“I was a good little girl. Helped Mom with the dishes. Did my homework. Sung in the church choir.”
“What went wrong?”
With a grin lighting up her face, Hedy cocks her head sideways, saying, “Don’t.” But she’s not upset. She gets it. I’m jiving. Poking fun at her childhood. Messing around. We’re both having a little fun.
“Survivor’s bias, you know?” I’m not sure what she means, but she clarifies. “Whenever anyone’s successful, they say, ‘Oh, it was hard work. I never gave up,’ or they attribute their success to green tea or exercise or whatever. They come up with some asinine idea about their success, as though everyone else isn’t doing exactly the same thing, sweating over the exact same bullshit. Truth is, they survived where everyone else failed—and they don’t really know why. Neither do I.
“It’s like the guy that survives a plane crash and attributes it to prayer. What? Was no one else praying as the plane plummeted toward the mountainside?
“It’s simple math, you know. Classic bell curve. Normal distribution. Most people are going to pile up in the middle, not going anywhere, but there’ll be a handful of outliers that go high and low, often for inexplicable reasons. Point is, even survivors don’t really understand why they survive—they just do.”
I see where she’s going with this, “And you landed on the high side.”
“Yes. All things being roughly equal, there will always be outliers, but why is never clear. Truth is, if it wasn’t for Lisa, I’d be teaching high school physics or perhaps working in a lab somewhere.”
“Lisa, huh?”
It’s funny, but being separate from the others, sitting here in the quiet of the Redstone gives us both a little freedom to talk honestly about things that might be socially awkward in any other context. After all, we’re sitting on what amounts to a keg of dynamite. We’re about to launch a lightweight, single-use methalox engine. Once this puppy is lit, we’re heading for orbit—hopefully in one piece and not several hundred.
Our engine is fueled with methane and oxygen. Liquid methane is easy to store long-term in the freezing conditions on Mars, while liquid oxygen can be harvested from subsurface aquifers, separating hydrogen from oxygen, making it ideal for returning to Earth. The challenge is, our rocket engine is untested. It’s not possible to test something that only gets used once. All that can be tested are replicas and clones.
Our engine has been sitting on the dusty surface of Mars for nine months and has been subject to daily temperature fluctuations of over a hundred degrees. The boffins at NASA took this into account in their design and ran a long-term exposure simulation in a vacuum chamber for four months before conducting a test fire on the design, but their simulated launch only lasted five seconds. Any longer and it would have begun melting the interior of the chamber. No one’s really sure it’s all going to work. They’re confident, but like Armstrong and Aldrin, we’re in uncharted territory.
Our launchpad is a scrappy slab of bedrock in a shallow, exposed crater. There’s no launch tower. No concrete blast channel to deflect the exhaust. No fire suppression equipment. No escape module. One day, launches like this will be routine, but for now it’s experimental—based on decades of learning, but novel nonetheless.
“So tell me about her?”
“Lisa was a sophomore when I started a degree in applied mathematics at Princeton. Things just clicked. She had an insatiable desire for learning. Always pushing herself and dragging me along behind her.”
I laugh. “I cannot imagine anyone dragging you anywhere.”
“She’s the reason I’m on Mars.”
Hedy mimics Lisa. The slight change in the pitch of her voice is as convincing as her faux-accent and tempo. She could be replaying a recording of her partner. “We should do a combined research paper on fluid dynamics in the Martian atmosphere and the impact on canyon erosion... We could apply for a scholarship to pursue our doctorates at MIT... I want to learn to fly, but not just light aircraft—helicopters as well… Lets apply to NASA for their aeronautics assessment program... We could be astronauts... One day, we might make it to Mars, can you imagine that? At least, that’s the one-decade-in-just-a-handful-of-sentences version.”
“And here you are.”
“And here we all are on another planet.”
There’s silence for a moment as we both reflect on the astonishing chain of events that led us to this moment, sitting in a rocket on the open plains of Mars. Call me nostalgic, but I feel a deep sense of connection with Hedy. Even though we’ve never been friends as such, we’ve depended on each other’s professionalism for years, and that’s built both respect and admiration between us.
“What about you, cowboy?”
“Me?”
I’m tempted to give her the generic answer—played with rockets as a kid, always wanted to be an astronaut, worked hard and all that bullshit, but she’s right—survivor’s bias. What about all those other kids who played the Kerbal Space Program? Nah. I’ve got to be honest. I don’t want to be, but she deserves better than sterile, pre-packaged answers.
“I was an asshole.”
“Was?” Hedy raises an eyebrow but can’t keep a straight face, chuckling at how she’s ribbing me for a change.
“Yeah, okay.”
Hedy raises a hand in apology, realizing I’m serious.
“Alpha male, you know.”
“You and Scott went to the same high school, right?”
“We were two years apart. Barely knew each other. Passed each other in the halls, that’s all. Makes for a good news story, though. Reality is, it’s your distribution curve again. Odds are we should all come from different corners of the globe, but luck is messy. Luck is never accommodating, right? Just a big smattering of probabilities that sometimes collide.
“Scott went to MIT. I started at Stanford and switched to Purdue. We were both in our second year within the astronaut corps before the penny dropped and we realized we’d been in high school together.”
I’m going off script. Hedy’s curious, bringing me back to my initial point. “But an asshole?”
“Do you know what all assholes have in common?”
She shakes her head. “I must say, I haven’t given rectums a lot of thought.”
“They’re oblivious to anything other than themselves. Self-centered. Absorbed. Arrogant.”
“But?”
“But at some point, the walls come crashing down.”
“And for you that was…”
“My mom dying from cancer. Yeah. Big tough guy is helpless in the face of tiny cellular replication spiraling out of control… You can’t even see the individual cells. That’s what got me. She was dying from something neither of us could actually see. Just a few grey smudges on a scan, but even then, a lump as small as my thumbnail could contain a billion cells.
“Cut them out, right? Blast them with radiation. Poison them with chemo. Fix it. Fix the problem. That was me. There always has to be a solution. Only there wasn’t.”
A lump forms in my throat. I’m lying on my back in a spaceship on Mars, and yet mentally I’m standing in a hospital room, smelling disinfectant, looking at the linoleum splash-backs curling up the walls. My mother lies there helpless. An IV drips slowly into a tube leading to her forearm. A medical monitor shows her heart rate, blood pressure and a bunch of other numbers and metrics that are meaningless to me.
“It’s funny the things I remember from back then. Everything was made from thick plastic or shiny chrome—screaming of utility, but utterly lifeless. The chairs. The bed. The mattress liner. The IV stand. The ports feeding oxygen into a tiny mask sitting over her nose and mouth. I remember brushing loose strands of hair from her forehead so they wouldn’t get in her eyes. That was it. That was all I could do for her. For once in my life, I couldn’t fix a damn thing. I was pathetic.”
Hedy is kind. “No, you weren’t.”
“There was this surgical tape. You know, two bucks at the drug
store. Just nothing, yet there it was holding an IV port in place on the back of her hand. The plastic tube looked like the fifty cent variety at my local pet store—something that should be running into a fish tank not sustaining human life. And there was a machine on the stand beside her with a tiny motor turning inside a clear chamber, gently pumping fluids into her. I had no idea what was in the IV bag or what purpose it served. It could have been water for all I knew. Or vodka. For the first time in my life, I was utterly helpless.
“Crazy thing was, I’d just been accepted into the Mars training program. I was engaged. Planning a wedding. Dreaming of space flight. Life was one long continuous run of wins. And then... Mom died two weeks before we got married.”
The silence that follows is like a blast of chilled air.
“You know what we’re really good at?” My comment’s rhetorical, but I pause nonetheless, giving Hedy the chance to say something if she wants. She doesn’t. “Forgetting. Ignoring. Resetting the moment. Getting things back to normal. Only, I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to forget the way I felt standing by Mom’s bedside. As much as I hated the present, I didn’t want to go back to the idyllic past or rush off into the future. I had to accept reality, not ignore it.
“I—I could write relativistic metric tensors showing how spacetime warps at hyper velocities, but I couldn’t do a damn thing to save my own mother.”
I throw my gloved hands in the air. It’s an impulsive act as I fight off tears, grounding myself back on Mars. Some thoughts are too painful to follow. Movement. Motion. Any act, regardless of how little, helps me through the anguish. I’m surprised by how I feel. Hedy is quiet, which is cathartic. It’s strange coming to the realization that I can be open with her, far more so than I’d ever be with Scott, even though he’s more of a friend.
“That’s when I switched to botany. It wasn’t so much an elective as swallowing my pride. Sure, I knew it was a favorable position for any Mars mission, but for me it was more than that. Rather than ignoring what had happened to Mom and just charging ahead, oblivious, it was a way of accepting reality, of relenting. I finally realized, I don’t have to be first. I don’t have to be better than everyone else. I don’t have to push through the crowd to get to the front of the line. I just need to be better than myself. Better today than I was yesterday.”
Hedy’s voice is soft. Considerate. “And here you are—part of the first research mission on Mars.”
“Yeah, it’s the kind of irony life loves throwing at you, huh?”
Hedy nods. “Before we launched, I spoke with Director Scizzack about crew composition. I felt flattered at being nominated as second-in-command but I was getting a lot of flak from the media and felt a little paranoid, as though everyone was against me. I thought you might resent my position. Scizzack told me not to worry.”
“He was right.”
“You’re all right, Anderson... What do you say we light this candle and get the hell out of here?”
“Sounds good to me, Washington.”
We both smile. There’s something therapeutic about reverting to our surnames. During training, they were used whenever we weren’t working as couples and, to my mind at least, the formality is an acknowledgement of all we’ve been through.
Hedy reaches up and pushes the transmit button on the digital console. “Shepard. Redstone. Any updates? Over.”
“Redstone. We have a revised flight plan from Houston. Just double-checking the figures. Don’t want to send you on your way to Jupiter.” That’s Lisa joking around. No surprise she’s running her eyes over the calculations. “They haven’t been able to reestablish contact with the taikonauts but they’re still receiving telemetry. Two heartbeats.”
“Copy that.”
“We’ve currently got two windows open. Seven minutes, and one hour forty.”
Seven minutes? Lisa’s still got the original clock running, leaving me wondering why Houston called off the launch. She’s suggesting there’s no reason we can’t leave on schedule. Hedy looks at me, raising an eyebrow, realizing the same thing. I nod. Hedy replies, “We are good to go.”
I pull my harness back in place, clipping in.
Lisa says, “Okay, we have you on task to rendezvous with the Schiaparelli supply vessel. Coming in from above, conducting a docking at 2 am. From there, you’ll have an eight-hour rest period and conduct a plane change before shifting altitude to reach Phobos.”
“Copy that.”
Launch
As commander of the Redstone, Hedy has override control. Being the pilot, my only role is to provide commentary. It might seem trivial, but it confirms we’re all in agreement about what’s happening and when—Redstone, Shepard and later, Houston. Should things go south, they’ll use our audio to help piece together what we knew at various points.
I speak with deliberate clarity. “Okay, this is Redstone standing by at two minutes. Manual override is OFF. PGNS is active with guidance and steering set to transfer to OGS at 50,000 meters. Fuel loading complete. Redstone is running on internal power.”
NASA is an organization with an acronym for a name, and that characteristic pervades every aspect of its culture. Acronyms run amok. To anyone listening, ‘pings’ is actually the acronym PGNS, or Primary Guidance and Navigation System. OGS is pronounced as ‘oh-gees.’ OGS is the Orbital Guidance System, but there’s also DAISY, the Data Acquisition and Interpretation SYstem.
Some of our acronyms are hilarious. One of our proposed field trips was an overland journey to the arctic circle to set up ‘a trap’ to look for MICE—Muons passing through ICE. We’ve set up SMURFs, QUIRCs, WASPs and T-RECS—seriously, some of these scientists need to get out more. Then there’s every astronaut’s favorite, the FUC—or the Far Ultraviolet Camera, used to study the impact of solar winds and cosmic radiation on the Martian atmosphere and look for any localized out-gassing, as in ‘Get the FUC on that.’ There was even a rocket named the FUCR which caused no end of delight for Mission Control.
“Redstone. You’re looking good.”
“Roger that.”
“Mark T-minus one minute.”
If I was a gangster, right about now I’d be saying, shit is getting real. Nerves. Five launches. This will make six. Like all astronauts, I want an even number of launches and landings. For every take-off, there’s got to be a touchdown—I hope.
“Thirty seconds. Master arm is ON. DSK Blank. Fuel pressure is nominal. Engine is online. We are GO for ascent.”
“Copy that, Redstone. We have you GO for ascent.”
Launches are crazy. Time drags and then it doesn’t. Not that long ago, Hedy and I were relaxing in our couch seats shooting the breeze. It felt like forever before we’d launch. Now, that moment is screaming toward us with the full force of a hurricane.
“Ten. Nine. Eight. Fuel pump is running. Engine is ARMED. Four. Three. Two. IGNITION… and LIFTOFF.”
The crazy thing about rocket launches is it doesn’t feel like we’re being pushed up. On the contrary, it’s as though someone’s pushing us down, shaking us and driving us into the ground. It’s insane. I’m sitting inside a glorified panel van with no visual clues as to our actual motion. The dust haze in the atmosphere means only a handful of stars shine through. There are no clouds for reference. As we’re lying on our backs, we can’t see the mountains or the plateau.
Shepard broadcasts a video feed from outside the main entrance. A fireball rises into the thin Martian air, but as soon as Mars falls away, it’s just a lick of flame fighting against the dark of night. We’re pushed back in our couches by the acceleration. The thin atmosphere makes this a smooth, shorter ride than departing Earth.
“Watching the ball.”
The Redstone has a mechanical gyroscope, allowing us to confirm the radar imaging that reveals our orientation relative to the curved surface of Mars. The intensity of the thrust provided by our single engine is misleading. We could be pitching over and racing back toward the surface and we’d never kno
w it. As we gain altitude, the guidance system automatically brings us horizontal, lining us up for our orbital profile.
“Pitching.”
It’s counterintuitive. Instead of going up into space, we’re going sideways. The atmosphere is so thin on Mars, we don’t need too much altitude to break into space. To anyone watching from the ground, it would look like there was some kind of malfunction as, unlike a launch from Kennedy, we’re almost immediately racing east, soaring over the rocky plain as we gain altitude.
Orbits are strange beasts. Rather than escaping the gravity of Mars, we’re surrendering to it, albeit at a speed and distance that allows us to fall around the planet. Like passengers in an elevator with the cable severed, we’re plummeting toward the ground, only we’re going sideways so fast we keep missing the planet. So much for zero gravity. Everything, everywhere in this whole wide universe is falling around something, held firmly in the grasp of stuff ranging from asteroids, moons, planets, stars, black holes, and millions, billions, trillions of stars and other galaxies. Gravity is a nested Russian doll. There’s always one more. As for us, once our engine cuts out we’ll have the flight profile of a cannonball.
“PGNS and OGS are in sync… Yaw is complete… Confirm radar tracking on target.”
To anyone listening to these broadcasts on public release, hearing about ‘pings,’ and ‘oh-gees’ would sound utterly cryptic. It would be much easier to say, ‘we’re on track,’ but it’s less precise. Noting that both guidance systems agree is NASA jargon for, ‘Computer says, we’re good.’ If they ever disagreed on our motion and position, it would mean we’re in deep shit.
Mars is weird. On one side, there’s the Tharsis uplift, a raised plateau that includes the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons. That’s a lot of mass in one spot. On the other side of the planet, in the southern hemisphere, there’s Hellas, the single largest crater in the solar system—a depression so deep most of North America would fit in it. It’s a single hole some seven kilometers deep. Between Tharsis in one hemisphere and Hellas in the other, the gravity of Mars is all screwy, which makes orbits tricky. If Mars was a gym medicine ball, it would be as though someone punched it, leaving an indent on one side and a bulge that deforms its shape on the other. Around Earth, we have geosynchronous satellites, but not around Mars. It’s too difficult to maintain a long term stable orbit. These variations won’t affect our orbit, but they mean our target has been drifting slightly over the past nine months. Catching the Schiaparelli will be fun.
Losing Mars Page 11