The Journey Begins

by Dan Eaton

  Before I could answer, Ananyu Patel asked the question I had been curious about, “Commander, have there been many people requesting your assistance?” “Not a one,” he said with a chuckle, “Not a single one.”

  Commander Engersole had Henry exit the capsule first and take up station down in the airlock to assist us if needed. Since we sat up higher in the capsule and therefore closer to the front where the docking hatch was Ananyu and I were the first to get to try moving about freely while weightless. I was a little relieved when Commander Engersole called Ananyu’s name first. I figured since it was a new experience better to watch her screw up and not embarrass myself in front of everybody. Ananyu popped her straps off and then with effortless grace deftly maneuvered herself out of the capsule and into the airlock. Commander Engersole then called my name. I carefully unsnapped the straps holding me down and rotated my body until I had a clear view of where I needed to go. To get to the hatch I needed to first clear the commander’s acceleration couch and then shift course in a bank shot that would take me to the hatch. Ananyu had got lucky with more of a straight shot to the hatch.

  I had this though, so I carefully pushed off, not too fast, not too slow, and while I might not have been as graceful as Ananyu I was pretty happy with the way things were going and had a big smile on my face. It was nice while it lasted the second, or two before my foot caught in one of the dang couch straps that had floated up and snared my foot. My forward motion was instantly translated into an arc that swung my shoulder into the commander’s acceleration couch. I let out a yelp when I hit, but fortunately the Commander grabbed me before anything else could happen.

  He gave me an amused smile and said “Easy there sport. It was a good try, but you need to remember that things like straps don’t stay where you leave them in zero-g and can grab the unwary.” He got my foot cleared of the strap and gave me a gentle push so I could clear the couch and take what little was left of my dignity on out the hatch.

  I floated down into the airlock and grabbed a strap on the wall next to Ananyu. Despite the gaff it was still an amazing experience and we both had big smiles on our faces. It took our parents a little longer to make it out of the capsule, but soon both families were hanging in the airlock and Commander Engersole came through the hatch and closed it behind him.

  “Okay folks,” he said, “the next step will be Henry will open the connector hatch and proceed through it to the connector module. We’ll give him a minute to open the central module hatch. Once that’s done, I’ll send you down the tube to Henry and he’ll direct you into the B330 pod where Commander Davies and Mission Specialist Peters are waiting for you along with the rest of the families going on your mission. Before we do that, let me give you a bit of advice about transiting the tube. Look at the wall of the tube and fix in your head that the wall is the floor and you are flying along the floor. That tube is fifteen meters long and occasionally we get someone that looks at the central module hatch and decides that’s the floor and they are falling to it. You won’t be going fast enough to get hurt but it’s not a comfortable feeling. Any questions before we start?”

  This time it was my mom’s voice that piped up and said, “Commander Engersole, thanks for getting us safely to the depot. Where do you head from here?”

  “Thanks Dr. Burns. Henry and I are picking up a passenger that just returned from the Moon and then taking them on to the ISS. From there we’ll be returning to Boca Chica with several passengers,” replied Commander Engersole. He asked if there were any other questions and then started sending us through the connector hatch in the same order we left the capsule. Ananyu was her usual graceful self and this time while keeping a sharp eye out for anything reaching up to grab me I managed to make it through the connector tube and with Henry’s direction on into the B330 pod with no problems.

  As I floated into the B330 pod I returned the waves of the other kids and their parents. In addition to the families the pod held a petite Black woman and a second woman who looked Asian. They both wore the same, full on pressure suits as Commander Engersole so I figured this had to be the Commander Davies and Mission Specialist Peters he had mentioned. As each of us got closer, the Asian woman plucked us from the air and deposited us along the side of the pod. The Asian woman doing the plucking had a name tag on her suit that said Peters so I figured she had to be Mission Specialist Peters and the Black woman keeping an eye on us had to be Commander Davies. A second later I caught sight of her name tag to confirm that. Once my parents and Ananyu’s parents had joined us, Commander Davies gave us a couple of minutes to say hello to each other. This was the first time in months that any of the families had been gathered in one place and it was good to see everyone again.

  Commander Davies gave us a little time and then asked for everyone’s attention. She said, “Hello everyone, for those that haven’t met me, I am Commander Makena Davies and this is Mission Specialist Yukiko Peters. We have a launch window for the Moon coming up in three hours and I like to have everything ready to shove off well before that. How I’d like to proceed is to have Yukiko start loading the Schubeler family and then the Stephenson family. Next up will be the Burns and Patel families in that order and by then the Cherneski and Dumas families should be here and we’ll get them loaded. I’d ask the Burns and Patel families to visit the bathroom located in this pod so that you’ll be ready to go when we’re ready to load you. Are there any questions?”

  This time there were no questions and I was a little disappointed that we weren’t going to get to spend much time in the B330 pod. I had been looking forward to talking with the Schubelers and Stephensons about their extra day in space. I had been really looking forward to talking to Nina. Not that it wouldn’t have been fun to spend some time talking to Willie also. We had been playing Gogo over the net often in the last couple of months and Willie was starting to feel like a friend I had known for a long time. Mom and Dad caught my eye and we drifted off as a family down to the bathroom facility. NASA had trained us on how to use a zero-g toilet, but I wasn’t looking forward to it even if I did need to go. We each took our turn and got back up with the rest of the gang just as the Stephensons were being led away. The Patels went to do their business at the head and when they returned Yukiko had shown up to get us squared away.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Steerage

  In Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, 2001 a space odyssey, Dr. Heywood Floyd made a trip to the Moon similar to the trip we were taking. Dr. Floyd left LEO from a giant rotating space station and traveled to the Moon on an Aries-1B Lunar Carrier capable of carrying a crew of six plus 30 passengers in shirt sleeve comfort during their journey. Thirty six years after 2001 we were going on the same trip as steerage. At least that’s what Mom called it. She had an interest in genealogy and through that had found some ancestors that had come across the Atlantic in the bowels of one of the great passenger liners of the day. Mom called it traveling in steerage and said we were doing the same thing. I looked up the word steerage and the description talked about passengers with the cheapest class of ticket who received a no frills voyage with limited toilet use, poor food, and no privacy. Yup, that described what we were going through perfectly.

  We were traveling in a passenger module carried by one of the lunar shuttles. The shuttle was approximately nineteen meters long and a little over five meters in diameter. It was a shaped like one of the external fuel tanks the old space shuttle used to use on launch. I thought it was funny that it had such an aerodynamic shape to it at first. It wasn’t like a lunar shuttle would ever be operating in an atmosphere. Dad and I had looked at the details on the shuttle and found that the lower seven and three quarters meters were the fuel tanks and engines. Above that was a cargo bay formed by two doors in the outer shroud that opened outward to allow access to the bay. Interchangeable cargo modules sat in the bay to transport either cargo or people.

  In our case the shuttle was equipped with a habitat module. The habitat was about nine meters
long and had an airlock section sitting at the lowest point. Above that was the habitat shell. As you entered the shell, there was a lavatory and small galley on either side of the airlock entrance. There was about a meter of space in front of the lavatory/galley and then there was a row of five bunks attached to the periphery of the room. Above that there were three more rows of bunks each separated by a meter. Finally, at the top of the module there were two standard acceleration couches for the crew and against the forward bulkhead were the screens and controls to let the crew fly the shuttle.

  In actuality, the shuttle was largely autonomous and a shuttle with freight didn’t use a crew. The crew was there for two reasons. The first was that no one would trust a shuttle to fly them to the Moon by itself so the crew was placed on board as a security blanket for the passengers. They could fly the shuttle in an emergency, but in reality probably none of them would ever have to. The second reason was where things got good. You see, NASA had figured out that penning twenty-two people up in a cramped can with no windows and nothing to do for the two and a half day flight to the Moon wasn’t a great idea. That many people used a lot of resources and got very bored, which could lead to problems. It was okay to do that to a small astronaut crew that you could keep busy, but doing it to general passengers wasn’t a great idea. The answer they came up with for the problem was we were going to sleep through most of the voyage.

  Mom had spent some time researching this part of the trip and said the technology they were using was an extension and further development of the technology the US Navy had used for medical restraints on submarines. The plan was for us to enter the habitat module and strap into one of the bunks assigned to us by Yukiko. We were still wearing our space suits so once we were situated and the crewman had plugged our suit into the on board medical monitoring system and external atmosphere connections they would give us a small tube of the restraint drug to drink. We barely had time to seal our helmets in case of a pressure loss and it was off to dreamland we went. Every twenty four hours, Yukiko would wake us up one by one, escort us to the bathroom, give us a can of broth from the galley and another tube of the sleepy drug, plug us back into the bunk and then off to sleep we’d go again.

  I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. Looking at the big picture it just seemed wrong to be on a grand adventure to the Moon and be sleeping through the whole thing. On a more practical level, I could see that with us just lying there we used far less resources than if we had been up moving around so I got where NASA was coming from. I could also see it was a small room with a bunch of people in it and not a whole lot to do so sleeping through that wasn’t a bad thing. I did wish I could have been awake for the first part of the journey. I had read about a thing called cosmic ray visual phenomena. This was where astronauts had reported seeing spontaneous flashes of light while traveling outside the magnetosphere of the Earth. At least some of these flashes of light were from cosmic rays passing through the astronaut’s brain and since no one ever got sick from the experience I thought it would be cool to see it for myself.

  The other reason I wished I could be awake for the first part of the trip was the Van Allen radiation belts. The Earth’s magnetic field protects the Earth from energetic particles carried from the Sun by the solar wind. Without the magnetic field, there would probably be no life on planet Earth. With the magnetic field in place those particles get trapped in what’s usually two sets of belts surrounding the planet. The strength of the belts varies as the number of particles coming from the sun varies, but in general the inner Van Allen belt has stronger radiation than the outer belt. Radiation is scary to most folks and is why there used to be some people who thought the Apollo missions were faked because how could they possibly get through the Van Allen belts to the Moon without receiving a lethal dose of radiation? In reality, the Apollo modules had radiation shielding and the astronauts received roughly the equivalent radiation as you would get from a CAT scan. Our habitat module had as good of radiation shielding as the Apollo capsules did plus, remember that question I had about the shuttle’s upper shroud having an aerodynamic shape? Turns out the shape is just a coincidence and the shroud actually provides additional radiation shielding. I thought it would be cool to tell someone I went through the Van Allen radiation belts and lived to tell the tale, but I guess it doesn’t count if you slept through it.

  I remembered Yukiko settling me into my bunk at the start of the trip and when Yukiko woke me the first time mid-trip. I was still a little groggy so I let her float me down to the head, but I woke up enough to avoid the embarrassment of her having to assist me in using the toilet. I wasn’t sure how that was done in zero-g but I had no desire to find out either. When I was done she handed me a small can of vegetable broth that provided all of the sustenance and liquid my body needed for the next 24 hours. Yukiko asked how I was feeling while I drank it and after checking my vitals it was back to the bunk and a quick slurp of the sleepy juice and I was out again.

  The next time she woke me up we were in lunar orbit. We were still a couple of hours away from the descent to the Northern Lunar Habitat but Commander Davies wanted us all awake and fully recovered by the time we touched down. Should the unthinkable happen and we needed to evacuate the shuttle after landing, she wanted us to be fully mobile on our own. After taking care of my business, Yukiko handed me an honest to God breakfast bar. Normally, I think the things taste like particle board, but it was the first solid food I had been able to eat in three days and the dang thing actually tasted pretty good. When I was done eating, Yukiko had me strap back into the bunk, but this time I got to skip the sleepy juice. Since we still had our helmets on we were allowed to talk over private comms channels so I pinged Mom and Dad and asked them how they were doing. We chatted for a bit and then I had an incoming call from Willie. Yukiko had started waking people up in the same order she had put them out so Willie had been awake for a while.

  As Yukiko was finishing up waking up the Cherneski’s and Dumas’s, I had Willie tell me about the extra day they got to spend in orbit around Earth. I think Willie had noticed I was interested in Nina and he mercilessly tweaked me about the good times he and Nina had enjoyed together and how he was sure she was into him. He finally gave up pulling my chain and told me they did get to meet the passenger that Commander Engersole and Henry had been picking up after dropping us off. The guy was part of the Mars Mission support team and had been to the Moon to discuss supplies the Mars Mission needed.

  After that the topic turned to Gogo. Neither of us had been allowed to bring our gaming shades so we were hoping that it would be possible to have some 3D printed once we reached the Habitat. No one we knew had ever heard of anyone from the Moon participating in a Gogo game and once we heard there was a 1.3 second communication delay between the Earth and the Moon we figured the delay was too serious a disadvantage for a game to be possible. We were really hoping that there were some people at the Habitat who were interested in playing Gogo or it was going to be a long stay on the Moon.

  After Willie and I ran out of stuff to talk about he pinged the other kids and asked them to join us on the channel. Once Adam got on he took over and started amusing us all with his stories. I didn’t realize he was such a motor mouth or maybe it was because he was nervous about the descent. I guess it could have been he had saved up two days of talking while we were all sleeping but whatever the reason was he just kept talking and had us laughing about the pranks he had pulled back at his school. He also did a good job of pulling each of us into the conversation which meant we all ended up getting to know each other a little better.

  Adam had been running the conversation for about an hour and a half with no sign of letting up when Commander Davies broke into all of the comm channels with an announcement that she was almost ready to start the descent to the Northern Lunar Habitat. I was thrilled that our journey was almost over, but also a bit disappointed. That Aries-1B Lunar Carrier Dr. Floyd had rode to the Moon in 2001 had windows thro
ugh which he had enjoyed a great view of the Moon. We on the other hand, had to make due with one of the screens on the forward bulkhead that Commander Davies had set to display the outside view.

  I appreciated what she had done, but the screen wasn’t that big and none of the bunks had a great view of it with some bunks having no view at all because either the Commander or Yukiko’s acceleration couch was blocking the view. There was an option to project the image onto the visor of the suit, which I did but honestly, it was a bit like watching a TV show. We were descending to the surface of the Moon like the Apollo astronauts had done so many years before, but for all you could tell inside the cabin of the shuttle we might as well have been lying on a couch back on Earth.

  Well, except for the noise. As the descent began, you could hear the shuttle’s motors firing to slow us down and drop out of orbit. It was nothing like the ascent to orbit from Earth had been. You could certainly hear the rockets firing, but it was quieter than the sound the ascent rockets had made. Even when most of Earth’s atmosphere lay well below us the ascent stage engines made more noise than the lunar shuttles motors made. We lay there strapped into our bunks listening to the changing rocket sounds coming from the back of the shuttle. It wasn’t that long after the Commander had announced the descent had started when we heard the motors throttle up and run for longer than we had yet heard them run. That went on for several minutes with the motors singing a constantly varying song between them when all of a sudden there was a gentle bump and the rockets fell quiet. There was about five seconds of silence before Commander Davies came back on the comm channel and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have landed on the Moon. Welcome to the Northern Lunar Habitat. A passenger transport will be here shortly to collect us. In the meantime, please remain in your bunks until the transport has safely attached to the lock and Yukiko escorts you from the cabin.”