"What do you think of the plan?" Bakala asked Dan the next night. They were part of a large crowd gathered in down forward 2. Many, America and Consortium alike, sported scarves instead of hair. Others were shaven, but tiny patches of hair showed that health was returning, now almost three weeks after the attack. Their eyes and the party itself showed how much energy had returned to them.
Several of the men looked to Dan. Captain Lannister had been right about one thing. At twenty seven, Dan was only a few years older than the average sailor, but the men looked up to him as older and wiser. Giving a shaded glance at Bakala, he wasn't sure they should. He certainly wasn't a good role model for fraternizing.
No one had to ask what plan Bakala was asking about. It was all over the news and the only thing anyone was discussing. The G21 energy summit had ended that day. There had been weeks of speculation about what Princess Sarasvat's agenda would be and how she would achieve it. Would she ban them from using any polluting fossil fuels? Would she listen to their concerns or dismiss them?
In the end she simply bribed them; and it was prodigious bribe. In return for a moratorium on offshore oil drilling and an end to the practice of fracking, she would gift the world ten solar space stations.
These solar stations were disks roughly a kilometer across, with solar panels that stretched out in a much larger disk. They would park in geocentric orbit over earth and drop a long nano carbon cable down to the surface. Each station could produce somewhere in the range of 30 quadrillion BTU's of energy every year. Collectively, the stations would replace nearly sixty percent of the energy used globally and fuel a massive new energy economy.
The cables would also allow special elevators to travel up and down. That meant shipping and travel. The stations, a kilometer across, had seventeen decks above and below the array and could house upwards of five hundred thousand people at maximum capacity. The flight crew was a fraction of that and the princess was offering joint management. There was a hint of another kind of wealth, jobs, in the new world above the earth.
"It's an interesting plan," Dan said. "In the long term, perhaps it's for the best. We all know we can't go on using fossil fuels forever."
"Solar energy can't replace gasoline, can it?" someone asked.
"Not directly, but it will make electric cars a lot more economical. Besides it will put a huge dent in coal and natural gas, and those are bigger polluters anyway," Dan said.
The catch to the stations was political â joint management. There was no way the Consortium could turn the stations over to local control even if they wished too, we didn't have a clue how to run such a space station. Maybe in ten, fifteen years. But joint management meant giving the Consortium a foothold on our planet, willingly.
It put many countries in an awkward place. Politically and militarily they wanted to hold the Consortium at bay, assert their independence. But the lure economic connection was hard to ignore. Billions of dollars worth of free energy was impossible to ignore.
"Where do you think these stations will go?" Kleppie asked. This was a crucial and hotly contested question, on board the ship and in the news they got from the earth. It was another political land mine. Did you curry the favor of the princess in order to get a station, or hold her at bay and risk losing out?
"I don't know," Dan said, "but I am willing to bet America gets as good as any. Do you think she'll give more than one station to any country?" he aimed this at one of the few fully haired people in the group, a member of the flight crew. At first many of the American crew thought the flight personnel were stand offish, afraid of outsiders. Turns out they were under their own sort of reverse quarantine. They had been inside the most protected parts of the ship, safe from radiation. The captain needed them to stay healthy and whole to do their job, so she ordered them to do everything they could to avoid exposing themselves to radiation. Now the average Sievert score, the score used to measure what risk each crew person represented to others, was down to the level of medical radiation back home. In another couple weeks they would hit background levels.
"I doubt that much," the crewman said, "one is a pretty big gift. But it will be based on multiple considerations, engineering, geographic, environmental impact and politics I am sure," He sneered the word politics to show his contempt for such considerations. "Your America, is geographically large and has a high energy consumption, so it's possible. But ten, spread over the entire globe, I don't think you'll rate two."
"But we're friends now," an American protested. "Doesn't that count for something?"
"Lots of countries have been friends," the man, Tellki, replied.
"Tellki is right," Dan said, trying to avoid an argument. "One is a big gift. And it should be great news for us, up here. She's moving the stations into our system as we speak. The placement will be announced by the end of the week. By three weeks time they'll be in place. I bet America gets one, and I'll bet that's our ticket home."
Everyone cheered at the thought. Out of the corner of his eye, Dan looked at Bakala. He should be happy about going home, but what about him and Bakala? So far it hadn't been anything more than a casual hook up, but Dan wondered if there could be more between them. He was twenty seven, maybe it was time to think of more than the occasional hook up. But how did you manage that kind of thing long distance? America to Consortium? Earth to space? It seemed preposterous, unless there was some sort of station in between.