Oceanworlds

  From the center rows a few letters back, a group of about fifty got up and walked to the stage through both middle aisles. They were not older than 10 or 12. They all wore blue flight suits. Most of them were bald from the side-effects of chemotherapy. As they got on stage, the first one, smaller and bony, picked up the mic.

  He proudly recited from memory in a raspy voice, “Dear Jimmy, we’re neither big enough nor old enough, but because of circumstances we are born warriors. There are a lot of us around the country, some going through tough times. When that started a few years ago in my case, my body sort of betrayed me and it was really hard sometimes. But your mission—I mean you, Belinda, and all the others, gave people like me a reason to continue fighting, so we can one day be explorers like you, going to Saturn and to other places … so as our aspiration and inspiration, we did a big big and successful campaign in all of the country and got a lot lot of money, which we want to give you to finance the Shackleton mission.”

  James was unable to speak. He kneeled in front of the boy and after receiving the yellow envelope, hugged a body even thinner than it looked. I will make you proud, he kept thinking.

  Back to the present, any temptation to postpone had died out in James’ mind. They were launching on June 17 2027.

  17 | Going Nuke

  Two months later, February 2027, 125 days before launch

  CAMP CENTURY, GREENLAND

  It was the third daylight after 101 days of darkness. Frigid -8 Fahrenheit at 1:53 PM made this a mild Arctic winter day, but the timid Sun that arose by 11:30 AM and had rolled atop the horizon would be offstage within minutes.

  A dozen people moved between the five big yellow dome tents comprising the base camp. Two others carefully removed ice from the aircraft propellers—the sole way of returning to Thule Air Base in two weeks, maybe ten days if today’s digging pace continued—but stopped to peer into the distance.

  A lone figure, faded by the whistling white wind and low light, was returning from the drilling site half a mile away. It could have been a polar bear, except there were no animals so far inland. A few hundred feet before reaching the camp, the Russian climbed the metal staircase of a dark cylinder protruding from the ice, opened a hatch, and disappeared inside. Up to the 1980s, the Americans in the group would have been gravely suspicious: the hatch gave access to the remains of the underground city of Camp Century, built at the apex of the Cold War.

  After a long ladder down, Sergei landed in a wide, flat area carved into the ice. There was barely enough light coming from cracks and crevasses to sense the broad emptiness. He turned on a flashlight. This had been a 200-man US Army underground base, spread throughout twenty-one tunnels, including a library, hospital, club, theater, chapel, and the reason for coming here, the nuclear reactor room.

  Like all of the best stories from the Cold War, reality outclassed fiction. Northern latitudes acquired critical status by being the shortest path for missiles between the Soviet Union and the US. In 1959, when the nuclear chessboard was verging on checkmate, Camp Century was conceived as the key top-secret location, carved under the ice, for the American nuclear retaliation strategy, consisting of the obliteration of the Soviet Union and everyone within. It was intended to be a grid of 2,500 miles of tunnels hiding 600 mobile launching pads for the Iceman, the intercontinental nuclear missile that would climb high into the atmosphere before dropping all over Russia.

  Walking forward, he encountered a collapsed roof of ice blocking the path. There was a narrow slit through which his big body struggled to fit. On the other side, the space felt even more spacious. A thunderous cracking of the ice sent echoes that came back trebled. The tunnel must have been enormous. Further on, Sergei tripped on one of the metal beams of a railroad, twisted like Play-Doh and its supporting timber splintered like a toothpick. The icecap was alive, and this was the reason for the demise of Camp Century six decades before. The military base engineers soon realized the glacier was moving much faster than anticipated, solid water in slow motion. In a matter of months, the tunnels deformed and bulged. In a matter of years, the underground city was evacuated permanently.

  Schadenfreude, thought Derya, from the relative warmth and comfort of the kitchen dome tent. Someone’s misfortune was another one’s prosperity: the base’s electricity and heating had been supplied by an on-site nuclear reactor fed with enriched uranium-235. When it was abandoned in 1967, the radioactive waste was left untouched under the assumption that it would remain entombed in perpetuity. But climate change had other plans and the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet would soon leave the toxic waste exposed to the elements. Additionally, the ice sheet right under Derya was 7,000 feet thick. These two complementing reasons had brought the sixteen-person team led by Sergei to the end of the world to test and train Waltzy Mole.

  “Shouldn’t we wait for the boss?” asked the glaciologist-turned-night-cook while stirring a big pot of goulash.

  Everyone’s so infatuated with the Russian—and by the way, I’m also your boss. “You don’t know him, he could take another hour,” said Derya, besotted with the stew’s steamy aroma. The wind-turned-gale drumming the nylon walls amplified the craving. Nobody knew why Sergei invariably arrived late and last, but Derya thought it obvious. It’s the shame.

  Among the multiple mission objectives, exploring Saturn’s sixth biggest moon, icy Enceladus, was at the expedition’s soul. Sergei and Derya were slated to land there, but miles of ultra-hard ice stood between the surface and its mysterious subsurface global ocean, possibly bigger than Earth’s largest, the Pacific. Meet Waltzy Mole, a torpedo-shaped cryobot with a scorching nose that melts the ice in front of it and sinks downward via gravity.

  The use of Camp Century for testing was highly debated and politicized because the cryobot’s fuel source was nuclear.8 Greenland and Denmark were adamantly against it but finally caved, considering no drilling testing meant no mission, and the location was already no man’s land—a nuclear waste cemetery. Others were less conceding: while the team was still at Thule Air Base on Greenland’s coast, Greenpeace attempted a night raid with a helicopter to seize critical equipment. After the venture failed, an enraged Sergei forced the two pilots out and battered them while activists broadcasted the beating live. That was already awful PR, but it paled with what came next: a picture in newspapers the world over of a woman falling mid-air into the snow, eyes shut and mouth open, after a face smacking from a sky-high Sergei. In black and white, to make it extra Cold War—what came right before, namely her kicking him in the nuts after minutes of verbally abusing him, went oddly undocumented. The easy thing, the reasonable thing, would have been for James to condemn Sergei publicly and support him privately, but that seemed to have fallen outside Jimmy’s unwavering principles. Instead, he stupidly backed Sergei, which cost the mission a very great many brownie points—today we celebrate Shackleton’s all-time-low public approval, Sergei’s gallant courtesy to the mission, and his most important legacy to date.

  “So, it’s 1991 and this European satellite spots one of the largest freshwater lakes in the entire world, more than two miles beneath the Vostok Russian station in Antarctica,” said Andrew, a geophysicist, to the lively kitchen tent audience. That’s the place with the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth, -130 degrees Fahrenheit—Enceladus at noon will be -320 degrees, that’s awfully close from absolute zero, the lowest temperature in the Universe, the shivering idea flashed through Derya’s mind. “Further study showed that the lake had been sealed off for millions of years, possibly since Antarctica was tropical and connected to Australia. This was a huge deal because it could mean a museum of living things that had evolved independently from the rest of the planet. The Russians started drilling in 1998, while the worldwide scientific community pleaded for, uh, what’s the word?”

  “Moratorium?” someone suggested.

  “Yes, a moratorium,” Andrew continued, “until technological advances could ensure exploration without contamina
tion. They stopped a few hundred feet above the lake. Then 2005 arrives, and the Cassini probe orbiting Saturn finds out of left field geysers of water coming out of Enceladus, which soon led to the sensational discovery of an enormous ocean beneath its icy surface …”

  The resemblance is uncanny, thought Derya. Both the lake and Enceladus’ ocean remained liquid by being isolated from the exterior and by having a geothermal heat source coming from the seafloor. Both were in complete darkness.

  “But hubris entered Lake Vostok—” A cloud of snow and a clout of cold entered the dome tent, along with a snorting Sergei, his thick blond beard covered in icicles. He grabbed a large bowl handed to him—Papa Bear’s porridge. Everyone keeps practicing their rimming technique on the Russian yeti’s ass.

  “Continue. Being Russian doesn’t make me an accomplice of such stupidity,” said Sergei while loading up on goulash.

  “Yeah. Well,” said Andrew coyly, “in 2012 the, um—”

  “Russians,” said Sergei.

  “—continued drilling and pierced the lake, contaminating it with Freon, kerosene, and bacteria present on the drills. No scientists outside Russia were allowed to examine the water collected before the borehole naturally refroze …”

  “There is a silver lining beyond the desecration,” said Derya, anxious for some protagonism. “If Lake Vostok could preserve life, Enceladus almost certainly has the necessary conditions as well. It not only has organic molecules, and water, and energy—the stuff of life-as-we-know-it—but it has an equally important fourth dimension: time. The moon’s giant ocean has probably remained liquid uninterrupted for billions of years. I bet Lake Vostok’s life forms would thrive in Enceladus … the remaining and crucial question is whether the moon has been able to incubate life to begin with.”

  * * *

  8 As a human being, Derya understood society’s reticence with nuclear power: a promise of hope that had instead shown a penchant to “become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” But as a physicist and crew member, he knew nuclear power was not optional. It was inescapable.

  The Mole could not be solar powered because Saturn stood about ten times further from the Sun than the Earth, which left the ugly bunch: chemical or nuclear energy. But in a mission where weight was the principal restriction, E=mc2 settled the score.

  The most powerful formula in physics is also its biggest Swiss Army knife. This equation explains, with staggering precision confirmed over a century of empirical experiments, many of the fundamental laws of the Universe. For the purposes of the mission, these five characters establish that matter is energy, and an immense amount of it.

  A gallon of gasoline has intrinsic energy equivalent to 2,500 times the energy released by both Little Boy over Hiroshima and Fat Man over Nagasaki.

  A gallon of gasoline, if we were able to extract all its energy, could power every land vehicle and airplane in the United States for forty hours. Yet a gallon of gasoline lasts less than an hour in a single car on a highway.

  That’s the problem with chemical energy. It is a miserable, pathetic, puny energy transformation. Nuclear energy is millions of times more efficient, yet it barely uses 0.1 percent of the intrinsic energy of matter. Still, that’s the best we have so far.

  The civilians’ squeamishness about nuclear power was perfectly ignored by the military: the first nuclear-powered submarine, USS Nautilus, was put to sea in 1954. At present, there are over one hundred submarines and aircraft carriers running on nuclear reactors. The safety record of the US nuclear navy is flawless, and nuclear power’s advantages are hard to overstate: a +100-crew nuclear submarine runs on a single lump of uranium-235 for two decades, and not just for propulsion but for its electricity, heating, air, and water.

  A few things stopped a parallel nuclear technology progression in space. While society has more or less tolerated nuclear power in land and sea, the sky has always been off-limits. This was sealed with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which barred weapons of mass destruction in space—and nuclear power reactors in overdrive become bombs. Additionally, propulsion in space is much harder: attach a propeller to a boat, car, or an airplane and expect forward motion; attach one to a spacecraft and it becomes a cute, ineffective infant mobile—there’s nothing to push against in the vacuum of space.

  Not only would the Mole run on uranium-235, Shackleton’s electricity supply and heating would come from a tiny ten-kilowatt nuclear reactor: twelve feet long, a two-ton cylinder with a fifty-pound core four inches in diameter. It had been developed and tested by NASA, the US Department of Energy, and the Los Alamos National Lab during the 2010s as the kilopower initiative for the long-duration crewed missions of the future. We are the future, thought Derya. The wonder of open-source, publicly funded research.

  To allay concerns, both the reactor and the Mole would be launched cold—the former would be turned on far away from Earth, the latter once it landed in Enceladus—which guaranteed no fallout even in the case of an accident at launch.

  18 | Conclave Day

  A month later, March 2027, 98 days before launch

  MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA

  The managers of all mission areas, along with the crew, were about to spend the day reviewing every aspect of the expedition. The quarterly gathering turned monthly once the launch countdown crossed the one-year threshold. The forty or so people were inside a high-security soundproof pavilion at X, Alphabet’s research and development facility, a mile from Hangar One.

  A serious-looking man of around 50 headed the session. He hid his considerable waistline under a Hawaiian shirt. His tablet showed a list of twenty-seven areas for the first, summary pass; eight were already crossed out.

  “Tom, status on water recycling.” Shackleton’s onboard system for water reuse. Every drop counts. Breathing, sweating, showering, peeing, and number two go into a filtration process to become potable. Yesterday’s sweat is today’s coffee. The International Space Station started in 2008 and by now had reached 94 percent efficiency. The mission needed to do much better. ‘Much’ is always a relative term: climbing to 97 percent meant a 50 percent decrease in losses.

  “Yesterday’s readout was 96.3 percent,” answered Tom.

  The emcee looked at Tom through the glasses resting at the end of his hefty nose. “Pretty darn distant from your team’s 97 percent commitment.”

  “We still have a month and a half.”

  “You have improved 0.2 percent from last time. I don’t see how you can close the gap.”

  “I hate finger-pointing, but it’s all interrelated, right. The food is not yet fully optimized. It is still creating too much solid waste. Trust me, it’s hard to squeeze drinkable water out of shit.”

  “Bookmark for Lana’s team … Lana, you’re number seventeen … next, 3D printing. Sadie?” A mission of this complexity was only possible with this technology, and not just because a significant portion of Shackleton was 3D printed. It was about the failures that would inevitably happen and how to correct them. In a game where payload weight and volume management were invaluable, bringing spares for all essentials was impossible.

  “From Shackleton’s 239,517 components, 7,981 are Mission Critical,” by which Sadie meant indispensable. “As of yesterday, 87 percent of these can be 3D printed.” Her team was large, working around the clock to create substitutes for unprintable components that could, without having ideal specifications, work as acceptable replacements. The work meant transforming physical spares into digital blueprints. Every time a bulky spare was cracked into code and thus avoided as cargo, an excited engineer ran to the Payload Team to break the news.

  There was a long list of non-necessities ranked by importance waiting to earn a spot on board. Strange things could happen in space, such as a new meaning to the concept of luxury items. The previous day had seen the boarding authorization for seven Little Caesars classic pepperoni pizzas and twelve portions of Yi’s newfound obsession, Mac n’ Cheetos, especially engineered for the mission by Bur
ger King. These didn’t come cheap, for sponsors.

  “How much additional weight can we expect to shave?”

  “The low- and mid-hanging fruits are gone … anything from 200 to maybe 500 pounds. I acknowledge this is quite a downgrade. We over-promised, we’ll under-deliver.”

  Jason from Payload was vocally unhappy.

  “Jason, save the comments for your turn. You come … twenty-fifth. Next is my undying nightmare. Sergei?” Roscosmos had been ironclad about doing 100 percent of the design, construction, and testing of artificial gravity in Russia, by Russians. The rotating wheel prototype was delivered to the ISS as an additional module in the Russian segment in a record nine months, and since then had been inhabited during nighttime, finally proving what was hypothesized and debated for decades. Around 40 percent gravity during sleeping hours, in addition to physical training, seemed to be enough to eliminate the harmful effects of weightlessness. Sergei was the point of contact.

  “The magnetic bearing is working nominally.” This was where the wheel rotated. It took a lot of convincing for Roscosmos to replace a mechanical ball bearing with a magnetic one. The latter was in fact a magnetic levitation that avoided physical contact between moving parts, producing negligible friction and no wear. Leaks revealed expenses having climbed north of $2 billion, a very tall order for something with direct costs of a few million—but that’s what space does to budgets. “No maintenance needed, single piece, 7 percent lighter than expected. Disassembling not possible.” Sergei preemptively answered the question in everyone’s mind—what if it failed? “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” That would have to do.