Deadly Debris

By Mike Combs

mikecombs@aol.com

Copyright © 1995

In a low Earth orbit, a glove slowly tumbled in the brilliant sunshine. The glove's career as a tiny artificial satellite of the Earth began on the day an astronaut of the early American space program had neglected to keep up with it. While the spacewalker was distracted with other matters, the glove had decided to venture out of the space capsule. By the time he took note of this, it had drifted beyond his reach.

The orbiting item of apparel had even deserved mention in books and magazine articles as an example of the kind of objects Space Command could track with its space-scanning radars. The glove dutifully returned every radar signal bounced up to it. As it rounded the blue-and-white globe below, it was privy to the kind of view which had never failed to deeply move the humans who had made it. The glove alternately warmed in the unimpeded rays of the sun and chilled in the shadow of the Earth as it progressed through innumerable ninety-minute days.

On this day, however, its circular journeys were coming to an end. The glove's path was intersecting with that of a defunct Russian weather satellite. It hit the bulky space platform almost dead-on with a velocity which would have made a rifle bullet seem a dawdler. The metal and plastic structure erupted with myriad pieces of debris. Mere minutes later, that swarm of fragments began slamming into the abandoned lower stage of a rocket launched over a decade ago. The giant cylinder pitched about crazily before being riddled and then disintegrated by the densest part of the swarm. It added its particles to the rapidly-moving cloud of space junk, and now the swarm was more dangerous still. Satellites, both functional and long disused, fell to the rapid attack and in turn became part of the Kamikaze assault themselves. Like a splitting nucleus which split other nuclei which split still more in an out-of-control nuclear chain reaction, the belt of speeding debris grew and spread along its orbit, devastating everything in its path.

* * *

Bruce Franklin and Reggie Deitrich were sitting in the lounge of the LEO Port space station in Low Earth Orbit, waiting on a ride to a place more than halfway to the moon. LEO Port was the departure point for all forays beyond the Earth. Their particular destination was L-1 Port, another space station located at that point where the opposing forces of the Terrestrial and Lunar gravity fields plus the centrifugal force of the orbit all precisely balanced each other. L-1 Port was the way-station for traffic back and forth between the Earth and its moon. It was also where Bruce and Reggie's off-world offices were located.

Bruce was of medium height and build. Brown hair and eyes combined with typical facial features made him look very average. But this was the preeminent space engineer of the age: the father of Sky Bridge, that gigantic space launcher on the coast of Brazil. Mere hours ago it had launched both men from the Earth to this giant space station.

Reggie had helped Bruce to design and build that engineering marvel shortly after the turn of the century. Bruce's partner was somewhat younger, dark-haired, and had an alarmingly prominent cleft in his chin. He was no less an engineer than Bruce, but had an endearing (alternately infuriating) silly streak a kilometer wide.

Reggie was also assisting Bruce with his current business venture: building the first genuine space habitat. The Space Industrial Revolution was in full swing with almost a thousand people working more or less full time in various high Earth orbits on many different projects. Solar Power Satellite construction alone employed over seven hundred workers. These workers were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with their living conditions as of late. One couldn't blame them; they were essentially living in small, orbiting cans. Bruce had returned to Earth to argue in favor of building a really huge habitat; one large enough to create a very Earth-like environment.

Normal construction methods for a space structure of this scale would have involved making countless steel I-beams and aluminum hull plates at the High Earth Orbit Manufacturing Facility. Robots would then be directed to assemble the beams into a spherical framework. Then the hull plates would be welded into place. Many dozens of robots, swarming over the structure like ants, would perform the over ten thousand welds required, not a single one of which could be permitted to leak. Those who held the purse-strings had insisted that assembling the mammoth structure would take too many robots away from the SPS work crews. Bruce had then proposed a novel construction method for the main portion of the habitat which would take just as long, but hardly occupy a single robot. Bruce and Reggie had formulated a plastic compound which could be blown into a giant bubble in space. The bubble would harden into a balloon slightly under a kilometer in diameter: the size of the rotating habitat sphere of the colony. Then a method called vacuum vapor deposition would be used to build up an aluminum shell around the balloon, forming a seamless pressure vessel. When Bruce began talking about giant balloons, he had to take a little bit of good-natured ribbing from his backers. They were all threatening to start calling him "Dr. Balloon." His most famous creation, Sky Bridge, was permanently supported high in the upper atmosphere by many hundreds of solar-powered hot-air balloons, each one over a kilometer in diameter. There was no denying that Dr. Franklin knew how to build balloons.

The project had been approved and now the pair were on their way back up to L-1 Port in order to set it into motion. They sat in the waiting lounge, awaiting word that their saucer (as the inter-orbit craft were commonly called) was fueled and ready to cast off.

Bruce was trying to read his Orbital Engineering Quarterly, but kept looking at the show Reggie had going on the lounge television. Bruce's companion was eagerly devouring the latest episode of "Star Trek: Beyond Our Galaxy." Reggie had gotten Bruce to watch the new show with him a few times. Enough for Bruce to know that this time it was the voyages of the starship Pioneer, exploring the lesser Magellanic cloud with the newly-perfected Trans-warp drive. Right now, the four-legged, mantis-like Chief Engineer, Lt. Commander Rill, was breathlessly relating something to the Captain about interstitial ruptures causing a de-quantitization of space-time.

Bruce couldn't keep from smiling. As a genuine space engineer, he was always amused by Star Trek's ubiquitous techno-babble. He thought that listening to it must be a lot like being French and listening to someone who doesn't know French try to fake their way through it: nonsense noise, a few correct words used in an incorrect context, suddenly a glimmer of something that makes an odd kind of sense, and then more nonsense.

He was unsure why Reggie, someone arguably as knowledgeable as himself, could take it so seriously. Just last week, when Bruce was wondering out loud why a computer model was giving absurd results, he had heard Reggie explain that it was "probably interference caused by the graviton emissions being given off from the sub-space bias generated by the warp nacelles." Bruce was sure he hadn't heard that little gem for the last time. Reggie had a habit of creating cute little sayings and then using them liberally. Bruce had decided the correct translation for this was "I don't have the foggiest idea what's causing it to do that."

Bruce was starting to make some progress through the article he was trying to read when he was suddenly startled by a loud alert klaxon. For a second, he thought Reggie had suddenly turned the volume up, but this sound did not emanate from the television. This was a real-life emergency in space.

"Attention all personnel. Evacuate to Earth immediately. I say again: evacuate to Earth immediately. You are in deadly peril if you remain on this station for another twenty minutes. Emergency evacuation to Earth procedures are in effect. Evacuate now!"

Both men came to their feet and began heading to the elevators which led up to the hub of this wheel of the station. In no time they were surrounded by a crowd with the same destination. Reggie called out to Bruce. "We're not heading to the hangar bay, are we?"

"You got that right," Bruce answered. "Control center. I want to know what's just happened."

"Somehow I had a feeling that would be higher on your priorities that us keeping our skins intact," Reggie commented.

At least twenty people jammed into the elevator before the door was allowed to close. As it was sliding shut, Bruce noted some people were avoiding the elevator in favor of the spiral staircase. He hoped they hadn't all made a fatal mistake. They ascended, feeling the coriolis force pressing them against one wall. Their weight ebbed away to nothing as the elevator approached the center of the rotating structure. When it stopped, the floating mass of humanity spilled out through the opening door and immediately began soaring off toward the hangar. Bruce, by contrast, began pushing off in the opposite direction. Reggie looked extremely dubious about the wisdom of this path, but followed his friend out of this rotating section of the station and into the de-spun section which contained the control center. The control center was a small, cylindrical module filled with computer workstations and capped by an observation blister. The module was presently manned by one soul: a balding man of slender build. He was hanging onto a console which was cycling though views from different security cameras throughout the station. Apparently he was trying to confirm total evacuation of each section. He looked up at the two engineers with an expression of surprise and annoyance as they coasted in towards him. "Who the hell are you?"

"Dr. Bruce Franklin, my partner Dr. Reggie Deitrich."

The man seemed to recognize their names but was careful not to look impressed. "Well, I am Jasper McDonald: Chief Administrator for LEO Port. I'll be the last one off the station, so you'll pardon me for saying get off, right now."

"What's happened?" Bruce wanted to know.

Jasper flashed him an exasperated look and then said, "There's been some kind of major orbital collision. Space Command advises us they are tracking a swarm of debris which is ripping up everything in this orbit. The swarm's on its way here. Get to your ship."

"Oh my God," Bruce said softly, "It's the Kessler Syndrome." Without looking up, Jasper said, "The what?"

"Only a few people know what it means," Reggie intoned solemnly. The other two men, not so well acquainted with movies of the twentieth century as Reggie, did not address themselves to his remark.

"We've been warning everybody about this for well over a decade," Bruce explained. "When you get above a certain critical mass of material in the same orbit, a single collision can create enough debris to destroy more satellites, which creates more debris which destroys still more. It's a snowballing effect. If this is permitted to continue, the Earth will become ringed with a zone of deadly debris which may render space travel impossible for centuries!"

The view through the observation blister was becoming interesting. Every single spacecraft docked at the station was now pouring out of the hangar bay. Among the fleeing flotilla were pencil-thin aerospace planes, short, stubby, lifting body shuttlecraft, and (the group was astonished to see) several saucers. The latter were inter-orbit craft shaped like two shallow domes pressed together with a small, spherical command module set on top. The lower part of the craft was a titanium heat shield which enabled it to perform an aero-braking maneuver in Earth's upper atmosphere, thus bleeding-off energy on the return leg back down to lower orbits. Saucers were not, however, designed for landing on the Earth. There was supposed to be some kind of emergency abort-to-surface procedure which involved jettisoning the lower part of the craft shortly before splashing down in the ocean, but in years of service the procedure had never been tried. It would be tried today.

Suddenly, there was a brilliant flash and then an explosion. One of the aerospace planes, apparently hit by an early-arriving fragment, had blown up. Other ships reacted, veering away wildly from the rapidly-expanding cloud of debris.

The black sky was now being lit up with engine flares from the ships as, one by one, each began the orbit-killing thrust which would bring it back down to the Earth.

Now a saucer was beginning to pin-wheel crazily. Apparently one of its fuel tanks had been ruptured by a speeding piece of orbital shrapnel and was now venting a plume of vaporizing hydrogen into space. To the astonishment of the observers, the pilot somehow managed to halt the spin and recover. He proceeded away from the station with the rest. Having lost so much fuel, it seemed impossible the tiny craft could now make it down to the surface safely, but Bruce wished the pilot luck. Jasper turned from the spectacle to look at the pair. "Are you two still here? Get to your ship!

Now!!"

"Are you changing the orbit of LEO Port?" Bruce asked.

"There's not enough fuel for that," Jasper replied sharply. "The only fuel we have is for orbital maintenance. The debris swarm extends from an altitude of two-hundred kilometers up to nine-hundred. To get above it, we would need to achieve a circular orbit of a least a thousand kilometers. I can raise the station's apogee that high, but then there's no fuel left for bringing up the perigee." The administrator didn't need to elaborate. All three men realized it did them no good to raise the high point of their orbit above the whirling junk if the low point still sliced through it every ninety minutes.

"And if I try to get underneath the debris," Jasper continued breathlessly, "We'll be grazing the upper atmosphere. Our orbit will decay and we'll fry. C'mon, let's go." Suddenly there was a loud <pop!> from somewhere else in the station. For a few seconds the distant sound of escaping air could be heard before the vacuum silenced it. After several more heart-stopping sounds, Bruce noticed a large pit in a window ahead of him which he was fairly sure hadn't been there a second ago. He knew enough about orbital debris to realize a pit that size needn't have been created by anything larger than a fleck of paint. He said nothing. Jasper started to fly from the console but Bruce reached out and grabbed his shoulder, restraining him. Bruce then rotated himself so as to face the administrator right-side-up. "You can't just abandon this place!" he said passionately. "This space station represents one of the most important assets of the human race! Besides which, this facility is the single-biggest object in this orbit. If you let it get pulverized, the problem will immediately get at least three times worse! If we can avoid that, maybe we can get a handle on the situation. If not, it's the end of space flight for our species for hundreds of years!"

"What can we do?" Jasper yelled angrily.

<Bang!>

Reggie drifted in between the two men, facing Jasper. "We can do our best," he stated softly.

"And get killed in the process, no doubt," Jasper cried derisively Bruce glided over to the console vacated by Jasper. He began punching up different exterior views of the station, suddenly stopping on the image of a large, wingless ship mated to one of the exterior docking ports. It was ringed with several pill-shaped pressure tanks.

<Pow!>

"What are you doing with that workstation?" Jasper demanded.

"It's a fuel tanker," Bruce said, mental wheels spinning.

"I know what you're thinking. It's a hydrogen tanker from Earth. You would need oxygen to do any kind of sustained engine burn."

"Reggie, get to the traffic controller station," Bruce ordered. "See what's on its way in."

<Crack!!>

Reggie pushed off towards a far console and immediately busied himself there. Jasper looked back and forth between the two men incredulously, eyes bulging with rage.

"You two are insane! If we don't get out of here now we are all dead men!!" As if to underscore the administrator's point there was a sudden loud <bang!> and a shudder which moved through the entire module. "I order you to your ships this instant!"

"Stop fighting me on this!" Bruce barked. "I'm not trying to take control away from you! I'm doing everything I can to save this little kingdom of yours! And I need your help!"

"Bruce," Reggie called to him cheerily from across the module. "I can grant you one wish today. There's an incoming tanker. It's from the moon. And it's filled to the brim with lunar oxygen!"

<Whang!>

Bruce immediately hit the station attitude jet controls. He fired the ones facing back along their orbital path without let up, and the station began to move. Jasper watched in silence as the orbital plot on the locator display ever-so-slowly began to draw out from a perfect circle into a slightly stretched-out ellipse. As their altitude raised, the frequency of stinging impacts subsided. Within a few moments the thrusters shut down, their fuel tanks drained dry.

"Our apogee is one thousand and twelve kilometers," Bruce reported. But the orbital plot on the screen made it plain that their perigee, the lowest point of their new lop-sided orbit, was still down in the zone of speeding space debris.

"LEO Port to incoming tanker. Incoming tanker come in please." Bruce was at the communications console now.

A forty-ish man with bushy, light-red hair appeared on the monitor. "LEO Port, this is Captain Biggsley with the LUNOX Corporation. I've been monitoring your orbital change and have altered course accordingly."

"Captain Biggsley, it's great to hear from you," Bruce enthused. "When you arrive, don't dock right away. We have a tanker with some hydrogen. I want you to dock with it so you can feed it LOX, and it can feed you liquid hydrogen. Then you will separate and dock at two external ports which we will indicate. The plan is to use the engines of the two tankers to raise our perigee and circularize our orbit."

"Sounds crazy, but count me in."

Bruce turned to Reggie, but the young engineer was already sailing away from his console and flying out of the hatchway, on his way to the port where the hydrogen tanker waited. Jasper and Bruce watched through the observation blister as the two giant ships mated together. Liquefied hydrogen gushed into the nearly-empty fuel tanks of the LUNOX tanker, and it in turn spurted liquid oxygen into the depleted O2 tanks of the refueling craft from Earth. Now each tanker had both fuel, and oxidizer to burn it with.

Jasper, using his knowledge of LEO Port's mass distribution, advised the two pilots on where to dock. The pair of giant tankers were soon attached to two ports at the rear of the station, one on either side of the center-line of the space facility.

Now the station needed to be pointed in the direction of its orbit. A couple of seconds of off-centered thrust from the tanker Reggie was piloting brought LEO Port around in a slow, ponderous, pirouette. As Jasper called off the degrees of rotation for the pilots, Bruce was grateful for the dual counter-rotating wheel design of the gravity portion of this space station. A single turning wheel out there would have been mankind's biggest gyroscope, stubbornly fighting against their efforts to turn the giant station. This re-alignment would have then been impossible.

Another burst of engine fire, this time from Captain Biggsley's ship, stopped the turn. The station was now poised and ready for the next maneuver.

"Neither one of us has enough hydrogen for our best specific impulse, so set your mixture as lean as it will go." Biggsley advised. "What our thrust lacks in quality we shall make up for with quantity."

"Roger, Captain," Reggie acknowledged.

Bruce gave them a countdown. "Coming up on apogee at T-minus six seconds...five seconds...four...three...two...one..."

"Ignition, full thrust." came a two-part chorus from the tankers. The station was accelerating, even more so than before on the attitude thrusters. As he held onto the console before him, Bruce was glad they were not in a rotating portion of LEO Port. The acceleration along with the spin would no doubt prove a stomach-churning combination. Jasper looked pale enough as it was.

"Throttle back a little, son," Biggsley warned. "We're starting to yaw a bit." Reggie complied. The orbital-plot display showed the low point of the station's orbit was slowly, inexorably, beginning to rise. Their path about the Earth was once again approaching a circle; a bigger one than before.

"That's it!" Bruce suddenly cried out. "Orbit is now circular at one thousand and twelve kilometers!

We're safe!!"

Reggie cut his thrust and then let out a triumphant whoop, almost (but not quite) drowning out Captain Biggsley's own jubilant yells. Bruce turned around to look at Jasper, who was hanging silently in the air near the center of the Control Center.

"Hey, you know what?" Bruce asked him softly.

"No, what?" Jasper responded, equally subdued.

"That took a lot of intestinal fortitude for you to stay with us in this station with all hell busting loose like that. I really didn't count on you sticking around. It surprised me when you stayed."

"Oh, really?" A wan smile was starting to play over Jasper's thin features. "Well, I'm glad I was able to surprise you."

Bruce didn't need to say thanks. Both men understood.

In short order both Reggie and Captain Biggsley were inside the station.

"Well, boss," Reggie chirped. "What's our next move?

"Let's transfer the remaining fuel from one of the tankers to the other, drop off all empty tanks, and pray it gets us all the way up to L-1 Port."

"And then?" Biggsley asked

"And then," Bruce seriously replied, "We find a solution."

* * *

In short order, the four men were on the flight deck of Captain Biggsley's tanker, watching as the Lagrange-1 Port grew from a small dot superimposed on the face of the moon into a sprawling space facility which surrounded them on all sides.

Once docked and inside, Reggie begged to be excused so he might get to a videophone and contact his wife back on Earth. The LEO Port Administrator and the tanker Captain had calls to make also. Bruce realized, a little bit sadly, he had no loved ones at home to call, and thus tagged along with Reggie so that he might say hello to Casandra. The pair proceeded down one of the spokes of the starboard wheel and located a public videophone.

Reggie asked to be put though to Casandra Morris in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. It was there his wife currently served as the Head Controller of Launcher Operations for Sky Bridge. When the petite, dark-haired, bespectacled woman appeared on the viewscreen, Bruce thought she was going to burst into tears before her first words were out her mouth.

As Reggie tried to reassure his upset mate, Bruce found himself reminiscing about the day the couple had announced their wedding plans and had requested he be their best man. LEO port was just starting to accept tourists then, and the pair had decided to honeymoon in Low Earth Orbit. Bruce fondly remembered how much fun he had had decorating the Bullet vehicle which would launch the newlyweds into space. He had used shoe polish, crepe paper, tin cans on strings, the whole nine yards. All the while, he was perfectly aware it would all come tearing off within a fraction of a second of launch, but it was the thought that counted.

As the tearful conversation drew to a close, Bruce felt for both of his dear friends. They had been married less than a year, and now the couple found themselves separated by an impenetrable wall of swiftly-moving space garbage. The business trip Bruce had taken Reggie on should have lasted no more than three months at the most. Now, there was the possibility both men would spend the rest of their lives circling the Earth, unable to reach the surface. How long that would last depended on how long all of the orbiting humans could survive now that there could be no more re-supply from Earth. The engineers were told the entire crew was already heading for the wardroom where the station administrator had called a meeting to discuss the situation. Bruce and Reggie headed off in the direction indicated.

The administrator was an impressively tall women named Linda Bonaparte. She had a light olive complexion. A face worthy of any fashion model was surrounded by black, wavy, shoulder-length hair. She stepped up to a podium at the head of the room and the gathered station personnel immediately fell into silence.

"I've been in discussions with our best brains on this matter," she began without preamble. "We have enough saucers to evacuate L-1, but will be unable to use conventional saucer maneuvers. Due to differences in orbital altitude and energy, the debris swarm has stretched out along its entire orbit. We now have a continuous ring of fragments around the Earth."

A viewscreen behind her lit up with a computer graphic being sent up to the station from Space Command. It was an Earth which now resembled Saturn for being encircled by a donut-shaped ring of particles.

"Any attempt by our saucers to do normal aero-braking to lower their orbits will send them through the debris zone. This is not considered a survivable maneuver."

An anxious murmur rose from the group. Bruce looked at his companion. Reggie looked back, pain twisting his young face, but said nothing.

"We've come up with an evacuation plan. It's a long shot, but it may save some of us. The plan involves each saucer killing all of its orbital speed and then dropping downward over the North Pole instead of the equator." The screen now began showing orbit plots which illustrated the maneuvers being described. "This is the only path which doesn't pass through a debris field. We then re-enter the atmosphere on the far side of Earth and proceed directly to a landing." A clamor of skepticism erupted from the gathering.

"Am I to understand that the proposal is to fall from a point more than half-way to the moon, straight down to the Earth, and then try to land?" Bruce asked in stunned disbelief. Linda looked at the father of Sky Bridge and seemed to recognize him from his many appearances on magazine covers and in news vids. "It is," she replied calmly. Captain Biggsley spoke up. "Can't we do some kind of aero-braking maneuver prior to attempting final re-entry?"

"No," the station administrator answered curtly. "You could conceivably dodge under the debris ring for the braking maneuver, but then you would pop back up out of the atmosphere, arc around over the near side, and then intersect the ring at a right angle. You'd get torn to pieces in seconds. No, it has to be straight in with no detours."

"Have the people who came up with this plan calculated the G-forces of a re-entry without a braking maneuver?" Bruce wanted to know.

"Yes," Linda responded with visible annoyance.

"Well, do you mind if I run that past the allowable stress-loads in the saucer airframe specs?" Linda fixed steady, dark eyes on the engineer. "Would an answer either way make any difference?"

"No, of course not," Bruce replied brusquely and opened the wafer-thin PC which always hung from a holster at his waist. After tapping intently on its keys for a few seconds, the engineer announced,

"I calculate we would exceed the absolute maximum stress limits by thirty-eight percent." All emotion seemed drained from her voice as Linda said, "Some of our people will survive." The level statement provoked soft cries of anguish from the assembly. It was not just for them. It was also for all of the men and women in Geosynchronous Earth Orbit at GEO-1 and GEO-2; all of the employees in High Earth Orbit at the Space Manufacturing Facility; not to mention the personnel of several bases scattered over the lunar surface. Were almost a thousand people now faced with a choice between running a gauntlet of deadly, high-velocity space trash, or permanent exile from their homeworld?

Bruce came to his feet. "This is insane! What I want to talk about is how to solve the problem and save all of us, not how to retreat to Earth and then turn our backs on space," he said with fierce determination.

Reggie looked up at his employer with a faint smile. If there was any subject Bruce was passionate about, it was humanity's movement out into the High Frontier.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Franklin," Ms. Bonaparte was now saying. "There does not appear to be any kind of

'solution' to a phenomena of this magnitude."

"Give me a few hours and I'll come up with one!" Bruce insisted with the hubris so typical of his species.

Linda ran her hands along the sides of the podium for a moment. Whether she was in deep thought or summoning up self-control, no one knew for sure.

"The longer we delay, the more critical our resource issues become. But I am willing to postpone evacuation for twenty-four hours while Dr. Franklin tries to come up with a better option." The meeting was over. Bruce headed straight to his office. There, he pushed aside the cover on the window behind his desk so he might view the stars. They moved around in a complete circle twice per minute as this portion of the station rotated for gravity. He sat down to watch the stately stellar waltz. It always helped him to think.

* * *

Now Bruce and Reggie were together at the Computer Simulations Console in their main lab. Bruce was having difficulty coming up with something which could sweep up the tons of space fragments now spread over many kilometers of orbital space. He had toyed with the idea of using electromagnetics, fantasizing about enormous magnetic coils de-orbiting any chunks passing through them. He quickly gave up on that. Not all of the debris fragments were metal, and not even all of the metals were ferromagnetic. This had to be a total solution.

He then began to wonder about electrostatics. If the pieces of junk could be charged, perhaps giant deflector plates could divert them, or even absorb them. Simulations showed that electrostatics would be somewhat effective against the very tiniest particles, but would hardly make a difference to chunks larger than a man's fist. Besides, neither engineer could come up with a credible scheme for putting a static charge on the swarming masses of debris without causing the particles to repel each other and scatter, thus worsening the problem.

Bruce was looking around at his files more or less at random when he noticed that while he had been back on Earth, Asteroid Mining Limited had made delivery on three tons of organic compounds. It was the raw stock used in the making of the plastic Reggie and he had developed for the Space Habitat project. He then began discussing the idea with his partner of sending the entire load of plastic into Low Earth Orbit and then inflating the bubble as planned. Would a gigantic balloon many kilometers in diameter sweep up the debris and solve the problem?

Unfortunately, the computer simulations proved less than satisfactory. The surface area of the balloon was most impressive. However, particles hitting the balloon merely passed through both sides and then continued on their way, their paths not altered by more than a degree or two. Bruce was ready to give up on using the plastic when an idea occurred to him.

"Wait a minute. What if instead of blowing up a balloon, we foam the plastic? Instead of just penetrating two walls, chunks would then have to pass through many cells in the foam. It might be enough to make a difference. We could package the liquid plastic in a pressure vessel with highly-compressed nitrogen. If we whipped the plastic up into a foam and then cracked the container, it would expand to many times its original volume before hardening."

A new simulation was crafted. The resulting sphere (which Reggie had now taken to calling "The Great Cosmic Sweeper-Upper") was much smaller than the balloon: a little under two and a half kilometers in diameter. However, what it now lacked in surface area, it made up for with stopping power.

Despite this encouraging development, the sweeper was still not doing the job necessary. Its path simply did not intersect with enough of the orbiting fragments to be very helpful. One could choose a particular particle and see that its orbital plot did not meet up with the sweeper for many years. Another problem was how to smoothly decrease the orbit of the sweeper. The plan was to place the sphere of plastic foam in orbit near the top of the debris belt, and then, over the course of many weeks, gradually lower its altitude to the bottom of the belt. The problem was, any kind of rocket engine would be getting constantly pelted by space garbage, and could not be counted on to remain functional for long. Bruce briefly thought about placing an enormous magnetic coil inside the sweeper and using interactions with the Earth's magnetic field to slowly bring down the orbit, but could not conceive of a way to safely power it. Besides, simulations indicated the conducting loop would be severed by debris in no time. The research seemed dead-ended and Bruce's frustration began to grow. Reggie wisely retreated to a discreet distance while Bruce dealt with it. Bruce had learned by past experience not to give up at times like these. The feeling a project was totally impossible was often the dark before the dawn of solution. Bruce tried an old trick. He took every PC in the lab and strew the thin, eight and a half-by-eleven inch slates haphazardly across the table top. He then did a string search through the TerraNet system for the keywords "space" and "debris". Now each PC display flashed through a separate article or scientific paper on the subject. Sometimes, Bruce had found, disparate facts could be linked up in this manner and lead to new, original ideas.

Now that was interesting. It was a feature out of Omni dating back to the last century. Evidently it was written at the height of the Cold War, for the cautionary article dealt with the concern the USSR (as it was known then) might wish to wipe out all American satellites in time of war. The scenario involved the Russians sending a spacecraft around the moon. The craft then swings back down into Earth orbit only moving in the opposite direction as everything else in that orbit. Like a drunk driver going the wrong way down a one-way street, it was a hazard to all other traffic. The plan called for the spacecraft to then explode, so each tiny fragment could become a satellite-killing missile. That explained why the keyword search for "space debris" had turned up the article.

THAT WAS IT! Swing the package around the moon and then release the sweeper into a counter-orbit. The whole problem before had been that the sweeper was moving more or less in the same direction (and with nearly the same velocity) as the particles it was trying to intercept. With a counter-orbit, the sweeper would pass by each fragment every forty-five minutes like clock-work, vastly increasing the odds that some pass would be an intercepting one.

A counter-orbit neatly solved two problems at once. There would now be no need for a rocket engine to gradually lower the orbit of the sweeper. The constant head-on collisions with debris would serve to do that in any case.

The two engineers began to dance about the lab with mad abandon. They knew they had the solution. Reggie knew he would soon be re-united with his beloved Cassandra. And Bruce knew that the last chapter in the story of man's movement outward into the universe had yet to be written.

* * *

Reggie and Bruce were now sitting in Linda Bonaparte's office. She was running their latest sweeper simulation on her PC. As she did so, Bruce noted Reggie had saved the simulation under the filename TGCSU. He was about to turn to his partner to ask about this when it suddenly hit him: The Great Cosmic Sweeper-Upper. Bruce decided not to volunteer to explain that particular acronym to the Administrator.

"I notice some of the larger pieces of debris just pass right through the sweeper," she observed.

"Yes," Reggie agreed. "But look at their orbital plots afterwards. Most of them loose enough orbital energy punching through the sphere that their perigee dips down into the upper atmosphere. You see?

That's all it takes. It doesn't matter if it takes one more orbit or twenty, that piece of junk is out of the running. Any fragments skimming the atmosphere at any point in their orbit are going to eventually decay out and re-enter."

"We start out in a nine-hundred kilometer counter-orbit," Bruce explained, "And over a period of several months the sweeper drops down to two-hundred kilometers. Shortly thereafter, it enters the atmosphere and burns up, along with all of the smaller particles which it had absorbed."

"You've still left almost half of the debris," Linda complained.

"Oh, I agree one sweeper alone can't do the job. I would propose no less than a dozen, sent out at roughly monthly intervals. But an important point is that we should send out the first sweeper right away. The first one thins out the debris field enough to keep the problem from getting a lot worse. The longer we sit here and allow fragments to hit fragments and fragment them, the worse the situation gets. There is a danger of the debris belt spreading to other orbits. But if we act immediately, we might can stay in control of the situation. From that point on, it's just a matter of mopping up the strays."

"How do you propose to lower the orbit of the saucer which delivers this package without an aero-braking maneuver?" Ms. Bonaparte inquired.

"The old fashioned way, with rocket power at the low point of the orbit. A single saucer doesn't carry enough excess fuel, even with drop tanks. So, we stack two saucers and use the bottom one as a lower stage. I suppose after separation we could remotely direct the lower stage to attempt to brake into a very low orbit. If we get lucky, and it somehow makes it through, then we've saved ourselves the price of one inter-orbit space craft. But we should probably look at that saucer as a sacrificial lower stage."

"The problem with that is, we are very fuel limited here," Linda reminded them. "If your plan doesn't work, and we have to fall back to evacuation, there may not be enough propellant to go around. Our de-orbiting maneuver will require far more than the usual amounts of thrust. I don't think you want some people left behind just because you squandered tons of fuel on an unworkable plan." Bruce became visibly upset at this. "Oh come on Linda! You know good and well only a small fraction of your people are going to survive that crazy maneuver! We can't just give in to this! We can't just go back home with our tails between our legs and give up on the dream, maybe forever!" Linda became suddenly livid. In a voice bristling with controlled fury she asked, "Are you familiar with my racial background, Dr. Franklin?"

Bruce's brows knitted together in consternation over the seemingly off-topic question. "I'd too afraid of embarrassing myself to hazard a guess," he admitted.

"I am of pure-blooded Polynesian descent," she revealed with obvious pride. "While your homeboys were mired in the Middle Ages, my ancestors were busy colonizing most of the islands of the South Pacific. Using boats far simpler than what the much-later Europeans explorers were able to employ, my people set out on great voyages of discovery and settlement. Depending on nothing more than their knowledge of the stars for navigation, those brave men and women spread themselves and their culture over a hundred islands."

Now her voice rose in pitch. "I joined the LUNOX Corporation and began working out here because I have dedicated my life to continuing the traditions of my forefathers! I want to start the next wave of settlement here in space: humanity hopping from asteroid to asteroid in this black vastness just as my people once hopped islands in the vast Pacific; and then later, leaping from solar system to solar system until our race is present throughout the entire galaxy! So don't you presume to lecture to me about

'The Dream', Doctor!! I know all about 'The Dream'!!!"

Despite the emotional volatility of the exchange, Reggie found himself having to turn his head and scratch around his mouth to keep the two from seeing the smile which was growing there. It was the unselfconscious look of open admiration Bruce was now giving to Linda. His newly-found respect for the administrator was plainly mixed with unabashed delight at having suddenly found a kindred spirit in an unexpected place. Reggie was beginning to worry that if he didn't get his boss out of here soon, Bruce might decide he had finally found 'Miss Right'.

"My sincere apologies, Linda," Bruce said with genuine feeling. "But please look at it this way. You have one plan which may save some of us and shuts down space travel for generations. You have another plan which may save all of us and will keep our mutual dream alive." Linda seemed torn. "Can you guarantee to me this plan of yours can work?"

"Linda, there's always the unexpected, and the unknown. But I can say to you that to the best of our knowledge, the data available, and to the best of my experience and abilities, I can make this work!

Linda rotated her chair away from the two men and looked out at the stars as they filed past the window behind her desk.

Almost a minute of silent reflection passed before she quietly said, "Please begin work on your sweeper, Bruce. Keep the dream alive for us all."

* * *

Several days later, the first sweeper package was mounted onto the top of two stacked saucers in the hanger bay. From the hangar observation deck, Bruce could see that someone had painted a crudely-lettered slogan on the top saucer. It read:

Space Garbage 'R' Us

You trash it,

we stash it.

He turned to look at Reggie who was working at a nearby console and feigning a look of honest bewilderment. Bruce was secretly delighted to have the old silly Reggie back again. His partner just hadn't been himself since this whole affair had started. Now that there was a plan to work on, Reggie's spirits had improved, and the old devilment had re-surfaced.

Reggie had given him genuine grief, however, over his plan to accompany the first package down inside the upper saucer. Bruce had argued that the first attempt was too critical to risk some kind of malfunction which might easily be fixed by someone on board.

"Your saucer is not going to have enough fuel to make it back up to L-1 Port," Reggie had pointed out. "And you won't be able to rendezvous with LEO-Port because you'll be going the wrong direction. How do you get back to us?"

"I suppose you could always have Captain Biggsley come down with a load of fuel. Of course, that's provided it's agreed by all I'm worth rescuing."

Reggie then shut his eyes and placed a closed fist to his forehead. "Ooohhh.... restraint....restraint..." he moaned. Then he looked up at his friend and said, "You make these openings way too easy for me. You know I prefer a challenge."

Failing to talk him out of it, Reggie had then insisted on coming along with him to help. So the next day it was the two of them pushing their way through the docking portal into the inter-orbit craft. Once Reggie was settled in the pilot's station he reported, "TGCSU module is secure."

"The what module?" Linda asked from Central Control.

"I'll have Reggie explain that to you when we get back," Bruce said. "Preparing to undock." The stacked array separated from the hangar bay wall, and proceeded out into open space. The engines on the belly of the lower saucer fired, and the twin craft headed off in the direction of the moon. Many hours later they were passing over the Lunar farside. Reggie was plastered all over a porthole like an excited tourist. Bruce had to admit the rugged landscape passing by them was indeed a stirring sight.

Their path through space was bent around by the gravity of the moon until they were swinging back towards Earth. This was not the normal figure-eight path of a typical Earth-Moon run, but an unprecedented East-to-West flight down towards the homeworld.

They cast off the nearly-exhausted lower saucer, and, when they had reached the lowest point of their orbit, fired the engines of the remaining, fully fueled saucer. Now they were in a circular orbit just under one thousand kilometers high. Going the wrong way.

It was time to deploy the sweeper package. The pressure vessel detached from the saucer and drifted into the distance. Reggie then backed them off quite a ways (this thing they were about to hatch was very quickly going to be kilometers in diameter, after all). Deep inside the package, a set of high-speed blades whipped the plastic fluid and high-pressure nitrogen into a frothy mixture. When the proper signal was sent, the pressure vessel separated and a gray-white sphere erupted from the package.

The growth of the sweeper was explosive at first, but quickly settled down into a slow swelling. The package which had contained all this foam was now nowhere to be seen, buried somewhere deep beneath the surface. Finally, the plastic hardened. The Great Cosmic Sweeper-Upper had achieved the predicted two and a half kilometers diameter. It seemed as though the saucer was now in orbit about some strange new gray moon of the Earth.

"The Death-star is approaching...the Death-star is approaching..." Reggie intoned ominously. Bruce chuckled and responded with, "I prefer to think of it as the Life-star."

"I hear that. Here's hoping it saves all our butts."

There was an incoming transmission from Linda at L-1 Port. "Hey, guys, we were monitoring the telemetry from that lower stage you dropped off a while back. All transmissions from it ceased within eight seconds of entering the debris field."

"Ouch. Nasty," Reggie murmured.

Now the saucer was maneuvered directly in front of the foamed sphere. The plan was for the ship to make contact, and then fire its engines sufficiently to drop the sweeper's perigee down to the top of the debris belt. The saucer would then quickly back off and regain orbital altitude before it entered the danger zone. That's all it took. As the low point of the sweeper's orbit took it through the debris, the force of impacts would bring the rest of the orbit down completely inside the belt, eventually. Reggie brought the saucer in for a head-first landing on the smooth, expansive landscape above. Their small ship sank into the frothy, gray material well past the windows. The cockpit darkened.

"Ready whenever you are," said Bruce.

Reggie threw over the throttle lever and the engines began pushing against the man-made moon. Both men intently watched the orbital plot on a display screen.

"That should do it," Bruce said with satisfaction. "Let's get out of here." Reggie cut the thrust and began firing the retros in order to back the saucer away from the sweeper. The only problem was...

Nothing was happening. The light-gray foam continued to press against the windows. They didn't seem to be going anywhere.

A cold chill went over both men as they remembered the exposed belly of their craft was facing squarely into the direction of their flight. The thought of being permanently mired in this gray goo, and then dragged down into a high-velocity barrage of space junk, would have unnerved the bravest of men.

"Maybe," Reggie began brightly, "It's the graviton emissions being given off by the sub-space..."

"Reggie!"

"Sorry. Just trying to break the tension a little. Geez."

"Try to shimmy around some," Bruce advised.

Reggie tried getting creative with the vernier jets. Nothing seemed to make any difference.

"OK, boss-man," Reggie said in an unusually subdued voice. "Now what?"

"I think the reason we're not getting anywhere is that we can't see what our situation is. There's only one thing for that. I'm going to suit up and go out."

"Just don't forget that we're minutes away from entering the upper debris belt."

"Right," Bruce said as he rose up out of his seat and flew towards the rear of the cabin. "You get into your suit too."

* * *

Fully clad in his space armor, Bruce cycled through the saucer airlock. The outer door hesitated for a heart-stopping second, but finally slid away from a solid wall of gray plastic foam. Bruce dug into it with both hands. Fortunately, its volume was probably only one percent plastic, the other ninety-nine being the thinnest wisps of nitrogen gas. Foam cells which had started out less than a millimeter in size were now larger than his fist. The plastic broke away in large chunks with surreal ease. In time, the space Bruce moved in was filled with slowly drifting, rebounding chunks of light-gray matter, illuminated only by his suit lights. Now he began angling downward, following the curve of the saucer's hull.

"How are you doing out there?" came Reggie's voice through his helmet earphones.

"Well, I'm starting to feel like a backyard dog tunneling his way down to China. But I'm making good progress."

Bruce knew he was now nearing the edge of the saucer because he could see light filtering through the foam ahead. Suddenly, he was tearing a hole into free space, and pushing his way out through it. He found himself at the bottom of a twenty meter hole punched into the sweeper by the saucer as its engines were firing. They had underestimated the fragility of this weird new substance they had created.

"OK, Reggie, I'm clear now, and I can see what the problem is. The tunnel we just made is bulging inward a little on your port side. That's what has us jammed in so good. Try several quick attempts at a clock-wise yaw."

A cluster of control jets on the port side of the saucer's belly began to spew streams of exhaust. Vapors also shot up from around the buried topside of the vehicle. Then there was a lurch, and the circular ship began a slowly rolling climb up the gray tunnel.

Bruce fired his suit jets and preceded the spacecraft upwards. The edges of the saucer kept sliding against the confining walls of the newly-made tunnel, but Reggie kept the vessel coming upward. Bruce was ascending up and out of the hole they had made, and now the vista of the sweeper's surface was once again revealed. The surrounding terrain was light-gray and nearly featureless, as he had expected. He had not, however, expected the fire-flies.

There were millions of them dotting the smooth landscape below. But not fire-flies, exactly. Each flashed for only the briefest of instants and then was gone; more like a tiny strobe light going off. It was as though God had spread glitter over this man-made moon while they had lain buried in it, and now it was slowly turning in the sunlight and sparkling with reflective brilliance.

Bruce was trying to figure out what he was looking at when he received a sudden, rude clue in the form of some kind of jolt to the topside of his helmet. It felt as though someone had abruptly popped him on top of the head over some unintentional offense he had given. The truth then dawned with immediate, terrifying clarity. Each flash below was a piece of space debris no larger than a pinhead, bursting into incandescence as each slammed into the sweeper at incomprehensible speed.

The tiny grains through which they hurtled were far too small to have been picked up on their radars. The orbiting fragments had been ceaselessly colliding and re-colliding with each other, and had now pulverized themselves down to a finer, even more insidious menace.

"Reggie, we're already getting pelted with fine particles!! We've got to get out of here!!! FAST!!!!" Reggie seized the joystick in front of him and began sending the saucer in Bruce's direction while the space-walker simultaneously began jetting towards him. Without warning there was a loud pop, and pieces of a window were exploding inward, rebounding throughout the cabin. Reggie was grateful he already had his helmet on as the atmosphere of the upper deck roared out into the surrounding vacuum to be replaced by the eerie silence of space. He continued his course towards his free-flying friend. As the saucer grew in his field of view, Bruce noticed everything around him was growing foggy. He wondered what kind of space phenomena might cause a sudden loss of vision, then quickly realized he was seeing the effect of countless dust-sized particles as they sand-blasted the face-plate of his helmet. If this continued, he would not be able to see well enough to climb back into the airlock of the approaching spacecraft.

Red-glowing indicators located inside the base of Bruce's helmet now reported his suit was slowly loosing pressure. He probably had at least a half-dozen pin-prick leaks by now. Thus far his backpack was maintaining against the air losses but if...

There was a sudden ear-splitting crack and a painful jolt to Bruce's left shoulder. He had been hit by a fragment at least the size of a match-head this time. It couldn't have hit the pressure-suit itself, or he would already be dead by now. It must have hit the corner of his backpack jet array. The impact pitched him around violently. Stinging, half-blind, Bruce began tumbling wildly out of control. Bruce shut his eyes against the madly whirling stars and landscape. "Command: De-spin, Enter," he cried. His pressure suit computer accepted the directive and automatically fired his backpack jets in such a manner as to bring the sickening somersaults under control.

The saucer was coming up at him quickly now. Through the white fog of his faceplate, Bruce could see that his partner had even swung the craft around to where the airlock was pointed straight at him. All Bruce had to do was jet a little to his left, and suddenly he was surrounded by ship. He grabbed onto a handhold, desperate not to rebound straight back out of the airlock. "I'm in!!!" Bruce yelled into his suit mike. "Punch it, Reggie!!!!"

The ship swung quickly about, and in less than a second Bruce was drifting downward against the floor as they began to accelerate. The thrust did not end until the propellant tanks were dry.

"One thousand and eight kilometers," Reggie reported from the cockpit. "We're about as safe as safe ever gets in our line of work."

Bruce laughed heartily. They had done it.

* * *

Captain Biggsley's trusty tanker soon delivered them to a traditional hero's welcome at L-1 Port. (Although Linda's warmest welcomes seemed directed solely toward Bruce.) After the celebrations, the two space engineers began setting up a small, automated, sweeper assembly line. During the weeks that followed, they also monitored the deployed sweeper's slow descent through the belts of debris encircling the Earth. Bruce was glad they had left the severely-eroded saucer in its final orbit. It gave them the only counter-orbiting camera from which to monitor the process.

It was fascinating to watch. The continuous sparkles Bruce had observed while so close to the surface of the sweeper could not be seen from this distance. However, there would be the occasional, brilliant flash on the leading edge of the sphere as a larger-than-average piece of space garbage impacted. When this happened, one could observe circular ripples on the surface as the shock waves propagated away in all directions. A new crater was now added to the landscape. Sometimes, star-hot sparks could be seen flying out the backside of the gray globe as something punched its way completely through. The price for wounding the sweeper clear through like this was nearly always a fiery death in the upper atmosphere two or three orbits later.

By the time The Great Cosmic Sweeper-Upper had descended to the lower reaches of the debris belt, its appearance was completely moon-like for the saturation cratering. As the sweeper had worked its way through the debris fields, asymmetric impacts with objects of widely different mass had twisted and turned it in every direction. Pockmarks of all sizes now covered every square meter of surface. By the time of the sweeper's last day, seven more sweepers were slowly spiraling downwards towards the Earth, with several more in the works. Casandra went out to a small hill in order to witness the original sweeper's blazing finale in the skies above South America.

The fireball was almost over-powering as the gigantic-yet-insubstantial globe plowed into the upper atmosphere with a velocity greater than that of any ordinary meteor. As the foamed plastic ceased to exist, a billion sparks fanned out: a billion trapped pieces of metal and silicon evaporating and disappearing far overhead.

As Casandra watched the fireworks display, she was filled with both pride for her distant husband, and an intense, silent joy. The pyrotechnics let her know that some day soon, Reggie would be returning to her.

When that day came several months later, Bruce embraced his dear friend and then watched as Reggie eagerly pushed off towards a connecting tube. The telescoping tunnel linked LEO-Port to the aerospace plane which would bring Reggie back down to his homeworld. When his partner was finally gone from sight, Bruce turned and glided away to another dock elsewhere in the terminal. He was, of course, heading outward.

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