5
Arrival
“Any questions about the video?” Ethel asked Will, David, and Sergei. They had just reviewed one of their training videos for the fifth time; all shook their heads. Then Will nodded.
“What are the chances we’ll separate some of the rarer metal carbonyls, anyway? If the carbonyl synthesizing unit can only make about a tonne of metal carbonyl at a time, even if we use typical nickel-iron meteorite for feedstock, that tonne will consist of 842 kilos of iron, 150 kilos of nickel, 7.6 kilos of cobalt, but only about 400 grams of platinum group metals. That’s not much metal of value.”
“That’s a good question. The carbonyl synthesizing unit exists mostly as an experiment; if it works as it should, it’ll allow us to fill molds with liquid iron carbonyl, drive off the carbon monoxide, and produce cold-molded metal parts. That potentially cuts down on imports from Earth. Refining platinum-group metals isn’t the purpose, but it should prove possible; the fractionation column has room for them. If, two years from now, we are able to head back to Earth with a kilo of platinum group metals, that would be a nice bonus.”
“But it would be worth $20,000,” noted Sergei. “The Mars Project has already cost forty billion; I don’t think it’s going to break even any time soon!”
“We’d make more money taking Mars rocks home for sale,” suggested David.
“I’m concerned about the strength of these cold-molded compounds,” added Sergei. “Hot rolled steel, obviously, is stronger.”
“Yes,” agreed Ethel. “We can get pretty strong alloys of nickel-iron from the cold-molded process, but they aren’t stronger than hot-rolled metals. Mars won’t have equipment for hit rolling for a few years at least. Meanwhile, cold-molded metals are plenty strong enough to make chairs, tables, door frames, airlocks, sheet-metal walls that can be pressurized, etc. It’s good enough, Sergei.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I have a more philosophical question,” exclaimed Will. “I sometimes feel we’re going to Mars not to explore the place, but to perform experiments. We’re flying almost five hundred million kilometers to get there and we’re staying eighteen months, yet we won’t travel more than a hundred kilometers or so from base. It’s crazy.”
“But it’s understandable, don’t you think?” replied Sergei. “The goal of Columbuses 1 and 2 are to establish a beach head on Mars. That means a base of operations, some food production, obtaining a reliable water supply, getting the habs set up, and proving that Mars shuttles work there. Once we have that, we won’t have to fly here with liquid hydrogen for return fuel and we’ll be able to double the cargo flown to Mars. At that point, sending in more people and machines, extensive exploration will be feasible.”
“Will just wishes he were coming here later,” said David. “And I can understand that. He and I are explorers, after all.”
“The ‘moon man,’” added Sergei.
“I’d like to go stand on the rim of Argyre Basin and sample rocks from the beginning of Mars,” said Will. “Or explore the young volcanics in Amazonis, or the ancient layered sedimentary deposits in Gangis. Those are my ambitions, not setting up an outpost.”
“We might make it to Gangis,” said David. “It’s not on the itinerary, but if miracles happen and we accomplish a lot, it might be possible.”
“It’s scheduled for Columbus 3 or 4,” replied Will. “No, I understand the logic of our mission objectives. They do make sense. But even so, I wish we were exploring more.”
“Don’t forget that you’ll get to some of those places telerobotically,” exclaimed Ethel. “We have six Prospector-200s to deploy and operate.”
“I know; but exploring a place by telerobotically operated vehicle is not the same. A five year old with a camera can do a better job.”
“You’ll have to teach me more geology,” replied Ethel. “Meanwhile, I very much appreciate the interest of all three of you in metal production. It’s an important matter for us to test; just as important as chemical and plastics synthesis.”
“We’ll have that equipment along as well,” said Will, nodding. “And we do have some valuable exploration objectives; I suppose I shouldn’t complain about that.”
He rose and walked over to a window that punctured the wall of the Cimmerium’s great room. It faced toward their destination and he was startled to see how big it was. “Wow; we’re noticeably closer than yesterday. It looks almost as big as the full moon.”
“Really?” said Sergei, skeptically. The others walked over and huddled around the window to look out.
“Let’s see, we’re still two million kilometers away, six times the Earth-moon distance, and Mars has twice the diameter of the moon,” said David. “Will, you’re close; it should be about a third the dimensions of a full moon.”
“Alright. That big, dark patch on the right is Syrtis Major; I’m amazed it’s so easy to see with the naked eye. To the left you can see just the tail end of the Valles Marineris dust storm.”
“So, that’s what’s delaying our landing,” exclaimed Sergei.
“Yes,” said Will. He sighed. “I wonder when people will clear the first dirt track all the way around the equator, or to the north and south poles, or the length of Marineris and to the top of the Tharsis volcanoes.”
“Whoa! You’re talking about decades from now,” replied Sergei. “We’ll need more than vehicles with bulldozers to pull off those tasks. We’ll need reliable airplanes to speed up transportation, and a solidly established hub.”
“Something like the exploration of Antarctica; a McMurdo Base where everything arrives, and a transportation network to get from there to any place you need,” observed Will.
“I think so,” agreed Sergei.
“But with one difference; McMurdo is less than twenty-four hours from any major city on Earth. Even Shackleton is only four days from Earth. Mars is months from Earth,” noted Ethel. “That means some people will sacrifice and stay, and maybe eventually raise children. That doesn’t happen on Antarctica or the moon.”
“None of us are doing that; we’re just getting the ball rolling,” said Sergei, and Will and David nodded. They were scheduled to remain eighteen months, then fly home nine months before Columbus 2 arrived with its crew of eight.
“I wonder when a child will be born, down there,” mused Ethel. “And I wonder what sort of society they’ll build.”
“One dependent on Earth,” said Will. “And I hope they have a closer knit social life than we’ve achieved.”
“Hey, we’re getting better!” replied Sergei. “After six months of floating across the solar system together, we’re finally getting to know each other.”
“It’ll be a society dependent on machines, and with little contact with nature,” observed David.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Will. “Everyone on Earth is dependent on machines as well, and on Mars everyone will know where their food comes from. They won’t buy it in a supermarket.”
“True, but a greenhouse and nature are not the same thing,” replied David. “Their contact with nature will be with potted trees, not a forest; or it’ll be a Martian duststorm.”
“You’re right; but that will be interesting in its own way.”
“I wonder what sort of society can or will be built here some day,” said Ethel. “The six of us have already found out how hard it is to create a multinational team. We don’t have a common culture, after all. But Mars will need a common culture of some sort.”
“One will probably evolve gradually,” said Will. “That’s an interesting thought.”
“And we get to start the process,” added Sergei. “We have quite a responsibility.”
Just then they heard the sound of someone sliding down the ladder shaft. They turned in time to watch Laura pop out.
“How was the video?” she asked.
“We see something new in the plot every time,” quipped Will.
Laura was not amused. “We just got a solar storm forecast. The storm may come this way, and it’ll hit about the time of aerocapture.”
“We can’t be in our acceleration couches and in the shelter at the same time,” commented Sergei, shaking his head.
“They are, as one might expect, asking us whether we want to consider abort.”
There was silence for a moment as everyone considered the matter. “Don’t be ridiculous. We can’t fly 500 million kilometers and abort,” said Will. “We’d be stuck in this can for eighteen more months before we returned to Earth, with nothing to show for it.”
“Well, we can’t fry, either,” responded Laura.
“Aerocapture only takes fifteen or twenty minutes, and the plasma will shield us substantially from the radiation,” said David.
“We could probably rearrange our supplies to shield the couches, too,” noted Ethel.
“I’m not advocating an abort; just that we need to know what we’re getting ourselves into,” said Laura.
“But what about that aeroshield sensor,” said Sergei, looking at Laura. He turned to the others. “I was checking the systems on the Elysium today and got a warning on one of the aeroshield’s latches. I was planning to go out and take a look.”
“We can’t have a shield fall off during aerocapture,” agreed David. “What are the chances it’s real?”
Sergei shrugged. “One in a hundred. The guys who latched the aeroshield on at Gateway were pretty careful. And the latches are overdesigned; if one failed, the others would hold the shield in place.”
“Is there time to check before the storm arrives?” asked Will.
Laura nodded. “I think so, but we can ask Houston.”
“What else can go wrong,” sighed Ethel.
“What’s the situation on Phobos?” asked Will, looking at Sergei.
“As soon as we’re in orbit, Moscow has authorized us to take over the controls. Maybe with nearly instantaneous response time, we can jiggle the driller free. So far, nothing they’ve tried has worked.”
“A person in a spacesuit with a flashlight and a long pole could probably bang the rock loose and free the drill head in half an hour,” said Will.
“True, but we aren’t authorized to it, and we have enough delta vee for either Mars or Phobos; not both,” reminded Laura. “You guys figure out what the EVA will involve; I’ll email Houston about it.”
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The next afternoon, with the solar storm building but not yet a problem, they slowed the rotation rate of the Columbus from five revolutions per minute to one, reducing the gravity on the top of the aeroshield to half that found on the moon. Sergei and Will suited up and exited the Mars shuttle’s cargo bay through an exit. They hooked their safety harnesses to a latch by the door and quickly walked over to the latch—a little bit of gravity helped that a lot. Always looking down so as to ignore the wheeling stars, they inspected the latching mechanism very closely. It looked fine, so they removed and replaced the sensor, which immediately caused the false warning to go away. Relieved, they went back inside.
That crisis resolved, the crew members turned to shifting the supplies around. Both ITVs had bridges adjoining a bathroom with a toilet and sink; the acceleration couches were moved to the bridge and bolted in place, and the supply lockers on the top level were bolted in place around it. Both shuttles had crew modules already stuffed with supplies, which provided excellent shelter there as well. All of them had the option of staying in their beds in their private rooms, as well; the beds were surrounded by ten centimeters of shielding that was very effective against solar radiation. A few minutes a day of moving around the ship was not a problem.
Then the solar storm hit, and for two days the six of them rarely left their rooms or the bridges. It finally abated about twelve hours before the aerocapture maneuver; just enough time to take showers and clean up before ending artificial gravity.
They all hurried to secure the
vehicles for spin-down and zero gravity, followed by several gees of sudden
deceleration. They were barely finished in time. They hurried to their
stations; Laura would pilot the Olympus, Sergei the Elysium,
David the Ausonia, and Ethel the Cimmerium through aerobraking
maneuvers. Will remained in the Ausonia and Shinji in the Cimmerium as well; with the crew divided among the four vehicles, all the vehicles
had a capable human pilot in charge, and it was guaranteed that an accident
would had a diminished effect on the mission.
Then Sergei, who was the chief pilot and thus in charge of their arrival, ended the rotation of the Columbus and it separated into four vehicles. Each vehicle lined itself up with its wide aeroshield pointed toward Mars, aimed toward the world’s edge so that it would just nick the atmosphere.
Atmospheric entry, once it began, built quickly, and gravity piled on until it pushed toward one and a half terrestrial gravities. Each vehicle dipped as low as ten kilometers into the atmosphere, then headed back out almost as quickly as it entered, slowing from 7.1 kilometers per second to 4.9 kilometers per second, a little less than escape velocity from the Red Planet. The 2,200 meters per second of “delta-vee” or change of velocity, at an average of one gee or ten meters per second, only took 220 seconds or three and a half minutes to accomplish, though the deceleration was hardly uniform; for thirty seconds it pushed as high as four gees as they flew less than ten kilometers above the surface. With their aeroshields glowing red hot they sped away from Mars, called each other on the radio, verified their condition, and the shuttles began to make rendezvous with their ITVs. Within twenty-four hours the Columbus’s four pieces were back together and rotating; artificial gravity was restored, and the vehicle was in its intended 24.6 hour elliptical orbit. Over breakfast the next day they held their first staff meeting.
“I gather the landing site is still too dusty?” asked Laura.
Sergei nodded. “Wind speeds are still too high and the sky is partially obscured. It’ll be another week at least.”
“This is surprising; the dust storm season ended back in October,” said Will. “But the Marineris system is prone to storms.”
“We can wait,” said Laura. “We’ve got plenty of time. Will, are you turning to the driller problem on Phobos?”
“That’s what David and I will focus on all day.”
“Good. What’s our fuel reserve?”
“Both shuttles have a delta-vee of a thousand meters per second,” replied David. “We’re forty percent above the seven hundred that’s nominal.”
“But we’re way short of the amount needed to visit Phobos,” added Sergei. “That takes 500 meters per second to reach from an elliptical transfer orbit, then 500 meters per second again to drop the periapsis into the atmosphere, on top of the 700 meters per second for landing maneuvers.”
“I know; I wasn’t even thinking about Phobos,” said Laura.
“Of course, Phobos has twenty tonnes of fuel,” noted Will. “And we can transfer it. That’s enough to provide a delta-vee of 1,400 meters per second to one shuttle; more than it needs.”
“Like I said, I wasn’t even thinking about Phobos,” repeated Laura. “As we know, it’s out of the question. Columbus 1 is focused on Mars, not Phobos.”
Will nodded. “Well, I’ll focus on the drill rig today.”
“Good. Then staff meeting’s over. Thanks, everyone,” said Laura.
Will rose. David tapped him on the shoulder. “I have to take care of an interview with Agence France Press, so I’ll join you in fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“Okay,” agreed Will. He headed up the ladder shaft to the docking cube, then down the Ausonia’s shaft to the lab on the second level. They had finally moved everything back to where it was before aerocapture; the smell of the leaking sewage tank had finally gone away almost completely. It was amazing they had managed to clean up the room as well as they had, not to mention effect an almost perfect repair. As a result, on the trip out they had managed to recycle water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide more efficiently than expected.
Will noted the red glow of Mars coming from a porthole window, so he walked over and stood for several minutes, looking out at the Red Planet. At the moment the Columbus had passed periapsis or closest point to the planet—400 kilometers—and was headed toward apoapsis, but was only about a thousand kilometers up. From that distance, the detail on the surface below visible to the human eye was astounding. They were flying over the Tharsis volcanic province at the moment, and the three big volcanoes—Arsia, Pavonis, and Ascreus—were all plainly visible. Olympus Mons, the solar system’s highest volcano, was just visible on the horizon. He looked down and it suddenly hit him forcefully: I am about to be one of the first human beings to land on Mars. A chill ran up his spine and he wasn’t sure whether it was excitement or fear. Their equipment was extremely reliable, but there was no guarantee of anything. Aerocapture was a maneuver a simpleton could perform; but NASA had once lost a spacecraft because metric measurements had been fed to the computer instead of English, causing too deep an aerocapture pass and destruction of the probe in the atmosphere. Landing was far more complex, involving additional aerobraking maneuvers, some steering in the atmosphere to refine the landing, deployment of three parachutes, jettisoning them, each shuttle’s engines had to fire precisely, and finally the shuttle had to avoid landing on a rock or a cargo vehicle. A miss was as serious as a crash because the shuttle was not equipped to run an entire mission without the cargo landers. Three cargo landers with a duplicate set of equipment—the equipment designated for Columbus 2—would arrive in six weeks and a shuttle that missed its destination could always await them, but if one of the three cargo landers crashed they could be in serious trouble, because all three were important. And if both Mars shuttles missed the primary landing zone, the crew at one would almost certainly die, as rescue options by the other would be extremely limited and risky.
Everything had to go right. That was highly likely, but one never knew. He considered how difficult it would be to function as a three-person crew on Mars, mourning the loss of the other three.
Then he turned away. There was no reason to dwell on the negative. He sat at his work station and activated the powerful control computer that allowed telerobotic control of equipment. But rather than turning to Phobos right away—David still had not arrived—he commanded the computer to connect to the Prospector telerover at their landing site at Aurorae, “the Valley of Dawns” located at the eastern end of Valles Marineris. Mars already had a network of communications and global positioning satellites that had been placed in orbit over the past decade; it allowed almost instantaneous communication across the planet, except the poles, and on the moons as well.
The picture snapped into focus on the screen a moment later. He knew the site well; for the last month he had wheeled the Prospector across the gravely plain at a fairly good clip, since he had good control over it. At the moment it was perched on the edge of a rise facing west. Will scanned left—toward the north—and the escarpment edge of Aurorae Chaos snapped into view, a wall of layered rocks almost two kilometers high about twenty kilometers away, as magnificently impressive and grand as the front range of the Tetons near Jackson Hole or the Front Range of the Rockies near Denver. He contemplated the layers for a moment, wondering for the dozenth time what they were; that was one of the questions he had to answer, and something for which the Prospector had proven of limited value, so far.
Then he scanned around to the west. A mere fifty meters from the rover was a mesa about 300 meters long, 200 meters wide, and 100 meters high dubbed “Boat Rock” because its shape roughly resembled an overturned boat. Beyond it, not visible from the rover, was “Face Rock,” a house-sized remnant, so called because at a certain angle one could see a face-like profile in its crags, rather similar to the “Old Man of the Mountain” once visible on New Hampshire’s Cannon Mountain. Behind the rover’s cameras and not visible on screen was “Layercake Mesa,” the largest erosional remnant in the area, also 100 meters high, but about four kilometers long and up to a kilometer wide. Will was itching to find a way to the top of all three mesas; it was not possible for the rover, but climbing to the top should be possible for a man in a pressure suit. The three mesas provided excellent exposures of the deposits that once filled the area—mostly lacustrine or formed in a lake, but some volcanic and meteoritic—and all three mesas could hold clues to whether Mars ever had life. The tops were also excellent locations for windmills, which could supplement the base’s solar power supply.
Finally, he panned the camera southward, across the expanse of Aurorae Chaos to the horizon. The plain that stretched as far as one could see was fairly flat and covered with small rocks and gravel, the top of over a kilometer of water-washed fill that had been deposited from the Mariner Valleys farther west. The sedimentary strata, according to ground-penetrating radar, were filled with permafrost; drill down, add heat, and water vapor would come out. Scattered across the plain about six to eight kilometers to the south were three automated cargo landers and a Mars Shuttle, all sent to the Red Planet two years earlier. Each vehicle had unrolled solar arrays on landing, exposing two hundred fifty square meters of tough, light weight, high-efficiency solar cells to the sun. When the sun was overhead in a clear sky the panels generated up to 40 kilowatts of power, though the output was closer to a continuous 12 or 13 kilowatts when averaged over a twenty-four point six hour day or “sol.” Each of the four vehicles landed at Aurorae had come equipped with a two hundred-kilogram rover possessing two remote controlled arms; the rovers had hauled electrical cable across the desert between the vehicles and connected them together, giving the Mars base an electrical grid. An additional three hundred square meters of panels had also been deployed, with the result that Aurorae Outpost already had a solar powered electrical system putting out an average of 75 kilowatts when the sky was dust free, which was two thirds of the year. This had been used, over the last two years, to combine the ten tonnes of liquid hydrogen inside the Mars Shuttle Pavonis with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere to make liquid oxygen and methane; additional oxygen had been extracted from the carbon dioxide as well, so that the Pavonis was already fully fueled for the return trip to Earth. Their first tasks involved repair of one solar array that had never opened fully, deployment of the inflatable hab and greenhouse, setting up additional solar arrays, unpacking the exploratory equipment, chemical synthesis unit, and metal working unit, drill a well, and starting their exploration.
Will looked up as he heard the sound of someone sliding down the ladder shaft. It was David. “How was the interview?”
“Oh, it went fine. The reporter did ask the standard tricky question I always get: ‘do you consider yourself a representative of France or of the Arab world?’”
“What did you say?”
“I said I was a Frenchman, my parents were French, and we were proud of it, but I was also proud to be an Arab and Muslim. That usually works.” He looked at the screen. “How’s everything down on the surface?”
“Pretty good; still a bit dusty, as you can see.”
David squinted at the screen. “Yes, the horizon especially is obscured. Those mesas fifteen klicks away look hazy.”
“They do; they’re worse than yesterday, I think. But let’s switch to Phobos and see what we can do.”
David nodded. He sat next to Will and pulled up the videomails from Moscow mission control—where the Phobos aspect of the mission was commanded—briefing them about the latest efforts to get the two drills to work. Almost two years earlier a Russian cargo vehicle had landed on Phobos on a ridge running along the southern hemisphere on the side facing away from Mars. It had touched down near the ridge’s beginning, close to Phobos’s equator; the high altitude gave it days slightly longer than its nights, and its position on the anti-Martian hemisphere meant the sun was eclipsed by Mars when it was nighttime anyway. After landing, the vehicle had unfolded enormous solar wings—650 square meters, enough to generate an average output of forty kilowatts. It had slowly sunk harpoons into the moon’s loose, fluffy regolith, then deployed its two drills. But the first drill had malfunctioned almost immediately after drilling only ten meters into the chondritic bedrock of the moon; a simple malfunction than an astronaut could fix in a few hours, once one was able to visit. The second drill had done better, managing to get thirty-six meters into the moon before the drill bit had gotten stuck near the bottom of the shaft. But the engineers had lowered a microwave heater into the shaft anyway and had nuked the chondrite with microwaves, heating it to several hundred degrees Centigrade, slowly driving off water vapor and carbon dioxide gas. They had drifted up the shaft and some had been captured by the lander’s volatile processing unit, which electrolyzed the water into hydrogen and oxygen and brought the carbon dioxide and hydrogen together to make methane gas and more water. Now, in spite of all the troubles, the Lifter Stickney docked to the lander, engine pointing upward, had managed to amass twenty tonnes of liquid methane and oxygen.
Will and David reviewed the latest report from mission control about the efforts to free drill number 2. It was designed to penetrate as much as one hundred meters into Phobos. Every additional meter meant six more tonnes of chondritic bedrock that could be broken down to release up to ten percent of its mass in water and carbon dioxide. Once a second lander arrived on the moon and all four drills were hard at work, Phobos had the potential to produce several hundred tonnes of rocket propellant every two years; more than enough to power the entire transportation system between Earth orbit and Mars orbit if it could be shipped back to Earth. The methane alone was worth a lot of money, since the moon produced a lot of surplus oxygen in the production of liquid hydrogen. That was the exciting potential of the effort.
They strategized and agreed to try the procedure mission control recommended: repeatedly yanking on the cable with the motors, something that was tricky to do when round trip communications from Earth took at least five minutes. They watched closely and started to jerk on the cable repeatedly, pausing briefly each time to see whether anything happened, then repeating the effort with a bit more torque. This had been tried from Earth twice, each time over several weeks, with no results.
Even taking their time, they built up to maximum torque in about fifteen minutes. “It’s simply not budging,” said David, shaking his head. “The drill bit must be wedged good, somehow.”
Will glanced at a particular gage. “According to this, we did manage to pull the bit upward by about a centimeter. So it can move.”
“Yes, but not much. It’d take a month to pull it up, at this rate.”
“Maybe we should try higher torque levels,” said Will. He hesitated, then turned to the microphone near him. Moscow and Houston were watching and listening in and had offered a few words of encouragement, though the eight-minute communications delay precluded their playing a central role in Will’s efforts. “Moscow, I want permission to try higher torque levels. I think I should try twice as much torque as we have used so far. I suppose there’s some danger something will snap in the motor, though. Please advise.”
Will repeated the request in English—his Russian wasn’t bad—then he turned back to the controls and made several more efforts with the low torque levels they were approved to use. He tried a very slow rotation of the bit; it didn’t work. In fact, nothing did.
It seemed like forever, but finally a reply arrived from Moscow in Russian: “Thanks, Will. We copy. You are go for trying up to twice as much torque.”
Will smiled at David. “They agree. Well, here goes,” and he set the amount of torque into the red level of the motor, then fired it up.
On the screen he could see the cable rotate and twist, then slow. It almost stopped moving entirely; then it seemed to speed up in its turn. “Ah-hah,” he said, pleased by the progress. He backed off on the rotation and set the drill to pull upward on the drill string, in order to break it free of the wedging it was in. The cable on the screen suddenly grew taut as the drill pulled at the maximum on the drill string trapped underground.
Then suddenly the cable accelerated, then shot free entirely from the drill. Will say staring in disbelief.
“Merde,” exclaimed David forcefully. He could swear in French because relatively few people in the world-wide cable audience understood the language.
“Shi---” Will caught himself swearing in public before a few million people watching on cable. “We seem to have a major cable failure here,” he said. “It appears that the cable connecting the drill head to the drilling mechanism has severed entirely.”
“That’s not something we can fix, is it?” asked David.
“In person, yes. We’ve got spare cables.”
Well, so much for this lander,” concluded David, shaking his head. “Let’s hope the next one has more luck.”
“I don’t know. Microgravity is just about the worst environment for deploying anything.” Will shook his head. Damn it!”
“At least we had permission to use the torque levels we did.”
“Terrible way to start the day!”
They stared at the screen. Then Will panned the camera upward. They could plainly see the break in the cable; a complete, clean break. There was no doubt.
“At least we’ve got twenty tonnes of methane and oxygen fuel,” noted David. “It’s just the right amount of fuel for emergency backup.”
“True. But that vehicle could hold thirty-six tonnes. We could have been returning to Earth with enough fuel to fly at least one shuttle back here.”
“I know. Phobos isn’t essential as a refueling station, but it’d be pretty valuable. Well, maybe Columbus 2 can visit and fix the break.”
Will stared in silence.
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Will and David had little else to do the rest of the day. They didn’t feel confident enough to drive a Prospector across the Martian surface, so they stared at the screen instead and watched nothing, first on Phobos, then at Aurorae. It wasn’t until suppertime when they felt better.
“Don’t blame yourselves,” said Ethel, who had cooked supper that night. “You had permission for every step.”
“And the folks in Moscow mission control had tried to shake the drill loose for two years,” added Sergei. “They had been unsuccessful. Something drastic had to be tried.”
“We’ve already got enough fuel there to serve as a backup for the trans-Earth injection,” pointed out Laura. “The mission is fine and the second lander will have two more drills, anyway.”
“I know, but I hate to see us miss an opportunity,” replied Will. “My recommendation, for what it’s worth, is for the Elysium to fly to Phobos on its way to the surface. We could fly the Lifter Stickney from Phobos to a Phobos transfer orbit; that’s a delta-vee of half a klick per second, so the Lifter would burn about three tonnes of its twenty tonnes of fuel to get there. Then the Elysium would aerobrake down from our current sun-synchronous elliptical orbit into the Phobos transfer orbit; that’d take only 50 meters per second of delta vee. We’d dock to the Lifter and transfer fuel; that’s the same maneuver the shuttles used to fuel up for the TMI. But if the fuel transfer failed, no essential part of the mission would be jeopardized; the Lifter could fly back to Phobos and the shuttle could aerobrake to the Martian surface. If the fuel transfer were successful, the Elysium would have all the fuel it needs to circularize its orbit, land on Phobos, repair the drill, get both drills working properly, explore the moon a bit, then head for the Martian surface. There would be enough fuel for the Lifter to return to Phobos and dock to the repaired fuel making plant. The Lifter would also be out of the way when we repaired the fuel-making plant.”
There was silence. Laura stared. “That’s a simple modification of an option in our emergency plans, but that doesn’t mean we can do it,” she finally said.
“The objection from Houston, will be that Mars is our primary mission and we shouldn’t get distracted from it,” noted Shinji.
“More specifically, we’re repairing a Russian piece of the mission that isn’t needed,” grumbled Sergei.
“We’ll be stuck in orbit two to three weeks anyway,” replied Will.
“The Marineris dust storm is abating very slowly,” added David. “In fact, today it reintensified somewhat.”
“I thought dust storm season was supposed to end two months ago,” growled Laura.
“This idea has merit,” said Sergei, deciding to stress the positive. “Moscow’s put a lot of resources into the Phobos plant. It has already made enough fuel to make a Phobos landing possible.”
“You don’t have a specialized suit for Phobos,” said Laura.
“True, but we have EVA suits,” replied Sergei. “The main thing Phobos suits need are small maneuvering jets, in case you jump off the moon. The EVA suits have that. We’ll have to watch the effects of Phobosian dust. We know that from the flight to 2011AR last year.”
“You don’t have training.”
“On the contrary; I do,” replied Sergei. “I trained to be a backup for the flight to 2011AR.”
“I sort of have training,” replied Will. “Phobos is a zero-gee environment; I know that environment, as do the rest of us. Phobos’s morphology resembles the moon, roughly, and its chemistry resembles chondritic meteorites. David has that kind of training, too.”
They nodded, but Laura persisted. “Look, Columbus 1 has to keep it simple. If we make the mission complicated, we increase the risk of accidents. What do you do if someone breaks an arm on Phobos?”
“Set it,” replied Will.
“I don’t know why the Americans have always been dead set against Phobos exploration and our fuel making plant,” added Sergei. “It’s politics.”
“Look, we can’t get stranded there,” said Will. “The Olympus could always come rescue us, and it could be refueled from newly made fuel. Phobos has two drills; both should make plenty of water available.”
“The Lifter could even go dock to one of the ITVs and haul it to Phobos, if necessary,” added David.
Laura threw her hands up. “Well, why not. Let’s tear up the standard mission and make up our own.”
“It’s not like we’ll be bored up here for three weeks,” added Shinji. “We can drive the prospectors on Mars much faster than the guys on Earth, and there’s outpost set up work to do.”
“That’s right,” reinforced Laura.
“I don’t know why you Americans have a problem with Phobos,” said Sergei, shaking his head. “NASA has been consistently against exploring the moons for three decades at least.”
“Hey, I’m not,” replied Will. “I think it’s a great idea. I’d love to visit a chondritic asteroid, which is what Phobos is.”
Ethel looked at Will; he looked at her, and it appeared they were exchanging a telepathic message. “You know, this is our mission,” she said. “This isn’t Apollo. We’re here for a year and a half. Our equipment is designed for ten years. Mission control really can’t help us much; they’re at least eight light-minutes away, usually much more. We need their permission, yes, but it’s our call.”
Laura looked at Shinji. “What do you think?”
He looked around, then shrugged. “I have no objection. I suppose I won’t be going, anyway, if the Elysium carries out the mission. The Olympus is scheduled to be the first on Mars, after all.”
“Exactly.” Laura looked around. “Okay, we have a reasonable plan, I think. Landing on Phobos involves two half kilometer-per-second delta-vees; extremely simple maneuvers. We’ve got a good system of global positioning satellites here and a beacon on Phobos already, so navigation is simple. We have the equipment and some training. Sergei, do we know how to fix the drillers?”
He nodded. “We’ve got the schematics, Ethel and I know the equipment, and the folks in Moscow are very good at explaining things to us.”
“They are,” agreed Ethel. “And the Phobos drillers have basically the same design as the drillers on the surface, so I am quite familiar with them.”
“Okay,” said Laura. “Let’s put the plan forward. I’ll contact mission control. All of you have contacts as well; feel free to email or videomail them. Let’s do it.”
© 2004 Robert H. Stockman