First in Flight

July 10, 2076. 0600.

The morning rush of commuters from London to New York arrive at Pads 32 and 33 at Armstrong Transit Pad, 10 miles offshore from Manhattan. Flight 14 was 2.3 seconds later than expected, but most of the passengers hadn’t noticed. The few first-time fliers were still in shock from the G-force and the sight of Earth’s curvature, while the veterans were more occupied preparing for their 8 o’clock meetings. If there was any hassle in the process, it was from unloading and boarding the powerboats that ferried them to the city from the launchpads, not the acoustic novelties of rocket travel.

At Langley Sentry 1, everything was running as expected. A 500kg payload of Helium-3 had launched from Lunar Frontier two days ago and was due to touch down at Spaceport Heartland in T-47 minutes and breach the atmosphere in 10. A few vehicles traced their way through the transcontinental flight zone as they moved from the Kennedy Annex to Vanderberg, but it would still be another hour before the morning’s launches from Miami to New York lit up the screen. Even with passengers in the air, the attention of the flight controllers was still diligently divided among the various cargo deliveries that were sent from Heartland or Vulcan to proto-pads in Iraq or Kazakhstan. Humanitarian ops had just wrapped in the Philippines, and per custom the pad that had been the workhorse of those operations was being left behind as a measure of goodwill and promise of future engagement.

While most of the heavy-launch vehicles that were being specced out and tested for Mars operations were all nuclear powered, these rockets were fitted with ion-thrusters. They were just as big, loud, and dirty as other rockets come, but without the risk of a significant change to a continent’s air quality in case of any atmosphere breakup. Old liquid-propellent rockets were in use only during the early days of point-to-point travel, but now the new models were cleaner, faster, and more predictable.

The people operating the station were the best of the best, supplemented by the world’s most advanced monitoring and modeling systems. These systems were networks that depended on the cooperation of all parties in the world that were capable of participating in them. It requires quite a bit of trust to let a ballistic missile enter your airspace, even when its cargo has been fully vetted.

All of a sudden, an alert flashes across the monitors. The Helium-3 payload is deviating from its trajectory. These type of notifications were exceedingly rare. Only one out of every 300 launches had any sort of minor error, but the ones that mattered were the ones that occurred outside of the atmosphere - exactly like this one. Weather was unpredictable, but solar weather and asteroid mapping should be, in theory, a matter of simply having enough instruments to collect the data. When the station missed something at this level, nothing good ever followed.

It wasn’t clear what was happening, but given that the factor of cumulative error was above the critical threshold and the payload was already in terminal phase, any course correction now would make the issue far worse. A terminal phase payload can’t be destroyed by anything kinetic because the time it would take to get it moving fast enough is far longer than the window of opportunity before impact. Anything destroyed within the thermosphere risks debris being scattered and the high casualties that come with it. There are only fifteen more seconds to hit before the payload crosses that line. The commander on duty glances at the display showing the computer iteratively moving through countermeasures.

The computer has a few options at its disposal, ranking from the most minimal interventions designed only to correct course to full vessel disintegration. The first line of defense is a laser ablation - a continuous, high-energy beam fired from an orbital array that vaporizes a small layer of surface material on the payload. That vaporization creates a rapid expansion and thrust that, if done correctly, redirects the payload to crash into the ocean for recovery instead of potentially landing on a population center.

The commander on duty presses ENTER to approve the response. A ground-based ASAT array that has been tracking it quickly makes its best prediction for where the deviated trajectory will lead the payload and sends a message to the satellite array, which rapidly adjusts and fires a millisecond petawatt beam at the target. A brief, blinding flash comes across the telemetry monitor as some of the shield material vaporizes, before recalibrating and showing a new trajectory landing 150 miles offshore in the Atlantic.

The closest response port is Cape Hatteras. A tug is automatically mobilized, someone starts an incident report, and everyone’s eyes return to the 54 other objects in the sky at that moment.

Most days of their work were incredibly boring. If they weren’t, point-to-point space travel never would have gotten off the ground.

This vision of a point-to-point economy pulls on a couple of key ideas - directed-energy weapons, Earth-Moon supply chains, and international space oversight - that may seem incredibly distant from the state of the aerospace industry today. Yet that vision can be easily scaled down into a fairly realistic pilot program, achievable within the next decade in the Eastern corridor of the United States. Why there? A variety of reasons, both political and physical.

On a cultural level, the Southeastern United States has as much aerospace heritage as anywhere in the world. Kitty Hawk is the birthplace of aviation and Cape Canaveral is a living monument to the Apollo Program, milestones held in equal respect everywhere in the world. Pure geography provided the impetus for much of this heritage, as rockets launched from the East Coast towards the Atlantic provide the United States’ safest and most efficient pathway to Low Earth Orbit.

Because the Earth rotates from west to east around its axis, at the latitude of Cape Canaveral, there is a ground speed boost of 410 m/s before the rocket ever lifts off. This speed boost increases closer to the equator, explaining why the Southeast is continental America’s best option for basing the majority of its space operations.

For North-South launch routes (known as polar trajectories in orbital science), launching from the East Coast doesn’t matter as much since the speed boost is working in a different direction than the rocket. But for trans-Atlantic routes or launches into orbit, it provides a massive advantage.

Cape Canaveral was chosen for America’s launch spot largely because of the ideal geography, and more recently, other spots around the Eastern Seaboard have attracted launch capital for the same reason. The only other operational vertical-launch spaceport in the Atlantic Coast is Wallops Island in Virginia, while Cecil Spaceport (Jacksonville) and Space Coast Regional (Titusville) host horizontal-launch facilities capable of flying space shuttles or space planes.

The well-irrigated lowlands of the Southeast are also ideal for the space-launch supply chain, which uses barges as the core for transporting massive rocket stages and boosters, along with fuel. The Cape is connected to the Intracoastal Waterway by an 8-mile canal, ensuring that components can be economically transported from nearby sites like Michoud Assembly Facility (New Orleans) and Stennis Space Center (Mississippi) that also occupy coastal real estate for the same reason.

This creates a case of “sunk infrastructure”, where currently existing expensive platforms demand that more infrastructure is built around them rather than rededicating them elsewhere. That historical investment also created a massive academic ecosystem and workforce development pipeline for the industry. While schools in the region are rarely considered equivalent to the Ivy League in terms of general prestige, schools like Embry-Riddle annually account for a double-digit share of conferred aerospace degrees, and the region accounts for over a third of America's aerospace graduates.

Space has also been a political priority for states like Alabama and Florida for longer than it has for anywhere else in America, barring some exceptions like JPL in California. Nearly half of Florida’s 28 Congressional seats have economic constituents directly tied to the space industry, which results in a constant flow of appropriations through the work of the bipartisan Florida Congressional Delegation.

Similarly, the history of Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama began with Senator John Sparkman’s lobbying of the US Army to relocate Werner von Braun and his team of German rocket scientists. Until that point, rocketry research was conducted out of Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, tethered to the massive proving grounds available in New Mexico. Had this move not occurred, von Braun would never have left Texas, never lobbied the Alabama Legislature to create UA Huntsville, and led to a far more dispersed space supply chain.

Today, the space industry in Alabama is over 45,000 workers strong, and over 130,000 in Florida. State-chartered economic development organizations continue to lead the way in the Southeast by maximizing the resources already dedicated over the last 75 years.

The rest of the Southeast is now following suit, with each of the 14 states represented by SEAS maintaining at least some form of an aerospace-focused economic development organ. As the scale of activity increases, so too does the degree of interconnectedness and the size of the Eastern corridor, extending all the way out to Texas and Oklahoma as more money is invested into the open land they can provide. This combination of safe geography, existing capital, and entrenched political will is why the Southeast's dominance is unlikely to erode from competition inside the United States, with the only threat being an outsourcing of American capital to equatorial sites overseas.