Another invited journalist asked a question that Saskia couldn’t quite hear. T.R. nodded. "The gun just lobs the shell up to the altitude we want—the stratosphere. About eighty thousand feet. Where sulfur does no harm—and much good. Now, at that point it’s just gonna fall straight back down unless we do something. We could just detonate it with an explosive charge and it would disperse the sulfur. Hopefully some of it would burn. That was actually plan A. But our aerospace engineers didn’t think that was fancy enough and so they ginned up the idea for a sulfur-burning engine that can keep the shell airborne for a little while. It’s got the worst performance characteristics you can imagine but we don’t care —it gives us a few minutes for the shell to remain at altitude and disperse the SO 2 more widely where the jet stream can catch it and begin spreading it around. Then the shell runs out of fuel and glides to the ground and we try to catch it."