoff maneuver. Nike will be a powerful ship, and we can design the ship to take that level of stress."
"In addition," Gupta chimed in, "if one such engine is sufficient for a vessel such as Nike, consider: We have here the chance to get several such engines built and sent into space. But only now—only now. The political winds are fickle, are they not? If we already have the engines—nuclear engines, which are the sort most likely to cause fear and caution to delay the launch—it makes it much, much more likely that additional large interplanetary vessels will be built. Would it not be desirable to have several Nikes, several large research and exploration vessels, while we indeed have the chance?"