by T I WADE
He knew which one the mining crew wanted, the last one; temperatures there often reached above freezing and even the rich red hematite dust covering the landscape on a hot, balmy Martian day reached as high as 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Ryan’s mind was made up before the pilots made up his mind for him.
“Good day, gentlemen,” said Ryan at the first meeting to determine the location for a base on Mars. He had grown into the habit of saying “Good day”, like the Aussies did back on Earth, because there wasn’t a real “Good morning” or “Good evening” time to say those phrases. It was dark all of the time and, with different shifts, one person could say “Good morning” to another who was going to bed. It just didn’t work. “What do we need to set up a decent, livable site on Mars?”
“A nice beach with blondes in bikinis and a beach bar?” suggested Jonesy, smiling, always the first to contribute useless information.
“Sunlight for solar power as backup,” suggested Igor.
“No damn, crappy, cold conditions like we had digging out that ice,” VIN put in.
“A place with less dust so we don’t have to sweep house so much,” suggested Maggie.
“No wind,” added Boris. “It’s dangerous here!”
“Solid ground to dig underground accommodations,” suggested Penny.
“We need to grow plants somewhere, so sunlight is good, even the weak Mars sunlight twelve hours a day will help, giving us a greenhouse effect.”
The flight crew had run out of ideas, so Ryan spent an hour describing the four best places to search out a new home and then asked each person in turn which location he or she preferred. Everyone said Hematite, so he agreed that Hematite City would be their first Martian home. This decision had been an easy one.
“I was expecting you would all say Hematite. I also believe it is the best place for us to set up camp. The Mars Rover, Opportunity, managed to survive here until it got stuck in sand last year near the Endeavour Crater. We might as well aim for the same crater. The Rover began travelling toward this crater in August 2008; the rim came into sight on March 7, 2009, and it arrived at the edge on August 9, 2011. In 2013, it got stuck in the sand or dust. Bill Withers at NASA asked me to free the Rover if we ever get a chance, so this could be a picture-perfect time to stare into its cameras once we power her up. Pictures of you can be sent back to Earth when or if they have any video feed still from the Rover. Proof that we are actually out here! What is important to us is that in December, 2011, Opportunity Rover discovered a vein of gypsum sticking out of the soil along the rim of Endeavour Crater. Tests confirmed that it contained calcium, sulfur, and water. The mineral gypsum is the best match for the data sent, and was likely formed from mineral-rich water moving through a crack in the rock sometime in the past.
“Gypsum is a very soft sulfate mineral. It can be used as a fertilizer and is the main constituent in many forms of plaster, as you already know. As a mineral, it is alabaster, which has been used for sculpture by many cultures. Gypsum has the definition of a hardness of only 2 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, which means that it will be easy for our mining spiders to dig out an underground home.”
A week later, the crew was ready to visit their third area. Instead of buckets and spades, five of the craft were filled with day-to-day survival supplies, mining equipment, and the rest of the spiders, eight of them. Three of the craft carried 1,100 complete, four-foot square Nano-Silicone window panels, as well as long columns of the pre-made pure graphite window connector panels. Most importantly, one ship had dozens of solar panels, batteries, inverters and a mobile nuclear battery with one pound of plutonium-238 to start up the power units.
Two cylinders with short aluminum legs were buckled to the hooks underneath Astermine One and Two, and would be used as storage units for the equipment when the storms arrived. They could be automatically released once on the ground.
It was “summer” in this area at the moment, and there were no major dust storms expected for 40 days, which gave them a window to set up some sort of exterior dome to protect the equipment when the storms came.
Fine dust would be the cause of equipment malfunctions, and a bad dust storm could last for months. The good thing was that close to the equator, where Hematite was located, the storms were considerably less powerful, comparable to strong storms on the large deserts of Earth.
Ryan was also coming along on this trip, leaving America One in the hands of Captain Pete. Also, no children were allowed on this first visit which would last two weeks, after which SB-III was to return to America One with rock and dust samples for testing, and then come back to the site with hydrogen fuel, air, food and water.
This first visit had three objectives: find the best location in, or around Endeavor Crater; begin piecing together a smaller 3,000-square foot dome, which would become an emergency dome inside the larger planned 12,000 square-foot dome; and get the spiders digging. Since each dome would have an inner and an outer wall, and in between a foot-thick helium gas layer to restrict radiation and radioactive penetration into the dome, several thousand panels would need to be constructed from 16 tons of Nano-Silicone. Another ton of Nano-Silicone would be melted and thinly sprayed onto the inner walls of the underground rooms to seal them from internal dangers.
Under the flight direction of the Chief Astronaut, the five Astermine craft, loaded with crew and a dozen of the build team, descended. Extra space suits had been completed on the journey over to Mars, and now Ryan could space-walk a team of twenty people at once. In SB-III, Jonesy had the crew unit in his forward cargo bay. It had been recently fitted with two extendable docking ports for the crew to enter and exit, and they would live in there until new housing was ready. The compartment had changed in the last couple of months. It was reconfigured with six double bunk beds, a space toilet and shower system, tanks of air, supplies for two weeks, heating, a refrigerator, and connections into SB-III’s systems for heat, air, and garbage disposal. All waste would be stored, to be returned to America One and converted into fertilizer.
Four of the five craft landed close to where the Rover Opportunity was stuck in the dust, while Jonesy hovered over the nearby wall of the crater, and then further down into the 14-mile wide, one- to two-mile deep crater.
Most of the walls were shallow cliffs up to the surface and within twenty minutes Jonesy had flown the circumference of the crater mapping out the walls. His computer had been programmed to look for ledges or areas of flat ground close to the steep cliff edges as a possible protection from the storms. Since most of the storms that hit the crater throughout the Martian year came from the southeast, there were steep vertical sides in this area.
The computers mapped and reported that there were three flat areas to land on. One was too small, showing a 30-foot high wall, and a flat surface of about 12,000 square feet, directly southeast of the wall.
The second looked perfect; it had a 75-foot high protective wall, and a bigger area about the size of an American football field; the ledge was shiny, appearing to have had very little dust on it. The middle ledge was still underneath the crater wall where the worst storms would come from.
The third area was too big; half a mile square, perfectly flat, and dull, it looked like it collected a lot of dust.
Jonesy put SB-III down on the middle ledge. As they descended, VIN, in the right seat, looked down at the approaching ledge. It resembled the last asteroid where they had left the spider: grey shiny rock and pretty clean. The wall protecting the ledge looked pockmarked and was extremely rough.
Endeavor wasn’t a deep crater; it was less than two miles at its lowest point, and the slope below the ledge wasn’t vertical like the one above, but a soft and gentle slope into the crater. A four-by-four jeep could have traversed down to the floor.
It took VIN twenty minutes to get out and he quickly walked around the ledge. It was clean, the ground flat, and it was harder than gypsum. He then felt the wall with his space glove. It was also firm, and no particl
es were loosened by his gloved hand moving across it.
“Ryan, this place is as perfect as any. I think our solar panels on the outer fringe of the ledge will get adequate sunlight. It’s clean and I’m ready to begin work.”
“Roger that,” replied Ryan. “All craft descend down to SB-III. Let’s all take a look.”
One by one the craft came in. VIN watched how graceful each one was. Allen Saunders and Max Burgos brought in SB-II first. Being bigger than the three mining craft, it would take up more room. Jonesy had parked to one side and Allen came in and parked SB-II directly in front, looking into the cockpit of SB-III, twenty feet away with no dust rising.
Then Jonesy helped coach the smaller craft down, and lined them up facing him on his port side, one by one. By the time all five craft were down, less than a third of the ledge had been used. It was perfect.
Since each spacewalk would be the usual three hours, there was enough time for everybody to exit, except for the five pilots who stayed with their ships. In total, fifteen spacewalkers began to scout around and search the ledge.
“You guys could play a game of football,” Jonesy said, watching them walk around. “Want me to throw out a ball?”
“Sure!” replied VIN, smiling and looking at SB-III’s cockpit windows, trying to give Jonesy a space finger. “I’m sure you have two in there, and both the right size for football.”
“Thank you, experienced miners,” Ryan interjected. “Would you be so kind as to let us newbies get used to walking around on a new planet first, before we play ball?”
VIN, so used to walking around on just about anything, had forgotten that the build crew was totally new to this treat: walking around on a planet or asteroid outside the space craft with low gravity. He bounded in giant leaps to where he thought Ryan was. The “football team” on the ledge all wore the same uniforms without telltale numbers on the back.
“Yes, Boris, Igor, Mr. Noble, I believe this place is perfect. Let’s get the ships unloaded. We only have three weeks before you, Mr. Noble, have to return to the asteroid to collect our lonely spider. I don’t think we will be needing it as a second vacation home anymore.” Ryan didn’t know how wrong he was.
With so many men, the unloading went pretty quickly. After two days, and pleasant daylight warming up the rocks around them, the craft were unloaded.
On the third day, a really beautiful day, he allowed the pilots out. For the first time, all twenty space suits were being used at the same time, and the work proceeded faster.
During the nights, breezes sprang up. Nothing like they had seen in the first crater, but the ships were tied down with quick release cords just in case.
On the fourth day, Ryan and his crew mapped out the ledge and decided that two holes would be dug vertically into the floor of the ledge, about twenty feet from the wall above them. Since in this area, the wall was nearly vertical, America One’s computers were tasked to determine the optimum way to build a corner garden-room that incorporated the floor, the corner, and the wall of the crater, instead of a perfect 180-degree dome. This idea would save them a ton and a half of the valuable Nano-Silicone.
It took several of the crew using several computers to figure out that the four-foot square window panes wouldn’t need to be cut into two to form the triangular halves for a half hexagon dome. The three walls could be constructed with whole panes, using up less graphite as well.
Ryan decided to build the inner emergency room the same way, and asked Boris and Vitaliy to get the other four spiders to work cutting horizontal shafts into the crater wall.
Two days into their dig, the vertical spiders had gone down 25 feet, and Ryan had them reprogrammed to dig horizontally underneath the ledge and towards the wall. When the tunnels were done, the spiders would connect them and then excavate larger rooms between the three-foot wide tunnels.
A day later, 25 feet into the cliff wall and three feet above the ledge the men were standing on, the second two spiders were reprogrammed to dig horizontal shafts into the cliff wall, and twenty yards in, then go vertical to meet the lower ones digging towards the wall. The slag or rubble coming out of the holes was deposited into several canisters to be taken up to America One for analysis. Then the spiders began depositing the loose rocks at the end of the ledge, making it even bigger.
VIN was still in charge of security, and there wasn’t that much for him to do after the craft were unloaded. The view from the ledge was pretty, certainly nothing compared to the first trip to the big crater, and the fourteen miles across the crater was unobstructed and, during daylight hours, calm and serene. Some days it reminded him of the Nevada desert. The only problem was they always had to wear spacesuits while outside.
“Mr. Noble, you have little to do. Why don’t you get aboard Astermine Two with Mr. Jones and try to fix the Rover? It should be directly above us,” Ryan suggested, walking over to him. Gazing out on the ledge, he was watching one of the spiders deposit about a hundred pounds of rock off the ledge. “Take a battery charger. I’m sure a battery juice-up would do it good, and keep it mobile for NASA for another decade.”
“Boss, can VIN do that in a day or two, or before we leave?” asked Boris, interrupting the conversation over the intercom. “We are about to start melting the graphite in the press chamber onto the silicone panels. We have got the chamber warm enough, and he can help us get the emergency room started.” Ryan shrugged his shoulders. The Rover could wait another day or two.
So, VIN got the job of helping to mount the press so that the heat machine, a $3 million fancy heater connected to the plutonium-238 power cell, sitting on a table and on rails, slowly moved across an extended 25-foot long table. On the table were ten panels, five on each side of the press and already placed in notches along a six-inch wide piece of graphite. It took three hours, the length of time of a spacewalk, as it moved the panels into its cavity, sealing the graphite onto the glass panes’ edges.
VIN was needed to lift the now-solid 20-foot long eight-foot wide wall of panels with six other men and carry it to a growing pile. The rest of the crew was working the graphite collected on the moon. With a change in plan, they had revamped a second press to make six-inch square, eight-foot long columns so that the panels would have support from underneath to the floor. The one-foot long and much thinner supports between the two walls of glass and graphite were already made.
On the third day after starting the panels, the crew had the three vertical walls standing. The inner emergency room was twenty feet long and twenty feet wide. An entrance/exit chamber would be inside the emergency room. Here spacewalkers could enter the four-foot square chamber from outside. The chamber would then be purged with fresh air, and then the person would walk into a second larger aluminum-walled room to take off his spacesuit and leave it to be cleaned in stalls made for them. Of course this wouldn’t be needed once the outer 12,000 square foot unit was complete. It too would have an entrance/exit chamber on each side.
Much of the interior was still being made in America One by the crew up there, and would be transported down and enclosed in the room before the final section of see-through roofing sealed the unit from the bad Martian atmosphere forever.
Finally, VIN wasn’t needed anymore and he caught a ride with Jonesy to the top of the crater, 100 feet above them.
There below them was the little Rover with what looked like its front left wheel stuck in a round hole filled with dust. The hole suddenly made VIN’s hair on the back of his neck rise. He had seen a round two-foot wide hole similar to this one before; on the asteroid!
“Jonesy, I don’t think I am going to like what I’m going to find out there.”
“Still wondering about the space shark?” joked his partner, gently landing the craft fifty feet from the ledge and twenty feet behind the poor little Rover. Having had a meal before they took off, neither were wearing helmets so nobody could hear them.
VIN hesitantly got his helmet on with Jonesy helping him. “Just dig out
the little machine, connect the battery charger, and we come back tomorrow before we leave and disconnect it.”
“I hope so,” replied VIN. He exited and saw that there was more dust up here than down on the ledge. Still standing on top of the mining craft’s roof, the view went on forever and the crater from here looked like a 14-mile round swimming pool. He grabbed the charger he had brought out through the port and carefully climbed down the ladder.
The dust was about an inch thick, and where the thrusters hadn’t played with the light dust, he could see the old tracks made by the Rover heading in both directions around the crater rim. The little guy had certainly travelled around before it got stuck in this hole half-filled with dust.
Before he freed the Rover, he carefully walked towards the edge and looked down, knowing that this time and in 30 percent gravity he would still fall and bounce off the ledge below. He was surprised to see that the hole where the Rover was stuck was directly above the new walls of the emergency cabin they were erecting, and about twenty feet in from the edge of the ledge.
Then he approached the hole. The Rover was pretty light, and with his metal legs he didn’t have a problem lifting the pretty little silver and gold machine free. It looked like it had an antenna and a large modern mobile camera placed on top of it. He searched for a power point, found one and within minutes the battery was feeding life-giving power into the brave little Rover that was only meant to last one year walking around Mars, and had lasted ten.
He pulled the Rover a few feet away from the hole and for the first time he looked directly inside the hole. It was perfectly round, jagged by weather on the sides and the same width as the two holes he had seen on the asteroid millions of miles away. His heart jumped. He returned to the side hatches of the spacecraft and hauled out a 100-pound tank of oxygen, which on Mars only weighed 30 pounds.