A Routine Departure, Terry Wilson [reading strategies book txt] 📗

A Routine Departure

Note: Cover image created by Ballistic Trajectory Planner by www.astrojava.com

<Equinox CDR, Malton go for startup. Thomas, any time you're ready. Hope you didn't forget your keys,> the intercom speakers announce to the four occupants of the Sprint Crew Ferry poised for launch.

The three-core Lilmax booster sits on Pad 43 of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The booster was built to be practical for the size of the payload it was going to be launching to low energy orbit, what LEO stands for in the dialect of the Canadian Aerospace Society and their main contractor, Ascent International. Like any rocket ready for launch, it smoulders excitedly with cryogenic mist, however it is still a couple of hours away from lift-off. This booster was built up to pad pressure and pre-chilled with almost harmless liquid nitrogen before the crew got on board in the last couple of minutes. Except for the small tanks of the Sprint Crew Ferry, and the equally small tanks of the booster's Reaction Control System, the frigid booster doesn't have a drop of fuel or oxidizer (both of which are needed for an engine to run without air.)

A couple hundred metres north is the pregnant looking sphere for the liquid oxygen, insulated and constantly under pressure, though modest, is ready to squeeze the "LOX" into the booster. It's large enough to fill five of the modules this booster has three of, and the concrete apron it sits on the corner of is big enough to stand three more such tanks, just in case Ascent International expanded into big boosters. But no: next to the tank, on its own foundation, is the first liquid oxygen plant, which efficiently draws in huge amounts of air, pushes it through a series of membrane filters to separate the 21% component of oxygen, and then cool it down to -160 degrees Centigrade, whence it liquifies. The second, even larger LOX factory sits on the same pad of concrete as the LOX tank, towering over it, taking up the real estate previously reserved for another tank. Enough LOX production for a booster a week, the launch rate maintained by Lilmax for the last five months.

"Malton, Equinox, standby one," he responds dryly, then takes the keys from his blue spacesuit's reflective orange shoulder pocket.

A mocking Australian drawl, "Standby one, he says." It's the lady in the back seat across the centre console to his right, who is also in a blue spacesuit with brilliant orange stripes that fail to overwhelm her high cheeks and intelligent blue eyes. She playfully drawls, "Ground Control to Major Tom, and he says Standby one like it'll take a whole minute to find his keys."

"Lucy, you should go carpooling with him," the spritely lad in the front seat offers.

Lucy, the pilot laughs, "Like you'd know, Ronny." During their two years of training, the members of the Equinox crew took turns carpooling.

Beatrice Laurence, the smallest of the four astronauts, in the front left hand seat in front of Thomas, silently unfolds the touchscreen flight console from its hiding spot in the wall to her left. Touching it with the stylus extending from the second knuckle of her right glove, she calls up the systems she's responsible for. "God," she gasps, the smile stretching across her charcoal face as the numbers and icons appear, burned into her brown eyes from almost two years of training, "I can't believe this is for real."

On hearing that, Thomas is suddenly just a tad reluctant to turn the key in the eleven billion dollar ignition. That might seem like a lot, but for sending four human beings to the red planet, it's a yard sale bargain. Thomas turns the key from Safe to Standby.

An klaxon buzzes outside, a flashing red strobe at the top of the gantry, as though the rust colored tower brooding over the smooth white booster angrily announces, "Nobody touches my child!"

27 years ago, a study team called the Space Exploration Initiative figured out a plan that would cost seven hundred billion dollars to get six people to Mars, then only stay there a month, subjecting the unfortunate crew to almost two years of cruising through space that was infested with micro-meteors, cosmic and solar radiation, and worst of all, boredom. The following year, Robert Zubrin and David Baker came up with a plan called Mars Direct which brought it down to "just" eighty billion dollars. The breakthrough was "live off the land." Make the fuel and oxidizer for the return trip using the atmosphere of Mars. He also disposed of the silly notion of spending only a month on Mars. We should be going to Mars to, well, actually do something on Mars!! And so, along with the way the two planets line up every two years plus change, the standard mission became six months out, six months back, punctuating a year and a half spent on the red planet.

Later, only nine years ago, Grant Bonin and Terry Wilson ganged up on the problem and put together a raft of seemingly innocuous ideas which together became rather controversial. "Live within your means," they said. Bonin first proposed launching Mars Direct using smaller boosters to get it into space and assemble it on Earth orbit in his plan Mars For Less. Wilson decided that the best approach was actually to use not only smaller boosters, but smaller landers to get to the surface of Mars, then assemble the mission once you've landed. Grant Bonin, in an impressive change of character, recommended high orbit assembly, and the result was After Columbia Mars Direction. Wilson also sifted hundreds of pages of technical papers on how to make a cheap booster, including John R. London III's seminal 1993 book LEO On The Cheap, hundreds of pages of rocket motor calculations, and figured out what the cheapest booster would look like for each payload category. A group of rich entrepreneurs discovered his Ascent Roadmap and used it to found Ascent International, which undercut existing launch service providers so badly that only two survived. The first was SpaceX, who rivaled Ascent's cheap steel boosters with aluminum boosters built using similar compromises of mass and cost and quickly adapted to Ascent's concept of step tapering. The other was ArianeSpace, who adopted the first practical booster ever: the Russian Soyuz. All three have contributed to the mission: the Lilmax launched all the mission elements, while the SpaceX Falcon launched many of the modular stages that would do all the deep space maneuvers. The smaller Soyuz launched the three communication satellites, two are already at Mars, the third launched last month.

Today is 20 March, 2016, and about darn well time we went to Mars.

After two hours of monitoring their booster as it was filled with liquid oxygen and kerosene fuel, Thomas turns his key from Standby to Launch, connecting the switches and valves that will light up the "candles" to the computers that will actually make the final decision. They are essentially trained million-mile-a-minute dogs designed to obediently follow the instructions on their sophisticated scripts, carefully sniffing for problems amongst over a thousand measurements, not the least of which are the pad crew's red switches, there just in case human intuition spots something the computer dogs aren't smart enough to figure out on their own, or, as it was in a couple of training simulations, an embarrassing case of stomach butterflies.

"Failure Scenario Lookouts," (FSL) paid to make Murphy look like a hopeless optimist in ignorant bliss, sadistically found ways to screw up training simulations that were (usually) plausible and realistic. Once, at the beginning of a training simulation starting the second day of the mission, one walked up to the Flight Director, put a hand on his shoulder and explained, "This morning you got into a car accident and suffered a skull fracture." Despite all the protests of his engineers, the fizzle continued, "You'll be fine in a couple of months, just these fellas will have to do the departure without you."

The balding Flight Director looked to his protegè with a smile and a wink and said, "Get him for me" then enjoyed his unannounced sick day from the visitor's gallery. The student didn't make every decision the same way as his mentor, but he certainly proved that the death of the Flight Director was something Equinox could live through.

The mighty Lilmax was hardly mighty, just a smidgen bigger than the Atlas VI it knocked out of the market last year. It didn't achieve its "90% off" reputation by being the "Big Dumb Booster" that so many people thought was the right way to go. Nor did it stick with the "Small Smart Booster" philosophy that made every satellite launcher in the western world so frustratingly expensive for almost sixty years. It found the middle road, a "Big Practical Booster" with the right combination of Smart and Dumb.

As the pressures in the main tanks built up for launch, stiffening each of Lilmax tanks like a wild bottle of soda pop, three dozen engineers in Malton, along with two dozen a couple miles away from the launch pad, kept a close eye on the systems they designed and built, most of which were already in space. The four whose lives would be at stake if something went terribly wrong are in the Sprint Crew Ferry on top of the centre module of the three barreled booster.

<In the front left seat we have Beatrice Laurence, a twenty-seven year old biologist of African descent…> The television commentator goes on to describe a modest education and career punctuated by a couple of famous papers on the Nakhli meteorites thought to have originated on Mars. Remembering her age, those "modest" credentials are pretty spectacular. She's also the Field Surgeon: If medicine or surgery is needed during the two and a half year mission, four doctors and all the engineers on Earth figure out how to do it using what Equinox has available, train her using virtual simulation, and then she'll actually cut the patient, and bake, brew, grow, ferment or whatever to make the prescribed medicine. They had their own FSLs. The doctors turned from of the fizzle's scenarios and, after considering for only a minute, asked Beatrice what she would prescribe for Ronny's impotence. Her answer was immediate, "Call Brenda (his wife), she'll be sleeping easier tonight."

<In the front right seat, twenty-nine year old mission geologist Ronald Harvey…> He looks like the blonde surfer boy without the tan, his appearance belies his age, and he still gets ID'd when he goes to the liquor store near the end of the newest girl's shift. Hardly looks like the guy who will be named mission commander seven days after landing until seven days before lifting off to return. On Devon Island, one of Nunavut's arctic islands in Canada, sits Flashline Station on the northern edge of Haughton Crater, among the most Mars-like terrain you can find on Earth. A couple hundred metres away sits the smaller Equinox Station, where the crew explored the island for an agonizing six months of "hard sim", rules maintained despite one danger they're not expecting on Mars: Bobby the polar bear. Only one of the four crew members seemed in his element, and