SpaceCorp: A Science Fiction Thriller

✍ Scribed by Fulsang, Ejner

• Book ID: 109012366
• Publisher: Aarhus Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 477 KB
• Series: Galactican 1
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780991324309

✦ Synopsis

Lots of science fiction books tell about space-faring societies, but none of them explain how those societies got that way. Author Ejner Fulsang, having spent the last seven years at NASA, thinks he has a way and is prepared to enlighten us with his Galactican Series. Book 1, SpaceCorp, takes place in 2070 and is a hard science fiction technothriller that will take mankind from Low Earth Orbit to a permanent colony in Cislunar space. Subsequent books will take man to Mars and the Asteroids, through the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, and on to the nearby stars. But SpaceCorp is not your typical action & adventure space exploration story. Billions of years of adaptation to life on Earth have left mankind technically and biologically unsuited for life among the stars.

The first challenge is in establishing a permanent human presence in Low Earth Orbit. This is no mean task given the density of space junk—the Kessler Syndrome—that rendered conventional spacecraft uninsurable by 2028. Satellites were still desperately needed, but nobody could afford to fly equipment costing hundreds of millions of dollars when space junk could destroy it in less than a month. It took a visionary corporation like SpaceCorp to see the solution in the SSS Werhner Von Braun, vanguard of a fleet of giant space stations whose thick hulls defend their technology from debris while harboring permanent human crews to make the continuous repairs needed for survival.

But while chemical rockets built the Von Braun, they were not suitable for trips beyond the Moon. Manned exploration of the inner solar system would require nuclear thermal rockets. And trips to the outer solar system and beyond will require even more exotic technology. Robert L. Forward’s beamed core antimatter drive could theoretically get us to half the speed of light—Alpha Centauri in a decade—presuming we could develop and store antimatter for rocket fuel without blowing ourselves and our planet to bits. It might be simpler and safer to develop an Alcubierre warp drive. A warp drive would allow us to exceed the light speed barrier. At 10 c, a trip to Alpha Centauri would take less than a year depending on acceleration and deceleration times. (NASA implemented nuclear rockets in the 1970s and is studying antimatter and warp drives.)

Hardware is not the only challenge. Homo sapiens would need some genetic engineering to withstand the radiation of interplanetary and interstellar space. Such engineering would result in a new species unable to breed with its human forebears, but while Homo galacticus may be biologically do-able, would he be socially acceptable?

Dystopias are a popular source of guilty pleasure in the literature, but their social value only comes from showing us how today’s trends could lead our planet to dystopian ruin. SpaceCorp is neither shy nor apologetic in exposing the villains. Ignorance, overpopulation, tribalism, xenophobia, depleted resources, and rising sea levels combine to create social and political stresses no government can deal with. Few individuals are courageous enough to run for office in a world where assassinations are more cost-effective than attack ads. It is small wonder that the erudite citizens of SpaceCorp are motivated to abandon Earth in favor of colonization among the stars. But where people climb mountains not for profit, but because they are there, the same could be said of space exploration. Even if faraway planets were made of solid gold, you’d go out of business transporting it back to Earth. But in the Galactican Series, you will see how the people of SpaceCorp discover something far more valuable than gold. Something that can be harvested from distant planets without depleting them. Something that makes it worth a one-way trip.

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