by Allen Steele
Montrose’s hands flitted around in midair, pressing invisible buttons only he could see. Although he had final command over every major decision in the countdown, he depended on the rest of his crew to give him information that would confirm what he saw in cyberspace; too many things can go wrong in virtual reality, and their feedback was necessary as an anchor to real-life.
“Three…two…one and mark…” Now the vessel three arms began to slowly rotate around the hub, gradually running up to the two RPMs which would induce one-tenth gravity within the habitation areas. There was an initial sense of sense of swerving movement through the hull until the main computer automatically fired RCRs to compensate for the torque, then the rocking motion gradually faded.
It was now ten minutes until launch. The crew moved through the rest of the checklist. Final telemetry tests with the three drone freighters, making sure that they’re slaved to the Medici Explorer’s guidance system and primed for simultaneous launch. A run-through of the seven back-up computers in search of unexpected bugs and glitches. Double-checking the outer fuselage sensors for air leaks, confirming that the inside hatches have all been secured. Running a systems-test of the primary life-support mainframe to ascertain that all the temperature, humidity, and oxygen-nitrogen feeds are up to par. All done with calm, unhurried competence, almost as if this bewildering array of chores was being performed in a ConSpace training simulator.
By the time the engine-arm sequence was initiated at T-minus two minutes, however, a thin sheen of sweat had appeared on Old Bill’s forehead. Yoshio Smith-Tanaka moved from the captain’s station to a bulkhead on the upper tier where he took firm hold of a pair of rungs, and Leslie Smith-Tanaka quietly told Kaneko to take a seat in the passenger alcove. The child was grinning unabashedly as he unerringly kicked across the compartment toward Wendy Smith-Makepeace and myself; the girl reached up and snagged Kaneko, hauling him into the chair next to her and strapping him down.
“T-minus-sixty seconds,” Montrose said. “All systems on auto-exec, burn in fifty seconds. Descartes Traffic, this is the Medici Explorer, one-twelve Whisky Bravo Nebraska, requesting final launch clearance. Over.”
“One-twelve Whisky Bravo Nebraska, this is Descartes Traffic, you have permission to launch when ready. Vaya con dios and good luck. Over.”
“Thank you, Descartes Traffic. See you when we get back. Over and out.” Montrose settled hack in his seat, his hands lightly resting on the arms of his chair. “Burn minus five…four…three…two…one…”
Now there was a great tremor through the ship, a miniature earthquake almost a quarter of a million miles away from the nearest geological fault, as the primary engine surged to life. On one of the holoscreens, a camera mounted on the outer hull caught a glimpse of a brilliant white-hot flare erupted from just beyond the engine radiation shield, as if a tactical nuke had exploded behind the Medici Explorer. There was no noise, no great roar—only a dull rumble which was felt more than heard, as everyone grasped their armrests, feeling the anticipated haul of gravity, the weight which pushed them firmly in their padded seats.
“Hot shit!” The voice belonged to Young Bill, yelling over the comlink from the observation blister. “Move, baby, move…!”
Then the secondary engines kicked in, gradually easing the Medici Explorer out of the Moon’s shallow gravity well, as the ship’s computers guided the vessel toward deep space. There was the almost-imperceptible sensation of rising. The hull creaked softly as bulkhead joists moved together. On one screen, the Moon began to gradually fall away; on another, Earth canted sideways, as if the planet itself had changed orbit by a few degrees.
“I love it, I love it, I love it!” Young Bill was shouting. “I can feel you movin’, baby! I can feel you humpin’…!”
“Watch your mouth, boy!” his father snapped and Young Bill abruptly fell silent, yet there are quiet, knowing grins throughout the bridge. On other screens, small flares of light from port and starboard showed that the engines of the three freighters had also fired, following the Medici Explorer as the convoy began to move out of lunar orbit.
It was January 10, 2061. We were on our way to Jupiter, the largest of all explored worlds, king of the solar system. From here to there, there were 628,700,000 kilometers of space…
And the weight.
2. THE JUPITER RUN
The reasons why the Medici Explorer again set sail for Jupiter and the Galilean moons, when analyzed closely, have less to do with the exploration of the cosmos than with the politics and problems of the last one hundred years. Although Jupiter has been regaled as the latest frontier of humankind’s “conquest of space”—itself a romantic term, as witnessed by the current spate of adventure fiction set in the Jovian system, most of it woefully inaccurate—the rationale behind the so-called “Jupiter Run” is principally grounded in historical events which go as far back as the last decades of the 20th century.
Until 2037, there was little practical reason for anyone to visit Jupiter. Its mean distance from Earth—4.2 astronomical units, or about 628,600,000 kilometers—made it almost inconceivable of being efficiently reached with liquid-fuel rockets. When the first unmanned probe from Earth to Jupiter, NASA’s Pioneer 10, swung past the planet in December, 1973, it confirmed that the miniature solar system orbiting the world was a realm of both great beauty and great danger; Jupiter was surrounded by menacing radiation belts ten thousand times more lethal than the Van Allen belt around Earth. Subsequent unmanned space missions—Pioneer 11, the two Voyagers later in the same decade and Galileo probe during the 1990’s—took closer looks at the Galilean moons; however fascinating they were, none looked particularly habitable. Only science fiction writers continued to seriously dream of manned spacecraft to Jupiter. For scientists, the Jovian system was something to be studied from a safe distance, visited only by robotic proxy.
However, this attitude gradually changed in the next century. With the beginning of the “Golden Age” of space exploration—the building of the powersat system, the colonization of the Moon and the establishment of the first bases on Mars—Jupiter began to look neither so distant nor so formidable. The major technological breakthrough which made Jupiter reachable was made in 2028 by a joint R&D project by Russian and American physicists at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: the development of a gas-core nuclear engine, resulting in an impulse-per-second engine thrust ratio twice as high as even the thermal-fission engines used by Mars cycleships.
Jupiter beckoned, and humankind followed. Under the auspices of the newly formed International Space Commission, with funding provided by several private-sector space companies, the first manned Jupiter vessel, the Tycho Brahe, was built in Earth orbit. Its ten-person crew voyaged to Jupiter in 2037, returning to Earth in 2039 with enough new scientific information about the Jovian system to fill a small library. However, despite the fact that a small base camp had been established—and abandoned—on Callisto, the fourth major Galilean moon, there appeared to be little reason to colonize Jupiter. It seemed as if humankind was permanently destined to inhabit only the inner solar system; common sense seemed to dictate that Jupiter, as academically intriguing as it was, served no immediate practical use for the human race.
“When the sun dies,” said the esteemed British astrophysicist Shelly Wood, “we may have good motive for settling Callisto or Ganymede. Until then, I’m quite satisfied to keep my current address in London.” Thus would remain the conventional wisdom for the next fifteen years, until the Moon War of 2052 proved that the human race could not afford to remain stagnant within the inner solar system.
By 2032, the first few large-scale fusion plants were in operation in the United States and Japan. By 2052, more than five hundred commercial tokamaks were being used around the world. Nuclear fusion had successfully supplanted the fossil-fuel plants of the 20th century and even the powersats of the early 21st as the major energy resource for most of the industrialized
world. The fuel source which made their operation possible was helium-3, an isotope which was extremely rare on Earth but abundant on the Moon…and since there seemed to be infinite supplies of helium-3 trapped within the Moon’s regolith, conventional wisdom held that this was a resource which could be mined, refined, and shipped home until the Sun did indeed grow cold.
However, yesterday’s wisdom often turns out to be tomorrow’s misguided thinking. When the lunar settlement at Descartes Station, prompted by the Clarke County space colony’s declaration of independence, also decreed itself to be a sovereign state, the governments and corporations which had previously thought helium-3 to be an infinitely exploitable resource, free to be extricated by whoever had the ability to put the necessary hardware on the Moon, suddenly found themselves facing new political realities. It was a situation remarkably similar to that faced by the western countries and oil companies of the 20* century when the Arab nations of the Middle East realized their true power and flexed their muscles, resulting in revolutions, embargoes and wars. The defeat of American-Russian space forces in the Battle of Mare Tranquility in 2052, and the subsequent establishment of the Pax Astra by the free countries of Clarke County and Descartes City, forced the terrestrial nations to come to grips with the fact that lunar helium-3 was no longer inexpensive nor endlessly available.
The tokamaks of the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia had to be fed or the wheels of civilization would grind to a halt, and the price of lunar helium-3 was not getting any cheaper. Even after the post-war tariffs were relaxed, following formal recognition of the Pax Astra as a sovereign state by the United Nations, the establishment of much of the lunar nearside as protected wilderness areas made it necessary for the government-industrial apparatus on Earth to look elsewhere for long-term energy reserves.
It had been known for almost a century that Jupiter’s upper atmosphere was rich with helium-3. In fact, not only was the isotope more abundant on Jupiter than on the Moon, but since it was not molecularly bound with all the other elements found in lunar regolith, it was theoretically easier to extract. As far back as the 1970s, the British Interplanetary Society had proposed “mining” Jupiter’s atmosphere for helium-3, although its projected purpose had been to serve as fuel for the proposed Daedalus unmanned interstellar probe. It didn’t take long for Consolidated Space Industries—the new independent consortium formed between Skycorp, Uchu-Hiko, Galileo Inc. and several other space companies—to dust off the old BIS scheme and see that it was not only technologically feasible, but in the long run more economically sound than depending entirely upon lunar helium-3.
Over the next ten years, ConSpace invested heavily in a crash program to begin Jovian mining operations. It was a mammoth undertaking, made even more remarkable by the speed in which it was accomplished. When the Tycho Brahe returned to Jupiter in 2057, it carried with it the first atmospheric separation plant. The nuclear-powered, remote-controlled system was dropped from low-orbit into the giant planet’s upper atmosphere, where it inflated immense balloonlike aerostats which countered the gravitational pull. Prometheus 1 then commenced to automatically siphon helium-3 from the swirling cloud tops as it was whisked around the planet by the upper-atmospheric jet streams, liquefying it and storing it in outboard tanks, which drone rockets would eventually launch out of the planet’s gravity well. The Brahe then ventured out to Callisto, where additional modules were brought down to the abandoned base camp which the first expedition had left in the Valhalla Basin, the first step in expanding the temporary camp into a permanent habitat.
At the same time, four new deep-space vessels—the Medici Explorer, as well as its drone freighters—were being built in lunar orbit. The Medici Explorer (named after the Medici family of Renaissance Italy, the patrons of Galileo Galilei’s research) was essentially a sister-ship of the Tycho Brahe, with upgraded engines and more spacious crew and passenger compartments. The freighters were simplified versions of the same design, each substituting a massive payload sphere for the hub-and-arm configuration. Another similar space vessel, the Hershel Explorer, was already on the drawing board, and long-range plans called a fleet of three Brahe-class ships, along with their freighters, to eventually rotate between Earth and Jupiter, similar to the cycleships which linked Earth and Mars.
Their swift construction was made possible by a cooperative agreement reached between the Pax Astra and ConSpace. In return for supplying lunar-made shipbuilding materials and portside facilities and services, ConSpace would share a pro-rated percent of its eventual profits with Descartes Station and Clarke County. Although Jovian helium-3 undercut the market for lunar helium-3, the Pax was wise enough to take the longer view: the agreement not only gave it a new economic base, since the Moon would be the terminus for future flights to Jupiter, but it would also help preserve the Moon’s mineral resources. It also helped the space colonies to achieve political reconciliation with their former governments on Earth; both the United States and Japan had been threatening an embargo on lunar-made products, and the Pax didn’t want to risk losing the independence for which it had fought so long and hard.
And then, just as success was at everyone’s fingertips, one of the worst disasters in the history of manned space exploration occurred: the loss of the Tycho Brahe.
Only three members of the second expedition survived the vessel’s freak-accident collision with a boulder-sized rock as the Brahe was journeying through the asteroid belt on its way back to Earth. It was partly as a result of their testimony in front of the International Space Commission, during which the causes for the loss of the seven other cosmonauts were fully explained, that a new methodology was established for the selection of crewmembers for the Medici Explorer and all other Jovian ships to follow.
According to the survivors of the Tycho Brahe, the true reason why so many lives had been lost had little to do with the fact that their vessel had been struck by a small asteroid. Indeed, the collision could have been avoided, and should have been; in hindsight, it was the human factor which had doomed the ship, not the asteroid itself.
When ConSpace chose the crew for the Tycho Brahe’s second voyage, it was almost strictly on the basis of either astronautical or scientific skills; in their rush to get the ship underway, little forethought had been given by the mission’s planning team to balancing the crew on a psychological basis. As a result, although the crew had all the expertise needed to perform their assignments, it was also badly mismatched: seven men, three women, all of whom were either single or not very stably married.
To further add to the mess, there was disparity between the ship’s command crew, who thought of the Brahe as their domain, and the scientists who were aboard as passengers, whose knowledge was vital but who came to be treated as second-class citizens. It was never clearly delineated who was in command, the captain or the senior mission scientist. Which was more important, the horse or the cart? No one really knew who was in charge; as a result, during the long months of the flight, a schism grew between the people in the command center and the people in the labs.
Added to this was a singles-bar atmosphere with the crew quarters. The question of who was sleeping with who often became more important than the mission objectives. Tempers flared, tensions rose, interpersonal cliques formed which stalled command decisions…and meanwhile, mundane shipboard chores such as galley cleanup and routine repairs were left undone.
The Tycho Brahe managed to perform its objectives, but by the time the ship left Jupiter and began its long journey home, half of its crew were no longer on speaking terms with the other half. It didn’t seem to matter very much by then—the scientists and engineers had gone into hibernation for the ride home—but most of the remaining crewmembers who had not gone into the zombie tanks became slovenly in carrying out their regular duties.
The tiny asteroid which collided with the Tycho Brahe could, and should, have been detected by whoever was supposed to standing watch in the bridge. Given warning, the crew might have
corrected the ship’s course in time to avoid collision. However, the crewmembers who were supposed to be in the command center were in the hydroponics area instead, squabbling over whose turn it was to monitor the nutrient feedlines. When the rock slammed into Arm Two, three levels below them and just above the hibernation bay, emergency decompression hatches should have closed immediately, sealing off each level and limiting the extent of the catastrophe. However, someone had neglected to reset the circuit breaker which controlled those pressure hatches, so the entire arm was blown out.
Two errors, both of them avoidable had not the crew been paralyzed by interpersonal conflict. As a result, all five persons who were hibernating in the zombie tanks, plus the two crewmen who had been in the hydroponics area, were killed by the asteroid collision. Only the three crew members who had been asleep in their quarters in Arm One at the time escaped death.
The survivors managed to patch the Tycho Brahe together just enough get them as far as Mars orbit, where they were ultimately forced to abandon ship and make their way to the red planet in the ship’s boat. The Brahe itself went into an elongated solar orbit; it wasn’t until three years later when it was retrieved by a salvage team from Arsia Station, who brought the derelict back to Mars as scrap metal.
Despite the tragedy and the setback it posed, ConSpace pressed on with its plans to open helium-mining operations in Jovian space. Yet the loss of seven lives, plus a valuable ship, forced the consortium to reconsider the means by which future crews of its deep-space vessels would be selected.
In that sense, the Tycho Brahe disaster was a blessing, because it finally coerced technocrats to ponder long-overlooked problems of human behavior during long space missions. As far back as the 1980’s, these questions had been posed by those who studied spaceflight, even though the major space agencies—most typically NASA, which had habitually short-changed life sciences in favor of hardware development—had typically swept them under the rug. The Brahe disaster was vivid testimony to the fact that the human condition was a more complex problem than could be solved by choosing pastel colors for the living quarters or putting in another porthole for sightseeing. Engineers and executives alike were impelled to come away from their blueprints and spreadsheets for a few minutes and listen to the psychologists, and what they were told was that the makeup of crews for stressful, long-duration flights was at least as important as IPS ratios and orbital mechanics.