Frozen Orbit
Page 31
“I didn’t even know that move had a name.”
She looked up. “There’s a name for everything. You opened with a classic Sicilian defense, for instance. Unbalances the game right away.”
“Sicilian? Like the mafia? And here I thought I was just getting a pawn out of the way.”
“I’d tell you to not let it go to your head, but it’s too late for that.”
“It’s taken me this long to beat you,” Jack said. “I’m not even certain you didn’t just let me win.”
She was about to patiently explain how she never, ever allowed anybody to beat her out of sympathy when Daisy’s message chime rang: INCOMING MESSAGE FROM MISSION CONTROL.
They shared a look of dread as Jack pulled up the comm window on a nearby monitor and read aloud. “Stand by for new mission parameters: Earth return utilizing Phase One contingency scenario . . . ”
If they hadn’t been floating, Traci would’ve fallen out of her chair.
“We can’t do this!” Traci protested.
“We have our orders,” Roy said, “unless I can come up with a better alternative to accomplish the mission.”
“I can think of a better alternative right away,” Jack said. “It’s called not abandoning ship after we’re most of the way home.”
“Unfortunately, that’s the mission now. I’m open to suggestions but good luck finding a way around it. The plan Owen’s team came up with is pretty ingenious, I have to admit.”
They’d start with a hard, continuous burn from Magellan’s main engines. There was enough hydrogen and lithium left in the tanks to return them in six months, without slowing down into Earth orbit. Shedding every ounce of excess mass would stretch their delta-v budget that much farther. It was essentially using the entire spacecraft as a booster to fling its human crew into a fast transit home.
Ultimately, the only components left at Earth would be the Dragon spacecraft, which they’d move into after weeks of constant acceleration from Magellan. About the time they crossed Mars’ orbit, they’d detach with a full logistics and propulsion unit left from the Cygnus tug and begin decelerating toward Earth. After several weeks of lazy, looping orbits skipping off the atmosphere to bleed energy, they’d parachute into the Pacific off of Los Angeles after what would be the fastest piloted reentry in history.
The drawback was the only mass left in the spacecraft would be its human occupants and a few remaining days’ worth of rations.
“There’s at least one long EVA ahead of us. Engine three still needs a tune-up, plus reconfiguring Puffy and the log mods before we start burning,” Jack said, resigned to their fate. “We can’t move all that stuff around while we’re under power.”
“That’s the plan,” Roy said. He pulled up the vehicle layout on a nearby monitor. “Use the MSEV for the grunt work and dock the stack to the forward node so it’s still accessible. While we’re burning at full blast, we can stock the logistics module for the last leg of the trip.”
“That’s a lot to decelerate from,” Jack noted. “You and Traci going to be able to fly us home if you’re blacking out from g loads?”
Roy shifted uncomfortably. “That’s when Houston takes over. The ship can just about fly itself anyway.”
Jack scrolled through the plans. “That’s still a tight mass and power budget.”
“Once we’re inside Mars orbit we can start drawing power from Cygnus’ solar panels. Won’t carry the full load, but it’s enough for us to recharge our tablets every day so we at least don’t die of boredom.”
“You’ve thought this through, haven’t you?” Traci asked, deflated.
“Didn’t have much choice,” Roy said. “Legally I’m on the hook for this ship for as long as NASA owns it. That means I follow their orders. But I’ll remind you that we’re living here and they’re not. We can find ways to save mass and power that they never dreamed of.” He looked to his wife. “At least enough to get a cooler full of Plutonian snowballs back to Earth.”
Jack and Traci were back in the MSEV cockpit, making their way slowly down the length of Magellan’s saddle truss. Weak sunlight reflected back at them off the golden insulating foil of the massive fuel tanks cradled within it.
With both of them in EVA suits, it was a tight fit. Jack made a particular effort to keep his arms by his sides, not wanting to accidentally bump anything important while Traci flew. They were only a couple of meters above the ship, hovering abeam its propulsion module. Small compared to the rest of the ship, its power was belied by the bulky thrust structure which mated it to Magellan’s spine.
The trio of engines at the end were likewise unremarkable as large rockets go. Each bell-shaped nozzle was roughly the size of the old RS-25 Space Shuttle Main Engines. Only when one came to the complex arrangement of magnetic field generators surrounding each engine bell did it become clear there was something unusual about them: Each was nested inside of a larger, foreshortened bell encircled by a system of metallic vanes. These were the electromagnetic injectors which sparked the pulsed fusion reactions. This unrelenting chain of conflagrations was channeled through the nozzle’s magnetic fields into exhaust far more powerful than any chemical rocket. This made them vitally important for another reason: They not only drove the spacecraft, they ensured it didn’t melt under its own power.
Inside their little cockpit, amber lights flashed intermittently in concert with a proximity alarm which Traci silenced with a tense flick of a switch. She didn’t need reminding how dangerously close they were. “Is the drone ready?”
“Beach ball is go and outer door is open,” Jack said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“Deploy.”
He wrapped his hand around a joystick. “Deploying,” he said calmly, mirroring her businesslike tone. Outside, a half-meter-wide sphere jetted out of a small utility airlock in the MSEV’s tail. Multiple windows came alive on Jack’s control screen as the drone’s instruments began searching across frequency spectrums. “Sensors are up, good visuals.” He twisted the joystick. The bot spun once around its vertical axis and brought itself to a stop. “Gyro platform’s nominal,” meaning the drone still knew where it was in space and wasn’t about to go careening into something important.
“Proceed.”
Jack tapped a translation controller by his free hand and the ball soon jetted into view. Keeping his “eye,” the lens of its main camera, centered on the nozzle throat, Jack gently pulsed thrusters to take the drone down into the problem engine. There was an unnerving microsecond as the engine bell suddenly glowed white, the drone’s powerful spotlights bouncing off the nozzle’s highly reflective surface. The sight was not unlike a fusion engine flashing to life.
Traci flinched. “Okay, that was cute.” Her tone suggested the exact opposite of cute.
A shudder shot through Jack as well. “I’m with you. I should probably dial the lights down a bit.”
Roy’s voice sounded in their helmets. “Let’s do that, please. You about gave me a coronary.”
Information began cascading across Jack’s monitors as the drone continued deeper into the nozzle, finally stopping at its throat. “Hot in there,” he whistled, noting spikes across multiple spectra as the drone floated down the nozzle throat. “I was afraid of that,” he said, pointing out a swirl of discoloration along the coppery magnetic coil. “See those scorch marks along the second-stage field generator? That’s from heat flux.”
“Heat flux” was just a polite way of saying “uncontained plasma.” Traci clenched her fist, making sure it was on the side opposite from Jack. No sense letting him see. “Is it within tolerance?” she asked, a little too warily.
“Can’t tell by eyeballing it. We’ll see what the CT scans tell us.” Jack twisted the joystick, centering the bot’s imagers on what appeared to be the worst damage. A thin region of blackened ceramic liner around the exit was the only other outward indication of trouble in one of the magnetic coils: Instead of channeling all of the fusion exhaust outside, there w
as just enough residual blowback to scorch the first-stage combustion liners. “Daisy, you seeing this?” Jack asked the ceiling, unconsciously mimicking Roy’s style of talking to a disembodied synthetic voice.
yes. analyzing . . .
Jack’s eyes danced between the camera feed and the scanning data. “If it’s light enough, I can just clean the coils and exit liner,” he said hopefully.
Traci looked over his shoulder, her lips pressing into a frown. “You sure that just polishing the brightwork will fix this?”
“Depends on the depth,” Jack said. “Some uncontained heat flux isn’t that surprising. We’re only creating small suns in here a few thousand times a day. What’s surprising is that we haven’t seen more of it. We’re getting off easy.”
Easy, she thought. “That depends on your definition of . . . ” she began when Daisy interrupted.
x-ray and chromatograph analysis support your visual inspection. nozzle throat erosion is uniformly within 0.02 centimeters.
“What about root causes?” Jack wondered. “Any indications of some latent problem with the first-stage coils or lithium injectors that we didn’t see?”
negative. as you observed, it was most likely caused by interaction with jupiter’s magnetic field. repairs are not recommended.
Jack offered a conciliatory smile. “See?”
however, mission rules require recalibration of number three lithium injector coil prior to next ignition.
Jack deflated, more for her benefit than his.
“So, an EVA,” Traci sighed. “Next to a fusion reactor.”
it’s not precisely a “reactor.” the thermonuclear cycle is instantaneously . . .
Traci rubbed at her temples. “Shut up, Daisy.”
a-ok.
Jack replied before she could lose her cool. “Wrong idiom, Daisy.” After several seconds, Jack flicked off the intercom with Roy and Noelle. “All you have to do is hand me the tools and keep my umbilical from tangling up.”
Traci closed her eyes, not wanting to admit that he was right. Jack reached up and squeezed her hand. For a fleeting moment their eyes met, a silent and mutual understanding of all they’d found and the burdens that placed upon them. They lingered a microsecond too long. “We have a pretty ambitious itinerary from here. It’ll be a long trip without all three engines burning.”
“I know,” Traci said, feeling her cheeks flush. Hopefully it wasn’t too noticeable. “Just pump me full of nausea meds so I don’t puke in my helmet. I’ll be fine.” She brightened with the ginned-up enthusiasm that astronauts had been trained to cultivate for decades. “I’m ready to go home. Let’s do this.”
34
Mission Day 342
Acceleration 0.0 m/s2 (0 g)
Pluto Orbit
Being a “pilot-astronaut” meant Traci Keene had been afforded very few opportunities to perform EVAs over her career. Those were most often left to the engineers and scientists, the “mission specialist” astros like Jack, and as usual he’d taken extra care during their inspections of each other’s equipment. Finally satisfied after running through the checklist twice, Jack had slipped his boots into a toehold, twisting back and forth, swinging his arms through an approximation of a circle, and flexing his hands through the stiff gloves. “Way better than the old model,” he said for her benefit.
Traci flexed her own suit before lifting an inertia reel safety tether out of the equipment bay. “Still mighty stiff,” she said warily.
“You’ll feel better once we come back with most of our fingernails still attached.” She locked the carabiner down on his harness. After a firm tug, they both watched the reel spin back before she unlocked the spool. “Ready,” she said in a voice weighted with dread. The smile on his face as he so effortlessly pushed out into the black annoyed her all the more. The lunatic loved this stuff.
Now left standing with her boots tucked into that same foothold in their open airlock, Traci reflected on the career choices that had brought her this far. How did a Kentucky hillbilly like me ever make it out of the hollers, much less to NASA? she wondered to herself, as she did often. If Daddy could see me now . . .
Her parents, perhaps more than most, had burst with pride at each step of their daughter’s climb to success: Air Force scholarship, test pilot stint at Edwards, then the space program. Their hometown had even named a street after her and prominently featured her name on welcome signs which might as well have said, Did y’all know we got us an astronaut? Real pretty one, too. Suck it, Ohio!
She especially missed them now as she stared out into that yawning gulf filled with nothing but stray hydrogen atoms and interstellar dust. It had taken several minutes for her eyes to adjust; her sole spacewalk years before had been above the comforting blue glow of Earth. Having home safely beneath her had been a reassuring plane of reference.
Slowly, the brighter stars crept into view as her eyes grew accustomed to the enveloping dark until the universe exploded with stars in every direction she turned. Spectacular would have been a gross understatement but having all of creation laid out before her like this only made the longing for home that much harder. Every single one of those points of light was so far beyond human reach that it might as well have been one big hologram, they were just as illusory to her. The rocky snowballs of Pluto and Charon seemed just as unlikely, their silhouettes hung in the firmament like some clumsy imitation of Earth and Luna. It gave her shivers, as if she could feel their cold from here through the layers of her suit.
But that wasn’t even the point: It was being faced with the truth of infinity. Was this God’s view of the universe, or just a tiny slice of the infinite? How much more was out there that couldn’t yet be seen? For that matter, how much of it could humans ever hope to perceive? In her mind, the concept of an afterlife could always be reconciled within theoretical physics: If other dimensions existed then we wouldn’t be able to perceive them any more than a flat two-dimensional being could perceive depth within a cardboard box.
It was then that she realized how much she craved Earth and home and sunshine and green hills. What else could she possibly do in the space program now? What would she even want to do, short of someone miraculously inventing warp drive . . . even then, so what?
She knew then what to do, once this mission was over. Go home. Quit NASA. Maybe take the salary she’d have banked over two years of no living expenses and buy an old biplane. Sell rides, maybe do some airshows, but all on Earth. Didn’t matter if it was on the ground, beneath the ocean, or among the clouds, it was all Earth: the place where God put Man on purpose. Didn’t matter how it happened, or how long it took. What mattered was that it happened. She knew now how to reconcile the conflicting versions of Truth, or at least explain it in a way that didn’t insult people.
We were created to do all of the things which culminated in this moment with the two of them alone at the edge of the solar system. Human experience was cumulative. Enlightenment philosophers had just as much to do with this moment as had the likes of Newton and Tsiolkovsky and Einstein—because the pursuit of knowledge was ultimately pointless without having the liberty to do something with it.
Is this what an epiphany feels like? she wondered, because it felt an awful lot like humility. Maybe that was the point. Traci Keene hadn’t done any of this herself: She might have done the bookwork, might have driven herself to repeatedly exceed her own expectations, but she certainly hadn’t done any of this. No matter how far we travel or what we do, in the end we’re ultimately spectators.
Besides Jack putzing around, the only other familiar sight was that creaky old Russian spacecraft looming nearby. Perhaps “creaky” was taking it too far since it had held up remarkably well for being so old. It was almost perfectly preserved, in fact—being this far out had saved it from fading to a sun-bleached pallor . . .
“Repeat . . . need your help.”
Traci blinked. How many times had Jack been calling her? “Say again?” she stammered.
“Copy,” she said, and turned to the tool carrier hung by the airlock door. “One pistol grip tool and extractor, coming right up.”
Traci secured the tools in the accessory pouch on her waist and unhooked her feet to float freely in the open door. “On the way,” she said, and braced at the edge. She caught a foot at the rim as she pushed out and cartwheeled into the black. Maybe she’d pushed too hard, maybe her mind was running away with her, but the sudden swirl of stars felt like falling from an impossible height. I’m already falling, she told herself angrily. That’s why we call it “free fall.” Her Emergency Maneuvering Unit immediately recognized a tumble and began pulsing the compressed nitrogen jets on her backpack to stabilize her. As the stars began to settle back into place, a cold sensation spread around the back of her neck. Perspiration, from being too jumpy for her own good. It would be nice to be back inside Magellan’s protective shell.
Noelle’s voice sounded in her ears. “How are you feeling, Traci?”
“Just peachy.” Had that come out as a gasp?
“Your O2 sats are a bit high. You’re in danger of hyperventilating. Dial back your airflow a bit.”
“Thanks. I’ll do that.” She grudgingly reached for the flow controls on her chest pack. Why was this so disorienting? she wondered. EVAs weren’t her favorite activity, but she’d done it before.
Not like this, she realized. Not having a planet beneath her—Pluto didn’t count in her mind, and they weren’t truly orbiting it anyway: They were in a cautious dance with Arkangel around the Pluto/Charon “barycenter.” Not being much bigger than its nominal moon, Pluto wasn’t the center of its own system in the usual sense. The two bodies, along with numerous smaller moons, orbited a mutual center of gravity in the empty space between them. Now that she was out in the open, the harsh reality of being just another independently orbiting body was stupefying.