by J. P. Landau
“The Chinese Dream’s poster child,” the People’s Daily newspaper had anointed him. Being the 3D Printing and Robotics mission specialist on the expedition to Saturn seemed inconceivable following a childhood among Inner Mongolian shepherds. Yet Yi knew something they did not: the title was premature. He was going to quit. I’m not nearly good enough—Derya Terzi, Mission Scientist. Turned down an offer to become the head of the physics department at ETH Zurich, where Einstein studied. Instead, he became an authority on Saturn and its moons before the mission selection process even began. Talk about commitment—James Egger, Mission Commander. Growing ever taller with each meeting we’ve had—Sophia Jong, Mission Physician and Molecular Biologist. Came indisputably first among tens of millions of resumes. So creative, confident, yet unassuming—meritocracy like there’s never been before. They breathe and sweat The Right Stuff … and then there’s me, the weekend warrior battling arthritis, thrown by mistake into the Table Tennis World Cup semi-finals. A new air pocket flipped his stomach again. This damn roller coaster is really, really getting old—and why do you always need to fly so high?
“We’re approaching Mountain View. Touching down in seven,” said the pilot.
Yi scanned the landscape below. To the east was the end of the placid San Francisco Bay, basking under the morning Sun. To the south he could see the townscape of San Jose, the southernmost tip of Silicon Valley and its only spot that felt like a proper city instead of a sleepy rural idyll. He came from Shenzhen, the hi-tech capital of Asia with its barrage of gleaming skyscrapers and vast industrial zone. The high-tech capital of the world instead had, for the most part, gotten rid of the hardware and dealt in transforming neuronal connections into zeros and ones. Exporting, in other words, the dirty, messy act of physically making stuff to us, keeping just the Utopia for themselves. Right below him, the greenery had been interrupted by the sprawling 2,200 acres of Moffett Federal Airfield. In 2014, Google had leased it for sixty years and soon rehabilitated the historic Hangar One, Two, and Three between the two large runways ending by the bay to house robotics, aviation, and space exploration projects. A Bay Area microcosm surrounded the airfield: Google headquarters, Amazon’s R&D division, and Ames Research Center, one of NASA’s major facilities.
The helicopter began a steep descent to Shackleton’s center of operations. The long shadow of Hangar One gave away its soaring height in the otherwise two-dimensional bird’s-eye view. It sure seemed an odd location pick: on top of the most expensive land in the US while barely being 350 miles from the aerospace hub and much cheaper real estate of Los Angeles.
Yi glimpsed the Googleplex to the left of the hangar, the search giant’s headquarters, a set of buildings and structures under huge translucent canopies of geometries both imitating and defying nature, surrounded by profuse amounts of it.
Yi hurried to the massive east clamshell doors of Hangar One,7 one of the world’s largest free-standing structures. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founders, rented Hangar One from their company for the sole use of the mission. The reputational boon went a long way to save the mission, the large fund they set up for research and development went even further. Over 800 people were working there. Its floor, equivalent to six American football fields, was littered with cranes, improvised workstations, modular roofless offices, and ant-sized people moving around the facility. An empty section in the middle waited for the Shackleton spaceship, due to arrive in two months for an extended, wide-ranging retrofitting.
Two hours in, Yi had already mapped almost everyone in the packed room. While the conference was solely devoted to the laser communication system on board Shackleton, not only leading optics researchers were present, but major industrial players such as Facebook’s fiber-optic communication division. Of course. Who would miss it? This is cutting-edge applied science pushing the boundaries of laser technology. Everyone on the planet, certainly in this room, stands to benefit. Even his boss, James, was unexpectedly seated by Yi’s side, checking his computer.
Wireless communication comes in two flavors: radio waves via antenna or light via laser. Both are different energy levels of the same particle, the photon. Photons move through space as waves, and their energy level depends on the inverse relation between frequency and wavelength. Radio waves have low energy. Their low frequency means that once on Saturn, Shackleton would only be able to transfer about fifty megabytes, or three minutes of HD video, per hour. Yet it has been the almost exclusive form of outer space communication, and this is because it comes with a silver lining: the high wavelength means that when the wave arrives at Earth, it’s already bigger than our planet, so it’s relatively easy for it to be picked up by one of the giant antennas from NASA’s Deep Space Network.
Light has much higher energy. Its high frequency allows data transfer around forty times greater, but the price to pay is a microscopic wavelength. It is thus the equivalent of going from firing a shotgun at point-blank range to firing a sniper rifle at a target on the Moon. The precision required for sending and intercepting lasers in outer space is stupefying.
Yi summarized in his mind what he saw as the two major issues.
The first was that even though outer space laser communication was already deployed, Saturn stood five times further away than the current technological limit. The consensus in the room was that no matter how much progress they made over the next two years, it wouldn’t be enough. Shackleton would therefore carry both laser and antenna. The former would be the communication technology for as long as they possibly could, the latter after they couldn’t.
The second was the injustice between uplinking data to versus downlinking data from Shackleton. The Airbus fellow said it neatly, “Compared to the size of Earth’s baseball glove, Shackleton’s receiver would be tight on a Barbie.” Therefore, even at this meeting with a natural alignment of interests, the unspoken concerns differed. For the crew, the main anxiety was how to prolong the laser feed from Earth for as long as was technically feasible. For some of the rest, it was the other way around. For the former, how to delay the moment when their already thin communication with the rest of humanity would drop to a few voice and word messages per day; the moment they would be forced to encounter the overwhelming sound of silence. For the latter, how to postpone the instant when data recovery from Shackleton would cut to hardly anything, because if something catastrophic were to happen after this, most of the invaluable mission data would be lost forever.
Yi saw a man tap on James’ shoulder and heard him whisper, “Jimmy, someone important is trying to reach you from Russia.” James and Yi exchanged confused glances. The last time they had spoken to the Russian government had been five months ago and they had never heard back from them.
James was smiling profusely. “Come,” he told Yi. Their walk toward the center of the hangar turned into a sprint.
Yi stopped behind James in the middle, the other inhaled and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Team … team … friends!” The sound reverberated like a male choir around the massive metal structure. Most sounds died down as people and machinery stopped. “I have bad news … for our detractors and slanderers, because against all odds …” he waited for the echoes to die down, “Roscosmos is in!”
A mellow wave of awe and pride flooded Yi. The press will trip over themselves on this one. This is incendiary material. Yi could already read the headlines: “A New Sputnik Moment,” “Russians at the Gate,” “Russia Looks at the Sky While the West Looks at its Shoes.” Finally, a victory lap. It was about time.
As he learned an hour later, the fine print made clear this wasn’t charity. In exchange, Roscosmos had put forth two conditions.
First, Sergei Lazarev was to become the fifth crew member as Mission Pilot and Mechanical Engineer. Even Yi had heard of him. If he was a good fit with the rest of the crew, he couldn’t think of anyone more ideal. “They don’t make them like him anymore,” James had said. Yi would have preferred for the artificial gravity wheel t
o have been made by Chinese or Western engineers, but having a Russian on board was a relief. He’ll probably be able to fix an engine with some baling wire, duct tape, and a few solid kicks.
Second, moving Mission Control to Star City—the Russian space-training center near Moscow. This was unacceptable, yet nobody was overly worried about rejecting condition number two. With so much at stake for Russia, Yi knew they wouldn’t kill the deal over that one point. The suspicion of many surfaced over the coming days from The Wall Street Journal to The Times of India—Russia’s true motive was potential territorial rights in space. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, signed by the Soviet Union, the United States, and most of the world save a few pockets in Africa and South America, specifically stated that “outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” But Russia could be unusually right-brained in matters of land, such as in 2007 when a robotic submarine put a flag on the seabed under the North Pole; the United States promptly answered, dismissing whether it planted “a metal flag, a rubber flag, or a bed sheet” as legally meaningless. But Yi had read that the Outer Space Treaty did have a loophole in that it was silent about individuals owning cosmic real estate. Russia’s most probable strategy was playing catch-up, as the crew already had Chinese, American, and German members, and if anything changed regarding international law, we could regress to the dictum of terra nullius or ‘nobody’s land,’ where the earliest explorers would have a natural sovereign right. What no one but me knows is that China is about to get disqualified—I can no longer delay this. I’m presenting my resignation to Jimmy as crew member and asking to be reassigned as engineer in the robotics department. I belong to the masses, not to the few.
A perplexed Yi scrutinized James’ face, searching for hints giving away his anger or defeat. There were none. Instead, James smiled caringly at him.
“Yi, buddy, I understand what you’re going through. Not because I’m compassionate but because I’m feeling the same—”
“Don’t think I don’t appreciate the camaraderie but I’m telling you, Jimmy, my case is different. You just saw me there. Fumbling in broken English, ending up sounding even more idiotic than in my own head. Meanwhile everyone else was precise, articulate … you, the three of you, are so impressive, so confident.”
“Hey, stop right there. First, that was a pretty eloquent delivery. Second, we’re all—Sophia, Derya, you, me—stretched beyond our abilities. And yes, the three of us are better than you … at acting. You think you’re looking at three peaceful ducks floating on a pond, but if you were to look under the water, you would see us all paddling frantically.”
“Jimmy, I’m even afraid of heights.”
“So what? There’s plenty of astronauts with a fear of heights. From the recent crop, from the famous ones, top of my head I can think of Mike ‘Mass’ Massimino—or, or Chris Hadfield, and Chris was a Canadian military test pilot! So, your excuse is rejected.” Yi kept looking down, dispirited. “Okay, let me tell you a story,” Jimmy continued. “Someone from the crew had a crisis two weeks ago, saying the same thing you’re saying now, thinking he or she was the one mistake in an otherwise flawless recruiting process. ‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ I said. ‘Sell an American for what he thinks he’s worth and buy him back for what he’s actually worth. You’ll make a killing.’ One moral of the story is that it’s easy to be bold on a stage before a crowd speaking your native tongue. Do not confuse appearance with essence.”
Is he talking about Derya? Impossible, thought Yi.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said James. “But maybe it wasn’t one of them. Maybe it was me.”
* * *
7 The hangar had been constructed in 1933 to lodge the biggest airship ever built in America, the zeppelin USS Macon, which rivaled the Hindenburg in size—the first destroyed in a sea storm out of Monterey Bay in 1935, the second infamously exploded while still in the air in 1937.
13 | Mission Training
Eight months later, May 2026, 404 days before launch
HOUSTON, TEXAS
“Power drill,” Sergei commanded. Sophia rotated her face in his direction but only saw the solid inside of her spheroidal helmet. Alligator head. She extended her mockup spacesuit arm and grabbed the handrail of the International Space Station replica fuselage. Her sweaty, throbbing fingers could barely feel the contact through the puffed glove. She hauled her body against the water friction to face Sergei. Too late, he had already reached the tool previously hanging from her belt. Houston, we have a problem. No, it’s not Apollo 13. It’s Sophia to report we have an asshole underwater. Her pride was taking a beating after two hours paired with Sergei fixing a simulated leak. And I thought we Americans were individualistic. Teamwork anybody?
The two were submerged inside the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, a giant diving tank equivalent to ten Olympic swimming pools where astronauts trained for spacewalks. The facility was part of the Johnson Space Center about a mile away.
“Come on, Sweetie!” said Yi over her helmet speaker from the Simulation Control Room hanging above the tank, watching every movement along with James and Derya via nine underwater cameras. His cheerleading wasn’t just ill-timed, but yet another lost-in-translation moment. Never mind, she really liked Yi.
“It’s Tweety, Yi,” said Derya. “Sweetie’s a little too intimate at this stage. Don’t blush, you’ll get there eventually.” Tweety, Sophia’s nickname, had followed her from JPL, where her high-pitch laugh was renowned. She liked Derya all right, though he was too cynical for her taste.
She looked up at the half-dozen divers looking back at her among their myriad bubbles, silently floating in black wet suits, waiting to facilitate transitions during the exercise. At first, she felt proud of her learning curve, but that was two long hours ago. I clearly don’t have Jimmy’s leadership inclination or skills, but man I’m a good sidekick. If you only tried Sergei—someone else should get paired with Mr. Charm so they realize it’s not just my mediocrity.
The crane lifted Sophia’s ninety-five-pound body cloistered inside 275 pounds of spacesuit and life support system out of the water tank. When two assistants removed the helmet, James saw none of her festive and carefree demeanor. This says a lot. James recalled when Sophia was still an Astronaut Candidate for the mission during the final week of physical and psychological tests. The tour-de-force claustrophobia assessment consisted of putting the candidate inside a coffin without telling them for how long they’d be held captive, while simultaneously monitoring their vital signs. Sophia unexpectedly fell asleep inside and when they opened it and she woke up, disoriented, she warbled incoherently, “Mango … I mean tango … I meant Fargo, you know, bodies inside the bags.” Already Tweety was Shack folklore.
Avoiding the Sergei question for another minute, James thought about the next three weeks: the crew partially isolated, living and working 24/7 with each other. All nicely wrapped in a tight-as-a-camel’s-ass-in-a-sandstorm schedule. Then back to their busy personas for two weeks before the cycle restarts—in his case this round included arguably the most significant event of his life.
Mission psychologists had settled on a five-week cycle, which they believed maximized team adaptation while minimizing the unavoidable stress and wear of living day-round in close quarters. The White House, James was still clueless as to why, coerced NASA to deny Shackleton’s request to rent two of their facilities—the second one being the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO), a metallic shoebox sixty feet underwater off the coast of Key Largo, Florida, which the crew was to inhabit for two weeks in September—but then Paul Mercer, the NASA Administrator, secretly called James and they agreed to jack up the rental price to double the ongoing market rate, which made the denial politically impractical.
Okay, let’s deal with this. Tomorrow I team up with Sergei. The rest of the crew would be watching and his conditi
on as commander could weaken if he was unable to keep up. He was an astronaut, after all. No pretexts for underperforming. But Sergei looks like a damn Bolshoi dancer dressed as Michelin Man. His dexterity today was bordering supernatural. But more importantly, Sergei was playing solo virtuoso instead of ensemble, something James needed to address ASAP. Just not today. Infantile and unworthy of his position as it may be, he wouldn’t tell the Russian until after their match. Having worked and lived with cosmonauts, James knew their hound’s nose for spotting mental or physical weaknesses, an unforgivable sin. Resourcefulness, steely-mindedness, and physical prowess had always been their way to compensate for their technological lag. I’ll show you I’m no Beach Boys’ Californian surfer softie. The feeling of wanting to be respected was dusty from lack of use. Until today.
Five days later at their first touchy-feely group session, it was clear to Sophia that Yi and Sergei were perfectly out of their element. Even during the introduction by the psychologist moderating the session, Yi’s face contorted like she was amputating a piece of him. There was no script: sit down for hours at a time, commit harakiri, and pour your soul out.
Sergei’s turn came up. He didn’t look intent on reciprocating to everyone else’s prior emotional opening the kimono ritual.
“Sergei, do you want to say something?” said the tutor.
“No.”
“If you want, maybe the group can ask you a few questions?” No reaction. “You’re married. Any children?”
“No.”
“What’s your wife’s name?”
“Iman.”
Everyone’s so shy all of a sudden. Let’s spice this up an itsy-bitsy. “That’s not a Russian name, is it?” asked Sophia.