Carbon Cowlings

I’d designed the ultimate escape pod—a personal ship with solar-pumped laser thrusters, its carbyne-graphene frame light enough to zip from Earth orbit to anywhere I damn well pleased. The catch? Three tons of carbon to build it, locked behind Earth’s brutal $250,000-per-ton tax and a seven-year waitlist. The 2030s climate accords had choked terrestrial mining, and off-world haulers couldn’t extract carbon from asteroids fast enough to dent the price. Orbit’s 3D printing boom sucked up every gram, leaving me with $200,000 and a nonrefundable MegaFreight Transatron ticket to space. I could buy 800 kilos—pathetic. As an ex-SpaceX materials engineer, I’d optimized Raptor casings for years; I wasn’t about to let Earth’s bureaucrats ground me.


The cowling plan was my ticket out. SpaceX’s methane-burning Transatrons spewed carbon nanoparticles in their exhaust—untaxed, unclaimed. I’d rig a carbyne-tube array with nanotube skin to harvest it, snagging 50 grams per launch. A year of daily flights from Canaveral, and I’d have my three tons. I tested it on a Chinese Xīnghuǒ knockoff, pitching it as an efficiency mod, and claimed the first units for “quality assurance.” By 2046, I had my ship—Cowlchaser—and a new target: Venus.


Earth’s carbon was a chokehold, but Venus? Its atmosphere was a floating carbon buffet—96% CO₂, ripe for the taking. I sank Cowlchaser into the upper cloud deck, 55 kilometers up, where the pressure was Earth-like and the temp hovered near 50°C. Solar panels drank the Sun’s rays—twice as strong as Earth’s—and powered a plasma reactor to split CO₂ into carbon and oxygen. The carbon fed a 3D printer, spitting out buoyant graphene frames. My ship grew, ballooning into a full-on airship, its laser thrusters repurposed to keep it aloft.


Then I coded the twinning protocol. Using surplus carbon, Cowlchaser printed a twin—identical, self-contained, solar-powered. Two became four, four became eight, each airship harvesting and printing in lockstep. The oxygen vented off; I didn’t need it clogging my operation. Within a year, I had a fleet of 16, drifting like silent whales in Venus’s yellow haze, sucking CO₂ and churning out carbon. By year three, 2049, exponential growth hit: 1,024 airships, a floating factory spanning kilometers.


The endgame was dry ice. I froze the carbon into solid CO₂ blocks—dense, stable, easy to ship. Small solar drones hauled them to Venus orbit, where buyers waited: lunar smelters, Mars terraformers, orbital printers desperate for raw stock. Earth’s tax couldn’t touch me; Venus was a lawless frontier. Bids rolled in—$300,000 per ton from Luna, $350,000 from a Martian co-op. I’d started with a cowling and $200,000; now I was the carbon king of the inner solar system, shipping tons to the highest bidder while my fleet kept twinning, growing, and printing itself into eternity.