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The Backhaul
Space has always run one way and thrown the trailer away. Every trucker knows that’s no way to make a living. Here is the return trip.
In “Out the Side of the Mountain,” I called the mass driver a freight train that never comes back down. I want to fix that, because a freight train that only runs one way is a bad business.
Never drive home empty
Every trucker knows it. Every construction hand who has ever hauled equipment to a job knows it. You don't drive home with an empty trailer. Fuel costs the same either way, the driver gets paid either way, and the truck wears out either way. A load on the way back is the difference between making money and losing it. In trucking, that return load is called the backhaul.
Space has always run without one. Nearly everything we've ever launched has either stayed up there or burned up coming back. We throw away the trailer after every trip. No freight outfit on Earth would last a year working that way.
The trip up
You know the first half already. Freight pods roll into the tunnel at the base of the mountain, one after another, like cars on a train. Magnets push them down 20 miles of vacuum tube, and they come out the flank of the volcano fast enough to climb to orbit. No rocket, no fuel tank, and no crew aboard. Just freight.
The catch
A pod coming out of the mountain doesn't reach where it's going on its own. So we don't ask it to. Up in orbit, a tug is waiting. It catches the pod, the way a yard engine picks up a car, and hauls it where it needs to go. That might be a depot, or a refinery, or the station we're building up in geosynchronous orbit, where the avatar crews are bolting it together. The tug drops off the load, and the pod is empty.
That's where every space program before us would throw it away. That's where we load it.
The load home
What comes back? To start with, whatever we've learned to make up there. Metals refined from asteroid rock, as I wrote about in “Send the Refinery, Not the Ore.” Parts printed in zero gravity that you can't make on the ground. Experiments, samples, and worn-out equipment that needs fixing. Later on, maybe things nobody has thought of yet.
The tug brings the loaded pod back down to a low orbit and lines it up, and it falls home.
Splashdown
The pod comes in hot behind a heat shield, deploys its parachutes, and splashes down in the ocean. This part isn't new. SpaceX has been bringing its Dragon capsules home this way for years, and ships pull them out of the water every time. 1 We'd just be doing it like a freight yard instead of an event. Recovery boats work the landing zone, lift the pods onto a platform ship, and sail them back to Hawaii.
At the dock, the pods are unloaded, inspected, and patched where needed, then trucked to the base of the mountain and put right back in line for the tunnel.
The loop
Up the mountain, out to the tug, unload, reload, back down, into the ocean, onto the ship, and back to the train. That's a loop, not a launch. Every pod that goes around again saves the cost of building a new one. Every load that comes home pays for part of the next trip up.
The point
Space is going to pay for itself the same way every working outfit pays for itself: the freight has to run both ways. We've been treating it like an expedition, where you go, you plant the flag, and you leave the trash behind. It needs to be a haul route. Steady trips, full loads, and a schedule.
Any trucker could have told you that.
That's our idea. If you've got a better one, we want to hear it.
From one explorer to another, we appreciate you reading this far. We are excited about what this endeavor brings, and we would like you along for the rest of it.
Come join us. Because we are Star Bound.
John LangEditor
Ideas in Star Bound are published open — take them, build them better. Our open proposal.
A note on where this comes from. I am not a metallurgist, a spacecraft engineer, or a degreed engineer of any kind. But I am a practical one, with more than forty years in heavy industrial construction: welding, millwright work, hydraulics, mining, and thirty-three years of electrical construction and commissioning on the North Slope of Alaska, in a place that punishes anything built wrong. Much of that time I have worked as a field engineer, which means I am the one standing in front of the equipment when the drawing turns out to be wrong, and the fix has to be made on the spot, with what is on hand, and has to work the first time. Anyone who has done that long enough learns that a lot of engineering gets corrected in the field by people with more experience than the people who drew it. That is the eye I bring to these subjects: not what should work on paper, but what actually gets built, and what breaks. The facts I take from other people are footnoted so you can check them and read further. The ideas built on top of those facts are my own, and I would rather see them knocked down by somebody who knows better than left standing because nobody looked.
Sources
- "SpaceX Dragon 2," Wikipedia — parachute splashdown and ship recovery of crew and cargo Dragon capsules, and their reuse. ↩
The pod loop, the orbital tug, and the return-freight model are my own, built on the mass driver described in “Out the Side of the Mountain.”
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