To Be Inspired  

Chapter 1:

In the year 2020, Dr. Robert Kelsie introduced an inertial propulsion device to the world.

Working with a team of students at Texas A&M, he demonstrated that propellantless propulsion could be achieved by the use of magnetic/static fields that created periodic mass variations in a crystalline material.

This material could then be given rapid mechanical oscillations that coincided with these mass variations that would produce a net thrust in one direction.

Dr. Kelsie’s life quickly became quite busy as companies offered him positions to be the head of their R&D departments. Kelsie rebuffed all of them until a flamboyant entrepreneur named Hugh Richardson offered him a position at his newly created company.

Richardson created this company to specifically develop advanced propulsion systems derived from Dr. Kelsie’s ideas; he offered the capital, the company, and a 50% share in all of the profits made from his ideas.

Dr. Kelsie was a brilliant scientist, but not a businessman; Richardson offered to put him in a place to pursue his ideas without worry of money or trying to get government grants.

Richardson also laid out a plan in which the technology would be licensed freely and used to open up the solar system; he even mentioned races in space using this propulsion. No other company could match the generosity and vision of Hugh Richardson and Kelsie soon agreed to go into partnership with him.

Dr. Kelsie got along quite well with Richardson; they both shared the vision of opening up the solar system to everyone as well as having fun along the way.

The next few years were exciting ones as the RK drive (Richardson -Kelsie drive) was used in almost all major space systems, licensed by a plethora of companies which all paid licensing fees to RK space systems.

The money rolled in as the industry expanded and every spacecraft used the RK drive for operation in space, by the end of the decade, airplanes, boats and even some cars were using them.

 With the advent of another revolutionary technology in 2033, that of zero-point energy generators, ships that could take off vertically from the moon and fly all of the way to low-Earth orbit in a matter of hours became a possibility.

 Richardson believed that a competition with prizes was a great way to advance the state of the art in spaceship, power and propulsion design.

 It also gave him a way of spotting any potential talent and/or genius in the field and recruiting them to work for him.

In the four decades since starting RK space systems, Richardson also created other companies that specialized in spaceship construction, technology development competitions, and even lunar hotels.

The moon had a considerable amount of commercial activity from hotels to mining camps to numerous geology expeditions.

The cost of transit to the moon had fallen dramatically because of the RK drive, which opened up whole new commercial possibilities, such as privately funded geology expeditions to the moon.

It wasn’t long before Richardson set up an annual competition to advance the performance of these new types of spacecraft that could propel themselves to incredible speeds since fuel was not a requirement on these craft.

 Styling himself after rich adventurers of the past, Richardson often flew his own spaceship, made by his own company, in these competitions.

 Many attributed this to an oversized ego, there was that, however Richardson truly loved the adventure and excitement of flying in space and that was seventy percent of his motivation, ego; and the desire to take part in the opening of the solar system to everyone, made up the rest, plus he was never one to turn down an opportunity to draw similarities between him and another wealthy industrialist/adventurer of the twentieth century that had a similar name.

RK1, Moonship1 and Moonbat

Chapter 2:

Hugh sat in his spacecraft on the surface of the moon ready to take off, along with nine other racers in their spacecraft.

The first race of the Lunar 3000 was about to get underway, the objective was to see who could take off from the lunar surface, circle around the Earth and return to this spot to land in the shortest amount of time.

 Hugh estimated, with his ship’s capability of .67 gee of constant acceleration, that it would take around 8 ½ hours to complete the race.

 Hopefully this would be better than what the other competitors could do. His ship was dubbed “Hugh’s wedge” by the press; it was a fairly sleek spacecraft that looked somewhat like a Ferrari with a large window across the breadth of the cockpit and a tapered aerodynamic nose with stubby protrusions on the side that looked like wings that housed the propulsion system.

 It had a generally aerodynamic wedge shape to it, so its design invited the rather unflattering name, even though it was a nice looking spaceship, with painted blue flames that flowed past half its length. Hugh just referred to it as the RK1 racer.

Looking across at the other competitors he saw the spacecraft from Scaled Composites to his right, it was a sleek craft as well.

 He was worried about these guys; they knew their stuff and had been in this business a lot longer than he had. Their entry was MoonShip1 and it had a narrower profile with what seemed like larger propulsion pods than his RK1.

Hopefully he made up for less engine thrust with a decrease in weight.

The other competitor to his left was from Trans-System Exploration Corporation.

 They were a team of ex-NASA engineers that formed their own private exploration company a couple of years ago.

 With the new low-cost spaceships now on the market, private exploration opportunities were considerable.

An assortment of cable TV channels, universities and companies were always wanting to mount a private expedition to the moon, Mars and sometimes an occasional near-Earth asteroid. They were kept busy and they needed their own custom-made spaceships to accommodate their customer’s needs.

 TSEC was a very experienced group of spacecraft makers; their design was more of an all-out lander configuration with a flat-bottomed craft with clustered propulsion modules on the side that tapered towards the top.

It seemed to be all engine, with few creature comforts. It was called the Moonbat and was painted with a large bat on it with the cockpit window as the eyes.

The starting point of the race was a landing port constructed in front of the Lunar Hilton’s large restaurant windows.

The Hilton won the bid to host the race because it had the largest lunar restaurant on the moon as well as ample window views from its spacious restaurant. It was a great way for VIP’s to watch the start of the race in the comfort of the restaurant and follow it for the entire 8-10 hours if they chose while they enjoyed the comfort of the restaurant’s luxuries.

 Many VIP’s were indeed present at this race, all of the CEO’s from the competitors companies were here, a few were flying their own racers.

CEO’s from Boeing and Lockheed Martin were there as well along with the vice-president of the United States. It was a time for hobnobbing with the rich and powerful while doing it all in one of the most exclusive and exotic places imaginable, the moon.

 The 8-10 hour race was mostly a large party for the attending VIP’s, so it was an event that was enthusiastically attended.

 The time for the start of the race neared as all ten competitors were working through their last-minute checklists. Hugh ran through the system checks, the Zero-Point generators, the new M2 RK drive, and the guidance systems were all nominal.

He double-checked his nav-points; he was ready.

 The com system had a feed from the announcer’s desk inside the hotel, so Hugh could see and hear the what was going on during the race.

 Each ship had a cam and microphone feed that transmitted whatever went on inside the craft to the outside world, so everyone would be able to follow the activities during the entire race.

 Hugh looked around at the other racers as the start time neared, he could see some of the ships rock to and fro from the impulse of their engines, however no sound and no lunar dust was disturbed because of the inherent nature of inertial drives.

 It was more like silent, bobbling balloons waiting to be released.

Chapter 3:

Hugh stared upwards through his cockpit window as the Earth hung like a blue jewel in the black lunar sky. That view would always be breathtaking to him.

 Over the com, the thirty second mark was announced, Hugh pulled his attention away from the incredible vista of Earth overhead and concentrated on his instrument panel. A quick check revealed systems were still nominal, his counter on the instrument panel counted down from five seconds, 4..3...2..1 !

Hugh hit the throttle that supplied power to his propulsion systems and he quickly felt the acceleration build to 7/10ths of a gee.

 The VIP’s in the hotel cheered as the ships rose out of site, one of the lesser-known competitor ships suddenly veered off course and lost power to their drive system.

 It coasted upwards a ways as the pilot used it’s RK positioning units to push the spacecraft away from the hotel, it then started falling back towards the surface, it crashed a few hundred feet from the hotel.

 The emergency craft were at the crash site rapidly, the ship cracked its hull when it hit and all of the air rushed out of it, the pilot was wearing a skin-suit with a few minutes of air supply.

 Fortunately that was enough time for the emergency crews to get there and rescue the pilot, he had only minor cuts and bruises and was in fairly good shape.

“Darn shame” Hugh thought as he watched events unfold on his ship monitor. “I really liked their design, guess they didn’t work out all of their power integration issues.”

Hugh set his ship on autopilot, barring any glitches, there wouldn’t be a need for any close monitoring for a couple of hours until the ship would turn around at the half-way point and begin it’s deceleration towards Earth.

Hugh checked his external monitors and saw the TSEC and Scaled Composites ships maintaining close to the same acceleration as his ship.

Scaled’s Moonship1 and the RK1 were deadlocked in terms of acceleration, they were almost perfectly matched, but TSEC’s Moonbat was slowly pulling away from both of them.

All Hugh could do was watch them pull away, hopefully there were a few tricks that the TSEC guys haven’t thought of and it would pay dividends for Hugh towards the end of the race.

The halfway point was reached and the RK1 turned and began its deceleration.

The Moonbat was almost beyond visual range by now; it was just a spec on the telescopic cameras on the RK1.

The Moonship1 made its turn, but didn’t decelerate right then, it soon pulled beyond visual range as the RK1 maintained it’s mid-point deceleration.

The other six competitors were lagging far enough behind to where they weren’t within visual range when they made their turn.

The RK1 was now decelerating from its peak speed of 182,000 Kilometers per hour.

Hugh was mulling these developments over, “The TSEC ship has simple raw power, it can accelerate faster than the rest of us, not surprising, since it’s basically a cluster of engines with a small cockpit on top. But what are the Scaled guys up to? We were deadlocked during the acceleration phase, but now they’re holding off on their deceleration. Maybe there’s some latent performance in their design that they haven’t used yet.”

Hugh mulled this over the next two hours as the Earth rushed up to meet his ship, it soon loomed large in his cockpit window.

Chapter 4:

As he neared the Earth, he watched the Moonbat on his monitors make a pass 500 miles above Earth as it swung around the planet and shot itself on a return trajectory to the moon. The Moonship1 then made it’s pass by Earth. It came in closer, about 400 miles away from Earth and then accelerated towards the moon.

 Looking closely on the monitors as the race coverage showed the inside of Moonship1's cockpit, he saw a readout on it’s panel that showed acceleration of .7 g, they were holding something back after all.

The RK1 careened past the Earth a few minutes later, Hugh believed that this was his chance to make up for some lost time, he angled the approach to Earth to come within 70 miles of the planet which would cut down on the size of his flight arc as he flew by.

It was the same principle as getting the inside track when you raced cars on an oval track.

The RK1 shot past the Earth rapidly as it was redirected towards the moon, Hugh then reduced power on some of the craft subsystems and channeled as much power as he could to the engines, he was now accelerating at .69 gees.

After making his pass over Earth, he pulled ahead of the Moonbat and Moonship1.

Their differing trajectories put them well beyond each other’s visual range, but he watched the coverage of the race from the Lunar Hilton back on the moon on the ship’s monitor as they tracked the progress of each ship.

Hugh altered his turnaround point to maximize his speed while he ran his engines full-tilt as he began the deceleration towards the moon.

The RK1 still maintained a lead over the other two, Moonship1’s trajectory put it ahead of the Moonbat when it made its pass over Earth, it seemed like they were deadlocked in acceleration now, Scaled’s acceleration, at full power now, matched TSEC’s ship and they were both gaining on the RK1.

After another two hours, the moon loomed large in the window; Moonship1 was in the lead now and Hugh’s RK1 was ahead of TSEC’s Moonbat. The final positioning for the landing phase of the race was now under way.

 Since all of the ships were converging on a single location, their trajectory brought them within visual range once again. Hugh’s ship was slightly behind the TSEC ship now and Moonship1 maintained a substantial lead on both of them, it looked like a race for 2^nd place now, but Hugh was determined to give it his best. Moonracer1 was within 500 feet of the landing pad and vectoring in at a relaxed pace, but the TSEC ship was only a few feet in front of Hugh.

 He decided to vector all of his directional thrusters in an aft direction and allowed his ship to decelerate at a slower rate than the Moonbat, he was going to come in as fast as he could and use his positioning systems to add to the thrust at the last second to keep him from hitting the surface too hard.

 It looked like the TSEC pilot opted to play it safe and at the last second Hugh’s RK1 edged out the Moonbat as it hit the surface of the landing pad, bounced up a few feet as Hugh furiously fought to regain control and then eased it down softly after a few seconds. The Moonbat landed as the RK1 came back down from its previous “bounce landing”, after a quick review of the rules, the panel of judges ruled that the RK1 had beat the Moonbat at touchdown since the rules only stated that the ship had to land in a functional condition, not that it had to be perfectly under control.

The TSEC team protested, but after a few hours of controversy, the race review board ruled for the RK1. Thus the first lunar race was now over and Scaled Composite’s Moonship1 was the winner and the RK1 racer finished an incredibly hard-fought and controversial second place.

The controversy, and the dramatic footage of the little RK1 fighting to regain control after its bounce, proved to be a great publicity coupe for Hugh and his company.

 All three companies were to profit from the exposure the race gave them and each company projected a distinct public impression from that first race. Since Scaled Composites was the winner, partly because of their camouflaged engine performance, their reputation was one of subtle yet brilliant design.

TSEC had a more no-nonsense reputation after that; they could build very capable systems that got the job done without too much flash.

 And RK Space Systems had the reputation of the whatever-it-takes, by-the-seat-of-your-pants type of engineering. It wasn’t exactly Hugh’s first choice on what type of reputation he wanted his company to have, but it was something he could work with anyway.

Chapter 5:

 Hugh had a private shuttle to transport him, the RK1 team, and the RK1racer back to Earth. Hugh made sure to sit next to Dr. Kelsie on the way back, Kelsie had reviewed some of the initial performance profiles of the ship during the race and Hugh was enthusiastic to talk about the ship’s performance and handling.

 Hugh wasted no time in starting the shoptalk as him and the doctor spent many hours doing while the RK1 was being built. “She handled great doctor!” Hugh said with an enthusiastic grin. “But we’re going to have to figure a way to finish first next time.” “I think you definitely took first place for the dramatic finish Hugh.”

“You’re lucky the hull didn’t crack like an eggshell when you crashed, you would’ve been disqualified if it did.” 

Hugh kind of winced. “Yeah I know it, but I would’ve placed behind TSEC if I didn’t try that though, you just have to roll the dice and sometimes fate will smile upon you.”

The doctor grimaced “Or kill you” “Well Hugh, I suppose we need to go through the entire design when we get back and see what improvements can be made, we will have to analyze where we can make weight reductions, improve thrust from the drive system, and increase output from the Zero-Point Energy system.” “Small improvements in all three of these will yield big results, of course the other teams will do the same thing, so we’ll have to analyze their designs from all of the available data we have and estimate how much of an improvement they could make on their ships, then hopefully we’ll make a bit more improvement than them.”

“Well, that’s what you get the big bucks for doctor” “I have to admit Hugh, that I’d probably do this for free, I really enjoy making working technology out of my theories.”

“And I enjoy flying your ships doctor.” “You know, you were luckier than anyone gave you credit for Hugh.”

“Oh? How’s that doctor?”

“Well, looking at the data showed that all of your clocks on the ship were 15 minutes slow after you landed, I don’t know how you could’ve made any accurate time estimates of your velocity when all your shipboard clocks were off”

“Hmmm, that’s interesting, I noticed that my watch was running 15 minutes slow not long after I landed on the moon.”

“Oh really? Well we’ll run through the data and see what happened, maybe some type of magnetic interference from Earth caused it, this will take some analysis.”

Chapter 6:

The next week Hugh was making the rounds to the television stations and giving interviews to popular web sites. The hoopla over the race was starting to die down and he was able to spend more time managing the company.

Dr. Kelsie called him on the phone in his office one day and asked to see him as soon as possible. He just mentioned something about “startling results” from the race and Richardson arranged to meet with him at Dr. Kelsie’s office the next day.

Hugh arrived in Kelsie’s office the next day; the doctor was sitting at his desk with a graph displayed on his computer monitor.

The doctor motioned for Hugh to come over. “Glad you got here early Hugh, I knew you’d be very interested in seeing this.” As he pointed at his screen, Dr. Kelsie explained. “What you see here are lines that represent the acceleration profile of every ship in the race compared with a plot of time discrepancies.”

 The professor clicked on one of the lines and the time profile overlaid on top of the acceleration profile, it matched perfectly. “This was observed on every ship.”

 “So what does this mean doctor?”

“From what we can gather this is a real phenomenon, time is actually being altered, look closely at the location markers on the graph and you’ll see that these time shifts occurred far away from Earth’s magnetic field as well as inside its magnetic field.”

 “Incredible doctor!” “So where is this generated from, the drive system?” 

“It would seem so Hugh, but look at this.” A click of the mouse brought up another graphic that showed precise positional information as the RK1 underwent these small time shifts.

“Your spacecraft actually seemed to reposition itself in space as well, when these time shifts occurred, probably only a few feet at most during the largest fluctuations, but nonetheless, it was a real phenomenon.”

“Why hasn’t this been observed before doctor?” “From what I’ve been able to see from my analysis Hugh, the accelerations on these racers were greater than anything we’ve flown before and there appears to be an exponential increase in the effects of these distortions when the engines are generating in excess of .65 gee. My best guess is the RK drives generate quantum gravity waves during their operation, which are causing these effects.

This is not entirely surprising, since the mass fluctuations that occur during their operation are the result of quantum inertia fluctuations, this confirms my suspicion that inertia and gravity are just two sides of the same coin, it just hasn’t shown up until we’ve reached these power levels”

“We bought data from Scaled Composite’s team and they were agreeable to that arrangement, TSEC has balked at selling its data to us, but from analyzing Scaled’s data, it looks as if the same thing occurred on their ship as well.”

Hugh was stunned as the implications of this became apparent to him. “So could this be making jumps through spacetime faster than the speed of light?” “I can’t speculate on that right now Hugh, but I would say that’s a reasonable question that would need more study to answer it fully. The data we have just isn’t precise enough to give a clear answer to that.” “Ok, well we’re damn well going to get a clear answer to that doctor!”

 “I think we can find someone to take over your duties in the space propulsion division, I want you to devote full time to getting the answers to this, I’ll free up any resources from the other divisions that you might need, make a list of people to head up a team to research this doctor, and I’ll make sure that that list is filled. From now on, this gets top priority.” Dr. Kelsie replied with a grin. “It will be a pleasure Hugh, this could be as big as Zero-Point energy if it proves to be what I think it is, maybe bigger. I just hope Scaled or TSEC haven’t come to the same conclusion.”

 “You’re already giving me an ulcer doctor, they’re not in quite as good of a position to do a crash research program on something like this, I hope, but I should probably have some inside sources inside these companies to keep us appraised of any developments.

 I want it to be a RK Space Systems ship that breaks the light barrier first.”

“And you’ll probably want to fly that ship when it does, won’t you Hugh?”

 Hugh chuckled. “That’s a distinct possibility doctor.”

Chapter 7:

Dr. Kelsie worked in secrecy the next few months as he assembled his team and equipment. Once the research got underway, it proceeded at a steady pace, Kelsie’s desire was to provide a working FTL drive and then develop a working theory to describe how the RK drive created the spacetime distortions.

The next 10 years RK space systems fielded no entry into the Lunar 3000 since most of the team members that worked on the RK1 racer were now working on FTL research for Dr. Kelsie. The RK1 racer was also being stripped to accommodate the new drive system that Kelsie’s team had been developing. Much work could be done in the lab, but at some point flying the thing in space would become a necessity.

Sending test objects through a spacetime distortion to speeds greater than the speed of light wasn’t a very sound practice in a lab.

Dr. Kelsie had good success at creating velocities close to FTL, but it took time to surpass light speed.

 As the time stretched into the tenth year of R&D, Kelsie had developed a sound theory on the cause of the spacetime distortions as well as a set of equations that predicted the performance of a drive.

 It was time to build a drive system to install into the RK1 racer, after a few weeks, the drive was installed and the RK1 was ready to make some test flights.

Dr. Kelsie had a sensing outpost built on the moon, it could attain visual, radar and cis-lunar positioning data from any ship within thousands of miles.

 It could relay precise timing of an event as soon as the RK1 closed within its range.

 That way precise performance data could be attained on the ship’s capabilities.

The RK1 was to begin its test flight at the RK Space Systems orbital repair facility, since it normally was used for satellite repair, it was a good staging area for such a test.

 Of course Hugh had to fly the RK1 for this test, even against Dr. Kelsie’s protests, he believed such a flight was too risky for a CEO, but Hugh actually had the most flight time in the cockpit of the RK1, and he felt he couldn’t risk an employee on something he should do himself, besides, he had to maintain his image too.

So Hugh piloted the RK1 away from the station in a graceful manner, after confirming all monitor stations were ready, he engaged the drive.

 Looking out of the cockpit window, he saw the stars shimmer for a second and the moon simply appeared in front of him.

The lunar sensing outpost relayed it’s timing info to his spaceship, a travel time of ¾ of a second was recorded for the transit to the moon, a quick calculation showed that to be 1.7 times light speed.

Hugh sat in stunned silence as he pondered upon what had just happened. “He actually did it, he really did it!” He radioed back to Earth, the orbital station confirmed the readings, the light barrier had been surpassed.

Hugh was still in a daze as he looked out of his cockpit window, a TSEC ship was on it’s way to an orbital lunar station as it passed within a mile of his ship.

The repair station in Earth orbit relayed that it was ready for the return run. “I’ll be there in a second.” Hugh quipped as he engaged the trans-light drive and just like that, he was back by the repair station in LEO.

   RK1 Racer goes Trans-Light

Chapter 8:

An hour later, Hugh stepped off of the shuttle onto the landing pad by RK Space System’s headquarters; a number of RKSS employees were there to meet him and gave him a resounding ovation.

 He made his way back to the control room inside RKSS to talk to Dr. Kelsie.

“How does it feel to be Master of Space and Time Dr.?” Hugh stated as he walked into the control room.

“This has been the culmination of my life’s dream, Hugh, so when are you going to buy me lunch at Alpha Centauri?”

 “Looks like that’s going to happen real soon Dr., the ship was so stable, you barely noticed the passage to TL travel, I don’t think we need a whole lot of development to start the manufacture of TL transports, we should probably run some more tests before we announce this to the world though.”

 “I agree Hugh, there are still some bugs to work out of it, I still would like to see what happens when it comes out of TL mode in an uncontrolled fashion, such as power loss to the drive.”

After a few days, the public relations officer Tim Allard called Hugh’s office, he happened to catch Hugh there just as he was getting ready to leave. “Mr. Richardson, I think we have a problem.”  “Oh? Why’s that Mr. Allard?”

 “A video of your ship in orbit around the moon has been circulating around the net.

 It shows the RK1 winking out as it went to TL mode, they also have records of the RK1 being admitted to our orbital repair dock just a few minutes after it was observed in orbit about the moon.

The news organizations have picked up on it, and now it will be on all of the newspaper and cable channels tomorrow.” Richardson replied calmly. “Thank you Tim, this should prove to be interesting in the next few days.”

The next few days were a firestorm of speculation; the New York Times ran the headline “Hugh Richardson breaks dimensional barrier?” Which showed a series of stills from the video as his ship winked out of spacetime.

The news channels were rife with a host of experts speculating about what that video showed. Even TSEC got into the act as they boasted that they were working on something similar and they could probably surpass his performance.

 Hugh was sure that all of TSEC’s pilots had standing orders to video any activity by RKSS when the opportunity arose.

 That transport documented the entire thing from lunar orbit. After Hugh let the publicity mill run rampant for a few days, he realized that he had to make an official announcement; he scheduled a news conference for 12 PM the next day.

The conference room at RKSS was packed with journalists, as he made his way to the podium, the room grew quiet. Hugh cleared his throat and began speaking.

“Almost eleven years ago, after the first Lunar 3000, our Chief Technical Officer, Dr. Robert Kelsie, observed anomalous time discrepancies of our RK1 racer as it made its roundtrip from the moon. After much analysis, it appeared that these time anomalies were in fact real.

As it became apparent the RK drive system was causing these time shifts; I directed Dr. Kelsie to conduct an intensive R&D program on this phenomenon.

The video everyone has seen was the culmination of our R&D program. The RK1 racer was refitted with a drive system that can distort space & time in a controlled fashion and cause rapid transit between distant points.

 It sets up compressed space-time in front of an object and expanded space-time in the back of it.

 The object is then coupled to the compressed space-time by matching the harmonic frequency of the waves. This is much like the famous Alcubierre drive that’s been speculated on for decades, except the fantastic energies that were thought to be a requirement of this scheme have been rendered irrelevant. A very modest amount of energy from an RK drive can be channeled and pulsed in a natural harmonic with space-time to create the effect of local distortions in space-time that cause an object to travel at speeds greater than the speed of light. We at RKSS have taken to calling it Trans-Light travel, or just TL.

 Our RK1 racer achieved a speed equivalent to 1.7c, or 1.7 times faster than the speed of light, it made the transit from Earth to the moon in ¾ of a second from external time references, not ship time.

So we have broken the light barrier, it will take a while to refine these drive systems to where we can begin production on ships and transports with the new drive systems, that’s why we were hesitant to reveal what we were up to, we wanted a more mature product before we went public, but due to the video, we had to go public after our first experimental flight.

We have already filed numerous patents on the various elements of this technology, however it will not be the policy of RKSS to safeguard the secrets of TL travel, we will be liberal in our licensing agreements to this technology.

Besides, over time, it has been my experience that our competitors inside and outside the US will know hundreds of variants of the technology.

 Our patents will be of little use to stop international competitors from stealing our ideas, so it will be better to have a free and open attitude going forward.

At this point I have to make mention of the bigger picture.

 With this technology, the entire solar system becomes easily accessible, even with our crude experimental RK1 racer; we could traverse the entire solar system in little over three hours and it would take about 2 ½ years to reach Alpha Centauri.

 This breakthrough opens up the stars to us; I predict we will see manned expeditions to nearby star systems within five years. The first interstellar colonies could be established soon after that. This was the “giant leap” that I believe Neil Armstrong had in mind when he spoke those words as he stepped onto the lunar surface in 1969, our next step will be to the stars. Now I’ll field a few questions.”

The room erupted from reporters shouting out their questions, Hugh selected one a couple of rows from the front for the first question. “Mr. Richardson, you mentioned Dr. Kelsie as the one who first noted the anomaly from your ship, was he the one that developed this breakthrough?”

“Yes, I have to give him full credit, I put him in charge of the R&D team as soon as he reported his findings from that first race eleven years ago.

 He’s showed absolute genius by turning an interesting phenomenon into a workable technology as well as a theoretical foundation on how this system functions. We plan to be releasing some of his papers on our website shortly.”

The questions from the reporters continued for the next hour as Richardson finally called the press conference to a close.

Hugh would learn a few years later that Scaled and TSEC had been investigating the same phenomenon that Kelsie had been studying all of these years. It must've become apparent after a few lunar races that something odd was going on with these racing ships, he later found a few patents that Scaled and TSEC had filed in the intervening years while RKSS was developing its working TL prototype.

As is the case with most breakthrough technology, the idea becomes apparent to a number of people simultaneously, then it's a race to see who develops a workable technology from the idea. If you're the first one, the history books give you the credit.

Chapter 9:

RK Space Systems devoted the next few years in designing and building ships with the TL drive, a couple of the large sub-light transports were converted to TL-capable ships by attaching large TL drive modules to them.

 This retrofitting worked fairly well and allowed RK Space Systems to field the largest TL transports early on.

Progress in improving TL speeds proceeded at a methodical pace. After the first five years of development, the first TL transports coming off of the production lines were capable of around 100 times lightspeed.

 This was adequate to begin manned exploration of many nearby star systems in a reasonable amount of time.

Hugh was determined to be on the first manned expedition to Alpha Centauri in 2080, since he was the CEO of RKSS; he got his wish.

 He invited Dr. Kelsie to come along too, and he accepted. Telescopes had already revealed a terrestrial planet in the habitable zone around Alpha Centauri A, it would only take a little over two weeks to get there.

Even though they were both in their 90’s, they were in prime shape due to medical nano-technology that had already extended life spans indefinitely, the TL drive was going to prove a necessity as the numbers of humans started to rapidly grow, new worlds had to be colonized. Dr. Kelsie and Richardson didn’t intend to disrupt the mission; they would just be passengers.

Once again, there was a lot of fanfare to seeing them off as they entered into the large transport, dubbed the Santa Maria, docked at the RKSS orbital shipyard. This was the first manned mission outside of the solar system and the spirit of adventure was high among the entire crew. After crewmembers bid their loved ones goodbye, the final person boarded. In a few minutes, the transport pulled away from the shipyard and attained escape velocity, after a few minutes the TL drive was engaged and the transport faded out of space-time.

The first flight to another star system went smoothly and in a couple of weeks they arrived in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri A.

 The shipboard telescopes soon focused on the terrestrial planet earth side telescopes had seen years before.

As soon as the shipboard telescopes revealed the high-resolution image of the planet, they realized the planet might be harboring life as faint greenish splotches were scattered on the surface. Spectral readings showed signs of methane, oxygen, and chlorophyll.

Crews were sent down immediately to the surface to inspect these green areas and try to bring back samples.

The atmosphere was breathable, though very thin; living here would be like living on top of Mt. Everest back on Earth.

 It didn’t take long for them to discover a few different species of rugged plants that dotted the surface; many samples were gathered and brought back to the ship.

Hugh decided to get with the captain and arrange for a celebration for the whole crew when the landing teams returned to the ship. In a few hours, everyone on board gathered in the mess hall as Hugh stepped forward to address the crew.

“First of all, I think we should give an appropriate name to this planet rather than the numeric one that distant astronomers gave it many years ago, I would suggest the name, Calesco, which means ‘to be inspired’ in Latin. I intend to send that suggestion back to Earth on a Zero-Point wave transmission tomorrow if the crew is in agreement.

I want to thank everyone here for their hard work and their dedication. We stand here today because of the efforts of Dr. Robert Kelsie, I promised a long time ago to buy the good doctor lunch at Alpha Centauri, and here we are.

Today we have answered definitively the question of life in other stellar systems, it’s a momentous event and you should all be proud.”  And with that, Hugh sat down to enjoy a feast with the crewmembers.

A new era was underway, one of the most exciting in human history. A time in which the stars at last came within mankind’s grasp.

 The next few years would yield discoveries of more habitable worlds, some of which would be colonized immediately.

 Other worlds held entrenched mysteries that would not easily yield to the xeno-archeologist’s pick and others would reveal intelligent life.

Whatever the universe held in store for humankind, we were ready to stake our claim in it.

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