by J. P. Landau
James opened the second airtight door, and as he exited, he was struck by the sight of the planet rotating beneath him. This will never get old. The contrast with watching Earth from inside the spacecraft reminded him of the difference between watching whale sharks through an acrylic glass in the Okinawa Aquarium two years back, and Belinda and himself diving among them off the coast of Mozambique last August. Both views of Earth are life-altering, but spacewalks are epiphanies with God. The peripheral vision through the new helmet was unlimited, and only the subtle glare on the visor betrayed its presence. The Mediterranean below was a stunning deep blue, followed by scattered clouds over the Syrian Desert unfurling into a uniform coating of icing reaching the horizon, cloaking Iran. He was enraptured. Sergei’s stern voice reminded him to keep moving.
Looking back, he saw Shackleton’s rear coupled to the back of a semi-twin, an autonomous tanker refueling and giving the impression of staring at the former’s reflection.
They moved efficiently through the hull heading to the bow using a handrail, and prepared for the untethered spacewalk right outside Bacchus’ Observation Window. Inside Shackleton, Sophia pointed a camera at them, beaming live to the world below.
Their helmets’ intercom crackled, “James Egger, Sergei Lazarev, this is Satoshi Fukuda, Commander of the ISS. The Joint Airlock is ready and waiting for you two, and the payload.” The water filtration system replacement for the ISS hung from Sergei’s harness, packed as a bale.
Not one to waste time with preambles, Sergei untethered from the handrail and fired his nozzle thrusters, promptly separating from Shackleton. Much too quick for James’ taste or confidence. Forced to follow the cosmonaut closely, he unclipped and got a drowning surge of adrenaline as he fired his thrusters.
They were about a third of the distance to the ISS when James looked straight down for the first time since separation. The exposure made him lightheaded. It was one thing to stare down while attached to a structure thousands of times more massive. It was something entirely different to be on his own in what was effectively a skintight, one-person spaceship. It was both pure bravery and pure helplessness. And dangerous in non-obvious ways. He remembered his second spacewalk, years earlier. James and his partner had been outside for five hours replacing a large plate half an inch thick when it jolted. Upon inspection, they noticed a hole as if someone had pierced the solid steel with an unbreakable toothpick. A grain of orbital debris is all it took. Very low probability, very high consequences.
He concentrated on the landscape revolving under him and immediately recognized the magnificent white ruggedness of the Himalayas, with its tens of thousands of ridges dividing each mountain into glare and shadow. Yet even the highest mountain barely protruded six miles above the ocean, on a planet 8,000 miles in diameter. The three dimensionalities below were a fabrication of his brain extrapolating shapes and colors. In fact, if the planet was painted as a billiard ball it would be indistinguishable from one. Everest, or the Mariana Trench, or its slightly oblate shape, were well within the World Pool-Billiard Association error tolerance for balls. My overly complicated way of saying the Earth is more or less a perfect sphere.
James had been battling with a nose itch that wouldn’t go away. My pinky, my pinky’s all I need. Unable to control himself anymore, he sneezed, aiming as low as he could, but it still splattered the visor with saliva. Well, that’s that—fortunately it’s a short spacewalk. The trifle was forgotten when, looking ahead, he saw the Sun about to disappear under the horizon, cutting through the fragile and ailing hazy bluish carapace of the Earth’s atmosphere. Using the previous analogy, a billiard ball’s coating is 1 percent of its thickness. The atmosphere? 0.1 percent—0.1 percent that makes the difference between the exuberant life on Earth and the barren desert of Mars. As soon as the Sun hid, the light switch went off and Sergei, twenty feet ahead, vanished into darkness. The only lights were a ceaseless collection of stars and the ISS right ahead. In seconds, the temperature dropped from 200 to -200 degrees Fahrenheit. James was safe inside his spacesuit, but he still felt something akin to a draft of cold air on an otherwise warm and windless autumnal evening.
As James converged upon the ISS airlock, instead of slowing down via thrusters, he attempted Sergei’s feat of grabbing the handrail and killing the inertia. He thumped against the hatch frame, bounced, and repeated two more times. Smile to the live camera, you clumsy rookie—that was stupid and hazardous. Mental note: do not try imitating Sergei.
Some twenty minutes later they were inside, honing the art of the awkward weightless hug. This was the moment old spacesuit technology died: at 30 percent of sea level atmospheric pressure, it used to take hours of patient waiting in the airlock before an astronaut could safely return inside without getting the bends. Instead, Sergei and James removed their helmets with the nonchalance of delivery boys.
After the formalities, Sergei went to the Russian segment for a call with Roscosmos, while James stayed with his Swedish friend Mika Holmgren.
“I had forgotten how noisy it’s here. Sounds like a tin can loaded with pennies,” said James.
“I call it the Impending Sinking Shit, or ISS for short. Not sure it was ever that glamorous, but nowadays half of our day is spent as plumbers. It is time. Next October, in recognition of its merit and seniority, it gets an official cremation by forcing it to enter the atmosphere. No twenty-one-gun salute or playing of ‘Taps’ unfortunately.”12
Hours later, after heartfelt farewells, Sergei and James entered the airlock. In minutes they separated from the ISS, their past Bed & Breakfast, one final time. Inside the ISS, the crew stayed immobile, watching the two men return to their ship.
Long after they were back inside Shackleton, Satoshi and Mika continued gazing at the other spaceship in silence. Mika felt disquieted and downcast, and he wondered what was going through Satoshi’s mind.
“What are you thinking, Commander?” asked Mika.
“Take a good look at them …” Satoshi’s voice was altered and gloomy. He turned and left.
* * *
12 James thought about it. There’s no temptation to salvage the $150-billion investment by leaving it in orbit. Doing so would be hugely irresponsible. In 2007, the Chinese military conducted an anti-satellite missile test by blowing up a 0.75-ton weather satellite that disintegrated into 2,000 pieces each larger than a golf ball, scattered in every direction at speeds many times that of a bullet. At that velocity, small things become huge threats. And with almost complete absence of atmosphere to slow things down and force a re-entry, they can remain a threat for centuries. There are more than half a million pieces of space junk bigger than one centimeter already destroying one satellite per year. If the ISS were to be left unattended—thus unable to dodge orbital debris—and something collided with it, the consequences would be apocalyptic: it was around 600 times heavier than the murdered weather satellite, so by extrapolation it may fragment into more than a million pieces, instantly tripling the amount of space junk in orbit. That could trigger the Kessler Syndrome, a recurrent nightmare among space personnel, where shrapnel creates a domino effect of collisions that could destroy the entire satellite network around our planet and make launching into space impossible, leaving us trapped on Earth for hundreds of years. The destruction of communication satellites would severely cripple television, telephone communication, and the Internet. No weather satellites would destroy the ability to predict and track weather events. No navigation satellites would mean a glorious return of the paper map. As with many things in life, cluttering and dirtying are the easy part, he reasoned.
To kill time while James waited for Sergei, Mika doubled as tour guide to the experiments being performed aboard.
They floated inside Kibo, the Japanese science module. Mika pointed to a semi-transparent container with a microscope on top. “You look like the sort of person who would be interested in the findings of this one. This is a yeast colony. We’re studying how cells divide in the ab
sence of gravity.”
“What sort of yeast?”
“Trichophyton rubrum, also known as athlete’s foot. Now check this one out. It’s the coolest place in the Universe.”
“Are you positive it’s in the Japanese section?”
“You’re gonna love this one. This metallic box is the famous Cold Atom Laboratory, one of the most sensitive instruments ever built. The size of an ice chest, it cost $90 million to build. By laser cooling and magnetic fields, the atoms inside the vacuum chamber are cooled to 1 pico Kelvin above absolute zero. Do you know what that means?” James shook his head. “Well, me neither if I’m being perfectly honest. But I’ve heard a few things here and there. For example, if we are—unless you guys prove otherwise—the only intelligent ones out there, this box is likely to be the coldest place in the entire Universe.”
James tried hard to show interest, but each new blink remained shut longer. I’m genuinely interested but I’m also dead tired. “Look, here’s a plate with some info: ‘The Universe has been cooling since the Big Bang for 13.8 billion years, and its current average temperature is 2.73 degrees Kelvin, or -455 degrees Fahrenheit. The coldest natural place known to us is the Boomerang Nebula, 5,000 light-years away, at 1 Kelvin. The Cold Atom Laboratory operates at a temperature less than a billionth of a degree above absolute zero.’ Meaning, if you shrank and were put inside it, you wouldn’t be just dead: every atom in your body would be inert. Even a small rock floating beyond Pluto would be livelier, as rays from the faint Sun manage to excite a few atoms—Jimmy?” James had fallen asleep in his attentive floating position, snoring softly with a slight hiss.
28 | Farewell
June 20 2027. Day 4; 3.2 Years to Saturn
At 2:23 AM, the crew received confirmation that the modified Super Heavy rocket docked to Shackleton had been approved for ignition. For the next hour, the paired rocket and spaceship steered into a higher orbit. Now they were seconds away from reaching the exact point of departure from Earth’s orbit, the true start of their journey. The rocket’s engines would burn through over 3,000 tons of propellant in under ten minutes, before disengaging from Shackleton and catapulting it toward the edge of the Solar System. The highest speed ever attained by humans would be shattered. A minute later, the crew would experience a new jolt as Shackleton fired its own engines at full thrust for three minutes. After the cut-off, there wouldn’t be more engines blasting until they arrived at Saturn. That’s the counterintuitive result of orbital mechanics, the application of ballistics—the science of throwing objects—and celestial mechanics—the science dealing with the motion of heavenly bodies—to the motion of rockets and spacecrafts. Shackleton was about to break free from Earth’s gravity, and for the next three years it would decelerate because of the Sun’s massive gravitational pull, until Saturn’s gravity claimed the spaceship for itself.
Nitha’s voice was crystal clear, as if she was seated among the crew. “Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Rocket ignition.”13
MOON FLYBY
“—being 9:53 PM UTC, Sophia Jong, Derya Terzi, Yi Meng, Sergei Lazarev, and Jimmy Egger have just broken the distance record made by the ill-fated yet ultimately successful Apollo 13 mission on April 14 1970 as they crossed over the dark side of the Moon. To put this in perspective, if Earth was a soccer ball, Shackleton would now be twenty-four feet away. Saturn? Europe as seen from the English coast—”
Sophia turned off the radio coming out of her headphones and looked at her tablet. Even after her secretaries’ patient screening, there were almost one hundred new messages in her inbox. But there was something profoundly impersonal about fame. There is no real personal connection, just hype, she thought. After three years of madness, the sound of silence was overwhelming. And the receding Earth, terrifying—I can sense the existential loneliness creeping in. She knew how to fight back: aural music replaced oral noise. She closed her eyes to the soothing, famous electric organ chords and remained in a meditative state.
When she took her headphones off, the seventh repetition of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” trailed away. She scanned around. The Moon stood in the Sun’s way and the lights were off, yet it was twilight in Bacchus; an ivory luster stood in for the tangerine orange. Yi floated mid-air between her and the Observation Window—the other three had left for their cabins. He was reading the Quran, a splendid copy with engraved brass plate cover lit by the cosmos. Freed from atmospheric distortion and filtering, the stars did not twinkle and their true colors blossomed into an assortment of yellows, blues, reds, purples, and greens. Sophia shivered as her soul poured out in the form of goosebumps as she witnessed a mesmerizing Milky Way, the greatest display of Christmas lights ever assembled.
“It’s so …” Sophia’s throat clenched the words. She did not follow through. Silence seemed the most eloquent tribute to the immensity before her.
After some time, Yi said, “‘And among His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the Earth, and the living creatures that He has scattered through them.’ Are you hearing the same I’m hearing? To me, Muhammad was acknowledging the existence of extraterrestrial life. In the year 632 AD! Such wisdom and humility. Today’s Earth would have been unrecognizable to him, yet the night sky he looked at hasn’t changed one bit—space defies our intuition and our intellect. On Earth, your eyes may be able to discern a tall mountain one hundred miles away. Get into a car and you can go past it in under two hours. But here … here, instead, we see everything yet we can reach nothing. Think about it. The closest star to our Solar System among hundreds of billions just in our Milky Way is that pinpoint of yellow light over there on the right, Alpha Centauri, 4.4 light-years away. At our current speed, the fastest ever achieved by humans, it would take us 80,000 years to get there.14 All the mysteries of the Universe are right here before us, naked, uncovered, exposed. But this clairvoyance comes with a terrible curse: they are only reachable by our eyes and imagination.”
For an instant during Yi’s musings Sophia felt elated, and at every moment she was in awe, hearing the recitation while looking at its inspiration. The sadness from before had pulled back. That marvelous, childlike curiosity you have—it’s not just admirable, but addictive, contagious. She understood him and felt understood. A kinship. I really like you, Yi.
He continued in that same dreamlike cadence that gave Sophia enough time to reflect on his words: “A thousand civilizations may be in front of us right now, staring back, as clueless as we are. Right in front of us there are black holes, orbiting around which we could slow time to a crawl and become effectively immortal. Or wormholes tunneling into other galaxies or maybe even other Universes—now think back to us and assimilate the scale of our insignificance. The number of stars in the Universe is far higher than the number of grains of sand in all the beaches of the Earth, yet our biggest achievement so far has been to walk on the Moon, a satellite orbiting another satellite orbiting a grain of sand known as the Sun. Even when this mission succeeds, we’ll still be hopelessly marooned on our lush microscopic island orbiting our star. The chasm to the next, closest grain of sand, Alpha Centauri, remains unbridgeable. We are pinned to a single grain of sand in the limitless cosmic beach of the cosmos. I certainly can’t possibly think Muhammad knew this, but I guess he may have sensed the bottomless vastness around us.”
“Shiver my timbers! That was mystical, friend. How far into the book are you?”
“A third,” Yi said shyly.
“Jumping Yisus, Jesus! And you haven’t even started the Vedas or the Bible or the Torah!” Yi had spent part of his personal payload in carrying physical copies of the main religions’ holy books on board. “At this rate we’ll have an onboard prophet soon. But soon is not yet now, so I’ll baptize you ‘Profe’ meanwhile.”
“Why ‘Profe’?”
“It’s prof in Spanish—as in professor, you know. Not a bad step in your stairway to attain enlightenment …”
The bottom of the
Observation Window steadily turned into the darkest dark Sophia had ever seen, as the rotisserie-like spin initiated hours before, and lasting for the next few months to evenly grill the spaceship’s hull with the Sun’s heating power, rotated toward the dark side of the Moon. The only thing betraying its presence was its anti-self: a sliding circle of unqualified darkness occupying most of the Observation Window, as if the heavens’ Maker had cut away a disk from a canvas swamped with motes of light.
James had just finished their extended daily chat. Belinda enumerated the preparations for the baby—the gender was a surprise, which complicated logistics. I could gobble up a political party broadcast if it was told by that never-tiring voice of yours. The time lag was still a little over a second, making for a delightful conversation. But going forward, each day would increase the lag by four seconds. We’ll soon need to speak in turns, and in two weeks the minute lag will murder the concept of a conversation. After that, it’ll be recorded messages only.
He put his earphones on and jumped through the stations until he landed on one of his favorite programs.
“—yet no one has ever lost visual contact with the Earth, the so-called ‘Earth-out-of-view’ phenomenon, when our home planet turns into so miniscule a dot that it becomes indistinguishable from the stars. Mark my words, Daniel: their isolation will become intolerable.”
Another voice answered back, “You’re a full-time professional defeatist, selling pessimism to fuel controversy. But facts are worth 1,000 experts. Arthur C. Clarke saw three stages of reactions to revolutionary ideas: ‘It’s completely impossible’ you used to say just a few months back. Now, you’re camouflaging and toning down by resorting to the long-term mental health risks of space traveling, which to me sounds awfully like the second, ‘it’s possible but not worth doing.’ In a couple of months, you’ll be preaching ‘I said it was a good idea all along.’ Problem is, you’re live, pal.”