by Jim Melanson
I made sure the water bag was full in my space suit. This was a device that allowed me to drink water through the sippy-hose; not to be confused with the other water bag, which would be almost full by the time I was done. I filled the pressure suit with air, and I put on the helmet. I had to re-set it twice before I could lock it in place. I put on the gloves, sealed them, and then closed my visor. Reaching around behind my helmet, I tightened the locking screw on the visor armature. I didn’t want to wind up like Nick Piantanida.
I may have made the whole space suit thing sound easy, but it’s not. On Earth I had three people helping me to put it on. In zero-g it was easier to get into; but it still had its challenges. The pressure suit underneath the space suit took almost 20 minutes to put on. The rest of the suit took about an hour to get on and hooked up properly. I always wondered why astronauts in space looked like rag dolls with their arms and legs splayed when resting. It’s because of the pressure suit. The pressure suit is pumped up with gas to keep your innerds, from becoming your outerds. Combined with the space suit it makes movement very unorganic. You have to be physically strong and have a good deal of stamina to work in a pressure suit/space suit. If the space suit itself had been pumped up to pressure, it would be useless for movement; hence the two suits. A few hours of EVA, and you can lose a few pounds from exertion against the pressure suit itself. Thankfully I’d be using a mechanical Activity Suit on Mars. Developed by MIT, the Activity Suit was going to be much easier to use. However, for now, I was in the real space suit that was provided to us almost last-minute by NASA, and had to get moving. I say almost last-minute because to this day, each and every NASA space suit is custom-made and hand stitched by a small company in the Mojave desert. They did, however, deliver mine in record time.
Powering up the suit environmental system, and getting all nominal readings, I floated into the smallish airlock on the Jalopy, then shut and sealed the inner hatch. The depressurization was about ninety seconds. I took a deep breath of anticipation, and then I opened the outer hatch.
I stood there in the open hatch, just taking a moment. I was a Pathfinder. I was an Explorer. I was travelling through space and going to a new planet. I was alone. After years of training and months of travel, now, at this moment, about to take my first step into the void: I felt like I was finally a real, honest to goodness astronaut. I laughed quietly; I was giddy like a school boy with a new toy rocket ship.
I looked all around the hatch opening. I could see beautiful Mars in full rise just above the horizon line. I looked down to see distant stars with a lot of nothingness in between them. My tether was securely attached to the airlock’s inner anchor point, my tool bag was clipped to my utility belt, and I was ready to go. Holding on to the frame of the hatch, I lifted a foot to step out into the void, and had to stop. I had to suppress the urge to vomit. I knew I was safe, I knew I wasn’t going to “fall”; but somewhere in my brain, the animal instinct that preserves most of us from acquiring a Darwin Award kicked in. I took another moment, breathing deeply a few times while still taking in the splendour before me, and then decided to fool my brain. I turned around, facing the interior of the smallish airlock, holding the door frame. Then I just let go and hung there, floating in the open hatch.
I gave a little toot on the manoeuvring jets on my space suit, and flipped upside down slowly. Now Mars appeared below the horizon and suddenly, I didn’t feel ill any more. I manoeuvred out about four feet, turned to the right (which was aft now that I was turned around and relatively upside down), and then another little burst on the manoeuvring jets sent me back to the solar wing which was about fifteen feet from the hatch.
I looked down into the cradle-well for the manual release on the solar wing armature, grabbed it and pushed it. Sticking up perpendicular to the cradle, it had to be moved all the way down flush with the cradle to disengage the locking mechanism that would allow me to fold up the wing manually. Of course, it wouldn’t budge. I tried again. No movement at all.
I had tools for nuts, bolts and prying things open; but nothing to lever another lever. “Well, wasn’t this a pickle,” I thought to myself. I can’t leave the wing extended. I was already four hours into my orbit time, and only had about sixty-eight hours remaining until descent. While I wasn’t in a rush, I wasn’t going to dilly-dally either. I put one hand on the frame of the wing-well opening, and swung my body around. I grabbed the frame with my other hand and then swung my body, foot first, down towards the locking mechanism. If you can’t turn it or force it … then kick it! The darn thing didn’t even pretend to move.
I repeated this about a dozen times. At some point I started giggling. I knew the exterior wing camera would be trained on me, and in eighteen minutes the live feed would start reaching Flight Control. I knew I would be a sight to see: the astronaut on his multimillion dollar space ship, on a spacewalk, trying to kick a lever closed. To make it even funnier, would be the audio of me grunting and groaning with every kick and calling the mechanism a few choice names; questioning its parentage, like I did with my snow blower during a particularly rough winter, years before on Terra.
After giving up that plan, I re-oriented myself. I floated down to the lower side of the 2 metre long hatch, hunkered down and pressed the back of my pressure suit and PLISS pack (air tanks, etc.) against the frame. I then placed my foot on the lever, and started pushing. I was straining hard, grunting, and then started kicking again, “Close! … Close! … Close!” Finally it gave. The lever moved forward like there had never been a problem. The tight wing went slack, and a sudden “Oh, shit” sent me scrambling out of the wing-well. I had visions of the solar wing fully retracting on me, and sealing me in the wing-well like a tomb. Of course, it didn’t retract. It had just gone a bit slack without the tension of the locking mechanism.
The rest of the process was easy. Crank in the tension cable a bit, fold the first solar panel flat, crank in the tension cable a bit more, then fold the next solar panel flat; but in the opposite direction. I started out thinking it was easy work, even though it was slow. The solar wings were 49 metres long, and had 156 solar panels. The crank, fold and placement for each panel took about five minutes. However, my nitrogen bottles (hey, I’m a rebel), only lasted a little over four hours. The stowage process took thirteen hours. Then you had to add in the time it took to get the wing unlocked, get the hatch finally sealed shut, stop to fill my nitrogen bottles four times, and take a break for lunch during one of the refills. In total, my port wing debacle was a nineteen hour exercise. At the end of it, I was exhausted. At first I thought manual labour in zero-g would be easy, but it’s not quite the walk in the park you would think. If anything, you spend more exertion keeping yourself anchored and oriented, as you do the actual work.
There was a whole list of things to do on a clock that was getting smaller, but I had to sleep at this point. I set the alarm for four hours, but wound up sleeping through it and waking up after six. A dozen messages were waiting for me from Flight Control. Hans Gohs, the on duty Mission Director, was beside himself. He didn’t outwardly show it, but I had spent a lot of time with the man back on Terra and I could tell he was ready to chew bubble gum, and kick ass. Mainly the ass of the person who programmed the software for the port wing retraction, but I knew I better be a bit “Yes, Sir. No, Sir. Three bags full Sir”, or else he might turn his attention to my ass.
Roughly forty-six hours until descent, and the next glitch struck.
After waking up and listening to Hans’ messages, I had to hit the head. In my haste (both to get to business, and to get this particular business done), I failed to notice the absence of a negative pressure lock when I sat on the space potty. You see, when you make nice-nice in space, the toilet actually has a slight negative pressure inside. It basically suctions itself to your butt or your penis (separate hose for peeing), so that what you eliminate from your body goes down into the small tank that holds it until you vent it to space. However, like I said, I failed to no
tice the absence of negative pressure.
The Mission Control propeller-head weenies informed me later that when I had been sitting in the wing well with my suit pressed back against the frame for leverage to move the lever of the locking mechanism; my suit had damaged the controller that held the negative pressure in the holding tank. The wing well was right beside where the transit vehicles’ head was, and some knob of a designer had put the controller in the port solar wing well.
I finished my business and moved away from the toilet seat (which was supposed to snap a cover closed when you moved away from it); but the cover never snapped shut because there was no negative pressure. As I was working my way through the ESA approved nine step “Sanitary Maintenance Post Evacuation Procedure” (wiping my ass), I noticed an odd smell. I started to turn around and came face to face with something roughly shaped, brown, and very moist. Ewwwww. Space turds …
With the cover not snapping shut, and the lack of negative pressure, everything in the holding tank over the last three days (since the last outboard dump, no pun intended) was slowly floating out of the toilet, and into the small compartment. Yes, I tried to scream in frustration. Tried, being the operative word. IT WAS A BAD CHOICE OF THINGS TO DO IN ZERO-G. When you scream, the first thing you do is make a large inhalation of air. Not wise with “stuff” floating so close to your face in this kind of environment.
The cleanup took two hours. Thankfully there was two small bottles of mouthwash available in the toiletry supplies. At the end of the two hours I had a floating plastic bag full of … well … you know what it was full of. I also had a non-functioning toilet that I had to manually close and permanently secure the lid on. It was a small mercy that this happened at the end of the journey, and not at the start. It was no small mercy, however, that in my disgust and haste to clean things up, I had completely forgotten about the live feed cameras sending images back to Flight Control; and from there, out to the internet. Apparently several million viewers saw me exiting the space toilet with my bare ass hanging out, floating space turds around me, and of course, me, spitting and hacking. Yep. The stuff legends are made of. Even now, eighty-three years later, it’s still considered one of the most hysterically funny videos of the entire Terran space program; especially after some tech head re-cut the feed and added Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz as the audio track. I still don’t think it’s so funny. There are certain events in a man’s life that he just has to accept he will never live down. It just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Hell, even the Hybrids had seen it; but that’s another story completely.
While the video I received from Flight Control was a room full of people laughing so hard I thought they were going to suffer renal failure, the image of Hans was different. He had gone from upset, stopped for lunch somewhere around supremely pissed, and was now driving forward at breakneck speed to the town of, “Apoplectic With Rage – Population 001”. His message that I watched after the cleanup indicated that if I was done turning the mission into a Keystone Cops’ routine, and that I might want to get on with the shutdown procedures as I was due to descend in approximately 45 hours. “IF, you don’t MIND,” was his acerbic and cutting closing statement as the vid ended.
Seeing him like that gave me a case of the giggles. The whole absurdity of the situation compounded it, but I knew he was right. Tempus was indeed Fugit-ing, and I was on the clock. I ate some rations quickly, and sipped a lukewarm plastic bag of coffee as I got on with the business of transitioning the MTV to satellite mode.
I had to transfer some supplies and equipment to the Lander. The transit vehicle had brought enough toiletries, food, water, consumables, and medical supplies for a round trip. This was for show. Had I arrived at Mars, and there been a problem with the Hab (Habitat) and other systems on the ground (AtmoGen, Solar Farm, Water Plant, etc), OR there had been a problem with the Lander; then I would need the supplies to do a free-return trajectory shot back to Earth. This step was solely for the happiness of the politicians, government bureaucrats, and the media pundits. Those in the program knew that if we were to do a free-return trajectory on this mission, the position of Mars and Terra at this point meant that the transit vehicle would in fact never reach Terra in time for me to survive. Terra would always be out of reach for the time the supplies would last (all that we had room for), and the transit vehicle would take almost two years for the orbital alignments to allow Terra and the transit vehicle to cross paths again. They only loaded an extra eight and a half months’ worth of supplies. Even if I went to half rations on a diet that was low cal and very basic to begin with, I’d still wind up four months short of the time needed to return home safely. This meant there were extras for me to take to the planet. It took me a full day to get everything bagged up and moved to the Lander, then securely stowed. It was a complete waste of time as things would turn out, but I didn’t know that then. Work like this is easy in zero-g, much easier than the heavy work outside: but it’s slow work nonetheless. This completed, a stop for lunch and two uses of the ESA approved Emergency Biological Evacuation System (basically eliminating into double thick plastic bags, cameras off), and I was ready for sleep. Thirty six hours until descent and I spent four hours in slumber to rest up for the next phase of preparation.
Awake, refreshed and fed, I had T-Minus 31 hours 20 minutes on the descent clock. It was time to get back into my pressure suit and space suit for my second (though the first planned) EVA. This was a secret part of the Jalopy-Sat’s future, so the live feed cameras were turned off. Mission Control would be getting delayed telemetry as usual, but they would not be getting any video, nor would the world. Only a small handful at Mission Control knew what I was up to. As far as the rest of the flight control crew were concerned, there was a problem with the relay satellite, Relay-1, in Terran orbit.
Opening the floor compartments, I pulled out the five square boxes and the one very long box which had been stored there by a “special” night shift crew of “experts”, shortly before assembly of the transit vehicle to the booster rockets. I put the long box and one of the square boxes in the airlock, finished getting my suit sealed and running properly, then went into the airlock and depressurized. I was installing a 1.5 metre long telescope on a mounting unit on the exterior dorsal portion of the Jalopy. This was a small telescope, but very powerful. Completely outside the Terran high atmosphere and just that much further from the sun, there was high hopes for what it would provide, in secret, to those planning future space missions. It’s true that the Martian thin atmosphere extends farther from Mars than the Terran atmosphere extends from Terra; however, the differences in atmospheric composition made it an insignificant consideration. The mounting platform for the telescope was hooked into the ships power and COM system to allow the telescope to be remotely controlled from Terra or Mars. They had made it idiot proof (a good thing, with me doing the installation). Other than a few mounting bolts, it was plug and play. Well, the secure point screws on the power and communication lines were a bit fiddly, but they had designed it well so I got it done the first try. All I had to do as a last step was run the power-up sequence. It worked like a charm, thankfully.
Finishing this installation, I went back inside, re-pressurized, and exchanged the empty containers for the four full ones which I had tethered together. Back in the airlock I depressurized and went EVA again.
The four boxes contained four cameras. One camera was a bit beyond Ultra-Hi-Def. It would be able to read the output of my suits control panel on my left forearm, when I got to the surface of Mars. Its capability was beyond what NASA or the NSA had, and had been developed in secret by the ESA as a contribution to this mission. They had plans to go commercial with it, but not just yet. The second box contained a targeting camera. It was part camera, part radar, part optical motion-tracker; and all American made. It was hooked up to some very powerful targeting software on board the Jalopy’s main computer. It could track any moving object on the surface of Mars larger than 2 centimetres i
n diameter or within a relatively close (750,000 kilometres, twice as far as Luna is from Terra) approach to Mars from space. It was going to be used for directing and focussing the Ultra-High-Definition camera. It had another use too, but I‘ll get to that later.
The first two cameras were mounted on the port side, which would always be oriented towards Mars. The final two boxes contained duplicates of the ones I had just installed. These were installed on the starboard side, pointing away from Mars. When that configuration came up in the security briefing, half a dozen questions came to mind; but I decided not ask any of them. I really didn’t want to know. When the ESA agent finished his briefing he walked over to me, looked me right in the eye and said, “Is there anything, anything at all, that you need to ask me?” I looked him squarely back in the eyes and said, “No sir. Not a thing. I have my instructions.” He reached out and gently slapped me on the shoulder and said, “Good man.” Then he walked out of the room, and I never saw him again.
The exterior “package” installation, in total, was fourteen hours. Of course, some of the fourteen hours was me, a-hem, doing a bit of cavorting about. Hey, it was the last time I’d ever walk in space; I was entitled to a bit of frolic. Had there been any audio or video feed of this going back to Flight Control, the “yee-haws” and “woo-hoos” would have done nothing to improve Hans’ state of mind. Thankfully, he was spared that challenge by the inherent secrecy of what I was doing. When I came back inside, I got out of the space suit/pressure suit combo and had a bite to eat; there was only 17 hours and 5 minutes left on the descent clock. There was only about four hours of real work left to do, so Flight Control told me to grab as much sleep as I could. It was getting harder to sleep, this close, after so much preparing and travelling. I was almost on Mars! This time, even though I was dog-tired, sleep came with a bit more difficulty. I finally managed to get a surprising seven hours of solid rack time (you have no idea how good you actually do sleep in deep space, until you’ve been there), and woke up with 7 hours and 45 minutes on the descent clock. I ate, used the emergency evacuation system for the last time, and moved the final three small bags of supplies into the Lander, securing them in place. Again, unbeknownst to me, this was a complete waste of time.