"Basically," Joe added, "we're taking advantage of the one thing we have plenty of now. Money. We're preempting everything everyone else has even in other countries by paying penalty fees. Sometimes huge fees. We've got our own scramlaunchers, a few of the Shuttle-C mods, Europe's EUROLaunch-4, and Japan and China's launch capacity too. We're negotiating with India now, though they're not going to be able to add that much. Still, every little bit helps. Fortunately, pretty much everyone has reusable first-stage stuff these days, however they do it. So if you're willing to spend money like water, you can get respectable turnaround times."
"If I read this right, we're looking at something like eighty to a hundred flights." The general shook his head. "The logistics will be a nightmare."
"General, you knew this was going to get ugly when we started," Friedet said. "That limitation comes from the payload capacity on each ship. Even the big ones only manage to approach two hundred tons at a shot—and none of them actually reach that number. The average is more like one hundred and forty tons per launch."
Joe rubbed his chin. "The actual limitation is size, more than mass. It'd be impossible to do this in any reasonable time if we were still limited to, say, things the size of the old Space Shuttle cargo bay. We'd have to send up some things in eight or ten separate pieces that would have to be put together, instead of two or three pieces. Some of our scramlaunchers can manage dimensions more than twice that now, which makes it—barely—doable, if we're really smart about what we ship so that we take maximum advantage of the payload capacity on each launch, and if we are ready to start assembling as soon as stuff gets up there."
"Still. That's an average of almost two launches per week. And assembling it will . . ." Deiderichs waved his hands, but Joe knew what he meant.
"Remote drones will be doing a lot of the assembly," Joe pointed out, "supervised on the ground and checked in orbit by experts. With A.J. and others helping to design the software that helps coordinate work like that—detecting the targets, translating the groundhog controller's directions into equivalents for space engineering, monitoring the assembly so that the drones can tell before they do something disastrous, projecting the feedback to the controllers so that they don't notice the time lag much, and so on—we can effectively have a far larger team in space. The first loads, of course, will be the manipulator drones."
Deiderichs winced. "I knew the idea was batted around for years, but we've only started to have good results with it, and there are so many debates about the designs. Are you going to get enough reliable drones for this kind of work?"
Ken Hathaway's face showed an interesting mixture of chagrin and pride. "Baker's Faeries have been performing amazingly well in far worse, less controlled conditions, including their manipulative capabilities—which I thought were such a waste when he designed them. We're going with modified Faerie designs for a lot of the construction drones. Not so many sensors and other redundancies that were absolutely necessary for things operating a hundred million miles off, more power, a bit bulkier, stronger manipulators and additional tool units to perform the work. But they're based on designs that have now proven themselves under fire—even when abused to near destruction—and that makes it possible for us to produce quite a few of them fast. We figure another month and a half and we'll be starting real construction, now that we have a nucleus of a space dry dock already up there."
"Modern design approaches and our testing of materials helps out too," Friedet pointed out. "For many of the internal components which aren't major structural load-bearing elements, we've developed flexible molding approaches. What that means is that we can send up a few mold forms and tanks of solidifying foam material and create a whole bunch of things like interior partitions and furniture—without having to ship the things up, pack them with extra space, and all that."
General Deiderichs pursed his lips as he examined the schedule again. "I still don't see any way we'll make the original deadline."
"Probably not," conceded Joe. "But given that under normal circumstances this would've been something like a ten-year effort, falling behind by about three to five months isn't something to gripe about. You have to allow for some problems, some wiggle room, some testing and reworking. Once Nike launches, everyone on it is absolutely and one hundred percent dependent on everything in her working right. Even with redundancy. I know you understand this, General, but I'm not sure how clear it is to other people. You might be old enough to remember the Columbia disaster?"