A Routine Departure by Terry Wilson (read people like a book .txt) 📖

from the sun by what looks like a pair of stir-fry woks, one inside the other. Floating along on an even lazier orbit farther away from the Sun around the libration point "L2", is the Max Planck, a telescope protected by three such nested woks. Under the sun shield is the affectionately named "stovetop", or more formally, interplanetary service module. Four long solar wings extend from it in a cruciform shape, and below it is the Lowell Rover, hiding inside the cone-shaped Stampede Lander, itself surrounded by a birdcage like structure which ties it securely to the stovetop, against which its heatshield rests. Attached to Stampede's upside down "roof" is the inflatable space habitat. The rounded cylinder looks like it's made out of high-grade canvas.

In the skies of Morocco, the Lilmax third stage fires to speed the crew ferry up to the train's velocity before it overshoots them. This final maneuver by the booster starts when the train is a few hundred kilometres behind and catching up fast. It ends a few minutes later with the train just three kilometres away and off to the side.

"Wooooo Hoo!" Lucy pumps her fist and cheers and the four pat backs around inside as the Lilmax third stage separates from the back of the crew ferry and gets out of the way. In the Malton control centre, the Flight Director does the same with his team of engineers.

Eventually the third stage will separate into two parts. The engine will shed its ablative nozzle extension, which will burn up in the atmosphere, before deploying an inflatable heatshield supplied by ILC Dover. The two-compartment tank, coming back bottom end first, is protected by spray-foam that is pressure-washed off and replaced before the two pieces are reunited in the shop in Titusville and used for another flight.

Thomas carefully maneuvers the crew ferry to a gentle docking, then hands the reins over to Ronald, who is already out of his spacesuit. He carefully pressurizes the space between the hatch of the crew ferry, and the hatch of the inflatable habitat. He makes the tunnel pressure just a tad higher than the crew ferry's pressure, and then the crew ferry's pressure just a tad higher than the habitat.

"And now, ladies and gentleman," he says to his crewmates, "You're home away from home for the next few months." Ronny pops the first hatch, then reaches through and pops the second hatch. Each swings gently away from the other on their hinges, blown open by the muscular geologist's choreographed breezes.

The four smiling astronauts float into the open interior of the space habitat, around the end-to-end lattice framework of the column spanning the hatch to the crew ferry, and the hatch to the Lowell Rover. They spend the next few hours unpacking, chatting about old times, playing microgravity games. Ronny and Beatrice strap themselves into the front seats of the rover, and, as they put it, "Race it around the inside of the lander."

Of course, like the other six payloads already on their way to Mars, the crew rover barely fits in its lander. Earlier mission plans proposed one or two enormous landers putting fifty tonnes on the surface of Mars at a crack. Downside is, no one had ever made such a lander, and landing on Mars is literally pulling a miracle out of thin air. If you jumped out of a plane over Mars with a parachute, with the air less than a hundredth as dense, you'll probably hit the ground faster than you would the surface of the Earth without a parachute. The Stampede Lander weighs twelve tonnes, lowering a six tonne payload to the Martian surface. Seven such landers are used together to build a forty-two tonne outpost on the surface of Mars. Half an hour's walk away from the planned outpost's location, is the fully fuelled Destiny Booster prescribed for the return trip, having already been quietly sitting there for a year and a half, making its LOX and ethylene propellants using power from a carpet of solar cells and the carbon dioxide in the thin air of Mars. Despite being smaller than the Lilmax third stage, it is far more expensive than the entire Lilmax booster.

Over Morocco, the train and now empty crew ferry fly in side by side formation, the clouds over the Atlantic rushing past below at almost ten kilometres per second. The maneuver stage at the back of the long interplanetary vehicle, topped by the fat habitat module, fires its tiny pumpless motor, the liquified oxygen and natural gas being pushed out of the compartmented tank by a supply of helium. The train pulls ahead, ending the dead heat and leaving the crew ferry behind.

The crew are sitting inside their rover, feeling the gentle push from the floor. Above them something clanks against the closed habitat hatch.

"That's probably my calculator," Lucy sighs, "I couldn't find it this morning." The universal lost and found aboard any spacecraft is the ventilation grille. Without gravity, anything left floating around will eventually be directed there by the circulating air. At least in theory. Firing a rocket "creates" gravity, and things start falling again.

The first maneuver stage has exhausted itself, separates from the stage ahead, and the other "locomotive" fires its motor. Well short of the full duration, it shuts down. Underneath, the mighty Atlas mountain range silently passes underneath.

Lucy scans her navigational display, taps a few keys. The rest of the crew watches her pensively. She turns to Thomas.

"You can't fake it," he says, "not with me, anyway."

Ronny and Beatrice lean forward from their back seats, wondering what the problem is.

Lucy pops her seatbelt and floats up towards the ceiling, "We're on our way to Mars, boys, woo hoo!"

Finding a window, she looks out upon the starless blackness she knows is the Indian Ocean. Losing track of time, she watches the lights of her home continent revolve into view. Touching the window, homesick tears float away from her eyes. Farther away already than any Australian has ever been, she won't be this close for another two and a half years. The sun comes around and shines its bright light on their ship and her home. On the shrinking sphere of the Earth, Australia retreats back over the horizon. That's the way the Earth spins. Hours have passed, and it is, by the clocks, late evening before she pulls herself away from the rover's window, allowed to see space by the lander shell's hinged panel. She dabs away the puddles of tears from her face and looks around, surprised to discover that she's the first among her crewmates to come out of the departure trance. One by one, they quietly slip into bed, caressing pictures of loved ones before turning off lights by switches that float about on cords.

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Landing Small

Two men, two women attempt to land on Mars in the biggest lander a parachute can handle: twelve tonnes. The speed of light is absolute: for eight agonizing minutes, the world will not know whether Thomas, Lucy, Ronald and Beatrice are alive or dead.

21 September 2016

The recorder sees data, sees the views of cameras. Hundreds of measurements. If it had a soul it could easily imagine what it looks like from outside the Stampede Lander it is riding on. With some imagination, it could visualize the mist of the refrigerant being let out of the craft's radiators. But in reality, it can only record the event. It can see the red planet Mars, increasingly flat horizon looming ahead. Valle Marineris, the solar system's biggest sinkhole, silently drifts by underneath. Over the horizon ahead is its destination, the rugged plains of Meridiani.

Feeling the traces of the atmosphere, the edges of the heatshield start to glow with the distinctive pink light of ionized oxygen and hydrogen in the high reaches of the Martian atmosphere. The guidance system calculates the current trajectory limits for Normal Load, Thermal Rate, Thermal Load, Uprange, Downrange, Track Left and Track Right, all of which the recorder sees; all of which can later be reconstructed into an ever-shrinking oval projected around the target point on the surface of Mars, representing where the lander could theoretically survive going. It feels several thermometers heat up. Its cameras are filled with orange flames. G-forces build, and it feels through several other sensors the small jolts from the thrusters and the heat of their firings. Does it enjoy the experience of descending through Mars' thin atmosphere? I'll ask it if I ever find the poor thing.

The guidance system knows that the lander is going long. It tells the recorder that it's worried. It's going to try popping the parachute early. The recorder feels the jolt as the thirty metre parachute inflates above, then as suddenly that force goes away. The recorder sees the parachute explode above, suspension lines dangling in the supersonic breeze with pieces of the shattered blue-and-white bowl still attached. The guidance system can't give up, keeps energizing the circuit to deploy the parachute over and over in the vain hope that it hasn't really deployed and shredded already. It keeps calculating and recalculating the rocket powered portion of the descent, just in case the parachute suddenly starts working again. The recorder sees the contact speeds increase from their gentle normal values rapidly into the range nothing could hope to survive. The emotionless guidance system refuses to give up, still planning what it would do if the parachute suddenly worked. The recorder hasn't been taught what normal looks like, so it only knows that the guidance system considers the situation hopeless, even as it-

The Destiny Booster watched it go in, the plume of wreckage scattering about above the horizon.

Thomas Shinra pounds the driver's console of the Lowell Rover, "Crap!"

Lucy, on his right, turns to him in alarm, her piercing blue eyes burn the side of his head. The mission commander is reluctant to turn his face to her. Instead closes his eyes and sighs, "It's gone. Trailer Two is gone. All we know is that the chute deployed twelve seconds ahead of schedule, and..." his voice trails off into a sad sigh.

"Damn," Lucy sighs quietly.

Ronny pops his crew cut blonde head through the hatch in the rover's roof, the rest of his athletic physique is in the inflatable space habitat. Thomas knew he was on his way already because the subtle wobble he felt in his seat from Ronald Harvey's workout on the "rope climber" had gone away.

"We lost Trailer Two," Thomas explains.

"Well that sucks," the upside down geologist replies.

In the hab, floating in front of the window in her grey tank top, curly black hair around her head, the brown-eyed, ebony-skinned Beatrice Laurence looks down at her digital camera with its long, fat lens, zooming on the picture she just took of the Martian surface. A tiny, slightly out of focus feature catches her eye, an upside down cone of red dust with a few pixels more grey than they should be. No sign of the blue and white parachute she was looking for. She points the camera back out the window and takes another picture. Zooming in on the same spot, she can see a grey patch on the