The Falcon and The Turtle

by Luigi Esguerra

The year is 2015; Crimea has fallen to Russia recently, the United States is about to enter an unusual election, SpaceX has become an Internet sensation, and the good author has passed on...and, wait, is that a big turtle carrying four elephants on its shell and a big flat world going across the skies?

1. Introduction

This is a vision of a silly alternate future, a possibility of what we could do should the situation present itself, in fact this exercise in story writing and alternate future writing is nothing more than a rehash of the initial 'Houston we have a turtle here, a big one!' story which was set in the days of the Apollo program.

Things have changed since the 1960s and 1970s, for one we - the human race - had recently shot out an electric car into space for nothing more than to be silly, something unimaginable in the days of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle programs when going to space was a privilege reserved only for scientists, those who have gone through rigorous training, and/or for the generally bright minds in the field of spaceflight and space sciences.

We are currently in another space race, and whereas the original one was a two horse race, this one is a multiple horse race and with bets all going to the private industry, particularly SpaceX (or Space Exploration Technologies).

This rehash of the original story aims to bring the history-lesson heavy story into something more readable for the present day reader, as much as I have crammed the original story with facts and plausible guesses of how the Apollo program could have gone Interplanetary, I was limited - very limited - by the fact that I cannot bring too much to the table or else it would be boring.

So here we are, the second attempt at this kind of story but written in my own way (the way that I ended up becoming a small time published author from where I came from) rather than a writing style that I have not done before.

This here would be the first and last chapter to be written solely to give technical data and/or historical information on spaceflight, much like how the original story had in the introduction and this here is to serve as a general briefing as to the sources used in creating the technical bits of the story.

Shortly before the point of divergence in the story, spaceflight has gone a long way from Sputnik, Yuri Gargarin, the Freedom 7 astronauts, and so on, however despite of its great achievements it was slow and losing political support, the Shuttle had been retired, the replacement of the Shuttle was facing delays, but the silver lining in all this would be the moment SpaceX has landed a booster that crossed the Karman line (a.k.a space) and reused it. (If you know your recent science and space news, you'll know the year of the point of divergence - 2015 for those unawares)

However the alternate history leading to the point of divergence is even more extraordinary, in order to have an understanding of the biggest 'what could have been' in spaceflight we should have a brief look at the post-Shuttle era and the rise of private spaceflight.

After the Apollo program, the U.S. Government decided to train the guns of NASA at reusability, or being able to bring back the entire - or most of - the spacecraft to be reused for another flight, this was supposed to lower costs and therefore make space more cheaper and accessible.

This culminated with the Space Shuttle, the famous Space Shuttle of the United States that was used to deploy and build humanity's greatest space constructs; Hubble, the International Space Station, and so on.

However, this Space Shuttle had not gone swimmingly well, in fact it claimed the lives of 15 astronauts and two Shuttle Orbiters during its run, and there are plenty more embarrassing facts about it, like NASA having to scavenge for old hospital machines in order to salvage the old computer chips from the 1980s for use in the Space Shuttle.

The Space Shuttle was to be terminated on 2011, and the program that was supposed to replace it was the Constellation program (or CXP) which was once described as 'Apollo on steroids' and it was placed into law by President George H. Bush in 2005.

This Constellation Program was to have a 188 tons to orbit heavy launch vehicle (the Ares V) and a human rated launch vehicle (Ares I), both using technologies derived from the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle, and their goal was the Moon and Mars.

It had the vision of setting up an expedition to Mars using a Martian Transfer Vehicle that uses nuclear engines, which was basically a rehash of Wernher Von Braun's 1969 Mars plan (the one using parts of the planned Nuclear Shuttle) in terms of technological applications (Nuclear engine? Check. A Lander? Check.) however the Constellation Mars Plan was bigger and grander, it caught the imaginations of many.

Cancellation soon slammed into the Constellation Program due to rising costs and general impracticality, this was replaced with the 2011 NASA Authorization Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama, which brought about the present Space Launch System that was supposed to launch on 2018 for a unmanned cis-lunar mission, but it was postponed to (as of the time of writing) December 2019 at the earliest. (But with several problems popping up, this schedule is expected to slip)

Instead what we have gotten so far was a car being blasted off into a Martian orbit by a private industry called SpaceX, owned by a man with a big personality and an even bigger vision; Elon Reeves Musk.

SpaceX has been making news recently, in fact CBS News had given SpaceX the title of 'Biggest Disruptor of 2018', and if you looked at the so called 'industry' of aerospace flight, SpaceX was not an earthquake, it was an Earth-shattering asteroid (or a Death Star blowing up Alderaan if you're so inclined to Star Wars.)

SpaceX in 2013 became the first private company to send a commercial cargo mission to the International Space Station, in 2015 they became the first people (not just as a private company, rather as a team doing spaceflight) to land and reuse an orbital booster, and in 2016 they were the first to land an orbital booster on an automated barge in the middle of the Atlantic.

The so called 'Space Race 2.0' was started (supposedly) when the C.E.O of Boeing said something around the lines of 'We'll beat SpaceX to Mars' and Elon Musk simply replied 'Do It'. However I think that Space Race 2 began with the launch of Falcon Heavy on February 8 2018, mainly because of Musk's showmanship skills in getting United Launch Alliance, Russia, China, Arianespace, and a bunch of companies to suddenly become competitive.

But the competition is FAR FAR FAR FAR OFF (in Musk's rear view mirror preferably) with the nearest first attempt at SpaceX-grade reusability (should everything go to plan, which as what we've seen with SpaceX's How NOT to land an orbital rocket booster video, is going to be unlikely) would be China's Long March 8 rocket (the new design) in 2020 or 2021, however there is a Chinese startup (LinkSpace, aka Chinese SpaceX) that plans to launch a Falcon 1 sized reusable rocket by 2018.

The United Launch Alliance, SpaceX's biggest competitor composed of two traditional aerospace titans; Lockheed and Boeing (as in they're the two among many that built the Saturn V), can't do much other than launch their semi-reusable Vulcan rocket in 2020, while still trash talking SpaceX through their puppet master owner, Boeing.

As for Arianespace (a.k.a the European counterpart of the United Launch Alliance) their C.E.O recently had what sounded like a meltdown during an interview with a European newspaper, in which - and I paraphrase from the translated version- he answered after being asked by the interviewer as to SpaceX's concept of reusability 'Don't ask me how they price their rockets so cheaply, ask them!' and 'We cannot have reusable rockets because we do not have thirty or so scheduled launches, I can't just tell my teams after building one rocket 'Alright guys, see you next year!'

Russia took an interesting U-turn, initially - and a day before the Falcon Heavy launch - President Putin signed into law a budget allocation to Roscomos (Russia's NASA) to build a sort of 'Soyuz Heavy' a rocket using the R7 Soyuz rocket to match the Falcon Heavy. But then a few months later, their Deputy Prime Minister - ex officio in charge of the space program - announced that Russia can no longer compete with SpaceX, period.

That surrender came from Russia, the largest launch provider post-Space Shuttle and shortly before SpaceX started executing twenty or thirty launches per year, the Russians - mind you - had more than 50% market share less than five years ago, now SpaceX has that 50% and more (about 70% market share for 2018, now that's how you run a company!)

So who else is planning to take on SpaceX? It's not much of the supposed multi-horse race perceived during the first 48 hours post Falcon Heavy launch. There's the plans for Skylon, a Single Stage To Orbit spacecraft, by the British, and India has something up its sleeve however there is still no announcements as of yet (though the speculation may have come from their 'Superpower by 2020' vision)

What you've just read was basically a simplified and summarized version of the whole ruckus with SpaceX and the supposed race to Mars that has been making the rounds in online news portals, reputable ones I must say, and it is not much of a race.

Anyhow, we now hand this to the story itself:

(A/N: Discworld was created and owned by Sir Terry Pratchett, all characters and settings belong to him/ his estate. SpaceX (and all related terminology, notably 'Falcon 9', 'Falcon Heavy', 'Dragon 1', 'Dragon V2', and 'Big Falcon Rocket') is owned by Elon Reeve Musk - a.k.a the most craziest inventor-billionaire we have so far, 'Blue Origins' is owned by Jeff Bezos ("Jeff Who?" - Elon Musk), United Launch Alliance is owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin)