Pluto's Ghost- Encounter Edition

by B. C. CHASE

  I pulled the phone from its pouch beside my bed. It’s an old clamshell cellphone. Doesn’t do anything fancy like the ones everybody’s always got an inch or two from their faces these days. Squinting at the digital screen, I didn’t recognize the caller ID, so I pushed the big red button on the keypad. It rang again. I dismissed it again. It rang a third time. I answered it. “It’s three o’clock in the morning,” I growled, “Who is this?”

  “This is John Hogarth, the administrator of NASA.”

  So there I was, on the bunk of my truck at three o’clock in the morning with a phone to my ear and the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on the other end of the line. Sure.

  “Do you know why I am calling you, Mr. Perkins?”

  “Is this about those fireworks I shot off July 4th? Honest, I had no idea they would go that high.”

  Crickets. He doesn’t think I’m funny.

  I cleared my throat, “No, I don’t know why you’re calling me.”

  “Mr. Perkins, you are going to come visit the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. All expenses paid.”

  Now that was a head-scratcher. I had no recollection of entering a contest for a trip to NASA.

  “Are you at home?”

  “I’m a trucker. I’m on the road.” Now I was suspicious. “Who did you say you are again?”

  “I am John Hogarth, the administrator of NASA. I report to the President of the United States of America. Where are you now?”

  I decided to play along, expecting that I would be asked for my bank account information so they could ostensibly wire me my winnings, but with the true intention of surreptitiously cleaning out my account ASAP. “I’m at the Big D truck stop off Highway 95 at exit 104.”

  “We will send a helicopter to pick you up.”

  Facetiously I said, “Okay, I’m driving a blue Freightliner Cascadia, Kansas license number 23826. There’s room for a helicopter behind me, just watch out for trucks coming in and out.”

  “Perfect. You can expect the helicopter in about an hour,” Hogarth said.

  “Now do you need my bank account number?” I asked.

  “No. I said there is no cost to you, Mr. Perkins,” he emphasized, and abruptly hung up.

  I was left holding the phone and feeling a little dumbfounded. Then it occurred to me that he might really be the administrator of NASA and that this wasn’t a prank or a scam. And that made me very uncomfortable.

  Three

  I feel like an ant sitting on top of one of those machines that jiggle away your fat. The extreme vibration and the sound of the thunder beneath us—like a thousand sonic booms a minute—are reminders of how much we are at the mercy of the giant engines we are riding. Even louder than the engines, though, is the wind. It sounds like a freight train. The cabin is rattling, with creaks coming from all over, and our seats don’t seem to be that securely fastened to the floor, as they’re shaking like crazy.

  Commander Tomlinson is keeping his hands close to his chest—presumably so he doesn’t accidentally poke one of the touch screens. He looks relaxed, but his voice is strained over the radio. He says, “There are the clouds at 20,000.” The black sky briefly brightens through the windows.

  Suddenly, an alarm sounds.

  “What have we got, Shelby?” Commander Tomlinson asks.

  “DP/DT is about point zero seven,” Shelby strains to say.

  Houston asks, “In the positive or negative?”

  “Negative,” she replies.

  “No action on DP/DT,” Houston says.

  “Gotcha,” Shelby says.

  “You ready for four g’s, Perkins?” Tim asks.

  I reply, “Four g’s? I could have sworn we were already doing ten.”

  Tim laughs ironically, “Not remotely.”

  Commander Tomlinson says, “Stage one cutoff in five seconds.”

  “Confirm stage one cutoff,” Houston says.

  There is a sudden jolt.

  “Stage two start,” Commander Tomlinson says.

  “Stage two start,” confirms Houston.

  Another jolt and I feel like I’m on a roller coaster, but there isn’t as much rumble from the engines or sound from the wind because we’ve come high enough that the atmosphere is thin.

  After a few moments, Houston tells us we can open our visors. Since I didn’t wear my helmet, I have no visor to open.

  I can sense that the cabin is shifting. I feel kind of like I’m upside down, though the engines are still pressing me back against my seat. A curved line of orange appears through the upmost windows. It grows stronger like the spark of a long flame in the blackness. I see a sliver of light at the edge of the lowest window to the right. I realize I am looking at the moon, a crescent of silver below us in a sea of black. We are definitely upside down. Another bright pin of light appears to the left. It is remarkably quiet. I can barely hear the rumble of the engine anymore.

  Shelby nudges me, “That’s Venus, our first destination.”

  A spot of rainbow-rimmed light appears on the floor of the cabin. The light shifts as the cabin tilts until a flood of light gushes in, unbridled and crystalline. Directly in front of us, the sun blazes, white, clear, and vibrant. Above us is the edge of Earth’s horizon, beautiful and blue with sunlight glowing golden at its edge and streaming through tiny clouds on its surface. The sight takes my breath away.

  Commander Tomlinson says, “It’s beautiful up here, Houston.”

  “Beautiful,” Shelby repeats, gazing in awe.

  The sun continues to lower under the horizon, a beacon of brilliance hanging in the dark. Commander Tomlinson says, “Stage two cutoff ten seconds.”

  “Confirm stage two cutoff,” Houston echoes.

  And suddenly, the pressure pushing me back against my seat stops. I feel like I’m falling. I grip the edges of my seat. The feeling of falling won’t stop. Blood is rushing into my head like I’m upside down. I’m starting to panic. But then, the falling sensation dissipates and I feel a little dizzy and start to black out. Someone’s hand is moving into my field of vision. The hand moves slowly and I see that it isn’t attached to any arm. Someone’s hand has been chopped off and the hand is floating towards my face. Crap shoot! I think. It’s happening. We’ve had an accident. Blackness is closing in.

  “Jim?” Shelby’s voice says. “Jim? Are you okay?” She gently pats my cheek.

  I take a deep breath and my vision returns. She has left her seat and is in front of me. The hand is not a hand at all. It is her glove. Her feet are not planted on the floor where they should be. She’s floating.

  “Welcome to space,” Commander Tomlinson says, looking at me from behind Shelby.

  With an especially wide smile—even for him—Tim says, “A lot better than four g’s, isn’t it?”

  I lift my hands and tap Shelby’s glove. It drifts before my face. I push it back and forth between my hands. I look at Tim and smile, probably appearing like a seventy-five-year-old child. “I like it!” I giddily exclaim. I suppose it’s a good thing I wasn’t the first man in space because that would have been an unfortunate choice of words for Yuri Gagarin when he got there, no matter how sincerely he uttered them.

  Shelby is passing around water bags that have straws with valves on them. I want to try some mid-air summersaults, but she wants me to worry about hydration. I protest, “I’m not thirsty.”

  She questions, “Did you drink that soda before we left? I told you not to do that!”

  “I had to have my last Coke!”

  She shakes her head. “It’s a wonder anyone from your generation lives past fifty-five. Who did you get to smuggle it in for you?”

  “Hogarth,” I say. Administrator Hogarth is a tough character, but, unlike Shelby, he’s human. He saw no harm in handing me my last Coke the night before I died.

  Of course, we apparently survived the launch. We’re not dead. Darn it, I should have smuggled more Cokes up in my britches.

  Speaking of britc
hes, first order of business once we are hydrated is to get these bulky spacesuits off. Underneath the suits we are wearing nothing fancy: just t-shirts and khaki pants or, in my case, loose-fitting Wranglers. It takes us a good thirty minutes to disrobe, a task made a little tricky by the fact that the interior of the Dragon capsule is a mere eleven feet across at its widest point. Once the suits have been stowed, the crew start reviewing their post-launch checklist.

  What do I have to do? Hope and pray I can hold my bladder, because, although I’m wearing a MAG (that’s an astronaut diaper), I am determined not to use it. Everyone assured me it was no big deal, that it’s expected we will fill our diapers during or after launch. Maybe it’s because I’m closer than these kids to that stage of life when diapers could become a routine part of my get-up, but for whatever reason I simply refuse to soil my diaper unless I absolutely must. It’s going to be a big challenge because we will be stuck in here for six hours while we perform a Hohmann transfer and get our spacecraft aligned with the space station.

  First, I watch Commander Tomlinson lead the crew through their checklist, but that quickly gets boring, so I decide to get a closer look at Earth from 400,000 feet through the windows. If you ever imagined what it might be like to see Earth from space, let me assure you your imagination cannot possibly do it justice. As I gaze out, I stop breathing. The deep black is contrasted sharply by the blue radiance of our planet. I watch in awe while we pass over the glinting ocean sunrise, the tops of the billowing clouds catching the orange light of the sun. I see a green coast approaching and my mind struggles to make geographic sense of it. I see one landmass edged on top by another long and almost crescent-like mass. Some other form is behind these, but I have no idea what it is or what I’m looking at. Tim comes beside me and peers out. He smiles, “There’s my home.”

  “That’s England?”

  “And Ireland and Scotland, yes.”

  It doesn’t look like the Scotland, Ireland, and England I’m used to seeing on maps, at all. From here, they look gigantic, like continents. Yet, to my astonishment, within two minutes, we’ve passed the United Kingdom and we’re heading over France and Belgium. Tim returns to his tasks, but I keep watching.

  By the time the International Space Station slips into view above us, we have been all the way around the Earth four times.

  To me, the six hours have passed like minutes. I’ve seen some great views on the road, but nothing compared to this. Below the ISS, a space shuttle orbiter is visible, floating over the serene backdrop of clouds and ocean with its cargo bay doors spread open. The shuttle’s nose is raising very slowly, revealing the word Atlantis on its starboard wing.

  Commander Tomlinson peers out the window next to me. To the rest of the crew, he says, “She’s doing the RPM. What a waste of time. I still can’t believe they chose to dig up the old shuttles.”

  For me, someone who saw the shuttles on television back when they were the pride of America’s space program and unequalled in the world, the moment is powerful. They were never supposed to fly again, since the program was retired in 2010-11, but Space Shuttle Atlantis floats before me in the vast beauty of space, a relic from more audacious times. Due to the accidents of Columbia and Challenger, and because of the prohibitive expense of launching them (between two hundred million and a billion dollars per launch, depending upon how you calculate it), they were placed in exhibits at museums all over the country. Now Atlantis, Discovery, Endeavor, and even Enterprise (which was not previously used in space) have performed a total of almost 150 missions in the span of two years—an almost unbelievable feat, considering they had previously flown 135 missions in thirty years. While, on the whole, this has been a remarkable success, it hasn’t been without tragedy. Discovery was lost last month when it exploded during the jettison of the solid rocket boosters (SRBs). Seven crewmembers died. The investigation is still ongoing.

  The shuttle program was originally designed to fly as many as 180 missions a year with a two-week prep time for each shuttle. Conceived to be like an airliner, reusable and with a speedy relaunch, NASA sold the program on what turned out to be wildly optimistic cost control. In practice, because the safety of each critical component had to be assured for every flight, the fastest turnaround record was set by Atlantis—at a whopping fifty-four days. This could have been much faster, but speed came at a tremendous price in terms of manpower, and as the public lost interest in the space program, budgets dwindled and NASA was forced to make do. With both the Challenger and Columbia disasters, additional safety protocols were put in place, which further extended the time to launch. The net effect was a bloated program of low efficiency, ballooning expenditure, tragic failures, and seemingly endless delays.

  Despite its big-time deficiencies, however, it was a program that had successfully built the ISS, a nearly million-pound behemoth with the interior volume of a five-bedroom house and a veritable factory of equipment outside. Commander Tomlinson was in the meeting where Administrator Hogarth made the reluctant decision to bring the shuttles out of retirement. Tomlinson told us it was a very heated debate, with the shuttles receiving a lot of scorn from those (including Tomlinson himself) who saw them as fundamentally flawed, experimental aircraft that had failed and, with good reason, were put to rest. But in the end, it came down to the fact that, even with all the world’s biggest rockets working overtime, only about half the heavy-lift launches NASA needed to complete the retrofit could be found. The space shuttle with its rockets was the only vehicle available that could get the job done as quickly as it was needed, and, for this mission at least, money was no object. Everybody was all excited about the newer programs like Falcon Heavy (which, by the way, is the rocket that just carried us into orbit), but like a kid whose moving off to college and must make do with mom’s good old minivan to get all his junk there, NASA had to make do with America’s good old shuttles in order to get the station ready to move out of Earth’s orbit.

  The shuttle, white and black with its wings looking kind of like flippers, reminds me of one of those killer whales you see in the amusement parks. Gracefully, it is performing a slow backflip over the blue backdrop of Earth’s ocean. The scene moves me with its serene beauty. They’re both the last of their kind. No more whales in the parks. No more shuttles in the sky.

  There are some loud noises as the thrusters are automatically fired in quick succession by the computer. A voice comes over the radio, “Station, this is Houston for Dragon. Confirm 250 meter hold for step two in one decimal one zero two.”

  A different voice responds, “Houston, we confirm we have good range and corridor is displayed. It’s looking good from our perspective.”

  “Okay we copy, thanks.”

  “Houston, this is Station. Are you guys ready for block bravo?”

  “Confirm block bravo.”

  I realize now that I really have to pee, and I’m still determined not to use the diaper I’m wearing, so I am relieved to hear this chatter. “How long ‘till we can dock?” I eagerly ask, trying not to do the space potty dance.

  My heart sinks when Commander Tomlinson replies, “About three hours. We have to wait for Atlantis.”

  Whereas before, six hours seemed like minutes, the hours to docking pass like a slow drip from a leaky faucet, and it’s all I can do to keep my legs from doing a jig. Finally, I lose control and I feel the warmth saturate my diaper. It’s a surprisingly pleasant sensation, like dipping into a warm bath. As soon as I’m able, I stop the flow, determined to cling to at least the last few drops of my dignity. Plus I don’t want to overfill my diaper and soil Old Glory. I’m wishing I’d have found a different hiding spot for the flag.

  Atlantis finishes its backflip and then rises with its back to the forward-most point of the station. I stare in impatience as it makes excruciatingly slow progress in docking. Finally, I hear someone say, “Atlantis docked successfully. Beginning pressurization.”

  Now it’s our turn. Ever so slowly, our Dragon capsule r
ises up towards the underside of the space station. Our craft needs to get close enough that one of the station’s robotic arms can capture us and reel us up to the node.

  The station is impressively long (about the length of two football fields) and much larger than it used to be. The one hundred fifty 150 post-retirement shuttle missions, in conjunction with another 170 additional missions performed by Atlas IV’s, Atlas V’s, Delta IV, Ariane V, H2, Falcon 9s, Falcon Heavies, Protons, and the ever-reliable Soyuz, have quadrupled the interior volume of the ISS. In addition to the fourteen sections it had before, it now has ten expandable Bigelow Aerospace B330 modules, each of which provide 514 square feet of space. These additions have been minor, however, compared to the structural trusses, thermal shields, rockets, and fuel tanks (spent space shuttle external tanks from all these construction missions) that have been retrofitted. The trusses have added the support that will be critical on a long-term voyage. The thermal shielding will protect us from the searing heat of the sun, and the rockets will power us away from the Earth and towards our first target: Venus. Contained in a series of the massive titanium tanks at the aft end of the station is the fuel we will need for the journey to Pluto: over one million gallons of liquid oxygen, hydrogen, and hydrazine. The oxygen and hydrogen will get us out of Earth orbit. The hydrazine, which can be stored almost indefinitely, will help us maneuver through space.

  There is a clunking sound as the robotic arm attaches itself to our capsule, and I hear the astronauts congratulate one another on a successful capture. It takes minutes for the arm to swing us up into place under the same node that the shuttle is docked to. The capture is again a success, but instead of throwing open the hatch and rushing into the station to storm the bathroom, as I hoped to do, I find we must wait yet again for the compartment between the space station’s hatch and our capsule’s hatch to pressurize.