Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  10 Minutes later. “We can see the crew being walked to the elevator that will take them to the bridge at the top, and then it’s just a few dozen steps before they enter the spaceship,” said the reporter.

  “Yes, and they’re allowed one last pit stop at a restroom up there, we call it The Last Toilet on Earth—this is a momentous day. In 2004, Neil Armstrong diagnosed the problem that has troubled space exploration for five decades by reminding us that society is much more risk-averse than the individuals sitting at the top of a rocket. Today, two decades later, the deadlock is finally about to be bulldozed. This mission is bringing back a ‘can do’ attitude that has been buried under our unwillingness to take the necessary risks to push the frontier of exploration. None of our leaders has been as bold, concise, or frank as John F. Kennedy when he set a date by which we would land on the Moon. Now, through the efforts of private enterprise, we are back to the era of extreme accountability. Three years ago they said June 17 2027, and here we stand. Let me add that the $6 billion mission price tag, four days of US military spending, for what could end up being the most important expedition in the history of mankind, is like buying the Taj Mahal for the cost of a Snickers,” said Scott Kelly.

  “Here’s the famous quote from President Kennedy’s 1962 speech, ‘We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’”

  “But the real tally of the challenge comes further into the speech. Let me get my notepad … ‘But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the Moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food, and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles an hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the Sun and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out—then we must be bold.’ To some it may sound trite, but I think it’s fitting and prescient.”

  11 All commercial airplanes and manned spacecraft pump air into the cabin to achieve and maintain an environment resembling the atmospheric pressure where most humans live, at or under 7,000 feet above sea level. At Everest’s summit, 29,029 feet, the atmospheric weight is a third of the sea level’s, like running up a staircase while holding your breath for two out of three steps.

  25 | A New Home

  June 17 2027, Launch Day

  LOW EARTH ORBIT

  A levitating Derya looked through the Observation Window at the International Space Station some 400 feet ahead. It had been six hours since launch and Shackleton was already stationed in its four-day orbit around the Earth before launching for its destination, Saturn. Next morning would see the docking with an autonomous tanker ship—five of them in total would take two days to refill the ship—and at night the first activation of the artificial gravity wheel.

  The gleaming, metallic, Lego-like structure of the ISS reminded Derya of his sister Fatma as an adolescent with braces: awkward and ugly. Seems more of an improvised emergency shelter than a spaceship. The first cylindrical module was put in orbit in 1998 and it presently consisted of seven American modules, five Russian, two Japanese, and one European. “The most stunning example of multinational cooperation during peacetime,” they like to call it. But to him, the six-people flying tin can contraption was a red beacon of stagnated space ambitions, a playground for grown-ups doing little more than high-school science experiments.

  He was pissed. There was no technical reason for converging with the international station. It all began as an innocent fan group proposal to have a stopover while the spaceship was being refueled—never mind that the ISS was crammed and, if anything, its crew would love to sleep in the relatively spacious luxury of Shackleton instead. The combination of a beautiful, artistic, but factually inaccurate video rendering of both vehicles coming together going viral plus the sluggish reaction from the Public Relations Team is all it took. What a touching, sensible idea of giving back to the hundreds of millions that donated money than spectacular footage of Shackleton in a space catwalk as seen from the ISS.

  The ISS, that nearly forgotten derelict old fart, offered the perfect pretext at a fitting time. The non-Russian closed-loop water filtration system was failing, which put the Russians’ under strain. If the latter were to fail, the problem would become an emergency. The Russian water system had it easier, as cosmonauts could never get around the mental block of drinking recycled urine. The non-Russian, instead, mimicked Mother Earth’s water cycle in all its splendor, which included pee from non-Russians, Russians, seventeen guinea pigs, two turtles, three bullfrogs, and one male and five female geckos. The entire infrastructure of the soon-to-be-decommissioned ISS was crumbling and it was rapidly becoming yesterday’s news, and, as such, severely cash-strapped. Enter Shackleton, the Good Samaritan, bringing a bladder replacement to the pensioner for free.

  In two more days, a spacewalk by James and Sergei would bring a water filtration system replacement to the ISS.

  Like the other four, Derya had committed every corner of Shackleton to memory. But no blueprint or virtual reality video could compete with a real-life inspection in space. Of its sixteen stories in length, half were filled with propellant tanks and engines that were inaccessible to the crew. The remaining eight were divided into five levels, all joined together by a hollow central backbone that served as passageway.

  He stuck his head out the passageway into the two-story cargo area, filled with food, water, various supplies, spares, and the two Dragon spacecraft, one of which would land him and Sergei on Enceladus. Here in the cargo area was the hatch that communicated with the outside.

  On the next level were the sleeping quarters, which starting the next day would spin during nighttime. The five cabins stemmed from the center like orange wedges and were cavernous compared to anything that had gone to space before. There were two beds in each, one against the hull for sleeping under artificial gravity, the other a sleeping bag anchored to one wall.

  He peeked into the following level. Most of it was dedicated to Demeter—named after the Greek goddess of agriculture—a greenhouse where a limited but steady supply of vegetables would complement their packaged diet. It was a Z-shaped maze, with year-round lettuce, spinach, and onion, plus seasonal crops of potatoes, beets, tomatoes, broccoli, peas, and radishes growing from the walls. Besides that, it will be nature’s equivalent to a tranquilizing pill. According to mission psychologists, the greenery would be the first go-to place in case of panic attacks. The rest of that floor was Hermes, a zero-gravity gym.

  But the heart of the crew’s new world was Bacchus, the two-story living and kitchen level. Compared to the spartan nature of everywhere else, this was Baroque. Even though it would be permanently under weightlessness, it was conceived and constructed by arbitrarily defining a roof and floor. A third of the curved fuselage wall was covered with a high-definition screen imitating a programmed iconic landscape every twenty-four hours. It behaved exactly like an Earth day, with changing light intensity, direction, and color. At the moment it was nighttime in Florence. The vista from the rooftop balcony at the Four Seasons Firenze had the Piazza del Duomo standing above the rest of the Renaissance city. The hills in the background were hinted at by the silvery light of a quarter Moon. The sounds of the sleeping town were soothing and soporific, and Derya felt suddenly exhausted. I was still right, but damn, it does look lifelike. He fiercely opposed wasting weight allowance on a load of screens to mimic mawkish postcards, but as in other opinions and preferences he lost four to one to the rest of the crew. The floor of Bacchus was made of a special Velcro so th
e astronauts could stick to it during meals or social activities. Table, chairs, and sofas had electromagnets attaching them to the floor that disengaged at the click of a button. At the side opposite to Florence was the lavish latticed main Observation Window, 130 square feet of real-life planetarium. By default, it was fully dimmed to avoid outcompeting Earth’s prerecorded visual impressions.

  The last level, a two-story dome, was the flight deck—right in front of another, smaller Observation Window—taking about half of the space. The rest was occupied by life support systems and electronics, including the ship’s mainframe—an obliging artificial intelligence named TT. The team in charge thought the acronym sounded genderless. Sophia disagrees. I side with her, but I won’t tell anyone. It was lauded as one of the most advanced computers in the world. But it’s the year 2027, and 2001: A Space Odyssey HAL 9000’s intelligence is to TT what a human brain is to a fruit fly’s. TT’s artificial neural networks made it something of an idiot savant. It was exceptional at performing basic autopilot navigation, managing the ship’s power generation, monitoring life support systems, or more generally freeing the crew from the majority of day-to-day operation and maintenance tasks. But in extended speech interactions or when gauging emotions, the illusion of intelligence broke down fast.

  It was 8:02 PM Eastern Time, but from then onward they switched to midnight in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). After the most intense day of their lives, the five retreated to the sleeping quarters.

  Derya glided into his cabin, closing the hatch behind him. A widespread complaint from people that have lived in space was the lack of privacy. Not here. His inner sanctum was spacious and soundproof. Having planned his personal space with a designer for over a year, he knew the location of everything by heart, from nail clippers to his Kindle packed with naughty romantic novels.

  He got inside his sleeping bag and zipped it up, swallowed the sleeping pills his mission physician prescribed for the first few days in space, and looked at his schedule for tomorrow. ‘Tomorrow’ was no longer what it used to be. In space, the concept of a twenty-four-hour day becomes a human construct: Shackleton completes a loop around the planet every ninety-two minutes, including a sunrise and a sunset.

  He was already loathing the seven back-to-back interviews starting at 8:30 AM, but knew he shouldn’t complain. Among apostles there was always a Jesus, and it wasn’t James but Yi. China was experiencing an acute case of Beatlemania.

  There were no windows in the cabin and the ambient light had dimmed and transitioned into blue-wavelength-depleted to avoid suppressing nocturnal melatonin and to induce sleep. Without external cues like sunrise and sunset, the traditional way to keep a properly regulated twenty-four-hour circadian rhythm during space missions was a systematic daily eating and exercise routine. But the most biologically fundamental mechanism for setting this clock is light.

  Life has a timekeeping system at the molecular level. Even bacteria living in darkness exhibit the twenty-four-hour biochemical clock. Disrupting it goes against billions of years of evolution. For the crew, deviations from the twenty-four-hour day as well as sleep deprivation were to be avoided at all costs. It weakened the immune system, blurred awareness, and degraded social skills. Sleep hygiene was not only recommended but also monitored from Earth. There were a lot of rules on board Shackleton, but this one ruled them all.

  26 | Hurricane Isaias

  June 18 2027. Day 2; 3.2 Years to Saturn

  Yi woke in his cabin with a sensation similar to doing a handstand, his head puffed up. His heart, used to pumping against gravity, now pushed too much. The inner ear, which regulates balance in addition to sound, was sending garbage signals to his brain—seasickness in space. His body didn’t know what was happening, and for an instant his mind didn’t know either. He looked at the digital wall in front of him. It was 7:12 AM. The wall showed his schedule, booked with interviews from 9:00 AM all the way to 8:00 PM, with sixty-five minutes allocated for lunch. I’ll be repeating the space exploration mantra I’ve been preaching for years—but talking from 250 miles up seems to amplify the message like an Earth-size megaphone, somehow imbuing new meaning into the same old words.

  Later, as he tried to sit down for breakfast at the communal table in Bacchus, he managed to elbow James and kick Derya. Sophia smiled, understanding.

  When Sergei appeared in the hatch, Derya asked him to do the kuvyrkat’sya, somersault in Russian. There is no chance his muscle memory is that good—but we shall see, thought Derya. Sergei launched forward across the roof and when he was flying right above the table, grabbed one of the hundreds of handrails around the ship, pivoted his body, and sent himself downward, landing a little off-center on his chair. “Give yourselves a month,” he quipped.

  “If you weren’t so blond you could have joined the Harlem Globetrotters,” said James. For everyone but Sophia it was yet another lost in translation moment. “Anyway,” he continued the previous conversation, “picture this one: David Bowman has terminated HAL 9000, but that has also killed artificial gravity, okay? So, he’s floating alone and heading to Jupiter. One day he’s heading to the bathroom for a number two, flying like Sergei. Closing in, he grabs a rod sticking out to slow down, kills all his momentum but … the rod breaks. He is floating there, perfectly still, an arm’s length away from the walls. Can he save himself?”

  “I don’t get it. What’s the problem?” asked Yi.

  “Newton.”

  “Mind adding some flavor, Jimmy?” said Sophia.

  Derya replied, “First Law: ‘An object shall remain at rest unless acted upon by a force,’ Bowman is stuck in the middle. He has nothing to push against. He can jerk and shake and scream all he wants, but he won’t move a millimeter closer to any of the walls. After a day he’ll get thirsty from so many tears of frustration, and a week or two later he’ll join Frank Poole and HAL 9000. And salvation will still be an arm’s length away. Pretty cool death, huh?”

  “You are a bunch of pitiful nerds. I really hope it’s not contagious,” said Sophia after finishing her last breakfast bite. She left Bacchus.

  No one but Yi seemed keen on the mental gymnastics. “Can he have a tube of toothpaste in his pocket?”

  “I’ll give you that, but only if it’s an airline sample,” said James.

  “That’s like a third of an ounce.”

  “That’s what you’ve got.”

  “Let me try Newton’s Third Law,” said Yi. “For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Bowman unscrews the cap, carefully points toward one wall, and squeezes the tube like his life depends on it.”

  “That’s fairly smart,” cut in Derya while thinking that’s damn smart. “But the difference in mass is like one to 10,000, so any thrust generated will be negligible. Maybe days to move inches …”

  “Sorry to kill the mood but it doesn’t work,” said James. “To create thrust, the toothpaste would need to physically separate from the tube, but I don’t see—”

  Sophia’s fired up voice came from the flight deck, “Guys, you must come and see this …”

  Directly below them, Tennessee—the state of Elvis and country music—looked uninterruptedly green, crossed diagonally by ancient seafloor turned into mountains, one of Earth’s most visible wrinkles, the Appalachians running from Newfoundland all the way to Alabama. Geological investigations, fossils, or plainly staring at a world map reveal how it used to belong to the mountain range extending from Scotland to Morocco. But the wheel of time keeps spinning, and continental drift seems to imply the formation of a new supercontinent in a couple of hundred million years.

  But no one was looking down, only sideways where the coastline should have been, hidden under a white rotating canopy with a footprint stretching from Georgia to north Florida. The effect of watching Hurricane Isaias while listening to news networks was hypnotic.

  “—turns out Nitha Sharma was right and I was wrong. I’m okay with that. Long live the Queen of Space and all that jazz.
But to say the mission was saved because of her farsightedness pushing ahead for launch is, sorry to be so blunt, utter horseshit.”

  Sophia got goosebumps. Yes, the storm below may be momentous, but compared to any of the hundreds happening right now in the gas giants, it’s pint-sized and ephemeral. Some 400 million miles away, Jupiter’s largest had spun for centuries and could easily swallow the entire Earth, the Great Red Spot. Doubling the distance, Saturn’s largest tempest may have been raging for billions of years, an even more gargantuan maelstrom capable of gulping all inner planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—moored to the North Pole.

  At 10:15 PM, the artificial gravity wheel started up. At first the spinning was imperceptible but half an hour later it achieved cruising speed—seven rotations per minute, simulating 40 percent of Earth’s gravity.

  27 | Spacewalk

  June 19 2027. Day 3; 3.2 Years to Saturn

  James and Sergei were donning their spacesuits by themselves. This is already revolutionary, thought James. Getting into my old sumo wrestler costume used to take two people and forty-five minutes. It fitted as tight as a surgical glove a size too small. Yi helped each one to mount the propulsion unit for untethered spacewalks on top of the spacesuit’s life support system backpack.

  First Sergei then James entered the airlock and closed the first airtight door behind them. After checking their screen displays one last time for leaks, they nodded at each other and activated the airlock, which depressurized to vacuum. Their lives were now 100 percent dependent on their spacesuits.