Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures

by Ed Finn

  “That’s good. Go slow. The Banshees take a light touch.”

  “I know that, Marshall.”

  He pinked. “I know you know. But I’m just reminding you. Now, I’ll get you down there, smooth as silk, and when it’s time to come home you just let us know, okay?”

  Donna’s head tilted. She did that when she was about to ask an important question. For a moment it reminded Khalidah so much of the woman she’d been and the woman they’d lost that she forgot to breathe. “Is it home now, for you?”

  Marshall’s blush deepened. He really did turn the most unfortunate shade of sunburned red. “I guess so,” he said. “Brooklyn, it’s your turn.”

  Brooklyn breezed in and, flipping herself to hang upside down, performed the final checks on Donna’s suit. “You’ve got eight hours,” she said. “Sorry it couldn’t be more. Tango is already on her way, and she’ll be there to meet you when you land.”

  “What’s Tango’s charge like?”

  “She’s sprinting to meet you, so she’ll be half-empty by the time she hits the rendezvous point,” Marshall said. “But there’s a set of auxiliary batteries in the cargo area. You’d have to move them to get into the cockpit anyhow.”

  Donna nodded. The reality of what was about to happen was settling on them. How odd, Khalidah thought, to be weightless and yet to feel the gravity of Donna’s mission tugging at the pit of her stomach. The first human on Mars. The first woman. The first cancer patient. She had read a metaphor of illness as another country, how patients became citizens of it, that place beyond the promise of life, and now she thought of Donna there on the blood-red sands, representing them. Not just a human, but a defiantly mortal one, one for whom all the life-extension dreams and schemes would never bear fruit. All the members of the Ganesha crew had augmentations to make their life on Mars more productive and less painful. Future colonists would doubtless have similar lifehacks. Donna was the only visitor who would ever set an unadulterated foot on that soil.

  “I’ll be watching your vitals the whole time,” Song said. “If I don’t like what I see, I’ll tell Marshall to take control of Tango and bring you back.”

  Donna cracked a smile. “Is that for my benefit, or the machine’s?”

  “Both,” Song said. “We can’t have you passing out and crashing millions of dollars’ worth of machine learning and robotics.”

  And then, too soon, the final checks were finished, and it was time for Donna to go. The others drifted to the other side of the airlock, and Brooklyn ran the final diagnostic of the detachment systems. Khalidah’s hands twitched at her veil. She had no idea what to say. Why did you lie to us? Did you really think that would make this easier? What were you so afraid of?

  Donna regarded her from the interior of her suit. She looked so small inside it. Khalidah thought of her fragile body shaking inside its soft volumes, her thin neck and her bare skull juddering like a bad piece of video.

  “I want—”

  “Don’t,” Donna said. “Don’t, Khal. Not now.”

  For the first time in a long time, Khalidah peeped at Donna’s aura through the additional layer in her lenses’ vision. It was deep blue, like a very wide and cold stretch of the sea. It was a color she had never seen on Donna. When she looked at her own pattern, it was much the same shade.

  Marshall chose this moment to poke his head in. “It’s time.”

  Donna reached over to the airlock button. “I have to go now, Khalidah.”

  Before Khalidah could say anything, Marshall had tugged her backward. The door rolled shut. For a moment she watched Donna through the small bright circle of glass. Then Donna’s helmet snapped shut and she wore a halo within a halo, like a bull’s-eye.

  The landing was as Marshall promised: smooth as silk. With Corvus he was in his element. He and the vessel knew each other well. They’d moved as much of Corvus’s cargo as they could into temporary storage outside the hab; the reduced weight would give Donna the extra boost on the trip back that she might need.

  Donna herself rode out the landing better than any of them expected. She took her time unburdening herself of her restraints, and they heard her breathing heavily, trying to choke back the nausea that now dominated her daily life. But eventually she lurched free of the unit, tuned up the jets on her suit, jiggered her air mix, and began the unlocking procedure to open Corvus. They watched her gloved hands hovering over the final lock.

  “I hope you’re not expecting some cheesy bullshit about giant leaps for womankind,” Donna said, panting audibly. She sounded sheepish. For Donna, that meant she was nervous. “I didn’t really have time to prepare any remarks. I have a job to do.”

  Brooklyn wiped her eyes and covered her mouth. Marshall passed her a tissue, and took one for himself.

  “You’ve wanted this since you were a little girl, Donna,” Song said. “Go out there and get it.”

  Together they watched the lock spin open, and Donna eased herself out. There was Tango, ready and waiting. And there was Mars, or at least their little corner of it, raw and open and red like a wound.

  “I wish I could smell it,” Donna said. “I wish I could taste the air. It feels strange to be here and yet not be here at the same time. You can stand here all you want and never really touch it.”

  “You can look at the samples when you bring them back,” Brooklyn managed to say.

  Donna said nothing, only silently made her way to Tango and moved the samples back to Corvus. Then she began the procedure to get Tango into manual. Her feed cut out a couple of times, but only briefly; they hadn’t thought to test the signal on the cameras themselves. Her audio was fine, though, and Marshall talked her through when she had questions. In the end it ran like any other remote repair. Even the dig went well; clearing the dirt from the drill and restarting it from the control panel was a lot simpler than any of them had expected.

  Halfway back to Corvus, Tango slowly rolled to a stop.

  “Donna, check your batteries,” Marshall suggested.

  There was no answer. Only Donna’s slow, wet breathing.

  “Donna, copy?”

  Nothing. They looked at Song; Song pulled up Donna’s vitals. “No changes in her eye movements or alpha pattern,” Song whispered. “She’s not having a seizure. Donna. Donna! Do you need help?”

  “No,” Donna said, finally. “I came here to do a job, and now I’m finished with it. I’m done.”

  Something in Khalidah’s stomach turned to ice. “Don’t do this,” she whispered, as Marshall began to say “No, no, no,” over and over. He started bashing things on the console, running every override he could.

  “No, you don’t, you crazy old broad,” he muttered. “I can get Tango to drive you back, you know!”

  “Not if I’ve ripped out the receiver,” Donna said. She sounded exhausted. “I think I’ll just stay here, thank you. Ganesha can deal with me when they come. You don’t have to do it. You’d have had to freeze me, anyway, and vibrate me down to crystal, like cat litter, and—”

  “Fuck. You.”

  It was the first full complete sentence that Khalidah had spoken to her in months. So she repeated it.

  “Fuck you. Fuck you for lying to us. Again. Fuck you for this selfish fucking bullshit. Oh, you think you’re being so romantic, dying on Mars. Well fuck you. We came here to prove we could live, not …” Her lips were hot. Her eyes were hot. It was getting harder to breathe. “Not whatever the fuck it is you think you’re doing.”

  Nothing.

  “Donna, please don’t,” Brooklyn whispered in her most wheedling tone. “Please don’t leave us. We need you.” She sounded like a child. Then again, Khalidah wasn’t sure she herself sounded any better. Somehow this loss contained within it all the other losses she’d ever experienced: her mother, her father, the slow pull away from the Earth and into the shared unknown.

  “This is a bad idea,” Marshall said, his voice calm and steady. “If you want to take the Lethezine, take the Lethezine.
But you don’t know how it works—what if it doesn’t go like you think it will, and you’re alone and in pain down there? Why don’t you come back up, and if something goes wrong, we’ll be there to help?”

  Silence. Was she deliberating? Could they change her mind? Khalidah strained to hear the sound of Tango starting back up again. They flicked nervous, tearful glances at each other.

  “Are you just going to quit?” Khalidah asked, when the silence stretched too long. “Are you just going to run away, like this? Now that it’s hard?”

  “You have no idea how hard this is, Khal, and you’ve never once thought to ask.”

  It stung. Khalidah let the pain transform itself into anger. Anger, she decided, was the only way out of this problem. “I thought you didn’t want me to ask, given how you never told us anything until it was too late.”

  “It’s not my fault I’m dying!”

  “But it’s your fault you didn’t tell us! We would have—”

  “You would have convinced me to go home.” Donna chuckled. It became a cough. The cough lasted too long. “Because you love me, and you want me to live. And I love you, so I would have done it.” She had another little coughing jag. “But the trouble with home is that there’s nothing to go back to. I’ve thrown my whole life into this. I’ve had to pass on things—real things—to get to this place. But now that I’m here, I know it was worth it. And that’s how I want to end it. I don’t want to die alone in a hospital surrounded by people who don’t understand what’s out here, or why we do this.”

  Khalidah forced her voice to remain firm. “And so you want to die alone, down there, surrounded by nothing at all?”

  “I’m not alone, Khal. You’re with me. You’re all with me, all the time.”

  Brooklyn broke down. She pushed herself into one corner. Khalidah reached up, and held her ankle, tethering her into the group. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt tears bud away. Song’s beautiful ponytail drifted across her face. Arms curled around Khalidah’s body. Khalidah curled her arms around the others. They were a Gordian knot, hovering far above Donna, a problem she could not solve and could only avoid.

  “That’s right, Donna,” Marshall said. “We’re here. We’re right here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Donna said. “I’m sorry I lied. I didn’t want to. But I just … I wanted to stay, more than I wanted to tell you.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” Khalidah said. “I …” She wiped at her face. Her throat hurt. “I miss you. Already.”

  “I miss you, too. I miss all of you.” Donna sniffed hard. “But this is where we’re supposed to be. Because this is where we are at our best.”

  They were quiet for a while. There was nothing to do but weep. Khalidah thought she might weep forever. The pain was a real thing—she had forgotten that it hurt to cry. She had forgotten the raw throat and pounding head that came with full-body grief. She had forgotten, since her mother, how physically taxing it could be.

  “Are you ready, now?” Song asked, finally. She wiped her eyes and swallowed. “Donna? Are you ready to take the dose?”

  The silence went on a long time. But still, they kept asking, “Are you ready? Are you ready?”

  Acknowledgments: First, I am grateful to Ed Finn, Joey Eschrich, Alissa Haddaji, and Steve Ruff at Arizona State University for their tireless work bringing this incredibly special project to fruition. I’m also profoundly lucky to have worked with Zachary Pirtle and Jacob Keaton at NASA. It is beyond cool to have had these gentlemen answer my questions. I also want to thank Scott Maxwell for his input and commentary, as well as his open discussion of his work as a Mars rover driver. (I should also thank Joi Weaver for introducing us!) Lastly, I must thank my husband David Nickle, who was beyond patient with me as I worked through one of the most difficult, engaging stories of my career.

  Life on Mars?

  by Steve Ruff

  I consider myself a Martian, at least virtually, like Karl Schroeder’s “homesteaders.” I’m actually a Mars geologist, a scientist who applies knowledge of Earth geology to explore Mars geology. But for three months in 2004, I and a few hundred other Earthbound explorers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory got as close to being Martians as humanly possible at this point in history. Many of us from across the U.S. and abroad took up residence in Pasadena and surroundings so that we could ride shotgun with the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Our apartments were equipped with blackout window shades to help adjust our wake and sleep cycle to the rising and setting sun in the Martian sky. We needed to be on Mars time, just like the rovers. Just like Wekesa Ballo.

  Although we Terrans share the same Sun with the real Martians (if they exist), their planet turns just a bit more slowly on its axis than ours, such that the Martian day is 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer. This Martian “sol” is quite a cosmic coincidence. Our other next-door neighbor, Venus, rotates the slowest of any planet. So a “day” there would stretch for more than 243 Earth days, precluding any hope of living on Venus time.

  Mars time, however, I could get used to. My night-owl ways had unexpectedly prepared me for a mission with about 40 minutes of bonus time each night, followed by the luxury of sleeping 40 minutes later each morning. Apparently my circadian metronome beats with a Martian rhythm. I was among the lucky few. My housemate lasted only a week before his decidedly terrestrial metronome forced him back to the rhythm of Earth time.

  Like my housemate, the baker and homesteaders in Schroeder’s story are permanently jet-lagged, a condition experienced by many of the JPL-based “Martians.” Fortunately, the jet lag of our team of JPL Martians ended after a mere 90 sols, the prespecified length of the rovers’ primary mission. The rovers, of course, are immune to jet lag and free from human frailties. They have been loyal mechanical surrogates following the commands of their Earthbound masters each day since their landing, one of them for more than 13 years now.

  For decades we’ve been sending our robotic surrogates to Mars. The first spaceships had just minutes of close encounters with the alien planet before sailing past. Subsequent missions graduated to extended visits in orbit, bolstered by ever-improving capabilities to sense the landscape a few hundred miles below and to probe the meager atmosphere in between.

  Our first touch of Martian soil came in 1976 from one-armed robotic landers, an incredible feat of engineering and science prowess. But the lack of mobility of the Viking landers was so frustrating that Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos how he found himself “unconsciously urging the spacecraft at least to stand on its tiptoes, as if this laboratory, designed for immobility, were perversely refusing to manage even a little hop.”[1] The rover mission he so passionately championed would not come until after his untimely death. That 1996 Pathfinder mission was wildly successful, but its modestly equipped little rover never ventured out of sight of its aptly named home base, the Carl Sagan Memorial Station.

  Nearly 10 years would pass before the next rovers visited Mars. Spirit and Opportunity arrived in 2004 with significant advances in mobility and scientific instrumentation, but their capacity to explore is still very limited. They undertake reconnaissance by committee, following orders from humans tens of millions of miles away who have an incomplete picture of the landscape through which the rovers move at the pace of a Galápagos tortoise. Even the newer, larger, and more sophisticated Curiosity rover still suffers from the same exploration-at-a-distance realities of its precursors. This is not an efficient way to investigate the vast reaches of an unknown planet. I often wonder what pieces of the scientific puzzle we’re missing that a geologist on the surface would’ve zeroed in on with ease.

  Karl Schroeder’s story describes a near future in which humans interact with Mars through virtual reality “telecommuting” in much the same way as our Earthbound teams navigate the terrain via rovers. The homesteaders and we must deal with the tens of minutes of time delay, but they use smarter robots and greater visibility of the landscape to create enhancements in productivity. For Schroeder’s imagined
future to work as intended, however, we’ll need significant improvements in satellite and receiver infrastructure to increase the amount of data sent between the planets. The fastest data rate from Mars to Earth today is two megabits per second. That’s about five times slower than the slowest “Starter Package” offered by my home internet service provider. We’re going to need at least the “Premier Package” to make high-definition 3D telepresence viable.

  In a very different vision of Mars exploration, Madeline Ashby’s story “Death on Mars” puts the human explorers in orbit around the Red Planet, using Phobos, one of its two tiny moons, as a natural satellite base camp. This would offer the major advantages of allowing astronauts to command rover activity in real time and the potential for much greater transfers of data. Other benefits include the fact that the microgravity of the moons allows spacecraft to land and take off with very little effort or special equipment compared with landing and taking off from the Martian surface. So appealing are these benefits that NASA is seriously eyeing this possibility as one of the first steps in the journey of humans to Mars. But even in this scenario, major advances in rover capabilities will still be necessary.

  We’ve already started to teach old rovers new tricks. For example, in the search for Martian dust devils using rover cameras, the otherwise data-intensive effort is minimized via software that only returns images in which a change is detected. And interesting rocks can now be targeted for imaging and other non-contact measurements using onboard software that is smart enough to recognize them without a human in the loop. Ultimately however, true in-depth exploration of the Red Planet will require highly mobile and dexterous robots that can explore and interact with the Martian environment using artificial intelligence. Just as test pilot astronauts during the Apollo era learned the fundamental skills of a geologist, so too could robotic surrogates on Mars. But unlike the rudimentary capabilities of the Apollo geologists, future Mars robotic geologists will be equipped with sensor systems unimaginable in the 1970s. These tools will identify rocks and minerals with a precision and accuracy that even skilled field geologists on Earth would envy. The discoveries of these robotic explorers would be the starting point for human explorers to make sorties from their orbiting base camp, and ultimately, from their surface exploration zones.