Powersat
This is the first book in Ben Bova’s “Grand Tour” series—chronologically at least. I get the idea it was one of the later ones written, but I haven’t looked deeply into that. Each one was written about a particular location in the solar system, and this one is… “orbit”.
Technothrillers generally have at least a whiff of science-fiction to them, since they often deal with the intersection of modern military and new technology, so every once in a while SF authors will come at it from the other direction. This is the second such I’ve read, and by far the more successful.
Bova avoids any mention of what year it’s supposed to be, but there’s some interesting hints of background as he writes from a 2005 perspective. There was a second 9/11 style event (three major bridges being blown up near-simultaneously), and the US occupied a decent amount of the Middle East, and is still there as a result. There’s no overall look at the privatization of space flight that was starting at the time, but there is certainly one company making a real go at it, and it is the center of the novel.
Thankfully, Dan Randolph has none of the authoritarian foot-in-mouth baggage that the real world has to deal with. But he is obsessive, and obsessive enough to have two separate obsessions, one of which powers the central plot, the other of which helps tie together pieces of the secondary plot (or maybe tertiary, the side stuff tends to be a bit fragmented to easily sort out).
The primary obsession is to deliver cheap power by setting up a large geosynchronous satellite that will gather solar power and beam it down to Earth. Whatever year this is, the various technical hurdles of this plan have been dealt with, and there’s even been a Japanese demonstration model already (which Randolph helped with).
Of course, this would completely upend current power structures (pun not quite intended). And that’s where the book goes from hard SF to technothriller as various groups try to stop or control this about-to-be new source of comparatively cheap power. It’s odd that all of this comes up as the project is nearing completion, instead of a decade or two of political fighting, but that would make for an extremely dull novel.
The novel starts with the crash in a test flight of the last piece of Randolph’s plan. A true reusable space plane that can get maintenance people up to geosynchronous orbit to perform any needed maintenance. Late in the novel you finally find out that there’s already an equivalent to the ’80s “space tug” proposal up there that is what is transferring everything from low orbit to geo. But there’s no discussion of when/how that was put there, what keeps it fueled, or any other infrastructure. Not even evidence of current space stations in orbit. The novel has a lot to talk about on the ground anyway, but it does make it feel like Astro Corporation is operating in a vacuum (har har).
Pacing is overall a bit slow, a little uneven, and ramps up to a technothriller action climax. Overall, it’s a good book, but a lot of the secondary parts feel underbaked. It’s a strong enough book for me to be continuing on to the asteroids.
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