Gateway
It was first visible as a tiny star, indistinguishable from the carpet of luminous points scattered across the dark velvet of space. Commander Heather Kimball diverted her attention from the controls momentarily to point it out through the front windows of the Artemis, then returned her focus to her work. The other three were skeptical until David Alaoui, who always prided himself on having 20:10 eyesight, announced that the star did indeed have a pair of solar panels. Five minutes later Will Elliott nodded. “I see them, too; you’re right, Dave.”
“As always, Moonman,” Dave joked, using a common nickname for Will among his friends, referring to his extensive experience with lunar geology.
“You’re right too often,” replied Kimball, who was always addressed by her last name.
“Oh, now I see them as well,” added Dr. Armando Cruz, their physician and the fourth person on board, whose eyesight obviously was worse than the others, though not by much. “I guess I should consider glasses after all.”
“Lasik; the only way to go in space,” replied Will.
“No thanks; I don’t want to have my eyeballs shaved.”
Will laughed. Dave stared through the window. “The L1 Gateway; boy, is it a sight for sore eyes.”
“You guys should have been here three months ago,” replied Kimball. “But at least you’re not too late.”
“Just for our training!” replied Dave.
“We’ve been to Devon Island before,” replied Will. “We really didn’t need it as much as the others did.”
“True, but there’s been no time for the team to bond, and there’s even a new member.” Dave shook his head.
“NASA’s never been strong on crew psychology,” replied Cruz. “I’ve seen some disastrous personal chemistry at ISS. It wasn’t great at Shackleton recently, either.”
“Safe to say, now that we’ve left,” observed Will. “I have to admit to some trepidation.”
“Y’all will be fine,” replied Kimball, lapsing into more of a southern accent than usual. “I’ve seen some pretty strange things in my seven years of lunar flying. But everything was fine in the end. Don’t worry. We’ll all get together three years from now and have plenty of laughs about our various respective experiences on the moon and Mars.”
“I suppose,” said Will, hesitating to say more. Kimball heard the pause and actually took her eyes off the controls to turn around, as if asking for the reason for his silence.
“It’s Commander Stillwell,” replied David. “When we got separated from the rest of the crew because of the grounding of the LBV fleet, she tried to get us dropped from the team.”
Kimball frowned. “Why?”
“Officially, because we would be stuck on the moon so long, the Mars trip would exceed our lifetime radiation allowance.”
“They make exceptions. Maybe she was concerned about crew morale if everyone couldn’t train together.”
“If so, she should have said so,” replied Dave.
They grew silent, while everyone considered the situation. Three months ago LBV 3 had lost an engine during ascent from the lunar surface to L1, stranding the other four members of the Mars crew in lunar orbit until they were able to override the computers and proceed on the other engines. Consequently Elliott and Alaoui had been stuck on the moon three months longer than intended—seven total—while the entire fleet of lunar-based vehicles was checked for the same problem. Kimball watched her systems; the others watched the star resolve itself into solar panels, then three clusters of objects, then the individual objects. Finally Cruz said “Columbus’s on the left, right?”
“You mean ‘left, correct,’” said Kimball stoically.
“Ah-hah.”
Will nodded and pointed. “The right hand collection of objects is the garbage dump, I think; I think that’s the LBV 3 there.” He was referring to a “lunar based vehicle,” a large stage with fixed landing legs and no heat shield, able to haul ten tonnes of liquid hydrogen and oxygen to L1 at a time or haul the same to the lunar surface.
Dave nodded. “Definitely; it’s LBV3. The infamous source of all our troubles.”
“At least no one died,” said Kimball. “I suppose it hasn’t been hauled back to low earth orbit for examination yet because the SEVs have been tied up lately.” She referred to the solar-electric vehicles, ion engines attached to a huge array of solar panels and a large hydrogen tank that pushed cargo from low earth orbit to the lagrange point where the earth’s and moon’s gravities canceled each other out. LBV 3 was scheduled to be taken to low earth orbit, so that its engines could be examined for defects.
Actually, LBV 3 is attached to an SEV,” said Dave. “But I guess it hasn’t gone anywhere yet. Probably not enough fuel.”
“More’s probably on its way, but it’ll take a few more months,” said Kimball, pushing a button to examine a worrisome computer screen.
“The other item on the right is a waste capsule, I think,” continued Will. “The SEV can push it to atmospheric re-entry. Then in the middle is Gateway Station itself. I’ve never seen so many LBVs docked to it.”
“There should be three,” replied Kimball. “The Mars shuttles need 25 tonnes of fuel each.”
“And the left?” asked Cruz. “Mars vehicles are not my expertise.”
“Well, you can see ‘the cube’ in the middle of Columbus,” began Will, shifting into a didactic tone of voice. “To the left and right of the docking cube are the two interplanetary habitats or Ihabs for short. I can’t see which one is the Cimmerium and which one is the Ausonia. Then attached to the top and bottom of the cube are Mars shuttles 1 and 2.”
“They can’t fly to Mars that way, right?”
“No, we’ll head to Mars as two separate vehicle complexes, each consisting of a shuttle and an Ihab,” replied Dave. “What you see is cruising configuration.”
“For artificial gravity,” said Armando, nodding. “I hadn’t realized the Mars shuttles and the Ihabs looked so much alike.”
“They’re hard to tell apart from here,” agreed Will. “They’re both cones with a six meter basal diameter and ten-meter heat shields attached, but the Ihabs are 13 meters long, whereas the shuttles are 15.”
“Ah, yes, I see the length difference.” Armando nodded, pleased he had finally noted a difference. “The Ihabs are basically like Gateway?”
Will nodded. “Sixteen tonnes including heat shield on the bottom, five stories of rooms, big enough to accommodate four people; though we’re flying two Ihabs with three in each for safety.”
“A historic trip,” commented Cruz.
Kimball snorted. “It’s friggin’ about time! Here it is, 2020! We should have landed people on Mars in 2014 or 2012!”
“Kimball, we landed people on the moon in 2014,” said Will, calmly.
“We should have done that again in 1980! Ridiculous, to have that big hiatus.”
“The approach NASA took was to build toward it.”
Kimball scowled. “Sort of. A hundred billion for ISS, then more when that wasn’t enough, then ten billion for L1 Gateway, then fifty billion for the lunar transportation system, and now fifty billion for the Mars transportation system. It could have been quicker and cheaper, as everyone knows.”
They all grew silent again and stared out the windows. The Artemis was now close enough to read Olympus on the side of one Mars Shuttle and Elysium on the side of the other. Mars Shuttles were named for mountains; the shuttle sitting on the planet, awaiting their arrival, was the Pavonis. The Ihabs had names as well, but they were named for classic canals and other dark features: the Cimmerium and Ausonia. Solar panels sprouted from the vehicles at various angles, making the complex look unplanned and unkempt.
The Artemis closed slowly but steadily. Docking was not to be rushed; they involved a careful, even delicate dance of vehicles that could puncture each other if they contacted incorrectly. The last kilometer took an hour. They could count every row of cells on the solar arrays by the time they were in the final stages of the docking. Kimball occasionally spoke laconically to Commander Stillwell, but there was little that needed to be said. The computers did much of the work, showing when the vehicle was properly aligned and when it strayed even slightly. Finally, there was a faint scrape of metal, then a clunk as soft docking was achieved. A few minutes later the docking latches slipped into place and they had a hard docking.
David and Armando turned to the docking tunnel, verifying the pressurization, opening the latch, and removing the soft docking apparatus. Soon it was ready to open up. By then, Kimball, assisted by Will, had completed her power-down of the navigational and propulsion systems. The four of them gathered around the tunnel as the latches were opened.
“Welcome to Columbus,” exclaimed Laura Stillwell. She sounded welcoming, but Will had to wonder whether he heard a certain ambiguity in her voice. She focused on Heather Kimball. “Kimball, you old salt, how are you! Good to see you again!”
“It’s good to see you, too, Laura.” Kimball pushed herself forward and floated through the docking tunnel perfectly, without touching any walls. She and Laura caught each other by their shaking hands and shook at the same time Kimball stood upright inside the docking cube. “I’m looking forward to seeing your vehicle.”
“I’ll be delighted to show you.” The two women moved out of the way so that Will could float through. “Come this way, Heather. We can go down into the Cimmerium; Will and David have to go into the Ausonia. Will, do you know where you’re going?”
“I think so,” he replied.
“Good.” Stillwell led Kimball to the right, out of the docking cube and down the tunnel into the Cimmerium. Will, holding onto his garment bag, stood in the cube and waited for David and Armando to come through.
“Some greeting from our commander,” growled David.
“Really,” agreed Will. Even Armando seemed surprised. Then the three men turned left and floated into the Ausonia. The first level down was a small room 3.2 meters across, stuffed with supplies for the trip out and back. The storage lockers narrowed the space to a mere 2.2 meters, not much wider than the standard 1.2 meter access shaft. “Flare shelter,” observed Armando, and he was right; this was where they came if a solar flare exploded on the sun and sent deadly radiation their way. The packed provisions would protect them from most of the particles.
They paused long enough to push a button that opened the hatch, allowing them to descend to the next level. They ignored the hand holds built into the shaft on two sides; in zero gravity there was no need to use them. The tube-like sides of the shaft were interrupted by a “porch” on one side that was just 1 meter deep; two doors opened onto it. The level, which was 4 meters in diameter, had two rooms for astronauts, each barely five square meters in size. A single bed almost occupied half the floor space of each room.
They continued downward. They could hear voices on the fourth or fifth level down, but they stopped at the third level. Four doors opened onto the porch there, which was a broader 1.2 meters wide and 1 meter deep. The doors to the left and right led into private rooms, while the two straight ahead opened onto a tiny toilet and shower stall respectively. Will, who was in the lead, pushed buttons to open the doors to both rooms. “They’re empty; David, any preference?”
“No.”
“Okay.” Will entered the right-hand room, garment bag stretched out behind him. It was a standard design that he had seen and lived in many times. Straight ahead was a small closet for his clothes. To the right of the closet was a desk with a chair pulled up to it; the chair had Velcro on its bottom and it stuck to the carpeting quite tightly. A small porthole-sized window provided a bit of sunlight and a view. To the right of the desk was the bed, with drawers below it. There were also shelves above the foot of the bed, some facing the desk and some facing the bed. Most of the shelves had strips of transparent plastic across the front to keep any floating objects inside. Around the top half of the bed was a fifteen-centimeter thick layer of polyethylene plastic, which had a high concentration of hydrogen in it and therefore provided good radiation shielding for the upper body and head.
The room was barely 1.8 meters wide and 4 meters long and curved to fit inside the circular outline of the Ihab. But it was private space, small but efficiently designed, and on a long trip like this a personal area was essential. It was large enough to entertain as well; one person could sit on the bed and the other on the chair.
Will could hear David entering the other room through the open doors; the walls were fairly well sound proofed. Armando drifted in and watched Will unpack, a simple and quick task. The clothes—nine changes, including six uniforms, a nice sports jacket, dress shirt, and slacks, and two other casual civilian outfits—went straight into the closet. Their hangers latched quickly and securely onto the bar. Socks and underwear went into the drawers under the bed. Pictures of his mother, father, and two sisters slipped under a sheet of transparent plastic covering the back wall of his desk. He put his personal assistant—a computer about the size of a large, thick clipboard—on the desk and anchored it to Velcro strips on one side. He pulled out several notebooks and pads of electronic paper and an electronic writing pen; he had learned always to bring a generous supply of electronic paper with him because efforts to create paperless offices had never worked and NASA never supplied enough. They went in a drawer. Six books—mostly small paperbacks—went on one of the shelves behind the vertical plastic strips. He pulled out a collection of very small rocks, looked at it, then put it back in his bag.
Armando chuckled. “You and your rock collection.”
“Well, it’s suitably sized for the trip! I am a geologist, after all.”
“True. And they are nice specimens.”
“Actually, some of them are meant to be gifts. But since we didn’t get back to Earth three months ago, as scheduled, I guess they’ll have to go to Mars first.” Will looked at the bed; it had a pile of sheets and a blanket on it, anchored under an elastic strip. A washcloth, hand towel, and bath towel were there as well. “Someone was kind enough to put my linen in here.”
“A nice touch,” agreed Armando. “I wonder where everyone is.”
“I’m surprised we weren’t greeted by more people. Let me put this away and we’ll go look.” Will grabbed the garment bag and put it on the closet floor. Then the two of them crossed the porch to David’s room.
David was almost finished as well. He had pictures of his parents and children on his desk, his Qur’an in a prominent spot on the shelf, a small framed “Allah” that he had already hung on the wall—there was a velcroed hook available—a hand woven Moroccan blanket on his bed and a smaller, more delicate one velcroed to the floor. He also had set up a large framed citation he had received from the government of France for his contributions to the nation.
“Looking for people?” he asked. Will nodded, so the three of them headed down the ladder shaft again. They stopped to glance around the next level down; a large science and medical room occupied most of the space, with a storage area, a toilet, and the Ihab’s control area occupying alcoves or rooms off the main space. But no one was there. So they went down the shaft one more time to enter the great room, from which they had heard talking. The great room had an alcove—formed by a wall running from the central ladder shaft to the outer edge—occupied by the kitchenette. The rest of the floor, which was six meters in diameter, was a large room with a dining room table able to seat six and a living room area with comfortable chairs that could either be pushed together to form a couch or separated to make separate chairs.
They quickly saw the source of the conversation; Sergei Alievitch Landsberg was talking in Russian to a woman with slight oriental features on the videophone. The great room had a screen almost a meter and a half across, which allowed life-sized imagery. When he saw the three of them, he was surprised.
“Sorry, my dear,” he said to the woman. He turned to them. “Gentlemen, I didn’t realize you had arrived; I apologize for neglecting you. Welcome on board. I’ve been in conversation with my wife for over an hour about a private matter of great importance to us.”
“Oh, I’m sorry; we’ll head over to the Cimmerium, then,” replied Will. He turned to the other two; they nodded and all headed back into the ladder shaft. “Well, might as well give this a try, for the first time in seven months,” he said, looking straight up and estimating distances. The shaft was open all the way to the top of the Ausonia and at least part way down the Cimmerium; a straight, open shaft 1.2 meters wide and twenty-six meters long. He carefully jumped and soared straight up. “I didn’t touch until I reached the Cimmerium!” he called back to the others. They repeated his leap and managed to go all the way to the Cimmerium’s great room.
All three of them “landed” at almost the same time. The thuds surprised the four people gathered there. In addition to Kimball and Laura, the other two Columbus crewmembers were present: Shinji Nagatani, their exobiologist, physician, and horticulturist; and Ethel MacGregor, a Scot, whose expertise was engineering, mechanics, and computers.
“Ah, you made it,” said Laura. “I’m sorry I didn’t greet you up top; I just hadn’t seen Heather, here, for months.”
“We go back a long way,” added Kimball.
Will nodded. He extended his hand to Nagatani. “Shinji, it’s good to meet you. We were all surprised when Yamamoto suddenly had to withdraw, but I hear you can do just about everything.”
Nagatani shook his hand. “Not everything. I’m not a geologist, after all. Never been to the moon; it’s strange to look out my window and see it so big and close, and know I’m not going there!”
David extended his hand as well. “Looking forward to getting to know you.”
“Thank you.”
Will turned to Ethel and offered her his hand. “It’s good to see you again as well, Ethel.”
She smiled. She was attractive, about his age, with short light brown hair and blue eyes. Her eyes lingered on his green eyes for a moment. “Thanks, Will. There have been a few times in the last three months I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“I worried about that, too, when LBV3 lost an engine and left the three of you in low lunar orbit for twenty-four hours,” replied Will.
“It was a pretty worrisome moment,” she replied, agreeing in her typically understated way. “And then we made it here anyway, but no one would let the two of you fly up, in case it was a problem with the whole fleet.”
“Messed up the entire end of training,” growled Laura. “But I guess we’ve got six months to catch up, if necessary.”
“And I hear there was a rescue on the lunar surface,” added Shinji.
“Indeed there was, of sorts,” agreed David. “Since you all had had your brush with death, Will and I decided we had to have ours.”
Will rolled his eyes. “I guess Tycho crater was never meant to be explored over land. The next explorers will have to arrive by hopper.”
“Well, I did manage to get almost a hundred meters below the rim!” replied David.
“Yeah, and it took me so long to get you back up, we both almost ran out of air.”
“Well, you’re here safe and sound now,” said Ethel. “And David’s tumble has left a mark in the regolith that will be visible a million years. I was surprised a man in a spacesuit could make such a track!”
Laura laughed. Will smiled. “It could have been either of us; the slope was steep and we were too close to the edge. The moon suits are pretty top heavy.”
“I was really surprised by the accident,” said Kimball. “You guys both have a lot of experience on the moon; what is it, fifteen months?”
Will nodded. “For me. Dave has nineteen, actually.”
“It all goes to show anyone can make a basic mistake,” replied Dave.
“Maybe it’s all the brain cells that have been fried by the radiation,” said Laura, no doubt trying to justify her effort to remove them from the team. But Kimball shook her head.
“No, my friend, nothing like that. I’ve spent twenty-three months on or near the moon, remember. You can get permission to do it. And I’ve spent a lot of time in the hab, buried under three meters of reg. My radiation count is still okay, my doc says.”
“It’s true; you can be careful about it and spend a lot of time up here,” agreed Shinji.
Just then there were sounds in the ladder shaft and Sergei came down. “I finished; I apologize again for being inhospitable.”
“Oh, no, Sergei, that’s alright,” replied Will.
“Have some punch,” added Laura. She reached over to the counter and pulled several sippy cups from their restraints, and passed them around.
“Kimball, you were on the first flight to the moon, right?” asked Shinji.
She nodded. “I was a junior officer, then. Six years ago.”
“The first woman on the moon,” added Laura, a touch of admiration in her voice.
“What was the first flight like?” asked Shinji.
Kimball shrugged. “I’m not sure what to say because it was so routine. Ours was really the fifth flight, in a sense. First, a booster put a solar-electric vehicle in orbit with Gateway Station attached to it. It was pushed here over six months and checked out remotely, so we knew it was working fine. Then a booster launched SEV 2 with lunar based vehicle 1 and the propellant manufacturing plant. That was all set up telerobotically at Shackleton and it began to extract water from the reg—thank God they landed by a really ice-rich patch of regolith, it made the work pretty simple. Then booster three and SEV 3 launched LBV 2 and an inflatable hab for all of us to live in, and booster four launched SEV 4, LBV 3, and eight tonnes of pressurized rover, extra solar panels, consumables, and scientific equipment. Thank God they all came down safely and near each other; but if they hadn’t, replacements would have been launched instead. In those days all the launches were twenty-four tonnes at a time and one third was for the solar-electric vehicle and its fuel. Only one third was cargo destined for the lunar surface, the rest was engines and fuel. Now that the SEVs are up and flying all you need is the fuel, so launches carry almost fifty percent more cargo than they could then.
“Anyway, we were launched in the Cybele to Gateway, we checked it out and set it up; and everything was ready for us, so that task was a piece of cake. LBV1 was docked here waiting for us, with eight tonnes of liquid hydrogen and oxygen it had made from lunar reg; all we had to do was dock the bottom of the Cybele to the top of LBV1 and fire its engines, and down we went to Shackleton. And it wasn’t like Apollo when we arrived; twenty-four tonnes of stuff was ready for us to deploy and use, there were two other LBVs with fuel that could have flown us home if necessary, the hab was nice and comfortable—we covered it with reg and were snug as a bug in a rug. We had to redeploy solar panels to put them in permanent sunlight and restring some power cables, and had a few other unexpected tasks, but it was really a pretty routine mission.”
“Still, it was the first,” replied Shinji.
“You’re too modest, Heather,” added Laura. “You all broke ground. Even if every centimeter had been photographed, it was a big risk. A big unknown.”
“I don’t know. The elements of the system had all been tested. I think the six of you will be much bigger heroes, frankly. You’re going a lot farther. We could have gotten rescued any time; there was a backup waiting in low Earth orbit. You have no possibility of rescue.”
“Well, we do,” replied Will. “That’s why Columbus 1 has two Ihabs and two Mars shuttles, and why each one is flying three instead of four on board. We can rescue each other if necessary.”
“And there’s already a Mars shuttle on the ground,” added Sergei. “So we have three of them. And then there’s thirty-three tonnes of supplies on the ground already, and thirty-three tonnes already on the way. And don’t forget the Phobos propellant plant that has already made fifteen tonnes of fuel, and a second plant’s on the way. We’ll have a lot more than you had, actually.”
“That’s true,” said Kimball. “And we had a lot more than Apollo 11; they just had a flimsy little lunar lander, they didn’t know where they were landing, they had no supplies ready for them, and they had no backup.”
“It makes me wish we could go along,” added Armando. “Hey, you’ve got room for two more, too! We could have LBV2 fly up with a couple tonnes of consumables from Shackleton and maybe a little more fuel to push the extra mass on its way. . .”
They all erupted in laughter at the idea. “It actually would be pretty easy,” added Will. “Of course, we’d all be fired!”
“I’ll wait for Columbus 2, then,” said Armando. “After seeing you all, I think I will put in. My wife will kill me.”
“No; just divorce you,” said Sergei, a sad tone in his voice.
Laura glanced at Sergei, surprised. Then she looked around. “Well, all six of us are here, now,” she exclaimed. “The shuttles are fully fueled. The consumables are all in place. The Ihabs are set up and functioning well. And our launch window opens in twenty-four hours. The sooner we get underway, the better it is from the point of view of fuel consumption. What do you all say? Will we be ready?”
She looked at each one of her crewmembers, one by one, and they nodded. “Good,” she said. “We can entertain our guests a few more hours, but then they need to get back to Gateway so they can rest and prepare for their flight to Earth. I guess I’ll call Houston and tell them we’ll be ready to go tomorrow morning.”
Copyright 2003 Robert Stockman.
Posted in Fiction at 07:05 PM on 7/08/03
