Back to the Moon

by Travis S. Taylor

  Li and his team were charged with monitoring the flight of the Dreamscape and collecting copies of all its telemetry during the test flight. The team had modified the Honda van and turned it into a mobile communications center, though the only external evidence of this was the antenna. Perched on top of the van was a small dish antenna, clearly designed to receive satellite space communications. Had the profusion of home-entertainment systems with satellite television not become commonplace in homes throughout the remote portions of the American southwest, the antenna might have stood out suspiciously. But satellite TV was ubiquitous, and almost every home and camper had the required hardware. Their van, therefore, looked no different than the many others who simply used their satellite communications system to watch Sunday Night Football.

  “It looks like they are about to successfully achieve orbit,” said another of the men as they keenly watched the data scroll by on the computer screens.

  “I could have told you that,” said the third man, who was watching the whole event live on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and the Science Channel.

  No one paid any attention to the van or its occupants as they collected the data that would enable their colleagues at home to better understand the Dreamscape design recently stolen from the computers at Space Excursions.

  “Dreamscape is in orbit,” declared Paul Gesling. Though he had been in space several times piloting the suborbital rockets that preceded Dreamscape, this was the first time he would actually circle the globe. Gesling was now euphoric. He was whizzing around the Earth in a 186-mile-high circular orbit at 17,253 miles per hour. One trip around the Earth at that altitude and speed took ninety minutes almost to the second. The mission plan included a total of ten orbits, which meant that he would be in space for the next fifteen hours. A lot of that time he would be busy, but there was enough of it to allow the occasional gaze out the window.

  “Control, now preparing for orbit-orientation burn,” he read right off his checklist. “OOB in forty-five seconds.”

  “Roger that, Paul. Preparing for OOB.”

  At the Dreamscape’s circular orbit, the ship was still in an airplane-like flight path. That meant that the nose was forward and the planet was underneath the belly. It would be easier to fly and maintain a steady spacecraft orientation if the ship was rolled over and flying ass-first just like the old space shuttles used to. The view would be better, too. Paul toggled the OOB (pronounced “oh-oh-bee”) and the forty-five-second clock started to count down. The countdown allowed the onboard computer systems to interrogate the global-positioning data, the inertial-navigation units, and the exterior star trackers to determine the exact orientation of the ship with respect to the Earth and space. Then it calculated the appropriate sets of burns to safely rotate the ship into the upside-down-and-backward flight configuration. The clock hit ten seconds, and all the calculations showed complete.

  “Warning, orbital-orientation burn in three, two, one.” Paul instinctively raised an eyebrow at the sound of the Bitchin’ Betty and gripped his restraints in preparation. The burn fired.

  Several small cold-gas rocket thrusters fired on exterior of the ship, flipping it over and rolling it. Then the thrusters fired again to stabilize and stop the flight path. Burns, very small ones, would be needed over time to maintain the proper orientation of Dreamscape, but they would be so small they would barely be noticeable compared to the OOB.

  “OOB is complete,” Paul announced as the Earth filled the view in all the windows. “All systems look good, and to quote John Glenn, ‘Oh, that view is tremendous!’ ” Gesling had been trying to think of something historic to say, but the best he could do was rob from history. The sentiment perfectly fit the moment as it stimulated the memory and feelings he had the first time he had heard that scratchy radio recording from 1962 when American astronaut John Glenn made his first journey into space—years before Gesling’s birth. Even though he had heard it as a rerun, it had instilled in him something amazing. Looking out the window now, he understood what it was. How Glenn must have felt that first time he looked out the window and saw that beautiful world beneath him…Paul felt the same way now.

  “Roger that, Paul,” Childers replied from his own control-room link. “You’ll have to let me tag along for the ride sometime.”

  “I’ll bring you up anytime you want to pay for it, Gary,” Paul replied with a chuckle.

  A checklist icon turned yellow on his monitor. The changing color caught his attention, which was why it was designed that way. The icon told Gesling that he needed to begin preparations for the rendezvous with the refueling satellite, now only eight orbits away. That was about twelve hours—he had plenty of time.

  Slowly but surely, Newton’s laws were guiding the Dreamscape and the refueling spacecraft closer together. Once they attained the same orbit and were separated by only some tens of meters, the most difficult part of this flight would commence. Dreamscape would gently bump into the orbital gas station, lock on to its docking ring, secure a connection, and demonstrate how fuel could be transferred from one vehicle to another. Without the extra fuel, the Dreamscape would not be able to go to the Moon. While no fuel would actually flow this time, they would test out every system so that when the actual Moon flight occurred, they would be reasonably sure that no problems would keep the transfer from happening.

  Again speaking only to himself, Gesling said, “If NASA can do it, then so can I.”

  About that time an icon labeled ISR Payload turned red, showing that it had priority in the mission timeline at the moment. Paul tapped the monitor and brought up the checklist for the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance package. Step one was to activate the system. This he did by tapping the appropriate key sequence. On the Lunar mission the ISR package would be controlled by the person in seat number 2B. It could be controlled by any of the seats, but the future occupant of seat 2B was the person who had trained for the ISR job. The job consisted of turning on a very nice twenty-inch commercially available telescope system.

  The telescope was a Schmidt-Cassegrain type with real-time digital-color visible video and false-color infrared video cameras. There was a full zoom capability and pan and tilt controls, all software-driven from the touchscreen on the back of any of the seats. With the planned ten-mile closest flyby altitude of the Moon, called the orbit’s periapsis, the system could resolve an inch or two on the lunar surface. It couldn’t read the license plates on the moonbuggies (if they had them), but it could give a pretty good image of the thing. At Dreamscape’s 186-mile-high orbit above the Earth, it could resolve, at best, about fifteen inches per pixel on the camera—assuming there were no atmospheric distortions in the way. In other words, the smallest thing the camera could see was the size of a beach ball. Although the system was designed for fun viewing of the Moon and for finding potential landing spots there in the future, Paul knew that the company had funding from other, more terrestrial, sources for flying future rapidly deployable spy missions. The Dreamscape was, in essence, a quickly deployable spy satellite that could be maneuvered to “locations of opportunity.” Paul also understood that Gary Childers liked money, Dreamscape needed lots of it, and the U.S. intelligence community liked the product they had, and they had plenty of money. Space Excursions had gotten contracts for undisclosed amounts from various DoD and three letter agencies to try out the system while in orbit around the Earth. Childers planned to create a fleet of these things that could be used for Moon missions, Earth-orbit tourist missions, and DoD missions; based, of course, on when the customers could pay.

  Paul ran the ISR telescope through its test sequence and then played around with it for the allotted thirty minutes he had available in the mission timeline. As he rolled around the planet, he could see Florida coming into view. He zoomed in on the Cape at the launch pads there and could see the Ares Vehicle Assembly Buildings. He could see motion around the pads like a flurry of ants on an anthill. A few minutes later he was over the Atlantic Ocean and
couldn’t find much to look at. He put the system on auto and closed the icon on his screen. To close out the checklist for this item, there was only one other thing he had to do. He unstrapped himself and practiced floating back to seat number 2B, where he checked that he could control the ISR system from there. All was well. Check. He floated his way to all the seats and ran through their operation.

  After the basic ship checkout and the occasional fun full backflip, he made his way back to his seat up front. It was time to start prepping for the rendezvous with the fuel depot. All the motion through the ship had made him a little dizzy, and he needed to strap himself in and focus to keep from getting motion sick. Microgravity was fun to him, but Paul knew to be careful until he was well adjusted or it could lead him down a dangerous and gut-wrenching path.

  At launch plus fifteen hours, the Dreamscape had completed ten orbits, docked with the refueling satellite, separated, and was preparing to fly home. Childers was ecstatic. The Dreamscape had performed flawlessly. In just a couple of months, if this landing went smoothly, he would be sending his first paying customers on a trip around the Moon.

  His soon-to-be partners were reassembling in the VIP area after a celebratory dinner and an abbreviated night’s rest to await the dawn landing of Dreamscape. Childers had already gotten verbal and e-mail statements from all seven investors of their excitement and plans to invest in the company. He would soon nail down the dollar figures and the paperwork, but it looked as though all seven in attendance would fully commit to the Moon-landing partnership, giving him and his company the money needed to begin work on Space Excursions’ next venture before the first one was even complete.

  Looking out the windows, Childers, O’Conner, the VIP entrepreneurs, and the press gazed expectantly at the sky. The sun was barely above the horizon when they caught the first sight of the Dreamscape winging its way back from space. Applause broke out everywhere, even in the control room, though there the applause was brief due to there still being much work for them to do.

  The vehicle glided onto the desert runway and bounced only once before rolling to a complete stop. As the air temperature began its daily rise from simply uncomfortable to totally unbearable, astronaut Paul Gesling opened the doors of Dreamscape, and awaited the portable stairs that would allow him to walk again on terra firma.

  Childers didn’t rush to greet his pilot; he was too busy chatting up his new partners, taking their enthusiastic congratulations with appropriate modesty, deflecting credit to his engineers and to Gesling. Childers was an expert at working a crowd, large or small.

  The Honda van on that mesa fifteen miles away was also bustling with activity. The roof antennas were being retracted and the hardware fastened down for travel. They had miles to go that day and a mountain of data to organize and send to their faraway homeland. As soon as they got to the local cyber café, their mission would be accomplished. Li was glad. He preferred cloak-and-dagger missions to require at least a cloak, if not the dagger, too. This was just too easy.

  Chapter 12

  Launched twelve months previously on an Atlas V unmanned rocket, the thirteen-thousand-kilogram Lunar Mapper spacecraft had been doing its job of mapping the Moon with quiet precision. Flying just fifty kilometers above the lunar surface in an orbit carrying it from pole to pole, the spacecraft’s high-resolution cameras photographed most of the lunar surface. Multiple overflights of the same terrain at different times during the lunar day, and with a slightly different viewing angle due to the Moon’s slowly changing orbit, allowed stereoscopic images to be created of most of the lunar surface. With Earth-based processing, a 3-D map of the Moon was created.

  The scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, had been studying the images for weeks as they worked to narrow down the landing-site options for Bill Stetson and his crew. They knew the landing would be somewhere near the Moon’s equator, selected because it was easier to reach this region of the Moon than the higher latitudes, and because that was where the Apollo missions had explored. They knew that it could be done, so doing it again would be the best and safest way to begin the return of NASA’s astronauts to the Moon. For NASA’s critics, it would just be another example of NASA’s inability to do anything new and different.

  On this day, the site-selection team was preparing their final recommendation for NASA Administrator Calvin Ross. Ross had been appointed by the President and had the distinction of being the only former United States senator to be appointed as NASA Administrator. The President had not made NASA a priority, and appointing his former colleague in the Senate, one who had recently been defeated in his reelection campaign, was a signal that he was not taking the direction of America’s space program seriously. Ross was neither an engineer nor a scientist. Before becoming a senator, Ross had been an attorney at a prominent Billings, Montana, law firm. Many viewed Ross’s appointment as a simple payback for some previous political favor or favors. Few in NASA appreciated his political savvy, and fewer still realized how hard he fought for the agency.

  The lead scientist for the site-selection team, Dr. Henry Morton, was standing before a wall-sized mural of the Moon made from images returned from the Lunar Mapper spacecraft. He was wearing 3-D glasses and studying carefully no less than six potential landing sites.

  Morton was a career scientist from the prestigious Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. He began his career in the late 1970s, when exploring the Moon was no longer “hot.” In fact, at that time, studying the Moon was considered career suicide. Funding for lunar research had dried up with the death of Apollo, and Morton kept his interest alive by winning small research grants and by convincing his management to keep his work funded, although at an embarrassingly low level. Morton had quietly waited in the wings until interest in the Moon resurfaced in the mid-2000s. He then quickly rose in prominence to become America’s leading expert on all things lunar. It helped that he was also virtually alone in the field. Without consistent funding for lunar science, there simply weren’t many others around. It was easier to be a big fish when there was a small pond. And the pond for lunar science had been very small indeed.

  “You’d think that since the 1950s we’d have developed a better way to view 3-D than by wearing these god-awful glasses,” said Morton to no particular member of his team. They were all assembled and themselves looking at the wall mural. And, without surprise, no one responded directly to his comment. He was prone to complaining about the glasses.

  “I’m just amazed that we can see Surveyor and all of the Apollo sites,” was the closest thing to a response. The comment came from one of the junior members of the team, Saul Britenstein. He continued. “Look here. As I’ve been saying, if we land near the Apollo 17 site we can show continuity with our last mission, and maybe even bring back the picture Cernan left on the surface. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

  “And the science benefit is what?” asked Mariam Upchurch, senior member of the team. Morton had heard that she had begun her career as a lunatic, as lunar scientists were sometimes called, back in the early 1980s, when even the International Space Station was yet to be built. Upchurch was interested in the science return of Project Constellation, not the cool technology and the “fun” things that the astronauts might accomplish there. She also had absolutely no inhibitions about sharing her strongly held opinions.

  “We’ve been through this all before, people,” said Morton, quickly losing patience with the continuous disagreement among his team about where the Altair should land and where people should again walk on the surface of the Moon. Morton showed his visible frustration by entering what many had come to call his “lecture mode.” To an outside observer, his demeanor would have appeared astonishingly similar to that of a parent lecturing a recalcitrant teenager about the dangers of having unprotected sex.

  “We know we have to be near the equator. We know we want to be near one of the Apollo sites because we want to bring back a piece of hardware to assess ho
w being on the Moon affected it. And Apollo 11 is out of the question. It will be a historical landmark, and we aren’t to mess with it in any way.” Morton broke out of the lecture mode to ask a real question. “Saul, other than the picture, what’s the benefit of going back to Taurus-Littrow and Apollo 17?”

  Morton considered Britenstein to be brilliant. In fact, the twentysomething scientist from the University of Arizona was on Morton’s short list of future recruits for the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Britenstein was tall, frighteningly thin, and certainly not among the most attractive half of the human species. Morton more than once wondered how such a brilliant and obviously awkward young man had managed to marry the quite attractive medical student that was his wife. But Morton didn’t want to be distracted by that thought at the moment.

  “Well,” began Britenstein, “it was from this area that Schmitt found the rocks that gave us the best history of the Moon to date. I think there is more to be gained from going back here and collecting more samples for comparison. I’ve shown you the data, and most of the selenologists agree. If you want to better understand the formation of the Moon, this is the place to start. Or, restart, as it were.” It was not Britenstein’s most eloquent response, but they had all seen his data before. There was no need to repeat it to this group.

  Morton, still peering through his 3-D goggles, was looking closely at one of the few lower-resolution images on the Moon mural. Though the Lunar Mapper had been in orbit about a year, there were still a few areas on the Moon that had escaped multidirectional imaging. Some of the gaps were caused by one-of-a-kind mission anomalies; others were caused by the vagaries of the Moon’s orbital rotation rate and the slow evolution of the spacecraft’s orbit around it. The portion of the image at which Morton was staring was one of those low-resolution areas that would soon be corrected with an upcoming flyover of the spacecraft.