The Rockoon Racket

“So about the time it passes out of the troposphere, the boosting envelopes will burst, and  ascent will slow. Somewhere just before the top of the stratosphere, it’ll stabilize and basically bob at the point where the weight of the payload equalizes with the lifting power of the hydrogen in the thinned atmosphere.”

Taylor was standing in front of a whiteboard, having eschewed slides. He’d drawn thick black horizontal lines representing the separations between the various layers of atmosphere. Blue lines represented the path of the payload and its associated booster systems upward and outward.

“It’s at this point that primary ignition takes place.”

“This is the part where it explodes, you mean.” His audience consisted of ten or so fellow enthusiasts, carefully selected for their ability to contribute to the project. One was a physics professor, one was a machinist, and the rest were in possession of various large quantities of money.

And there was one Heckler, whose job was to entertainingly tee up talking points cleverly disguised as criticisms. He grinned at the Heckler, his housemate, Josh. Josh raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“In point of fact, of seven of these we’ve put above the Karman line, only one has actually exploded. We were able to retrieve the payload from that one, actually, and re-use it.”

He paused a moment, looking around at his audience. He hadn’t covered anything that wasn’t on the youtube channel, but people liked hearing it from him in person. He turned back to the whiteboard and began to draw circles and lines in green.

 “A ring of rockets around the perimeter of the payload ignite in sequence, three at a time, boosting the payload the rest of the way out of the stratosphere and into the range for low earth orbit.”

“And then it explodes?” Josh again.

“No,” he said, “So far the only ignition containment failure was the one at primary ignition. Actually, the problem we reach at this point is a universal one: Heat death.”

The physicist snorted; two of the potential investors laughed out loud.

“So,” said one of the investors who hadn’t laughed, “you’re saying they run out of fuel.”

“Yes. As designed, actually. The goal with these things was to put them above the Karman line, just to prove that it could be done. That goal has been achieved.

“The next goal involves actually getting them to orbit. Minimum orbital velocity is about seventeen thousand miles per hour, which...”

“Which requires a big-assed rocket.” Josh again. “So some of the payload needs to be giant tube full of explosives.”

“Yeah,” said Taylor, with the air of someone admitting something. “Yeah, a significant amount of the initial payload weight will be taken up by the third-stage booster.

“There are basically two ways around this: One, we can have something already in orbit basically hook the new stuff as it goes past. This requires a lot of work on coordination and will take some serious software modeling to achieve, and will still require some sort of tertiary boost, because the initial phase, the balloon, doesn’t allow for a whole lot of accuracy in aiming.”

Nods all around the room.

“Okay,” said one of the machinists, who was obviously fascinated, “So what’s the second way?”

“Scale.”

There was a certain amount of shifting around.

“A significantly larger payload means that we need bigger envelopes -- or more envelopes -- and more second-stage rockets, but it’s basically feasible. And even if we triple or quadruple the size of the whole thing, it’s still going to come in under a hundred K per launch, which is pennies compared to a traditional rocket.”

There was a general shifting in seats. Silence grew as everyone thought about it.

“Yeah, but...” Josh again, standing at the back of the room. “Honestly, you’re talking about a hybrid balloon rocket launch system. Isn’t this basically...” He waved his hands around vaguely. “Isn’t this the sort of thing a five-year-old dreams up and draws out in detailed crayon for the fridge?”

Taylor grinned. He leaned over to where his briefcase was sitting on a table nearby, rifling momentarily before he whipped out a battered-looking sheet of typing paper; he slapped it onto the whiteboard and stuck it in place with a magnet.

It was a crayon drawing of a rocket hanging from a balloon, a stick-figure man astride the rocket grinning out at posterity. Taylor turned back toward the room and grinned a grin that matched the stick figure’s.

After a grueling question and answer period, after the money people had finally wandered off and the physicist had been lured away by a good looking young man engaged for just this purpose, after the machinists had retired to a nearby pub to argue with each other about arcane metal-smoothing techniques, Taylor took the picture back down from the whiteboard and slid it carefully back into the folder in his briefcase.

“So,” said Josh, now sitting in the back of the room, looking even more exhausted than Taylor, “What do you think?”

“I think we’re going to get angel-level investment from at least half of them...”

Josh shook his head. “All on the strength of a crayon drawing.”

Taylor grinned. “It’s all about showmanship, my friend. And I have to tell you, getting the aging right on the drawing was not easy, it was like a whole day’s work, seven or eight tries.”

“Right. I’m sort of amazed that that was the hardest part.”

“It just goes to show, you can never tell what the hard part of a particular project is going to be. Who knew that making fake rocket launch GoPro video would be so easy?”