Back to the Moon

by Travis S. Taylor

  “And then there’s that Sudanese guy, Sharik Mbanta. Who does he think he is? Sure, his father is filthy rich, but that is absolutely no excuse for him trying constantly to sleep with my trainers. Sharon and Tara are good at what they do, and, yes, they are both pretty good-looking. They are also both very married, and Tara has two kids! But that doesn’t stop Mr. Mbanta. Oh, no. If he propositions her one more time, he’s liable to end up with something removed from his anatomy and stuffed in his mouth by an irate Mr. Tara. I could go on.…” Gesling’s voice trailed off.

  “Ha.” This time Childers’s laugh was genuine. “So, the unflappable Mr. Gesling doesn’t like his job as babysitter-in-chief?”

  “Damn right I don’t” came the clear and unequivocal response.

  “Believe it or not, I understand. But that doesn’t mean I can or will do anything about it. What you need from me isn’t action; you need me to be your counselor. You probably want me to tell you to suck it up and be a man. But I won’t.” Childers sighed and leaned back in his chair before he continued. “Yes, Thibodeau is an ass. He has a reputation for being selfish, self-centered, and an all-around difficult person to work with. He’s also well connected, and if he takes the flight and enjoys it, I suspect at least five others from his circle of friends will sign up for a future flight.”

  “Money, Paul. Money.” Leaning forward for effect, he intoned, “That’s one hundred twenty-five million dollars.” Once again leaning back in his chair, he continued. “Mr. Mbanta is a special case. He doesn’t have many friends eager to fly in space. But there are many filthy-rich Africans who have spoiled family members eager for that next thrill that will be lining up at our door once Mr. Mbanta gets home and the African press runs with his story. I cannot do anything about his overactive libido other than offer your trainers hazardous-duty pay.”

  Paul was taking it in. He knew he had to suck it up, and he knew that it took money, lots of money, to go to the Moon. But he was not sold yet. Gary Childers rose from his seat and walked around his desk to stand by Gesling’s chair.

  “Paul, I’m the president and CEO of a Fortune 500 company. I don’t just deal with contracts, the futures market, and keep up with the latest green-energy legislation. I find that I spend over half my time managing people. The buck stops here on everything in the company. We recently fired an employee for selling sensitive corporate data to a trading company that was actually owned by a Chinese sovereign investment fund. The guy is now under investigation by the FBI, yet he sues us for some alleged prejudicial misconduct. It seems the man is also a member of some offbeat religious cult, and he claims we singled him out because of it. I can’t tell you how many meetings—how many hours—that’s taken. And the list goes on. I simply do not have time to whine nor to hear my key people do so.”

  “I am not whining. I’m just used to dealing with people who take orders and, most of all, take their mission seriously. Out of the five passengers you’ve given me for the first flight, three are okay. The other two I’d just as soon see kicked out of line and replaced with their backups.”

  “Kicked out?” An incredulous tone appeared in Childers’s voice. “Captain Gesling, that is simply out of the question. Let me remind you that I have a backup for you. This is a business—not the military—and these are paying customers. They are paying us millions of dollars for this trip, and unless I determine that one of them is a risk to the flight, they will all, by God, be flying. So, and I said I wouldn’t say this, but by damn, suck it the hell up, Paul! Stop your damned whining and do your job. Make it work and quit involving me at every hiccup!” The tone in Childers’s voice went from incredulous to borderline anger, and it was clear that he wasn’t going to put up with much more of Paul’s whining. Gesling really hadn’t thought of it as whining until just then.

  “Yes, sir!” was all Gesling could say at this point. He was used to following orders, and that was exactly what had just happened. He had trained too long and too hard to let Thibodeau and Mbanta cost him a trip to the Moon. It was all he could do not to stand at attention and salute. Given Childers’s mood at this point, doing so might have cost him his job—and a chance to go to the Moon.

  “Damn right.” Childers’s tone returned to a more businesslike one as he retraced his steps back toward the other side of his desk. “Was there anything else?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Very good. Now, I’ve got that personnel matter to attend to. If you will excuse me?”

  Taken aback at how this informal “chat” had nearly cost him his job, Gesling arose uncomfortably, but quickly, and walked back toward the office door. As he neared the exit, two models on the rocket table caught his eye. Clearly visible on a simulated lunar landscape were the Apollo lunar lander and the new Altair lander that NASA at this moment was commanding into low lunar orbit as part of their unmanned test flight.

  “Yeah,” he muttered as he opened the door. “I envy those guys.…”

  Chapter 5

  Mission Specialist Anthony Chow awoke with a start. He turned his head and saw the red LED numbers gleaming on his clock radio, seemingly taunting him as they informed him that it was 2:45 a.m. He looked to his left and saw the slumbering form of Paula, his wife.

  Thank goodness I didn’t wake her up again, he thought to himself. This was not the first time he’d been awakened by that recurring dream. Merely thinking about what he’d been dreaming caused him to shudder.

  Carefully and ever so slowly, he pulled back the covers and eased himself out of bed. Remaining in the bedroom only long enough to pull on a pair of socks, Chow moved toward the hallway door and then down the hallway and stairs to the kitchen. A late-night cup of hot tea and then a few minutes with the newspaper were becoming a ritual that he’d just as soon not become a habit. And it was all because of that dream. The dream.

  “Tea. Earl Grey—hot,” he said with his best English accent as he stood solidly and looked at the microwave just before it beeped. He pulled the teacup from the appliance and halfheartedly chuckled to himself. “Replicator’s a little slow tonight. Gonna have to get Mr. La Forge up here to have a look at it.” He smiled to himself and sat at the kitchen table.

  After sipping the tea and perusing yesterday’s headlines, Chow once again became drowsy enough to fall back asleep. He put down the teacup and padded his way back up the stairs and into bed. Paula’s regular deep breathing was not interrupted as he pulled the covers up over his shoulders.

  “Good. I won’t have to tell her that the dream came back.” Chow was asleep in minutes.

  As usual, Chow began his day with a 5:30 a.m. run around the neighborhood. He was forty years old, in excellent physical condition, and intended to remain that way. The average age of a payload specialist was forty-two. He still had years of his astronaut career left if he took care of himself. He focused on his breathing and took in the sun as it started to rise. The reds and oranges cast rays across the sky that made getting up early worth it. It was going to be another glorious day with clear blue skies and not a cloud as far as he could see.

  His MP3 player finished his five-mile playlist just as he reached the front porch of his house. He shut the device off, pulled the headbuds from his ears, and eased open the door, uncertain if Paula was awake or not. As he started up the stairs, he passed Paula as she came down them and moved toward the kitchen.

  “ ’Morning.”

  “Good run?”

  “About the same as usual. I need a shower.” He smiled at his wife.

  She was dressed and ready to begin her day at Oak Park Travel. She was a “travel consultant” for one of the more successful travel companies in Houston. The sight of her slight figure and long blond hair falling seemingly haphazardly over her left shoulder was always enough to remind Anthony why he’d asked her to marry him.

  “I’ll leave breakfast on the counter behind the stove. I’ve got to go in early for a meeting. I hope the landing goes well. Will you be in mission control?”


  “No, but I’ll be watching from the conference room. We’ll be listening to the chatter from the control room and seeing what they see on the monitors. The next best thing to being there…” His voice trailed off as the unintentional humor of his own words registered in his brain.

  “Sounds exciting. Good luck. I love you.” The words came naturally, though hurriedly, as Paula rounded the corner into the kitchen.

  Chow briefly paused to rethink whether or not he’d put away the teacup and newspaper from last night’s “calming session.” He was sure that he had. With that, he continued up the stairs and into the shower.

  “Standing room only?” The conference room was crowded when Chow arrived. “And I’m here two hours before separation,” he muttered to himself. Two large monitors hung from one wall of the room while a dozen or so computers lined the conference table, each showing something different on its screen. Seating was not ad hoc. Even here, in a secondary conference room, one could not simply pop in to observe. Each person in the room was supposed to be in the room, and that included Anthony Chow.

  As he entered, he looked around to take a mental note of who else was there. He didn’t like being surprised.

  Today Chow would be an observer. With a doctorate in biophysics and a medical degree, there wasn’t really much for him to do on a test flight with no humans aboard. Engineers would be monitoring the detailed information from the systems and subsystems of the Altair—power, propulsion, communications, and navigation. Unless there were questions about human health or relating to the planned crew health experiments that they were to undertake during their upcoming manned flight, Chow would have the pleasure of watching history from the inside with nothing to do.

  He stood there and psychologically fed on the energy of the people in the room. Given that level of energy and sense of purpose, one would think that this modest conference room holding almost four dozen people, was actually mission control rather that simply a room down the hall from it.

  “Tony! Come here a minute, would ya?”

  Chow recognized the voice as that of Helen Menendez, the other mission specialist who would be going to the Moon with him as part of Commander Stetson’s crew. He respected Helen and trusted her implicitly, but he couldn’t say he really “liked” her. At times she could be downright antisocial. But she was good, very good, at what she did. Not only was she near the top of her field, geology, but she was cross-trained in all things mechanical. If a moving part was on the Altair, you could bet Helen knew where it was and all about how it worked.

  Chow rose from his not-yet-warm seat and moved down the table to lean over Menendez’s shoulder as she stared intently at the computer monitor in front of her.

  “Tony, are you as excited as I am? What’s it going to be like? Leaving the Orion and all of us going to the surface in the Altair? We’ve been training for years, but seeing it happen on the screen in front of me with no crew seems kind of creepy.”

  “Hmm.” Chow thought about it for a moment and rubbed his fingers through his hair. “Helen, I honestly don’t know. It doesn’t strike me as creepy. It just seems, well, wrong. Empty. People are meant to be there. What’s the point if it doesn’t happen with people?”

  She said, “Wrong. Yeah, that’s it. Wrong.”

  “Uh-huh.” He hesitated. “Is that all you wanted?” Having all-work-and-no-play Helen Menendez call him over for what amounted to idle chitchat at a moment like this was simply not normal.

  “No, not really. I’m just excited. That’s all.” That and the fact that her blunt approach to just about everything at work and outside of it had alienated a sizable fraction of the people in the room. “I just thought you, of all people, might be able to understand. Never mind.”

  With that, Menendez reverted back to the business at hand. And that no longer included off-topic conversation with Anthony Chow. He immediately regretted his reaction to her overture.

  Chow returned to his seat and reviewed the mission-summary reports from the previous thirty-six hours. With only a few minor exceptions, all had gone according to plan and all systems were working nearly flawlessly. Only a few hours previously, the Altair lander had used its engines to accomplish the Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) burn, slowing the vehicle down so that it could be captured into orbit around the Moon. Depleting about forty percent of the fuel in its tanks, the Altair was now poised to burn the remainder in its descent to the surface.

  Having separated from the Orion a few hours previously, the Altair was about to perform a totally automated descent and landing on the surface of the Moon. The more Chow thought about it, the more he regretted his response to Menendez.

  She is right to be excited, he thought to himself as he felt his own heart rate increase. We should be there.

  Chow looked up at the monitors in the front of the room. The one on the right showed various camera views from the Altair. One was toward deep space, with what appeared to be the Orion as a point of light in the distance, barely resolvable as more than a point in the sky. The one to the left showed the interior of the lander. Finally, the bottom portion of the screen showed the gray and brown landscape of the surface of the Moon moving rapidly beneath it.

  It was this view that caused Chow to relive the most vivid portions of his recurring nightmare. He lost touch with what was happening around him in the crowded conference room and remembered how it played out in his dream.…

  It was always the same. He was not with his crewmates and colleagues on the surface of the Moon. Instead, he was alone. He was standing in the crew cabin of the Altair, looking across the desolate lunar surface and feeling afraid. Afraid because he’d just learned that the ascent engine that was supposed to loft the top portion of the Altair, called the Lunar Ascent Vehicle, was not functioning. The ascent vehicle was supposed to carry the crew back into space for a rendezvous with the Orion and the trip home. But, at least in his dream, the engines did not light. He was trapped. Alone.

  In the dream he could hear the voice of his wife telling him that she loved him and would miss him. He recalled hearing the voices of his friends and family tell him similar things as he frantically sought a way out of being trapped on the lunar surface to die. And the people who spoke to him on the radio included his now-dead parents, both of whom told him how much they loved him and what a hero he would be. In the dream he wept, and, in many cases, he awoke from the recurring dream with tears running down his face.

  Alone. Trapped. Facing death. No way out.

  No way out. Nowhere to run except out the airlock and across the barren and very dead lunar surface.

  It was a nightmare he didn’t dare to tell anybody other than his wife. And he didn’t tell her about most of them. There was no need to give a shrink any reason to ground him from the mission.

  He was sure he was having just a private moment of inward reflection, but when he snapped out of his stupor for a moment he was positive that everyone in the room had noticed his lapse. As he looked around, however, he discovered that no one was paying him any particular attention. They were either focused on their individual data streams or engaged in conversation with others nearby.

  “Whew,” he sighed. Relieved, he resumed scanning the status reports. To himself, he asked, Am I ready for this? Do I need to see a counselor? Will the dream ever go away? Another part of himself answered sinlengly, Suck it up, wussy. Give up a trip to the Moon? What, am I nuts?!

  Thirty minutes later, the command was given and the Altair’s four liquid-hydrogen and oxygen engines fired for the second time, slowing the twenty-two-ton lander and causing it to move closer to the lunar surface. The onboard radar and extensive lunar-terrain maps were correlated and cross-checked as the lander began its descent.

  The landing site for this practice run was to be near the lunar south pole, though not nearly as close to the Aitkin Basin as was thought to be the leading candidate for the next flight—the one with people aboard—the one that would be his.

  The desc
ent to the surface would take only twelve minutes, and to those in mission control and in all the conference rooms throughout NASA it would seem like hours. Since 2004, tens of thousands of engineers had been working for this moment, and most were now glued to their televisions and computer monitors, holding their collective breath.

  “Landing in three minutes,” came the voice from mission control. All the chatter in the conference room now died down to nothing—all would be listening for the proverbial pin to drop.

  “Landing in two minutes.” Still no one in the room with Chow spoke.

  “Landing in sixty seconds.”

  With that, Chow averted his eyes from the big-screen monitors at the front of the room and scanned the faces of those in the room with him. He had always been more interested in human emotions than machines. Though he’d always been fascinated by all things space, he’d never considered the traditional engineering fields. They were all about the toys—he wanted to understand the people that went to space. He was eager to experience the Moon and not worry so much about how he was to get there.

  Menendez’s eyes were fixed on her own screen, and she seemed totally oblivious to the images coming back from near the lunar surface being returned by the Altair’s imaging system.

  Though many others in the room were similarly transfixed by the raw data, most had now placed their attention squarely on the monitors as the lunar surface loomed closer and closer, yet a quarter million miles away.

  “Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.…We have touchdown!”