The Solar Storm
Ceres paused Arthur’s Fountains of Paradise that was slowly scrolling down the screen. She wanted to watch the predicted display as she passed through the Van Allen radiation belts. It should be spectacular tonight, especially as the sun was throwing out Corona Mass Ejections – CMEs – at irregular intervals during this eleven year solar maximum.
She wasn’t supposed to be on this trip but had swapped her place on the duty roster with Sergei as she still enjoyed the work and couldn’t imagine anything better than seeing the expected display. This had to be her last trip as it would bring her up to mandatory retirement as she reached her radiation dose limit. This is why the astronauts, or lift operators as they were disparagingly called by the ground staff, were so well paid for their short working life. She sometimes thought of herself as a trucker, especially when on a supply trip like today. Her plan was to retire to her native Norway and make bread and babies. With a name like hers, how could it be otherwise? She had called her boyfriend, Nils, last night and was looking forward to seeing him again when she got back after this trip.
The day had been spent in preparation, loading and checks at the space port in Ecuador. She had found the altitude a bit of a problem at first but now she was aclimatised to living and working at 6,000 m on the high shoulder of Chimborazo, a dormant stratovolcano. Not the easiest place to get to but as it is the highest point on the equator and the place that is furthest from the centre of the Earth, it is ideal for a spaceport that operated as the base station of the space elevator, or The Sky Hook as it was known.
The theory of the elevator had been known since the nineteenth century but it could not be built until the twenty first as the available materials were not strong enough. The breakthrough came with the developments in material science and the invention and manufacture of fullerenes, specifically Buckminster Fullerene. This allotrope of carbon 60 is two hundred times as strong as the best titanium alloy. The final design used woven strands of graphene and the cable reached its maximum diameter at geosynchronous height of just under 36,000 km above Chimborazo.
Her payload today consisted of hydroponic chemicals and repair parts for the outpost at Port Lowell on Mars. There were to be no passengers, just Ceres and the payload.
The lift off was very gentle as the laser energy transfer system worked against full Earth gravity. The accelaration increased slowly but inexorably until it reached a maximum of five G. Ceres didn’t enjoy this part much as it was very uncomfortable even with her inflated pressure suit but she exulted in the feeling of speed. The drag to the West felt a little strange as the climber gained angular momentum from the Coriolis force.
This elevator cabin, or climber,was going all the way to Mars and would be return to Earth, with Ceres, after using the elevator near Port Lowell.
Ceres passed through the inner Van Allen belt with little display and no problems but after that a series of events combined to form the tragedy.
It was ironic that all the solar observing satellites had been shut down for the duration of the predicted solar storm so no one saw an enormous CME that was the biggest since the famous Carrington event in 1859. Previous CMEs had cleared the way so the burst of protons would only take 18 hours to travel the 150 million kilometres to Earth.
The wave front hit Ceres in her climber as she was entering the outer Van Allen belt at an altitude of 13,000 km. The shielding was nowhere near adequate for this onslaught so she quickly exceeded her lifetime allowed radiation dose and her hopes of ever having a child were destroyed during those first seconds. The interaction between the highly charged protons and the Earths magnetic field produced a beautiful, ever changing rainbow glow around her. She felt like an angel flying up to heaven surrounded by an enormous halo.
Then Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction kicked in. The highly energetic protons passed through and around the graphene cable so inducing a voltage. C60 is, of course, an excellent electrical conductor so an enormous current started to flow in the cable. It rushed down the cable and came up against its weakest point where it was anchored at the space port. The current was too great for the cable to carry here so it heated up and eventualy melted. The cable, complete with the climber with Ceres inside was now free so it obeyed Newton’s first law of motion: ‘The velocity of a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force.’ so it no longer rotated around with the Earth and set off in a straight line which just happened to be towards Alpha Centauri. The effect was similar to an athlete letting go of the hammer after spinning a few times on the circle.
Alpha Centauri is about 4.37 light years from Earth so it would take Ceres over 20,000 years to get there, after a very lonely journey.
She would be forever remembered as the first human ever to leave our solar system.
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