Rose Across the Sky

A beautiful sculpture in space might be wonderful . . . but the working stiffs building it have their own opinions.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

“I hate this job,” muttered Josh, as he grabbed the welding rig to stop its momentum.

Pete laughed at him, waving at the Earth below with the space-suited hand not holding on to the structure they were assembling. “What’s to hate? We have a great view, you’re being paid for space time, EVA time, radiation exposure time, and welding time. The money’s stacking up.”

“I want to build something real. Something that matters. Not artsy-fartsy shit.”

The aluminum panel Pete was steadying was another petal of a giant metal rose. Once Josh finished welding it into place the sculpture would be 70% complete.

“See, man,” explained Pete, “It’s all part of the circle of life. Some dude gets rich. His kids invest the money. Then their kids waste it on parties and showing off. Guy like us get hired to run the parties and build the stuff they want to show off. We give our kids a better start. And maybe one of our kids becomes rich and starts the circle over again.”

Josh said, “It’s still bullshit.”

His weld was clean, making a smooth connection between the white petal and the black one under it. Only the best welders were selected for extra-vehicular activity work. EVA training was intense. Those who passed it drew serious pay.

“Someday you’ll be the old guy, listening to the young ones complaining about some bullshit. And you’ll say, ‘You think this is bullshit? Let me tell you about the Oswald Rose.’ You’ll put them all in their place.”

“Yeah? Shouldn’t you be telling me about something more bullshit than this, then?”

“Okay, this beats any of the bullshit I’ve done before. But that means you’re getting good money and a good story.”

Josh blew a raspberry. “I’d rather have good money and some work worth doing. How’s that look?”

Pete drew his gaze away from Earth. They were passing over the Arctic, so it was just boring white anyway. The seam between the two petals looked good. He drew the verifier off his belt and traced it along the seam. Both the measuring laser and the thermal imager declared there were no gaps or inconsistencies. “It’s good. Too close to shift end to start another one. Let’s get back to the shack.”

They worked their way up the petals to the base of the flower. The petals would survive gentle handling. Strong force—such as kicking off to cross a few hundred meters of empty space—would ruin them. The base ring could handle that.

Both welders had enough free fall experience to aim themselves at the construction shack. A kick could give them the momentum to cross the space. Aiming exactly was harder. Both Josh and Pete had to fire the jets on their backs to line up exactly with the shack.

The construction shack was smaller than the Rose in progress. It held life support equipment, maintenance facilities for the tools and spacesuits, private (sort of) rooms for the workers to sleep in, and a screen-equipped office for management to survey progress—or layabouts to watch entertainment from Earth. Once the project was over a tug would take it to the next site.

Rather than a manager, this shack held The Artist. Theodore Oswald was the grandson of a billionaire. His father died while working on the first geostationary space station. Theodore was qualified in space suits, but had no training in any skills useful for construction or maintenance of space structures.

His degree was in modern art.

The “Rose” was intended as the first in a series of sculptures to “make Mankind look at the sky and see beauty.”

Josh’s comment was they’d need a good telescope. Even at fifty meters across, the Rose wasn’t going to be visible to the naked eye.

Pete coasted straight to the shack, turning to absorb the impact with his legs. He had plenty of propellant in his pack, but EVA training drove home the importance of not wasting it. He hooked his safety line to a handhold and slid out of the way of Josh’s arrival.

The junior welder needed to fire a quick course correction to land squarely on the shack. They went into the airlock together.

When the airlock’s inner door opened, they heard noises from outside their own suits for the first time that shift. Oswald was playing his music, some weird abstract stuff which set the welders’ teeth on edge. They didn’t complain. There were worse bosses than ones who played bad music.

“Hi! You made so much progress today, I’m delighted to see it. Thank you for working so hard! Are you hungry? Should I start dinner?” Pete was pretty sure the boss man had read some magazine articles about the importance of giving employees positive feedback.

“Yes, sir, dinner would be good,” said Pete. Josh grunted agreement.

None of them had the training to do real cooking in free fall. That was an entirely different art from Earthside cooking. But Oswald could put packages in a microwave. That worked just as well here as anywhere.

Having hot food and a cold drink ready as soon as they were out of their suits did improve their mood. Pete felt better about The Artist for a few minutes.

That faded as the monitor next to the dinner table switched to a view of the Rose.

“The playoffs are going on right now,” suggested Josh.

The Artist kept staring at the Rose. “I never watch sports.”

Pete gave Josh a firm look. Once the meal was done, he could retreat to his own bunk, draw the curtain around it, and turn the game on. In the meantime it would be better not to argue with the boss.

Josh shut up and ate.

“The spin rate seems to be up a bit,” said Pete as he stared at the image.

The Artist was still enraptured by the sight. “I’m sure that’s just from the construction perturbations.”

Pete was too tired to argue. He declined an offer of pudding and retreated to his own bunk. In a spacesuit, every motion was working against the suit’s pressurization trying to keep the limbs and body straight. He was old enough to feel the effort after a full shift.

A night of free fall sleep left him relaxed again. That lasted until he and Josh landed back on the support structure of the rose. Their feet slid to the side, putting them into spins. Firing the backpack thrusters brought them back under control, or at least close enough they could grab the frame and be pulled along with it.

“If this gets any faster, it’s going to throw us off,” complained Josh.

Pete opened the hand holding a grab bar. A small space opened between hand and metal. As he watched, it grew perceptibly. Not enough to keep him from taking the grip back, but more than before. “Yep. Let’s get the next petal off the stack. We want to finish this before it’s more of a pain in the ass.”

Two more petals went on without trouble. Josh kept glancing at the shack. It visibly moved between checks.

The spin wasn’t Josh’s only complaint. “Why do we never get a break from the sun here? The heat is making my suit work harder for cooling.”

“It’s a sun-synchronous orbit. Always keeps the same angle to the sun, more or less.” It was Pete’s turn to do a weld. He’d had enough practice to lay a smooth bead while chatting about their location.

“I thought we’d been here long enough to go into the shade. Orbits drift around.”

“Yeah, they drift, because the Earth is irregular and perturbs them. Pick the right orbit and the perturbations cancel out and the orbit twists to follow the sun. No night time for you. Inspect this.”

Josh ran the verifier over the seam. “Looks good. Why the hell are we in that orbit?”

“For Art. That way the Rose is always in sunlight.”

“Half of it is.”

“That’s the Artist’s problem. Let’s get the next petal.”

The increasing spin forced them to use more fuel from their suit jets to land safely on the shack.

“Dammit,” cursed Josh, “we ought to be able to time it right so we jump right as the spin is throwing us the right direction.”

Pete laughed. “That takes practice. And with the spin speed going up, it’s always new.”

The next day they made even rougher landing on the Rose’s structure.

“That’s it,” declared Pete. “Time to use safety lines.”

Josh grumbled as he hooked up the line. The Artist had procured lines long enough to let them jump to the shack without disconnecting. For work on the Rose, they left the lines coiled up except for the ends, which made for a heavy cylinder bumping against their belts.

He had to admit the safety line was useful once he drew it in to the length he needed. Without it, he’d need one of his hands to brace himself against the centrifugal force of the spin.

“Hey, Pete. Is this spin going to mess up the tethers?” Josh pointed at the cable rising into space from the Rose’s axis. It faded from sight, but they knew 500 meters away it ended with a lead weight. There was a counterpart going Earthward. Tidal forces kept the two ends of the tethers pulling against each other, which made the Rose face the Earth, and The Artist’s future audience.

“Shouldn’t,” said Pete. “They’re attached to the base, so they’re spinning too.”

Aligning the big metal petals was more work with the increased spin. They installed two fewer than the day before. Which wasn’t a big issue, The Artist hadn’t set a deadline, but they wanted to finish this job and move on.

The next day the Rose was spinning another notch faster. Josh hooked his tether onto the base structure and began maneuvering along the side to the stack of petals awaiting their installation. Lifting up the strap which kept them in place to slip one out required bracing his feet against the structure—and with the faster spin rate lightening the weight he put on them, they slipped. Josh lifted off the Rose, turning slowly on the end of his tether.

Pete looked up from the inspection he was doing of the older petals as irritated cursing came across the radio. “You okay?”

“Just tumbling, I’ll be fine when I get my feet placed again.” As his body came around in the tumble, Josh kicked hard against the structure, intending to take up the slack in the tether and stop himself by bracing against his feet and the tether.

He kicked too hard.

The clamps holding the coil of excess tether were intended for storage, not holding against the full strength of a young man’s leg muscles. They popped off, letting the coil unroll.

Josh drifted away from the Rose as if he’d been thrown by a sling.

The radio waves filled with angrier curses. Pete watched his partner move away. He checked their position against the shack. Fortunately Josh’s angle would keep him clear of it. “Don’t waste fuel,” he transmitted. “Just reel yourself back in.”

“I’m trying!” protested the junior welder. His arms were full of a tangled mess of tether. The main coil was out of his reach, still unrolling.

It took several minutes for the coil to go taut. When it did it yanked the armload of tether out of Josh’s grasp. His momentum pulled that straight in another minute of flight. Then the whole tether jerked taut. An “Ow!” came across the radio as Josh’s neck was whiplashed by the sudden stop.

Now instead of falling freely, Josh felt the pull of the tether as it dragged him around at the Rose’s spin rate. With the extra length of the tether adding leverage, it was the most acceleration he’d felt since the rocket taxi delivered him to this work site.

He reached an arm down the tether, grabbed hold, and pulled himself back toward the Rose.

That made things worse.

The Artist bought his supplies from Sky Chandlery, a reputable company. They inspected their tethers after every rental. Frayed spots were spliced out. The whole tether would be replaced when it was too old.

But the steel D-rings at each end were just casually inspected. They were the sturdy part, what could go wrong with them? The D-ring clipped onto the Rose had been in use over a decade. Radiation embrittlement, cycling between direct sunlight and the bitter cold of utter darkness, and plain metal fatigue had taken their toll. When Josh hit the end of the cable, that shock created a crack in the D-ring. His pull increased the force on it, making the crack propagate faster.

It snapped.

Josh found himself in free fall again, flying away from the Rose much faster than when he’d originally slipped off. The radio was filled with curses again, this time with real panic in them.

Pete watch his partner sailing off. White exhaust plumes surrounded him as he fired his suit jets. “Josh, stop maneuvering! Save your fuel. You don’t have enough Delta-V to come straight back. Just stay calm.”

“Calm? I’m lost in space! If I get too far away, you’ll never find me again!”

“I see you. I won’t lose you. You’re not lost. We know right where you are.” He kept his tone calm, hoping it would set an example for the younger man.

“I’m out of orbit!”

“No. You’re in a different orbit. An intersecting orbit. You’ll come right back here in about fifty minutes.”

“What? How the hell can you know that?” Good, Josh was thinking about the problem, not panicking.

“You had a plane change. That puts you in a new orbit. But the new orbit still intersects the Rose’s orbit at two points a hundred and eight degrees apart. When you come back to the intersection, we pull you back to the Rose.”

“Okay.” Still nervous.

Well, Pete couldn’t blame him for that. It was a lonely feeling, sailing off into the black by yourself. “You have a whole shift’s worth of air. We have plenty of time to fix it. Right now, get your tether under control. Coil it up so you can throw it to me on closest approach.”

“Coil it up. Right.” Having a task to focus on was calming him.

A self-rescue wasn’t the only option. They could call for a rocket taxi, or even one of the Guard’s rescue cutters. But neither would get here before the orbits intersected, and they were expensive. The kind of expense that broke contracts and made managers reluctant to hire young guys. Better not to have that on Josh’s record.

Fifteen minutes later they had to boost the power on their radios to keep in touch. The separation was making Josh nervous again. Pete wondered if he should have delayed telling him to coil the tether until then. Not having anything to do made it easier for Josh to brood. Pete kept talking to distract him.

“Hey, the Rose is looking bigger again,” said Josh after another twenty minutes.

“Yep, you’re coming closer. I’m stepping down my broadcast power. Can you still hear me?”

“Yeah. So, when you had that vacation in Aruba . . .”

Telling entertaining stories to keep Josh from brooding or panicking had run Pete out of his casual party chatter. He’d resorted to telling some anecdotes he’d rather keep quiet. But that let Josh know there were other stories he could ask for.

The sacrifices you had to make to save someone’s life.

Pete interrupted himself to say, “Hey, I see you.”

“Yeah, I can make you out on the Rose. Ready for me to throw the line?”

“Wait until you’re closer. I mean, no big deal, we get to do this every fifty minutes until we get it right. But it’d be cool to get you back on the first try.”

Josh actually laughed. “Yeah, I’m all for the first try.”

At two hundred meters, Pete ordered, “Throw it!”

The coiled tether flew toward the Rose, leaving a line behind connected to Josh.

Pete stood ready. He’d tied off his tether, leaving himself with about thirty meters, and the rest was coiled up with a wrench tied to the end. If Josh’s line was out of reach, he’d throw his, and hope they’d entangle enough to let him pull his lost lamb home.

It wasn’t needed. Josh’s throw was close enough Pete could grab it with a jump. He tied it onto his belt, and reeled himself back to the Rose pulling on his own tether.

Then it was just a matter of tying some slack to one of the hand holds on the Rose. “Okay, dude, you’re secured. Pull yourself in. Not too fast.”

“I know, I know. They’ve been telling me ‘slow and careful’ since the first time I suited up.” Josh pulled in slack until the line was taut. Then he worked up it, making sure not to stress the line.

When Josh came in reach, Pete grabbed his hand and pulled him to the structure. “Hold tight there.”

Josh didn’t need the suggestion. He had both hands on the structure and a foot hooked under a handhold. “Can we file a grievance now?”

“Not yet. First we ask The Artist nicely to fix this mess. If he doesn’t, then we file a grievance with our contract arbiter.”

“Fine. Now?”

“When you’re ready.”

“I’m ready.”

Pete tied them together for the jump back to the shack. Because Josh’s thrusters were low on fuel. Not for any psychological reason.

The Artist was shocked by the tale of the near disaster. Pete let Josh tell it. That way the danger was exaggerated, but it was told sincerely.

“Yes, yes, we must take the spin off. I’d planned to, but I didn’t expect so much. I need to consult my engineer,” said Oswald.

Bringing someone with some actual technical knowledge into this discussion was fine with Pete.

It turned out the engineer, one Dr. Koyama, had worked on the original design of the Rose, turning the pretty concept drawings into the technical designs Pete and Josh had been implementing. She was unsurprised by the spin problem.

“I told you that was going to happen. The asymmetrical coloring of the petals, combined with the arrangement edge on to the Sun, guaranteed you’d get this increasing spin unless you did something to stabilize the structure. You’ve created a fancy version of those radiometers, which spin when you put them in sunlight.” She was on the largest screen in the office, which gave her glare an outsized impact on The Artist.

“But roses are not symmetrical!” moaned The Artist.

“You could have the petals colored the same on each side. But that’s only going to reduce the solar torque. You’d still need some sort of stabilizer,” offered Dr. Koyama.

Pete and Josh traded horrified looks. Painting in vacuum was something they’d been trained how to do, but it was a messy, tedious, unpleasant job they’d rather avoid.

Koyama’s face was replaced by a picture of the Rose with a shiny banner attached to its shady side.

“You want to put a tail on my rose? That’s not what roses look like.”

The engineer’s face came back. She looked even more determined. “That’s what you need to stabilize the whole assembly in the face of solar radiation pressure.”

“Never! A transparent one maybe, that won’t interfere with the art.”

“If it’s transparent, it won’t reflect enough light pressure to counter the force on the petals.”

This seemed to be a practiced conversation. Those two must have had the same argument when designing the thing in the first place. Pete wondered if they’d have to pull the plug on the project and just declare the partly-built Rose to be orbital debris.

“Rose bushes have leaves,” offered Josh.

That brought the attention of artist and engineer on him. “What?” said Oswald.

“Here.” Josh put a picture of a rose and its stem on the screen. “What if we have one leaf, maybe attach it to the tether like it’s a stem, and have that be the stabilizer? You can make it green, like a real rose.”

It took a couple of hours of playing with alternative concepts and arguments between the artist and engineer for the new idea to become a design. Dr. Koyama promised to provide detailed plans tomorrow. Manufacturing the leaf-shaped light sail and delivering it by rocket taxi would take a few more days. Before that, another taxi would deliver some “jato” rocket packs to take the spin off the Rose.

The hard part of removing the spin for Josh and Pete was covering all the Rose’s petals with tarps to make sure they wouldn’t be tarnished by the rocket exhaust. Somewhat to their surprise, all the petals survived the despin.

The leaf arrived the next day. The first step was to attach a spar to the Earthward tether two hundred and fifty meters from the Rose. Since the leaf was Josh’s idea, Pete let him have the honor of installing it. Both tether and spar were carbon fiber which meant they couldn’t weld it. A clamp at the center of the spar went over the tether. Then some vacuum-rated epoxy was applied to make sure it wouldn’t slip.

That was the only task for that day. The epoxy had to cure before they could put more load on it. Dr. Koyama said they had four days to finish the installation before the Rose would be spinning enough to mess up the leaf.

The green leaf came folded up like an accordion. It would unfold into an oval. Multiple tethers hung from it. Most were attached to the spar. Josh hung from the Rose on his tether, attaching each one to its assigned point.

Pete was on the Rose above, reeling in the one tether connected to the top point of the leaf. Once Josh confirmed the bottom was secure, Pete pulled the top tether tight.

The leaf stretched out. As the solar light pressed the light sail material flat, it resembled a real leaf. The tethers held it in a triangle of forces, stable against the Sun’s pressure, and overwhelming the torques from the Rose’s petals.

Pete and Josh watched it from the unfinished portion of the Rose.

“Y’know,” said Josh, “I think it kinda is pretty.”

If you want another of my stories of people working in space, check out my story “Zombie” in Baen’s Tales of the United States Space Force. Some Space Force Guardians deal with a burial in space gone awry.