We reach for the stars in an immense struggle that consumes every heartbeat, every day, from every scientist, engineer, and technician. We battle time and physics with every calorie our human metabolisms can deliver, but is it ever enough? Join an e...
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Sparks fly and forklifts beep at 2am, and Joe moves quickly past, head down, urgently attending to a welling flood of tasks that never decreases, never gets easier. Sweating in the late night heat of the south Texas swamp, he shuffles across the weather-dampened concrete of the rocket primary structures production tent, passing speakers that blast rock, mariachi, and EDM in an echoing, electronically saturated chorus that fills the space to overflowing.
Supercomputers across the globe churn away at the finite element models he submitted to the queue an hour ago. Even the company's massive parallel cluster of CPUs is limited in the number of calculations it can compress into every second, so the jobs from every engineer and analyst each receive a priority-based ration from the server banks according to the QoS (Quality of Service) rules. Ever-advancing structural, fluid, and thermal simulations pile onto the cluster, always increasing demand for teraflops and terabytes. Warm plumes constantly dissipate as air conditioning condensers at the company's multitude of data centers emit the worldwide thermal signature of the hopeful advance of a species by way of hot silicon.
He hurries past the foundry. The vacuum furnace gapes and discharges glowing turbopump castings in rippling waves of superheated air. Joe arrives at the tent's hangar door but stops short as a tracked crane roars slowly across his path, suspending from its boom a shining stainless steel rocket section nine meters in diameter, swinging like a ship in a slow swell as it heads to its next manufacturing cell. Joe jogs around a corner in the dark, and passes the shadowy forms of fellow techs and engineers that exchange nods or shouts of excitement as he hurries past. He makes brief stops at the bathroom and breakroom. From a warm plastic box he forks sustenance without bothering to notice its taste. Joe and most of the others know they aren't quite making the minimum contribution to biological necessity, but with bloodshot eyes they force themselves to continue working regardless.
The week, the month, the quarter have been a flow of activity like a stormy gale, with random surges that keep him up for twenty, thirty, forty hours straight. The river of tasks inundating the organization comes in streams of meetings attended by a few, a dozen, or a hundred of the world's best: here's how we'll fly, here's our hope for the system, here's a sudden change of plan from our crazed genius founder. Bad news, good news - heartrates and blood pressures rise either way. The chronology leading to the present is tangled in most of their minds, but the team presses on, always attempting to accelerate. Design reviews conducted in hallways scattered with rocket parts, in huddles around glowing flat screens, and in video calls during commutes both ways in the streaks of headlights and taillights have shaped the extreme machines growing in the production tent.
Squinting in the bright lights, Joe arrives at his table in the row of temporary office trailers behind the production tents. The supercomputer is done. Joe draws a breath as he downloads the results to the Texas swamp, fighting a rush of adrenaline.
The hundreds of hours leading to this moment flash: charter and commercial flights between sites, stays in camping trailers among the mosquitoes, frogs, and crabs of the country's southernmost extremity, lightning dancing, sparks flying, and hammers smashing to align rocket barrel sections, deafening. Five-signature peer reviews, redesigns, re-reviews, then finally approvals and parts release. Requests For Quotes, Requests For Parts, Requests For Purchase Orders — all in parallel while the team scrambles to refine the analysis models. Forklifts, pallets, and box cutters - parts arrive, barcode stickers print in ribbons and fall like snow to stick on cardboard and plastic baggies. Inventory throbs like a lung, inhaling check-ins and exhaling checkouts. Fluid transfer tubes, wire harnesses, and actuators arrive and immediately depart for installation. Sparks fly. A row of machines under construction aims skyward, but will they succeed? No answer yet - the analyses are still running, far too late.
