Near-Space 06 Sex and Violence in Zero-G: The Complete Near Space Stories, Expanded Edition by Allen Steele

Author:Allen Steele [Steele, Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781617203589
Google: yvCrpwAACAAJ
Amazon: 1617203580
Goodreads: 13355345
Publisher: Fantastic Books
Published: 1999-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

2. THE JUPITER RUN

The reasons why the Medici Explorer again set sail for Jupiter and the Galilean moons, when analyzed closely, have less to do with the exploration of the cosmos than with the politics and problems of the last one hundred years. Although Jupiter has been regaled as the latest frontier of humankind’s “conquest of space”—itself a romantic term, as witnessed by the current spate of adventure fiction set in the Jovian system, most of it woefully inaccurate—the rationale behind the so-called “Jupiter Run” is principally grounded in historical events which go as far back as the last decades of the 20th century.

Until 2037, there was little practical reason for anyone to visit Jupiter. Its mean distance from Earth—4.2 astronomical units, or about 628,600,000 kilometers—made it almost inconceivable of being efficiently reached with liquid-fuel rockets. When the first unmanned probe from Earth to Jupiter, NASA’s Pioneer 10, swung past the planet in December, 1973, it confirmed that the miniature solar system orbiting the world was a realm of both great beauty and great danger; Jupiter was surrounded by menacing radiation belts ten thousand times more lethal than the Van Allen belt around Earth. Subsequent unmanned space missions—Pioneer 11, the two Voyagers later in the same decade and Galileo probe during the 1990’s—took closer looks at the Galilean moons; however fascinating they were, none looked particularly habitable. Only science fiction writers continued to seriously dream of manned spacecraft to Jupiter. For scientists, the Jovian system was something to be studied from a safe distance, visited only by robotic proxy.

However, this attitude gradually changed in the next century. With the beginning of the “Golden Age” of space exploration—the building of the powersat system, the colonization of the Moon and the establishment of the first bases on Mars—Jupiter began to look neither so distant nor so formidable. The major technological breakthrough which made Jupiter reachable was made in 2028 by a joint R&D project by Russian and American physicists at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: the development of a gas-core nuclear engine, resulting in an impulse-per-second engine thrust ratio twice as high as even the thermal-fission engines used by Mars cycleships.

Jupiter beckoned, and humankind followed. Under the auspices of the newly formed International Space Commission, with funding provided by several private-sector space companies, the first manned Jupiter vessel, the Tycho Brahe, was built in Earth orbit. Its ten-person crew voyaged to Jupiter in 2037, returning to Earth in 2039 with enough new scientific information about the Jovian system to fill a small library. However, despite the fact that a small base camp had been established—and abandoned—on Callisto, the fourth major Galilean moon, there appeared to be little reason to colonize Jupiter. It seemed as if humankind was permanently destined to inhabit only the inner solar system; common sense seemed to dictate that Jupiter, as academically intriguing as it was, served no immediate practical use for the human race.

“When the sun dies,” said the esteemed British astrophysicist Shelly Wood, “we may have good motive for settling Callisto or Ganymede.

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