by Jeff Pollard
“The studio tried to salvage it by doing a romantic comedy called 'Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus.' And it would be about like three married couples making the trip, and then they all break up and get pissed at each other. Problem is that we only have one girl. I was thinking it should be a race, with three billionaires on one side, that'd be me, George, and Sergei, and the Russians trying to beat us there. Sergei said Putin himself should be on the mission, because, as he put it, Putin is that crazy. The producers wanted it to be China.”
“What if it was only two married couples, one gay and one straight,” Caroline says without looking into the camera.
“I don't know that either George or Sergei would be down with going gay,” K replies. “I'm trying to think of something more sci-fi we could do, something deeper than just a mission to Mars, something more like Solaris or Sphere or 2001, but drawing blanks.”
Caroline sips tea, staring at the TV screen.
“I've got another Skype call,” K says, “can I call you back.”
“I'll probably fall asleep soon,” Caroline says, “bye,” she shuts off her feed. K shakes his head. She's not been taking this well. K answers the other call from an unknown number, finding himself face-to-face with Lorne Walken, the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, sitting in a command center in a hotel conference room with dozens of Democratic operatives.
“Mr. Senator, future Vice...what do I call you?” K asks.
“How about Lorne,” Lorne Walken replies.
“Why are you calling me right now?” K asks.
“I'm about to become your boss,” Lorne replies.
“I don't have a boss.”
“Trust me, you want me to be your boss,” Lorne says. “You ready for a real competition?” “What the hell are you talking about?”
“A real competition. NASA is staying out of the rocket business-”
“You're talking like you guys already won, isn't there like twenty-eight states left to call?” K asks.
“We won,” Lorne replies.
“Really? You know that already? Did you guys take Texas?”
“We lost Texas, but that was never necessary to a win, it would have just been icing on the cake. Ohio, Missouri, and Florida are still too close to call. But we're pretty confident in calling Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. Really it was Virginia that put us over the top. So if things break the way we're pretty sure they will, then we don't need Missouri, Florida, or Ohio. But we're still too close to call on all three. We win any of those and it's definitely over.”
“Don't you guys worry about tempting fate with this kind of thinking?”
“We had 38 states called two weeks ago. This stuff is pretty predictable,” Lorne replies.
“So you're the next Vice President,” K says. “So what's this competition for? We getting a fair shot at crew ferrying to the ISS?”
“Think bigger,” Lorne says.
“Mars?”
“Less big.”
“Phobos?”
“Moon base,” Lorne replies.
“Moon base?” K asks.
“Moon base. A permanent presence, prove we can live on the surface of another world, prove we can use resources, prove it all.”
“I don't know, I hear a lot about the Moon being a stopping point on the way to Mars, but I don't think we need to do it.”
“Not literally a stopping point,” Lorne replies.
“I mean, we've been to the Moon,” K says.
“We've barely scratched the surface of the Moon. The whole Apollo program netted us a total of twenty-six man days on the Moon. And eleven of the twelve guys were test pilots, only one was a scientist. Imagine a permanent manned base with a crew of four for a decade, with pressurized rovers that can take them hundreds of kilometers away from the base. Imagine teams of exogeologists doing year long studies on the surface. We're talking about tends of thousands of man-days of science conducted on the surface, exploring craters and drilling samples. There's plenty of exploration to be done there. And look at it this way. The ISS created a market, a constant need for resupply. And that gave us the Griffin, Antares/Cygnus, CST-100, the Dream Chaser. Imagine what happens to the market when we have a Moon base that needs constant resupply.”
“You sure you can fund this?” K asks.
“We're announcing it tomorrow,” Lorne says. “Anyway, I've got a lot of calls to make. ULA is next.”
“Thanks for the heads up,” K replies. Lorne ends the call. K calls Caroline and he sees her face glowing in the dark, reflecting the light of the TV screen in the dark room.
“They just called Texas red,” Caroline says, sounding defeated.
“Yeah,” K replies. “That was Lorne on the other line.”
“What did he want?” Caroline asks, surprised.
“To tell me to build him a Moon base,” K replies.
“Jesus,” Caroline says. “So they think they won.”
“Yeah. So I'm gonna call everyone and get started right now.”
“Yeah,” Caroline says quietly.
“You alright?”
“Fine. Talk to you tomorrow,” Caroline says, “guess I don't need to stay up to see how this turns out.”
“Guess not,” K says. In a moment he has the SpacEx department heads on a conference call and gets them up to speed.
“No matter what happens, it's not going to be one company doing all of the work. Which means they're going to have a modular approach, where each piece can be launched by any of a number of proposed rockets, that way you keep costs in line, because if one company jacks the price up, they don't get launches. Keeps everyone honest, keeps costs down, and in all likelihood, we'll all be getting some number of launches. A permanent base is going to need three tiers of support. One, building the actual base, delivering large pieces to the lunar surface. Two, delivering crew to the surface. Three, delivering cargo to resupply the crew. It might be that each company will get one of those duties. But here's what I want everyone to keep in mind. This isn't Apollo. We're not in this in order to do NASA's bidding. If we build NASA a base, that means we can build a SpacEx base. If we transfer NASA astronauts to the Moon, that means we can take tourists to the Moon. NASA is going to be funding a lot of R&D, so lets put it to good use. I want a unified strategy for us to build a Moon base. If NASA pays us to do it, great. If they don't pick us, if they turn this into a pork system, if the whole thing gets canceled, then we're going to build this ourselves and sell tickets. Understood?”
K is met with a lot of nods on the dozen small windows showing the faces of his employees.
“In-situ resource utilization is a main goal of this mission. ISRU is absolutely a necessity for a manned mission to Mars. If you need to take all the fuel that you need for a return burn with you all the way to Mars, then that makes your rocket massive. But, on the other hand, if you have a smaller rocket that's empty when you get to Mars, but then you fill it up with fuel on Mars and come back, you end up reducing your mass at Earth Departure by nine-fold. Going to Mars on a one-way trip requires about seven-parts fuel to one-part mass. A round trip is sixty-three-parts fuel to one-part mass. Unless you make the fuel there, in which case, you're back at seven. That reduces your launch requirements to LEO by a factor of nine. If Lunar Orbit Rendezvous is what made Moon missions possible, ISRU is going to be the wrinkle that makes Mars missions possible, and NASA wants to prove that ISRU can work on the Moon before they depend on it to go to Mars.”
“Do you know the mode we're going to use for our Moon program, will it be lunar orbit rendezvous or direct ascent?” Daniel Rask, chief of the thermal protection team asks.
“Yeah, you know NASA was thinking about going to direct ascent when they were studying Constellation,” Paul Weller, chief of propulsion chimes in, saying it in a way that shows his disdain for all NASA planning.
“Why? Doesn't it save a ton in delta-v to
do LOR?” Rask asks.
“Yes, about a hundred and ninety tonnes to LEO worth of delta-V,” Weller replies, “but they were thinking about staying on the surface for long periods of time. With LOR, you can't go back to Earth without stopping off in lunar orbit to dock with the orbiting command ship. Which means you have to keep that orbiting ship ready and in the proper orbit. And if you've got an inclination to the orbit, then you might have to wait for a launch window. None of that is good news for a crew staying on the lunar surface, and it then might require that you keep a crew in the orbiting ship.”
“Plus lunar orbits are unstable,” Kingsley adds.
“That too,” Weller says.
“Lunar orbits are unstable?” Josh asks.
“The Moon is lumpy,” Kingsley says, “lots of masscons (mass concentrations), they make the gravity variable and most orbits aren't stable over long periods of time.”
“So if we go with LOR with long term landings, then we'll have to deal with these gravitational perturbations,” Josh says, worried.
“There are four frozen orbits, 27, 50, 76, and 86 degrees,” K says. “They released some satellites during Apollo. Release it on a frozen orbit and you get a couple of years of service from it. The wrong orbit and it lasts maybe a month before it-”
“Hey K,” Clooney says from the doorway.
“I'm kinda busy,” K replies.
“Umm, Bieber is, how do you say it...tripping balls,” Clooney says.
“On what?”
“Shrooms? Not really sure. Anyway, he's trying to go outside.”
“Outside?”
“Yeah, he thought he saw a fairy out the window. Also he's naked. And he's fidgeting with the air lock.”
“Well talk him out of it. Do what you did to Sandra Bullock,” K says.
“You don't want to come handle it?” Clooney pleads.
“What do I look like to you, some kind of Canadian wrangler? If anybody can talk anybody into anything, it's Clooney.”
“Alright,” Clooney sighs and floats away.
“Where were we?”
“Mode,” Rask says impatiently.
“Right, direct ascent is out, at least until ISRU is up and running, and even then, it's iffy. LOR is too smart to abandon. Leaving half your ship in lunar orbit while you go down and come back up saved a huge amount of work. If I remember my Apollo math correctly, the payload to low Earth orbit with LOR was 120 tonnes. If they tried to do direct ascent, the mass in low Earth orbit would have had to have been over 300 tonnes. Now with modern technology, lighter materials, I'm sure we could do a direct ascent mission for less, but an LOR mission would be less too.
For lunar resources, what they're talking about is oxygen. There's oxygen in the lunar soil. You can extract that and use it for breathing air, but also as oxidizer. Fuel is an iffy proposition, but we're pretty confident you can get oxygen. Which means that you can at least produce a good portion of your propellant. But we'd need the system to be capable of working before ISRU comes online.
Then there's the question of where to build a base. Now, if it's me, I'm looking at the poles. There are peaks of eternal light at both poles, that's places where the Sun never sets. Which means you can have continuous solar power supply. There are craters on the poles that are craters of eternal darkness, they never get any sunlight. These craters are extremely cold, and likely good places to find frozen volatiles like water ice. If there's water, we can drink it, but we can also break it up and breathe it, or we can turn it into rocket fuel. So the polar regions offer interesting characteristics, and luckily, 86 degrees is a frozen orbit, so we can park spacecraft in a nearly polar orbit permanently and we won't have to wait for launch windows. If it's me, I go with Shackleton Crater, but there are other options. My guess is that there will be a few landings at various possible sites before a base site is chosen.
Next up, lunar lander, is it single-stage or a two-stage lander like in Apollo? I think one-stage and make it reusable. You park it at a lunar space station between missions. Then for the next mission you simply bring along the propellant, refill it, and go back. Then once you're producing oxygen on the Moon, you only need to bring the fuel, not the oxidizer. And with methalox (methane and oxygen), the oxygen is two thirds of the propellant mass, so you cut the mass of fuel you need by 66%. So we need to design this lander. When we do test flights of it, we can use it as a cargo delivery ship for ISS or Excalibur, then just let it burn up. But this means we can get funding to pay for these test flights rather than having the mission be nothing but a test flight. So a single-stage, reusable, methalox lunar lander.
Next up, command ship. Griffin 3.0.”
“Do we tack on a service module that's discarded, or do we integrate the fuel tanks into the Griffin and keep it at one stage and fully reusable?” Weller asks.
“I'm thinking one-stage and reusable, but we'll see how the math works out, will you handle that?”
“Got it,” Weller replies.
“Once we get the new upper stage and the higher payload figures, we're looking at 63 tonnes to LEO for the Heavy, with the boosters reused and the core Eagle 9 discarded. With boosters discarded the payload goes to 70 tonnes, but if we can reuse two-thirds of the Heavy, that'll save us a lot. Only throw away the core once it has done several launches. That means everything has to fit within that figure, and the manned ship needs to fit on the Eagle 9 with the new upper stage. So that means our command ship is 17 tonnes fully fueled. By my quick math, a 17 tonne Griffin, if dry mass is 8 tonnes, has 2.8 km/s of delta-v, that's twice what you need to do LOI (lunar orbit insertion) and TEI (trans-Earth injection). For the lander, which I have named Pegasus, basically we take a Griffin 3.0, remove the heat shield, lighten and reduce the structure wherever possible, increase the size of the tanks. Dry mass of 6 tonnes, fully fueled at 24 tonnes.
We also need a departure stage. Fully fueled at about 70 tonnes, capable of storing fuel for long periods, heat-shielded for re-use, legs, etc. Also docking port so it can meet up with other spacecraft and transfer fuels if needed. An Eagle Heavy can put the departure stage into LEO. I'm calling the departure stage Aquila.
Remember that we can do all of our tests as operational missions. We can use Griffin 3.0s for just routine missions to LEO. We can use Pegasus landers for routine cargo missions.”
“K,” Clooney's back at the door.
“Yeah?”
“Do we have a taser, or perhaps a gun of some kind?” Clooney asks. Kingsley thinks hard for a moment.
“There's a flare gun in the survival kit in the Griffin,” K says.
“Alright, that might work,” Clooney says before disappearing.
“So here's how this all works,” K says, “First launch: Eagle Heavy puts up an Aquila departure stage, it then sends itself to lunar orbit. This is a special version of the Aquila, it has multiple docking ports, and is designed to be a fuel depot. It inserts itself into an 86 degree lunar orbit, and will be down to about 15 tonnes of fuel left.
Launch two: a heavy sends a BA-330 to dock with the fuel depot. The Aquila does TLI, then has a free-return back to Earth, re-enters, is reusable. Now we have a habitat in lunar orbit.
Launches three and four: an Eagle 9 puts up a Griffin 3.0 unmanned, a Heavy puts up a departure stage. Meet them up. Departure stage does TLI, and can do almost all of lunar orbit insertion. Separate, then the Aquilla only needs a tiny bit of fuel to send itself back to Earth. Griffin 3 uses just a little bit of fuel and goes to the lunar station. It only needs 2-3 tonnes of fuel to go back to Earth, but has about 7, so we can transfer over about 4 tonnes to the depot, now at 19 tonnes.
Launch five, a crew in a Griffin 3.0 on an Eagle 9 to LEO. Launch six, a heavy launches an Aquila departure stage. Meet the two up. Aquila does all of TLI, most of LOI, then goes back to Earth. Griffin does just a little work and goes to the lunar station, can deposit another couple of tonnes of fuel in the depot, now at 23. Notice, every
manned mission can either deposit a few tonnes of fuel or can carry a few extra tonnes of cargo. The crew gets everything up and running in our habitat, and they have two Griffin 3.0s at their disposal for Earth return if one should fail. They'll take the first one back, leaving the newer one behind. Each new crew does this, that way we always have one extra return ship in case one has some kind of failure.
Launch seven, a heavy launches a lander, unmanned of course. I have the departure stage not quite able to send all 24 tonnes to TLI, so the lander has to use some fuel to finish TLI. Then it has to do lunar orbit insertion. At this point our 24 tonne lander is down to 16 tonnes. Not enough to land and come back to orbit. Unless it goes to our brand new fuel depot...
The crew oversees docking of the lander, and the transfer of fuel. Then our lunar station crew remotely pilots the lander as it goes down to the lunar surface, unmanned. It lands, deploys some payload, such as a rover, then flies back to lunar orbit, docks back with the station. At this point she needs about 18 tonnes of fuel to fill back up. That's what it takes to do a landing and return, 18 tonnes of fuel. We've now proven that our lander works and that our fuel depot is feasible in just seven launches. We've got a lunar space station with a habitat, a fuel depot, reusable lander, and a pair of Earth return ships.
The crew heads back to Earth in the first Griffin 3.0, leaving the second one there.
Launch eight is just a departure stage. Heads to the lunar station, transfers about 15 tonnes of fuel over to the depot, now we're at about 30 tonnes.
Launch nine is another lander on a heavy. Send it to the station needing to take on just eight tonnes of fuel to be full.
Launch ten is another departure stage. Launch eleven is a Griffin 3.0 with a crew on an Eagle 9. They meet the departure stage. Departure stage does all of TLI, most of LOI, then they separate, as usual, the departure Aquilla then boosts back towards Earth, lands at Hawthorne. The fact that the Aquilla stays with the Griffin until they've nearly reached the station means that the crew has an abort capability the whole way in case of a failure of either the departure stage or the Griffin engines. So at this point in Apollo 13 you have one of the two propulsion systems fail, you use the other and you get home without a problem. Plus you have solar panels and so you'll have power. And, if for some reason you get stuck in lunar orbit, you can seek refuge on our lunar space station. There's always a backup plan.