Daedalus E-Book

Robert G. Williscroft

• Herausgeber: Fresh Ink Group
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 69

Beschreibung

Using a new Gryphon-7 hard-shell wingsuit, Tiger Baily, irreverent member of the Navy SEALS Winged Insertion Command, makes a harrowing first experimental base jump from the edge of Space, the Fred Noonan Skyport 80,000 meters above Jarvis Island in the Equatorial Pacific. Tiger’s target, which he must reach to survive, is Kiritimati Island, a tiny isolated atoll 379 km northeast of Jarvis over ever-threatening and oh-so-deep ocean waters.

Leseprobe

DAEDALUSSWIC Basejump from Fred Noonan Skyport

Copyright © 2019

by Robert G. Williscroft

All rights reserved

Fresh Ink Group

An Imprint of:

The Fresh Ink Group, LLC

Box 931

Guntersville, AL 35976

[email protected]

FreshInkGroup.com

Edition 1.0    2019

Cover art by Anik / FIG

Artwork by Robert G. Williscroft

Book design by Amit Dey / FIG

Covers by Stephen Geez / FIG

Names, characters, and incidents in this story are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, names, and people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 and except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, no portion of this book’s content may be stored in any medium, transmitted in any form, used in whole or part, or sourced for derivative works such as videos, television, and motion pictures, without prior written permission from the publisher.

BISAC Subject Headings:

FIC028020 FICTION / Science Fiction / Hard Science Fiction

FIC002000 FICTION / Action & Adventure

FIC028010 FICTION / Science Fiction / Action & Adventure

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941739

ISBN-13:

978-1-947867-56-7 Papercover

978-1-947867-57-4 Hardcover

978-1-947867-58-1 Ebooks

This story is dedicated to parachute record-holderAlan Eustace, to Wingsuit Flyers Dean Potter andGraham Hunt, and to the World Wingsuit community.

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Cast of Characters

Daedalus

California – Several Years In The Past

Yosemite Park – Two Years Later

Coronado, California – The Gryphon

Coronado, California – Gryphon Drops

Equatorial Pacific – Slingshot

The Slingshot Space Launch Loop

Equatorial Pacific – Howland Island

Equatorial Pacific – Baker Island

Equatorial Pacific – Fred Noonan Skyport (Jarvis Island)

Equatorial Pacific – Gryphon Flight

Howland, Baker, Jarvis & Kiribati Islands – Flight of the Gryphon

Kiritimati Island

Kiritimati Island –Gryphon splashdown

Daedalus – Finale

Please Post a Review for Daedalus

Excerpt from the first chapter of Slingshot

Words of Praise for Slingshot

About Robert G. Williscroft

Other books by Robert G. Williscroft

Connect with Robert G. Williscroft

Daedalus Glossary

Several people contributed to the creation of this book.

Most significantly, my wonderful wife, Jill, whom I first met when I returned from a year at the South Pole conducting atmospheric research, and who finally consented to marry me nearly thirty years later, pored over this story with her discerning engineer’s eye. She kept my timeline honest, and made sure that regular readers could understand fully the arcane details of the Launch Loop and the Gryphon.

Jill’s twin sons, Arthur and Robert, also read the manuscript, and provided their insights.

Hard science fiction authors Alastair Mayer, John Clark, and Prof. John Rosenman, and USA Today bestselling author Dave Edlund reviewed the manuscript and offered their editorial insights.

Lauren Smith from Fresh Ink Group applied her professional associate publisher’s eyes to improve the story.

It goes without saying that any remaining omissions, errors, and mistakes fall directly on my shoulders.

Robert G. Williscroft, PhDCentennial, ColoradoJune 2019

Slingshot is my novel about constructing the world’s first Space Launch Loop. The inventor of the concept, Keith Lofstrom, wrote the foreword to that novel. Here is a portion of that Foreword.

Imagine a stream of water out of a fire hose. Without air friction, the stream might make a parabolic arc 20 meters high. Faster, and the arc goes higher and farther. A stream moving 7.3 kilometers per second would come down on the other side of the planet, and a stream moving 11 kilometers per second would keep going into interplanetary space. Wrap the stream in a frictionless hose, and...THAT won’t work either. But what if...?

The launch loop: replace the water with flexible iron pipe, 5 centimeters outer diameter, 3 metric tons per kilometer, moving at 14 kilometers per second. Bend it to the curvature of the earth with a stationary magnetic track, 7 metric tons per kilometer, 2,000 kilometers long, at 80 kilometers altitude. Stabilize the moving iron with electromagnets controlled by fast electronics. Turn it around at the ends with powerful magnets, and complete the loop.

On the eastbound section, 5-metric-ton payloads ride on magnets designed for high drag, which accelerates payloads at 3 gees. Payloads exit the east end of the track between 7.7 and 11 kilometers per second, to equatorial low earth orbits, to the moon, or to interplanetary space. Launching a payload weighing 5 metric tons to low earth orbit consumes 180 megawatt-hours, about $15,000 worth of electricity, or $3 per kilogram of payload. Passengers will still need vehicles and air, but freight can be launched on wooden shipping pallets. This small launch loop can launch 2,000 5-metric-ton payloads to orbit per day. Heavier launch loops can launch thousands of standard 30-metric-ton intermodal shipping containers per hour. They can also store peak power for the global electrical grid. Space travel can be as cheap as ocean cargo travel.

In the early 1980s, I published in an American Astronautical Society Newsletter and other journals, and presented at many conferences. In England, physicist Paul Birch wrote about orbital rings in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. Ken Brakke, a math professor in Pennsylvania, published his version of orbital rings.

Ken, Paul, and I met at one of the Space Studies Institute conferences at Princeton. We spent three days developing nomenclature, doing math, finding errors and fixes. I met Robert Williscroft in the mid-1990s in Philadelphia while I was on a trip to the East Coast. He had contacted me about a novel he was outlining – Slingshot. We spent a day together becoming acquainted and have kept in touch since then. Slingshot in its current form is a result of our brainstorming during that visit.

For years afterwards, Paul and I swapped ideas. Under Jerome Pearson’s leadership, and with our friend John Knapman, we submitted grant proposals until Paul’s untimely passing in 2012. We were friends, never competitors, though Paul was much better at reciting Tennyson. I hope one of us will be the first launch loop astronaut. Conflict makes great stories, but friendship makes great lives, so I now pass page control to my friend R.G....

So there you have it. I wrote Slingshot. It was launched at the International Space Elevator Conference in Seattle in August 2015, and the book resides on the desk of every Space Elevator scientist in the world. Space Launch Loops appear in the subsequent books in The Starchild Trilogy, and anyone familiar with my Trilogy knows all about these commercial space launch systems.

When I discovered the Gryphon rigid wingsuit, the story you are about to read pushed itself into my consciousness. It’s the natural consequence of Slingshot’s skyports effectively being 80 km tall towers.

Robert G. Williscroft Centennial,ColoradoJune 2019

SEAL Winged Insertion Command Three (SWIC-3)

Lt. Brad Nelson – Officer-in-Charge of Second Platoon.

Lt. Tom Spitzer – Executive Officer Second Platoon.

Senior Chief Jerry Boldt – In charge of Second Platoon, First Squad.

Derek “Tiger” Baily – Narrator, member of Second Platoon, First Squad.

Launch Loop International (LLI)

Apryl Searson – Diver EMT.

CALIFORNIA – SEVERAL YEARS IN THE PAST

Obviously, I survived, since I am telling this story. But it’s not that simple – let me explain.

My name is Derek Baily. I’m an extreme sports enthusiast, an adrenaline junkie. It all started several years ago when I made my first parachute jump. Before that, I was just your typical skateboarder, snowboarder, trick-bike rider…I think you get the idea. I had gone parasailing a couple of times, and it was really cool. I decided I wanted to do more of that, and was talking it over with my buds.

That’s when one of them suggested that I try a jump. “Jump out of a perfectly safe airplane?” I asked, but only half in jest.