The man oo saved ve Erf

Arfer Smiff was a third generation scrap metal dealer. At the beginning of the 21st century he began to make a lot of money selling scrap to the Chinese. As a direct result of having the funds available he let his son, imaginatively named Arthur, finish his schooling before employing him in the family business. That was the time when he first found out that his name was really spelled Arthur Smith.

At first young Arthur worked doing the book keeping.

“He done the computerin’ beautiful” his mother told all her friends.

But Arthur had other ideas. He used to read old copies of the Science Fiction fanzines. Contributors were always making pseudo scientific statements about perpetual motion machines that could power space ships. But Arthur wasn’t stupid; he could see the fallacies behind much of the reasoning and started designing such machines for himself that he thought should work. He’d just jot down a few ideas and kept them all neatly filed in a large pad.

One day his dad saw his scribble pad and began to leaf through it.

“Wossall viss abaht ven?” said his father. Arthur heaved a big sigh; his dad had plenty of money but had no idea of what to do with it.

He explained about space and how much junk there was orbiting around the earth. “If only there was a way of getting out there and collecting it we’d clear up space for the future and make a real fortune in the process.”

His dad saw the potential in a flash. “Got plenty of dough boy, we’ll build our own spaceship; can’t be too difficult!”

Arthur sighed again and explained the problems of space flight telling his dad how a big country like America needed thousands of people to design, build and send a spacecraft just to the moon and back.”

“Well we don’t want to go to the moon,” replied dad, “we only want to go a little way to where all this junk is. It don’t sound too difficult to me.”

Arthur was just about to try and tell his dad the problems involved when he had an idea. As he saw it one of the main troubles with space ships was keeping the air inside while the vehicle itself was in a vacuum. Surely if radio activity could be confined using heavy water, why couldn’t the air in a space craft be kept in using heavy air? An osmotic net around the capsule should do the trick. The result should be atmospheric shielding from meteorites and a constant supply of air to the crew. Rather like the force field shielding used in Science Fiction. This time it would weigh practically nothing and be comparatively cheap and practical.

He persuaded his dad that his ideas were practical and asked to be sent to university to learn more about the theory of space flight. Three years later he came home with a strange accent and a degree in cosmology.

His dad was enthusiastic and went to see his contacts in China who agreed to fund the experiments. With the Chinese labour force behind him the first spaceship was ready inside one year. Arthur’s Russian customers agreed to take the prototype into space for on site testing and with very few modifications the “Smiff” was born.

Almost immediately Arthur found the first problem with his idea. Everything worked a treat but getting the collected junk safely back to earth using Russian spacecraft was very expensive. Nearly all the profit was taken up in this single activity.

He went back to his fanzines to see if there were any ideas to be found there. A week later he found the theoretical answer. Some bright spark had had the idea of a geostationary cable between the planet and a space station. Using gravity and centrifugal force on the pay load, the junk could be sent down the cable and supplies back up to the space station in the reverse direction. All that was needed was a couple of big screw eyes to attach the payload to the cable.

The big snag to this idea had always been the length and hence the weight of the cable if it was to be strong enough to do the job. Nano technology molecular carbon fibre was the answer. The Chinese work force produced two hundred miles of bucky ball cable to make sure there was some spare to use as a counterbalance beyond the required orbit. It was small enough compared to the length of the transatlantic cables laid in the Victorian period.

“Simples!”

However even Arthur’s dad saw the problems with sending payloads down to earth using gravity. There was going to be an awfully big hole in the ground if a few tons of metal arrived at two hundred miles an hour.

So the next step in the planning was to buy an island in the Pacific using the nearby ocean to cushion the shock. This was considered cheaper than trying to design a braking system to cope with the expected large variations in load.

Eventually a conventional space tug was built to chase after the space junk. This cruised around picking up the wreckage and towing it to the space station on the end of its cable.

It was the next generation before space was entirely cleared of man made rubbish. However there were two slowly emerging unexpected benefits arising from this clearance. Firstly global warming was halted as the blanket effect of the metal orbiting the planet was removed. Secondly the scientists announced a reduction of magnetic drift in the planets core. Although a natural phenomenon this had been speeding up in recent years and it was considered a benefit to the scientific community to have the rate stabilised.

Having made a colossal fortune and being a philanthropic benefactor to many organisations received its final reward when Arthur’s statue was enthroned as the “Man who saved the Earth” on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar square.