Outer Space

I am back from vacation. I took a week off from the blog last week and am now rejuvenated and ready to push this book across the finish line. I have about twenty beta readers reading my draft manuscript and continue to make edits and updates. I was just adding some additional detail about rockets to the novel, so I thought I'd talk about some of the SpaceX technology referenced in the book. Remember, all technology is advanced by about seven years in the book, but it is also based on reality. I sometimes wonder if I am too conservative with my estimates. I feel a need to get the book out before the advances I articulate in technology are already here. The rate of change of new technology continues to accelerate!

The Quantum Contingent features many SpaceX advancements including Falcon rockets, the Dragon capsule, and even the
upcoming StarHopper rocket ship and its deep sea landing platform, Phobos. If you follow SpaceX, you’ve been treated to some amazing videos of their launches, their landings and even some dramatic exploding failures, all in the name of rapidly advancing the state of the art. Reusable rockets dramatically reduce the cost of space travel. Elon Musk views SpaceX as a chance to make humans a multi-planetary species by building colonies on Mars and in order to succeed, you need to be able to reuse rockets, and produce them in mass quantities. SpaceX has demonstrated reusability with the Falcon 9 and are now producing Raptor rocket engines at the rate of about one every two days! The Starship will use twenty-nine rocket engines, and be fully reusable. Starship is huge. It is ~390 feet tall, and designed to carry up to 100 people. It is taller than the Saturn V rocket that took US astronauts to the moon. (The Saturn V is ~363 feet tall). SpaceX has also purchased two deep water oil platforms to repurpose as StarShip launch and landing platforms. The platforms are fully operational in The Quantum Contingent. They should be ready next year. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_offshore_platform

Of course, SpaceX already has "drone" barges that serve as autonomous landing platforms for the Falcon 9 rocket. One thing that is hard to grasp from the pictures and videos of the Falcon landing is its scale. Even though the Falcon 9 is not has tall as the Starship, it is no small rocket, standing at ~290 feet tall! I try to keep the science accurate as I project it into the future, so you'll see sizes and descriptions in the novel that are based on either today's reality or future projections of today's realities. 

So, as you may have guessed by now, there are places in The Quantum Contingent that I haven't travelled to, outer space being one of them. So please join me on the journey and learn more about up and coming technologies from the comfort of my upcoming spy novel, The Quantum Contingent.

Thanks for reading the blog, soon the book!

Greg