Orbital Cloud Page 2

  Kazumi closed his eyes, feeling the weight of the spinning eraser as he sorted through the information he had in his head. SAFIR 3 had been launched from northern Iran’s Imam Khomeini Space Center on December 1, ten days ago. The first-stage rocket booster that had gotten it off the ground had fallen back into the ocean that same day. Its third-stage apogee motor had successfully completed the launch’s primary mission of inserting two satellites into orbit at 500 km before settling into orbit itself at the same altitude. It would most likely stay there for a few decades, circling the Earth as space debris. What interested Kazumi was the second stage: the rocket body that had allowed SAFIR 3 to climb into an initial parking orbit 250 km up. US Strategic Command had named it “SAFIR 3 R/B.”

  When would it fall back to Earth?

  Satellites, rocket shells, and other debris orbiting lower than 500 km slowly but surely lost velocity and altitude as they collided with atmospheric particles, scarce but not absent at those heights. Once a piece of debris dropped below 170 km or so, things started to change. Atmospheric molecules bounced off the object, now moving at eight kilometers a second, which began to glow with the energy of the collisions. It also developed a tail, albeit one too faint to be seen from the Earth’s surface.

  Under 80 km, the atmosphere became so dense with molecules attracted by the gravity of the Earth that it became like a thick soup enveloping the debris. No longer able to bounce freely off the moving object, molecules were pressed against each other. This compression resulted in temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius, which in turn melted the front of the object and caused a long tail of plasma to flare up behind it.

  The birth of a shooting star.

  Kazumi’s web service, Meteor News, was in the business of predicting the appearance of shooting stars for its subscribers. And SAFIR 3 was a much-anticipated bit of debris, set to make its glittering debut in the sky that very weekend.

  Unlike satellite fragments or similar miscellaneous debris, the several-meters-long metal cylinder of a rocket body still contained some liquid fuel and was highly likely to turn into a brilliantly shining kind of shooting star called a “fireball.” In fact, rocket bodies were often long and fragile enough to break in half, creating twin shooting stars. If Meteor News could predict when and where a shooting star like that would fall, its reputation among space enthusiasts and photographers interested in celestial bodies would receive a significant boost. In fact, this might be the best chance they ever got to increase their paid subscriber count, which was currently languishing in the low two hundreds.

  Kazumi looked down at the laptop’s screen. It was filled with two-line elements, or “TLEs,” a data format for describing objects in orbit that packed orbital angle, motion, and other useful information into just two lines of text.

  These TLEs were only a couple of hours old, fresh from USSTRATCOM. Every day, TLEs for thousands of objects orbiting the Earth were updated by the Joint Space Operations Center run by the Joint Functional Component Command for Space within STRATCOM. The primary intended beneficiaries were companies operating communications and other satellites, but the information was a treasure trove for space fans too. They used it to identify the lines of light they saw arc across the sky, to check when the ISS would be visible overhead, to plot satellites on maps, and more. Kazumi used it to forecast shooting stars at Meteor News.

  “Parked at 250 km. How far has it slipped, I wonder?”

  Kazumi opened the TLE from yesterday and placed his left index finger against the eighth field of its second line: Mean motion, 16.1. That was fast enough to go around the Earth just over sixteen times in a day. A higher mean motion generally meant a lower orbit. The ISS at its 420 km altitude had a mean motion of 15.5, while the Chinese space station Tiangong-2 at 350 km had a mean motion of 15.7. You could estimate an object’s altitude fairly well by comparing its mean motion to representative examples like this. This sort of calculation was second nature to Kazumi, who spent every day staring at TLEs for orbital debris.

  Kazumi opened the TLE for today.

  “Huh? 15.8 … ?”

  A mean motion of 15.8 implied an altitude over 300 km—which would mean that the object’s altitude had increased.

  “Must be some kind of mistake,” Kazumi muttered. Still swinging the eraser with his right hand, he used his left to place the two TLEs side by side so that he could compare their other orbital elements.

  “Eccentricity holding stable near zero. Yesterday’s inclination eighty-five degrees …”

  Kazumi held his right arm out horizontally in front of him, eraser still orbiting his finger, then raised it half a fist higher. He had memorized some of the angles different parts of his body made. At the end of an outstretched arm, his fist covered around ten degrees of arc. His thumb at the same distance was about two degrees across.

  Kazumi imagined a sphere with a 6,400-kilometer radius—Earth—superimposed over his right finger. The eraser became the duralumin rocket body that was SAFIR 3’s second stage. The thread connecting the two was gravity.

  “December, so the sun’s declination is minus twenty degrees or so …”

  He spun the Earth superimposed over his finger away from himself. The sun was about two kilometers behind him, near Komaba-todaimae Station, two stops from Shibuya. As he added the alternation of day and night to the Earth in his mind’s eye, Kazumi followed the same orbit around it as the one given for SAFIR 3 by the TLEs. He looked down and saw the surface of the planet passing by 300 km beneath his feet.

  He was in.

  He soared north past the reddish-brown expanse of Australia and saw the Hawaiian Islands appear up ahead. This was yesterday’s inclination. Kazumi tried to shift his orbit exactly ten degrees, to match the TLE from today. The pull against his index finger was surprisingly strong. This was SAFIR 3’s moment.

  Strange. Had SAFIR 3 really made an orbital adjustment requiring this much power? And if so—

  “The last big deal of the year has arrived!”

  The voice came from diagonally in front of him, bringing Kazumi back to his surroundings. The Earth floating at his fingertip vanished. The whitewashed duralumin tube that was SAFIR 3’s second stage was just an eraser once more.

  Ten or so of Kazumi’s “coworkers” were gathered at the round table in the middle of his working space. Watanabe, the most senior among them, held court at the center of the group, holding up a tablet displaying an article on a news website.

  The row for tokyo on the world clock hanging on the wall had just hit 9:30. This was when the morning information exchange, known as the “AM exchange” or “AMX” for short, began. The AMX was an institution at Fool’s Launchpad, designed to help prevent chronically unpunctual freelancers from drifting away from regular working rhythms.

  “Let’s go with this for today’s AMX,” Watanabe said, showing his tablet to the assembled attendees. “A pure software service, sold for forty billion. That’s a first. Let me open up the VisGen release and Pat’s blog and see what we can learn from them.”

  VisGen had been founded by Pat Feuer, an IT entrepreneur who’d only just turned twenty. That made him eight years younger than Kazumi and twelve younger than Watanabe. Watanabe called him by his first name in an attempt to communicate to the other Fool’s Launchpad tenants—Watanabe preferred to call them “coworkers”—that such success was attainable even for someone in their generation.

  “First, let’s have a big round of applause. Pat, congratulations on your exit!”

  There weren’t many sitting at the table, but they were passionate and applauded vigorously. Even Kazumi lightly tapped the fist in which he held the eraser against his left hand. In the wake of the touch screen revolution, inaugurated by the smartphone and then the tablet, attracting as much capital as Pat had for software alone wasn’t easy. A sale like this was the ideal exit for VisGen.

  A hand went up at
the table. It was Hamada, who’d just joined Fool’s Launchpad that week.

  “Forty billion dollars—that’s four hundred oku yen, right?”

  “Hamada-kun,” said the woman sitting next to him, using a slightly patronizing form of address. She was the only person at the table wearing a suit. “You’ve got to stop converting everything to yen in Japanese numbers. You won’t even get a start-up off the ground if you don’t get used to thinking in dollars.”

  This was Mary, the resident English expert. She was Japanese—her real name was Hitomi or something similar, as Kazumi recalled—but she used an English name for business like they did in Singapore or Taiwan.

  “Come on, Mary. That’s a bit harsh,” said Watanabe, noticing Hamada’s wounded expression. “You really should get used to thousands and billions though, Hamada,” he added. “If you ever end up working on a job where these figures come up a lot, just ask someone for help. Like this. Hey, Kazumi! What’s $40 billion in yen?”

  Kazumi raised his hand to acknowledge the address. “Forty billion dollars at today’s rates? Four point five cho yen.”

  The table nodded in approval. Kazumi forced a smile, then turned back to his laptop. Mental arithmetic was no big deal. He just happened to run a site that took payment in foreign currencies and occasionally made orbital calculations with figures representing distances of hundreds of kilometers but written out to the millimeter.

  “Cheers,” Watanabe said, and turned back to the group. “You see? If you need help, just ask for it. That’s how VisGen got so big. Oh, that reminds me—when I was at my publisher’s yesterday about Pocket Folder, I presented my one-click purchase proposal, and …”

  Watanabe had entered his Sales Tales phase. This was his way of reminding the other tenants of Fool’s Launchpad how important it was to develop services beyond straight contract work.

  Watanabe’s insistence on always keeping your eyes on the prize could be tiresome, but Kazumi liked the atmosphere here. He doubted he could maintain the motivation to keep Meteor News going if he switched to an office full of unambitious web designers for hire, even if the rent were cheaper there. Being able to work alongside people who wanted something more was one of the reasons he was willing to pay the ¥40,000 a month that Fool’s Launchpad charged, despite the impact on his budget.

  A mass of orange moved at the corner of his vision. “Good morning, Kimura-san,” it said.

  A gigantic MacBook slid onto the desk opposite him. Here was the other reason he was at Fool’s Launchpad: Akari Numata, whose trademark was a fluorescent orange Afro more than twice the size of her head.

  Akari unloaded an assortment of devices and cable bundles, piling them up on either side of her MacBook. Three smartphones, two tablets, one sixteen-port USB hub, a portable Wi-Fi hotspot, and a large mobile battery. It must have weighed twenty pounds or more altogether.

  One thing Kazumi hadn’t seen before was the two-inch-square circuit board wrapped in clear film. Noticing that it had both a USB and an Ethernet port, he craned his neck to get a closer look, but Akari’s voice interrupted him before he could.

  “Is today’s news ready?” she asked.

  “Not yet, sorry,” Kazumi replied. “I was planning to write about SAFIR 3, but something’s off about the data.”

  “The top story’s not the meteor shower? The pageviews for that are going crazy.”

  “Yeah, but the people coming for that one aren’t going to become paying subscribers.”

  Kazumi had written a blog post about the current Geminid meteor shower containing a brief overview of the Geminids and some observational data. The post had become much more popular than he’d expected after a web-development site praised the intricate 3-D graphics of the Earth he’d included, bringing a flood of engineers to Meteor News in addition to their usual customers.

  “Oh,” said Akari. “Well, I’ll increase the server count anyway. Otherwise, the subscriber pages will slow down every time visitor numbers double. Is it okay if I just set it to add servers automatically as the pageviews go up? I could do it manually, but then there’d be long times when the servers would just be idling.”

  “Adding servers automatically sounds a bit risky to me,” said Kazumi.

  Meteor News was hosted on virtual server space rented from a cloud service run by the world’s biggest retail site. The service let you specify how many servers to use and for how long, down to the second, but the servers weren’t free. Renting a middle-spec server cost ¥150 per night, so if a hundred were added due to an unexpected wave of visitors, the bill could go up ¥15,000 overnight. That would hurt.

  “Trust me, it beats managing the servers manually,” said Akari. “How about if I set up the dashboard so you can cap the number of servers from there? It’s all ready to go, just waiting for deployment.”

  Kazumi knew she was right. He should be spending his time on writing, trying to draw in more subscribers, not micromanaging the server count week after week. And if they could just get up to a thousand subscribers or so, he’d be able to devote half of each week to the site.

  “All right,” he said at last. “Go for it.”

  “Thanks,” Akari said. She turned her attention to her MacBook and began tapping rhythmically away at the keyboard. Having an engineer as skilled as her on his side—and for so little that she practically worked for free—gave Kazumi the time he needed to write his news posts. If giving her free rein was what it took to keep her motivated, it wouldn’t do any harm.

  With a final flourish from Akari, the sound of the keyboard stopped. “Deployment complete,” she said.

  “Already?”

  “Just let me test it. Ten thousand pageviews per second on the 3-D view. You watch the analytics.”

  Kazumi scrambled to open his view. Ten thousand pageviews per second? That was worse than a denial-of-service attack. His server setup couldn’t handle ten thousand requests per second for plain HTML, let alone 3-D image data.

  “Ready?” said Akari. “Here we go.”

  Without waiting for Kazumi to nod, Akari began typing furiously again. As Kazumi watched, the figure “10,000” appeared on the real-time hit counter and a new bar appeared at the edge of the hit graph, so much larger than the others that the graph was forced to rescale. The previous rises and falls of a dozen pageviews here, a dozen there were too small to see at the new scale. Page requests were flooding in from Seattle, Singapore, Hong Kong, Brazil.

  “Ten seconds, one hundred thousand pageviews in total,” said Akari. “All distributed among the servers so only the 3-D pages should have slowed down.”

  Just as Akari said, the real-time hit count held steady at 13,400. Kazumi opened Meteor News, dreading the worst, but the 3-D-free top page loaded just as smoothly as ever.

  “The virtual server count went up by 120 to deal with the activity, just as planned,” Akari continued. “Okay, I’ll pull the plug now. Cost for this test … let me see, ¥122. Can I send you the bill?”

  Kazumi was speechless for a moment. “Sure,” he said at last. “Of course. But, wow, that’s amazing. I’ve never seen the pageviews move like that before.”

  Thanks to Akari, the virtual server control panel now included round-robin and test functionality. Which was ridiculous—things like that were used by services with user counts in the millions, like VisGen. A site like Meteor News, which saw a few thousand hits per day at most, didn’t need that sort of power, and neither did the ones run by the web designers that Akari did most of her day-to-day contracting for.

  “By the way, aren’t you going to post about this?” Akari said, holding up one of her tablets. “The launch is coming up soon.”

  The tablet displayed a news story about what promised to be not only the last but also the biggest space event of the year: Ronnie Smark’s Wyvern Orbital Hotel.

  Smark was a legend in the IT industry. In the late
nineties, he’d made his fortune founding a service for transferring money over the Internet, allowing anyone to set up shop online. Today he was at the cutting edge of space development. Having started Project Wyvern with the goal of making consumer space tourism a reality, he’d developed one rocket after another in his Loki series, and now even did contract work for NASA. The International Space Station, whose rising maintenance costs had gradually eroded the international assistance it had once enjoyed, already received 20 percent of its supplies via the Loki 8 rocket and Wyvern spacecraft, both Ronnie’s.

  Loki 9 was set to launch from Cape Canaveral this week with both Ronnie and his journalist daughter Judy on board. The two of them would then spend a week in space, staying at an orbital hotel that Wyvern was to spit out, and then transfer to the ISS. It would be the most sensational twenty-day vacation in history.

  “Loki 9’s planned orbit is available on the Wyvern site,” Kazumi said. “But maybe I’ll do a write-up.”

  “You should,” said Akari. “Some readers might be interested if you have any kind of scoop on it, even if it’s mostly just a bunch of numbers. But enough about that—when will the news going out today be finished?”

  “I’ll start work on it this evening. Some last-minute design work came in. I could use some help, actually. “

  “Sounds like you’re pretty busy.” Akari closed her MacBook instantly, signaling her utter lack of interest in web design work. She didn’t seem to have much interest in space either, but for some reason she worked hard to make Meteor News look good.

  It had been Akari’s help that had taken Meteor News from an unremarkable email magazine to a rich online service accessible from PCs, tablets, smartphones, and even those smart glasses that were just starting to catch on. The content came from Kazumi, but the app and the server programs supporting the service were all Akari’s work. The site could accept payment in currencies from around the world, not to mention mobile credit. It even had support systems to help Kazumi write articles in English, one of his weak spots. It would have cost millions of yen to outsource the entire tech infrastructure for Meteor News, but Akari had taken care of everything herself. What’s more, she’d done all this for a mere 20 percent of revenue. Given that monthly revenue was currently twenty or thirty thousand yen, her share was practically nothing.