On to the Asteroid

by Travis S. Taylor

  The lander reached zero altitude while the speed indicator showed he was moving at five kilometers per hour. He felt the not-very-gentle whump of the gear taking most of the initial impact before the entire lander jolted, rocked and then settled into a full stop. Most automobiles had better than a five kilometer impact bumper. He wasn’t driving a car.

  I’m still alive, thought Gesling as he looked around the cabin and made sure it wasn’t about to explode or have some piece of rock plunge through its skin. The ship stopped rocking and remained fully upright. The status boards showed that all systems were working and all of the red lights that had previously indicated his imminent death and doom were now green. It was then that he realized he was holding his breath and let out an explosive exhalation.

  “Paul? Are you okay down there?” asked Stetson from high above, probably now flying over the lunar far side with his voice being relayed by one of the small cubesat communications satellites now orbiting and providing global communications and positioning information to anyone and everyone on the Moon. In other words, the cubesats were relaying the message to Paul since he was the only one there at the moment.

  “Bill, I’m not only okay, I’m pumped. She landed hard, but there is no indication of damage. I’m walking through the shutdown sequence now.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. I know Mr. Childers and a certain Carolyn O’Connor-Gesling are also glad for that. I’m not sure, but I think they were both chewing nails back in Nevada as they watched your status board light up.”

  “I’ll get on the private channel with them as soon as I make sure the ship is secure. What a way to end your career, eh? Were you experiencing déjà vu up there?”

  “Hey, don’t remind me. I may be retiring after this flight, but that doesn’t mean I’m out to pasture yet. I was already running through options to get a rescue ship down there to you while you were restarting that engine. I did it once and I could do it again. But if it’s all the same with you, I’d rather not.”

  “Not is fine by me,” said Gesling as he went through the post-landing checklist on his helmet’s heads up display. He couldn’t help but muse at the fact that just five years ago, Bill Stetson had been the one piloting a NASA ship to the Moon’s surface. He’d been on a mission to find and bring home the survivors of a wrecked Chinese lunar lander that Gesling had found on the world’s first commercial lunar flyby. He’d brought them all home safely, despite what seemed to be an endless stream of mishaps, and now he was part of Gary Childers’s private space company that would soon be bringing tourists for a week’s stay at the company’s lunar hotel.

  Thinking of the hotel prompted Gesling to take his first real look out the window since the dust kicked up from his rocket engine had settled. He scanned the horizon, looking for it and found it almost immediately. Clearly not natural and standing out rather starkly against the deep grey of the lunar surface was the Out of This World, Space Excursions’ lunar habitat and hotel, waiting on its first paying customers. From a distance, Gesling was able to confirm what the Out of This World’s onboard cameras and those from orbit showed—that the hotel was in one piece and undamaged. Gesling would soon find out for himself. After securing the ship, he was going to exit the airlock and take his first stroll across the lunar surface to check it out. Thank God he didn’t put flashing neon lights on it, Gesling thought as he continued working his way through the checklist.

  About forty-five minutes later, Gesling finished powering down the lander and adjusting his spacesuit for his short stroll to the Out of This World. He was nervous without a doubt. Between him and the hotel was just about the deadliest environment humanity had ever decided to explore: an airless world bathed in unfiltered sunlight which would cause his ambient temperature to increase above two-hundred degrees Celsius if it weren’t for the suit’s built-in air conditioner. Accompanying the abundant sunlight was a steady stream of ionized particle radiation, the solar wind, and the risk of a sudden solar storm that could dose him with enough radiation to kill him outright.

  A walk in the park, he thought as he opened the door from the lander to the airless lunar surface.

  Gesling eased his way down the ladder from the lander to the surface and soon felt the reassuring solidness of the ground beneath his feet. It wasn’t the ground he was used to, and that made his heart rate increase. He could hear the blood pumping in his ears and his rapid deep breaths as he took his first steps on another world. Unlike the explorers who had come before, the Apollo astronauts, the returning Americans that included Bill Stetson, the Russians and now the Chinese, he didn’t make any pithy comments meant for public consumption. Instead, he chose to remain quiet and in his own thoughts during those first few moments.

  “Paul, if you don’t say something I am going to get in a rocket and come up there to beat some sense into you!” The voice on the speaker was that of his wife, and Space Excursions’ very own media liaison, Carolyn O’Connor-Gesling. When they’d met about seven years ago, Gesling had no idea she would become his wife. At this moment, he wasn’t sure if she was speaking as his mate or as the chief publicity officer for Space Excursions.

  “Yeah, right. I guess I should,” Gesling said, thinking of the words he’d rehearsed with Carolyn and Mr. Childers before he’d departed Earth just three days ago.

  “This is Paul Gesling of Space Excursions, taking the first steps by a non-government employee on the surface of another world. Today is a new beginning for humanity. A beginning that will fulfill the promises made to a previous generation by opening up the space frontier to all of us. And I dare say, it is about time!” Gesling looked down at the footprints he was making in the dirt so that his headset camera feed would clearly image them for all back home to see. He continued, “These footprints aren’t being made by some elite, out-of-reach and too-perfect astronaut. They’re mine and you can add yours to them soon by signing up for Space Excursions’ Ultimate Getaway—a week-long stay on the Moon. I may be the first to land here and walk this path to the hotel ahead of me, but I won’t be the last. Join Space Excursion as we make space an affordable excursion for all. It may be only one small step for a man, but it most certainly is a giant leap that every member of mankind can take.”

  “Perfect,” said Carolyn. “Now you can forget about all the PR stuff and get yourself safely into the Out of This World. I’ll process the footage and get it out on the net before you can get settled in for your rest break.”

  “Carolyn, I miss you.”

  “I miss you too, but we’ve both got work to do,” she said. After a brief pause she added, “And Paul, be careful.”

  “Right, careful. Always.” Paul smiled though nobody could see it. He’d switched the interior helmet camera view off. He looked around at the lunarscape spread out around him. The landing vehicle and ascent system was like something out of the old science fiction movies he’d watched as a kid. Only, now, he was the would-be hero on a daring space adventure.

  “Onward and upward it is,” Gesling said to himself, wiping the smile from his face. He was already looking forward to being home and in his wife’s embrace—but first he had a Moon to cross. Or, at least several hundred meters of Moon to cross. Pinch me now, he thought.

  The walk on the Moon felt just like he’d thought it would. It was almost exactly like the bungee cord rigging system they had developed to simulate walking on the Moon back at Space Excursions on Earth. The training system would serve future lunar tourists well. There was a slight difference though. On Earth, even though the bungees made his steps and jumps much longer the full feel of one Earth gravity was still ever present. On the Moon, however, he felt light as air. Old aches and pains he’d had in his body just were no longer there. That slight catch in his left knee he sometimes felt ever since his football injury in high school, wasn’t there. The stiffness he felt in his shoulder from throwing too many baseballs from centerfield in high school and then aggravating it at the company softball tournament, well, it simply wasn�
�t there. The one-sixth gravity made him feel good. There was definitely a business aspect of that feeling he would have to relay further to Gary. Assuming a person could survive the launch and flight, a stay on the Moon might make them feel years younger. The longer-term health benefits or detriments would most certainly have to be investigated.

  It took only a few minutes to cross the dusty lunar plain that stretched between the landing zone and the entrance of the Out of This World’s airlock. But it was an exciting and surreal few minutes. Paul had to stop and scoop up a handful of the lunar dust and drop it just to get a feel of how different the gravity really was. As soon as he’d done that, he wondered if he should have. The fine grains of the lunar regolith stuck to his suit like Styrofoam peanuts do anytime they are used as packing materials. The electrostatic interactions between the dust and his suit were more than evident.

  “Until you feel it you just can’t truly understand it,” he muttered to himself as the dust glittered and danced in the sunlight in front of him. The arch of dust descended to the surface slowly throwing scattered shards of multicolored rays from the Sun in every direction. Paul stepped up in front of the airlock door of the lunar hotel and pressed a passcode into the keypad. The door cycled, opened silently, and he stepped in.

  As the airlock repressurized, Gesling was aware of the strong airflow being directed across his spacesuit and sucked through the grate and into the floor beneath where he was standing. He could see that the air was doing its job of removing much of the pesky lunar dust that had attached itself to his suit during his walk. A considerable amount of the dust remained on the suit, looking like grey smudge prints, mostly on his pants and some around his gauntlets where he had picked up a handful of the Moon’s surface. Childers knew the lunar dust was going to be a problem and installed the best cleaning system his engineers could provide to try and keep it at a minimum and Gesling was now providing the system its first real test. Since paying customers wouldn’t want to spend a week in a dirty hotel, Childers had spared no expense.

  “We’ll have to think a bit more seriously about the air shower to clean off a little more of this dust. There is no way that tourists are going to come here without reaching down and playing with the Moon dirt,” he said to nobody in particular, but he knew that his every word was being recorded for analysis. In essence, he was leaving himself a note. Satisfied that he was now as clean as the air shower was going to get him and that the air in the lock was safe to breathe, Gesling removed his helmet to take a deep breath before opening the inner door and into the hotel proper. While he was still a bit dirty, he wasn’t too dirty. The air was a bit stale, but otherwise good. Gesling took another deep breath and then keyed in the sequence that would allow him to enter the inflated habitat. The door opened and he stepped through.

  The interior was more spacious than Paul remembered. He’d walked through the full-size mockup many times at Space Excursions’ Nevada assembly plant, but it never seemed this spacious. And then he realized that it probably seemed big because he and Bill Stetson had spent the last three days cooped up in the Dreamscape together and that this was the most open area he’d had since before they launched. Paul laughed to himself at the thought of Dreamscape being crowded. He had studied in detail the Apollo mission and the previous mission that the Chinese and Stetson had flown on. The Dreamscape was a luxury liner compared to its predecessors. He told himself he was spoiled and to quit whining.

  The Dreamscape was a reusable hypersonic spaceship made by Space Excursions that was able to take off and land like an airplane and, once refueled in space, make the six-day round trip voyage to the Moon and back. It could make the trip to loop around the Moon and return to Earth, without stopping there, and not need any modification or additional hardware. To stop at the Moon required additional fuel and the Dreamscape did this by carrying with it an expendable stage that was attached to its frame in Earth orbit before departure. The stage carried enough fuel to slow them down so they could capture into lunar orbit and then start again to boost them back home. Once they were on the way home, the stage would separate and fly into a million-year long solar orbit before it was likely to crash into anything else in space. But it wasn’t just space trash at that point. Gary Childers was too much of an opportunist and businessman to let such a spacecraft go to waste. There were two payload packages aboard the booster stage. One of them housed small canisters, which were actually cremation urns holding the remains of several multibillionaires. The other was a small camera and transceiver package that allowed family members back on Earth to check in on the status of their departed loved ones as they traveled through space. The system was solar powered and was designed to last for at least one hundred fifty years. It was possible it would last even longer. For generations family members could sit with their long gone loved ones as they journeyed through deep space.

  Paul took in a slow breath and made a full three-hundred-sixty-degree turn. He looked at the hotel space around him. Gesling made a mental note to share his perceptions with Carolyn and Gary Childers upon his return. After all, if the Out of This World seemed big to him, then it was bound to seem big for its future guests as well. The first thing he did was move to the hotel’s command computer to personally check out its status.

  Paul pulled the gauntlets and twisted them. The stiff gloves popped loose and he slid them off his hands. They were cold to the touch. He tethered them to his waist and then tapped at the controls on the computer touchscreen. The screen lit up with a bright blue dot that then expanded and filled the screen. There was a welcome icon and a login tab. Paul tapped the login and entered his username and password. The system screen opened up and displayed a welcome message to him.

  “Welcome Mr. Gesling. Would you like to check in?” A female computer voice said. Paul laughed and then began inserting information that would allow him to check internal systems status as well as cycle on the entire hotel. He was relieved to see that everything was working as it should. Then he had to do the basic administrative tasks because it was a hotel. He had to check in before he could stay there. At least he didn’t have to leave a credit card number for incidentals. Gary Childers would be picking up the tab for his stay.

  “Paul, how does it look?” The disembodied voice of his boss, Gary Childers, came over the hotel’s PA system and startled Gesling, as he was totally engaged in the checkout process. He was glad he was wearing a diaper in his spacesuit.

  “Mr. Childers, you startled me,” Gesling stammered before recovering.

  “Sorry, Paul. We’re on pins and needles here,” Childers replied. “How does it look?”

  “It all looks pretty good to me,” Gesling said as he surveyed the two-room hotel and habitat. He was standing in the all-purpose room that contained the onboard control center, the galley, the entertainment center and the bathroom. Ahead and separated from the main room by only a curtain that was currently not drawn was the storage area and where the guests would sleep. Gesling wasn’t yet sure how they would fare sleeping in hammocks they’d have to string up and take down every day. At one-sixth gravity, sleeping on the netting of a hammock shouldn’t be uncomfortable, but it didn’t quite fit the image of a multi-million-dollar getaway to the Moon. He would soon find out. He was to bunk here for the night, checking out all of the hotel’s features, including the shower—which he thought should feel pretty good right about now—and report back any glitches that needed fixing before the first guests arrived in about a year.

  CHAPTER 2

  Gary Childers was an old-school businessman running a multibillion-dollar energy company from his corporate headquarters in downtown Lexington, Kentucky, where he’d made his fortune mining, processing and selling coal. Then came the whole global warming thing and he’d diversified into solar, geothermal and offshore wind energy—making more millions in the process. Childers was one of those people who knew how to make money turn into more money, and he did it well and often.

  At age sixty-five, Chi
lders was also a frustrated space fanatic. As a boy, he’d seen the end of Apollo and the lunar landings that went with it. He lived through Skylab, the International Space Station and the slow rebirth of American piloted spaceflight after the retirement of the Space Shuttle. And the pace at which his beloved NASA was making progress pained him. It pained him so much that he had spent over half his fortune to build a commercial space company that would do more than the other, similar startups that were ferrying wealthy businessmen on suborbital joy rides. He built a completely reusable spaceship capable of traveling from Earth to the Moon and back again. He built it with passenger seats and big windows. And the millionaires and politicians lined up to take their own five-day joyrides around the Moon and back. For the first few years, his Space Excursions company was a money loser. Then it broke even. Now it was turning a profit that stockholders would love, had there been any. But Gary Childers didn’t want to be beholden to anyone, let alone a bunch of shortsighted investors that didn’t know or understand the long view. That’s why Space Excursions remained one hundred percent private and one hundred percent owned by Gary Childers.

  It was the crew and paying passengers aboard Childers’s company’s spaceship, the Dreamscape, that had heard the call for help coming from stranded Chinese astronauts in their disastrous attempt to beat America back to the Moon just five years prior. His friend and chief pilot, Paul Gesling, had then once again come to the rescue by flying the Dreamscape into Earth orbit to bring home the Chinese crew rescued by NASA and stranded there by the actions of a rogue Chinese astronaut among the crew who had apparently thought it would be better to be dead than rescued by Americans. Now, he was about to make history again, hopefully in an equally dramatic but less dangerous manner. And it was this topic that he and his public relations manager, Carolyn O’Connor-Gesling, were discussing in his last minute pre-press conference cramming session.