Once again, our meal could not proceed without the annoyance of one final video message from Liuˇ Diānrén.
“First, there was a dream,” Liuˇ intoned solemnly. “Now, there is reality. Once, it was called the International Space Station. The name itself was a cruel, humiliating joke. How could the station have been ‘international’ when China was deliberately excluded, despite the fact that even then we had a space program at least equal to that of the United States?
“No more humiliation! Today, we Chinese have made another great leap forward into the untainted cradle of the heavens. The guiˇlǎ o have abandoned the stars. Let them now look up and pay deference to the ultimate dynasty that I have created, and know there is a new order in the heavens. Henceforth, it will no longer be the ‘International’ Space Station but will be known as Xīn Shìjiè Tiān Zhōu, a new spacecraft for a new world, my gift to humanity, a vessel that will soon go even farther than anyone has dreamed.”
Zīchéng, Wénxìn and Chéngfēi smiled broadly and patted each other on the back. Lìxúe and I watched in stony silence. With his slicked black hair, demonic beard and ugly ass yellow-beige suit, I thought Liuˇ looked like a James Bond villain. The guy was crazy.
“Gōng xiˇ fā cái, my loyal comrades, and enjoy the New Year’s feast. Eat lots of food to build up your strength so that you can work even harder next year!”
We dug into our food as soon as the video link closed. On paper, it looked like a feast, an eight-item meal starting with tubes of swallow’s nest soup and tins of jellyfish salad, followed by thermo-stabilized duck, fish and dumplings, rehydrated báicài and mushroom noodles, and finishing with mango pudding cups. In practice, everything was lukewarm except the dessert, which was cold and watery. Our food had been like this throughout the mission, but I guess I was expecting better for New Year’s.
After dinner, Yuán Lìxúe handed out small red gift bags for each of us. Inside was a cheesy booklet commemorating the Xīn Shìjiè Corporation’s 25th anniversary, a chocolate coin in gold foil wrapping, a pair of red socks, and most surprising of all, a mandarin orange.
“Lìxúe, this is unbelievable!” Wénxìn stammered. “Where were you hiding these?”
I put the mandarin to my nose and inhaled deeply. It was not fresh and the smell was faint, but the scent of fruit from the green Earth almost overwhelmed me.
“Xiè xie, Lìxúe,” Chéngfēi said with heartfelt sincerity. “I can’t think of a better way to end our time together in space.”
Three days later, Zīchéng, Wénxìn and Chéngfēi donned their launch and entry suits in preparation for departure. Following established procedure, they would take the older Shénzhōu J-8 spacecraft back to Earth, leaving the newer Shénzhōu J-9 vehicle for me and Lìxúe. The Zhìhuì research module to which Shénzhōu J-8 was docked was cramped for five, so the goodbyes were brief.
“You are hereby relieved of your duties,” Lìxúe said.
Wénxìn turned briefly to Chéngfēi and Zīchéng before speaking. “We stand relieved.”
Lìxúe and I embraced each of the guys as they passed, exchanging expressions of thanks and goodwill. The three of them floated in turn through the passageway into the Shénzhōu, and the hatch closed behind them.
An hour later, Shénzhōu J-8 disengaged from the Zhìhuì docking port. I watched from the scarred Cupola windows, the rugged peaks of the Peruvian Andes providing a spectacular background to the retreating insect-like spacecraft. I continued to watch until the Shénzhōu was only a point in the distance, hurtling towards a touchdown at the Sìziˇwáng landing site in Inner Mongolia.
***
Our final visitor, the Wàn Hù lunar boost vehicle, arrived a week later. Lìxúe and I monitored its approach from the Cupola. I cycled through the station’s external cameras, but only the unit at the end of the P1 truss worked well enough to provide an image. Something was amiss. The camera zoom settings were much lower than I had expected. I looked out a blurry window. My eyes widened as it got closer and its size became apparent. The Sun momentarily passed behind the booster, and we were briefly eclipsed in darkness.
“Huge,” I whispered in awe.
“Yes,” Lìxúe said.
Now within a few meters of the Dōngxīng docking port, I got a good look at the monstrosity. It was cylindrical, almost thirty meters long and eight meters in diameter, and covered with rusty orange insulating foam. A large radiator panel jutted out from one side. At the nose were rendezvous sensors and a docking mechanism, and at the back was a module with a pair of large engine nozzles surrounding by quads of smaller thrusters.
The Wàn Hù booster ploughed into the back of the Dōngxīng service module. A shudder reverberated through the station. From the Cupola windows, I saw the station’s central axis of pressurized modules writhe under torsion like an awakening dragon. Wàn Hù was more than twice the size of any of the station’s modules.
“Shěnyáng, we have contact and capture,” Lìxúe reported.
We spent the next three days preparing the station for its second, and hopefully much briefer, dormancy. Lìxúe and I closed many of the interior hatches to prevent the whole station from depressurizing in case one of the modules suffered a debris strike. The common cabin air assembly — basically the station’s dehumidifier — was cranked up to control moisture and reduce microbial growth. We shut off as many pieces of equipment as we could to lower the risk of fire, but left the water processor assembly active to keep fluids flowing through the lines and prevent stagnation.
The first engine burns to inject the station into the Earth-Moon cycling orbit were to start at the end of the third day, before cryogenic boil-off became a problem. I made my way to the Dōngxīng module and donned my launch and entry suit, then went to meet Lìxúe in the Kēxué laboratory where the Shénzhōu J-9 spacecraft was docked. She was already there, waiting for me, still dressed in a T-shirt, long pants…and a pair of bright red socks.
I understood immediately.
“You not coming,” I said.
Lìxúe shook her head.
“Why” I asked.
“I am to stay aboard and monitor the EMCO insertion,” Lìxúe replied, “and intervene if anything goes wrong.”
“Crazy,” I said.
“I’ll be fine,” Lìxúe said stoically. “Life support is still sized for five people, and there’s lots of food and water. Once the station is established in EMCO, the Advanced Shénzhōu will arrive with the lunar mission crew…and I will be here, waiting for them.”
“Many journeys through Van Allen radiation belts,” I said quietly.
“The transits are relatively brief, and the modified Níngjìng node is an adequate radiation shelter.”
“Why you really do this?” I asked.
“My family…my son. We need the money.”
I nodded, understanding. I had needed the money too. It really was that banal.
“It’s ironic, you know,” Lìxúe said. “The name, Wàn Hù. It’s not Chinese.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“The story never appears in historic Chinese literature,” Lìxúe continued. “The first mention was actually in an American magazine, I think in the early 1900s. It’s a nice story, but it’s not Chinese.”
I pondered that for a moment, then said, “I am relieved of duties.”
“You are relieved,” Lìxúe said.
We stared awkwardly at each over for a moment, then hugged. The embrace was warm and sustained. “Zài jiàn, hǎ o péngyou,” I whispered.
“Time to go,” Lìxúe said.
I saluted Lìxúe, then dove into the hatchway to the Shénzhōu. Inside the orbital module of the cramped spacecraft, I turned. Lìxúe was looking at me. The round hatch began to close, gradually eclipsing her face until it was gone.
***
There was the slightest thump as the holding latches and hooks were released and springs pushed Shénzhōu J-9 away from the docking port.
“Shěnyáng,
separation at 11:38,” I reported.
The station looked vastly different than what Lìxúe and I had seen when we arrived almost three months ago. Most prominent was the bloated orange bulk of the Wàn Hù docked at the end of the Zvezda service module. The massive Chinese booster was almost two-thirds the length of the station itself, from Zvezda to the Harmony node. Along the main truss, the solar arrays and radiator panels were retracted in preparation for the upcoming propulsive thrust, the largest ever attempted in space.
Alone in the Shénzhōu, I found myself referring once again to the station modules by their original names.
I was now above and behind the ISS. My video survey complete, I fired the thrusters again, ending the fly-around and breaking away from the station’s vicinity. In a higher, slower orbit, I watched the massive complex pull away. Squinting at the screen, I thought I saw a small panel fall away from the station.
Half an hour later, the ISS was five kilometers ahead of me, soaring gracefully over the Taiwan Strait.
Over the radio, the commentator in Mission Control was counting down. “…sān…èr… yī…fā shè!”
The massive cryogenic engines of the Wàn Hù booster ignited.
“Shùn fēng, Yuán Lìxúe,” I whispered. “You’re going to the Moon.”
“Wàn Hù’s two main engines are at maximum thrust,” Mission Control reported.
Zooming the Shénzhōu’s camera on the accelerating ISS, I saw a pair of fuzzy, incandescent auras streaming from the twin nozzles of the Wàn Hù booster. There was little sense of speed, but this first engine firing was supposed to increase the station’s velocity by about two hundred and seventy meters per second.
I took a quick glance at my watch. Seventy seconds had elapsed in the planned three minute burn.
Four seconds later, it all went wrong.
At first, it was difficult to see what was happening. I blinked, not quite believing my eyes that were telling me the central axis of the space station’s modules no longer appeared quite straight. The calamity became obvious a fraction of a second later when it visibly distorted into a flattened V-shape, the vertex of the bend near the intersection of the module stack and the transverse truss. With a painful knot forming in the pit of my stomach, I realized that I was witnessing a catastrophic structural failure at the junction between the pressurized mating adapter and the former Unity node.
“Oh, crap!” I exclaimed in English. “Sweet mother of —”
The Wàn Hù booster was still firing as the structural failures cascaded. The line of pressurized modules was now severed behind the old Unity node, like a string of sausages cut by a butcher. Seconds later, the central truss snapped like a twig between the S0 and P1 elements. Then, the former Japanese module Kibo broke away from the Harmony node.
“There appears to have been a major malfunction,” intoned the cold voice of the Mission Control commentator. “Telemetry has been lost.”
I keyed the radio. “Shěnyáng! Terrible structural failure!” Without waiting for a response, I tried to raise the commander. “Yuán Lìxúe, respond!”
Starved of propellant, Wàn Hù’s engines finally went dark.
The space station was shattered into five major pieces, with dozens of smaller bits floating about. Clouds of gas, frozen fluid drops and shards of equipment briefly spewed from ruptured modules until the air was completely dispersed to vacuum. Amongst the debris was a small octagonal mirror — the bāguà, which proved itself completely useless in warding off disaster. In time, the smashed remnants of the station would succumb to orbital decay, bringing down to Earth the mad dreams of a little emperor in Sharjah.
The International Space Station was dead.
Afterword
In the final episode of the 1990s science fiction TV series Babylon 5, the titular space station is decommissioned by deliberately overloading its fusion reactors and blowing the place to smithereens. “We can’t just leave it here, it would be a menace to navigation,” an Earthforce commander tells former president John Sheridan, saying the station had “become sort of redundant” and citing recent budget cutbacks. This is a peculiar action because one would think a massive cloud of debris in the Epsilon Eridani system would be an even greater menace to navigation. A more logical decommissioning would have been to crash the station onto Epsilon 3, the planet about which it had orbited, although I suppose Draal and the Great Machine might have taken offense.
Like its fictional counterpart, the International Space Station (ISS) will also require a suitable retirement at the end of its mission. The current multinational ISS partnership — consisting of the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and Canada — have agreed to continue operating the station until 2024, with preliminary discussions underway to potentially extend its life to 2028. Whenever its mission finally ends, the ISS will have to be removed from orbit. This will be the largest human-made object ever brought down to Earth, and doing so safely will be a challenging engineering problem. Nobody wants a repeat of the (mostly) uncontrolled 1979 reentry of Skylab, in which parts of the station ended up hitting a remote region of Australia and resulting in a $400 littering fine to NASA.
One of the cargo vehicles that brings supplies to the ISS is called Progress, a type of spacecraft the Russians have been using since the late 1970s to support their earlier generations of space stations. The current ISS decommissioning plan envisions using a modified Progress equipped with a more powerful engine, extra propellant tanks, and the plumbing needed to use up any remaining fuel in the Russian segment of the ISS. This modified Progress would execute a series of high-thrust burns to lower the ISS orbit and eventually bring the station to a fiery destructive plunge into a remote part of the ocean — likely the South Pacific or the Indian Ocean — as far away from major shipping lanes as possible (see “menace to navigation”).
Such was also the fate of the immediate predecessor to the ISS, the much-maligned Russian space station Mir. For a brief time, the Mir actually got a temporary stay of execution. In 2000, a private firm called MirCorp signed an agreement with the Russian space company RSC Energia to lease the station for commercial activities. MirCorp privately funded a 73-day mission to Mir by two cosmonauts later that year, which turned out to be the final expedition. Plans to refurbish the station and raise its orbit were not realized, and the Russians eventually succumbed to political pressure to decommission the Mir and concentrate its resources on the ISS. The fascinating saga of MirCorp is chronicled in Michael Potter’s documentary Orphans of Apollo.
In “Fixer Upper,” the fictional Xīn Shìjiè Company is a kind of latter-day MirCorp. But where would CEO Liuˇ Diānrén have gotten a crazy idea like trying to send the ISS to the Moon? Perhaps, somewhere in his misguided youth, Liuˇ Diānrén might have read the final report of a student project from the 2003 summer session of the International Space University (ISU). Named Metztli after the Aztec lunar goddess, the objective of the project was to define options for robotic and human missions to the Moon using ISS capabilities where advantageous. As part of their work, the students conducted a preliminary feasibility study of sending the ISS and/or components thereof towards lunar space using an Earth-Moon cycling orbit (EMCO). The Metztli project is one of the most innovative to come out of an ISU session and its final report is well worth reading (http://tinyurl.com/Metztli-ISU). In 2011, Aviation Week reported that some engineers at NASA and Boeing were looking into the feasibility of repurposing ISS modules for potential use at an Earth-Moon Lagrangian point or in lunar orbit.
Both the Americans and the Russians have experience in successfully repairing crippled space stations. Six years before dropping in on the Australian outback, the first U.S. station Skylab suffered significant damage during its launch in 1973. As a result of the mishap a micrometeoroid shield separated from the hull and tore away, taking one of two main solar panels with it and jamming the other panel so that it could not deploy. The first Skylab crew of astronauts Pete Conra
d, Joe Kerwin and Paul Weitz succeeded in installing a Sun shield over the damaged hull and releasing the stuck solar array. Equally remarkable was the courage of Russian cosmonauts Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh, who in 1985 endured almost two weeks of cold, darkness and physical hardship to bring the Salyut 7 station back to life after a power system failure left it dead in space.
Shortly after the launch of the first elements of the International Space Station in 1998, I remember reading an online post by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski in which he commented on the outward physical resemblance between his fictional station and the Zvezda service module of the ISS. Such linkages between science fiction and our real-life exploration of space are a big part of what appeals most to me about the genre. Historian Roger Launius has called space stations “base camps to the stars,” and I cannot help but agree. Now, if only the Centauri would actually sell us jumpgate technology, then we’d really be getting somewhere.
© The Author 2017
Michael Brotherton (ed.)Science Fiction by ScientistsScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-41102-6_13
Spreading the Seed
Les Johnson1
(1)Alabama, USA
“We’re actually going to the stars.”
“About damn time.”
“You think so? To me it seems like it didn’t take any time at all…”
“That’s because you were born after they perfected the de Broglie drive. You’re used to traveling around the solar system at nearly light speed. Me? I remember when it took a month just to get to Mars on one of the old fusion ships. Now that was real space travel.”
For some reason, Akhil didn’t think of his friend as being that much older than himself. He knew better, of course; Raymond only looked young thanks to the rejuve treatments he’d received most of his life. He didn’t look a day over thirty even though he was pushing one hundred and twenty. When he really thought about it, he was pretty much an inexperienced brat compared to his friend. He was, after all, only thirty-two himself. And, yes, he had been born after the de Broglie drive had changed, well, everything.
Science Fiction by Scientists: An Anthology of Short Stories (Science and Fiction) Page 24