Cantilever Jones Swings Low, Part 3
by Albert Kuhawlik
e set the Jones to take off early the next morning. The weather was briefly favoring us, with a run of warm
weather that was holding in the north. The reports said that this would hold for another few days, maybe. Or
maybe not. I had no faith in it, but Vin did, and I decided to trust his insight.
W
[What else were you going to do? Program the nav computer yourself?]
Have I told you how helpful you’ve been on this voyage so far?
[No.]
Weird…
“In the dawn of aviation and star travel,” said Vin, “Humans had an idea of flying a large weapons platform with
wings from one end of a planet to another. It would take off, fly above the troposphere, and then come down again
when it was time to attack. They called it ‘antipodal flight’.”
“Fascinating,” I replied, genuinely.
“So what we’re going to do is similar. We’ll take off, but not go all the way out of the atmosphere as we normally
would. Just above the magnetosphere will do. It will take up about 80% of the kinetic energy of a full launch.”
“And then we go back down.”
“Approximately 1 degree above the start of the polar zone.”
“Sound like a plan.”
Vin said nothing for a moment, then said “that’s a human idiom intended to convey confidence while downplaying
it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because if you express a lot of confidence, that means you don’t have any. Plus, it sounds like you’re anticipating
problems, which tends to make people thing the problems will be surmountable.”
Vin accepted this insight, and then said “How much of human communication is you convincing yourselves of
something you know isn’t true?”
“Quite a bit.”