Losing Mars

by Peter Cawdron

  Dedication

  Pure O2

  Outbound

  Rescue

  Descent

  Space Lesbians

  The Chinese

  Flight

  Launch

  Phobos

  Oxygen

  Huŏxīng Wu

  Beautiful

  Going Home

  Inside the Crater

  Lost in the Darkness

  Fate

  Lies

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Losing Mars

  Copyright © Peter Cawdron 2018

  All rights reserved. The right of Peter Cawdron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by me in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Dedication

  For my son, Sam

  “Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.”

  Humphry Davy, 1830

  Pure O2

  Water drips from dozens of hydroponic tubes, slowly making its way back to the murky pond beneath the rack. Fresh spinach rises out of the white PVC piping. I run my hands over the crop, feeling the texture of the leaves beneath my fingertips, and turn over a leaf, examining the veins on the underside. Lush and healthy.

  A slight crackle in my earpiece precedes an incoming message from my wife, Jen. “How are the kids doing?”

  My voice sounds faint from behind the thin plastic mask covering my nose and mouth. “They’re going to be fine.”

  Jen’s bored. If she’s talking to me it’s because everyone else is busy and she’s twiddling her thumbs waiting on incoming messages from Houston.

  Most people imagine life on Mars is a constant heart-thumping adventure. There’s a sense of romanticism about being the first explorers on another planet. The final frontier and all that. Nothing could be further from reality. Life here is monotonous and repetitive. The glamor of a high profile launch faded with seven boring months while we undertook our transit to the red planet. Then there was a rush of adrenalin with the landing. Since then, it’s been all business. In decades to come, I’m sure we’ll reflect back on our time on Mars with a sense of nostalgia, but the truth is, we’re working long days with little to show for it.

  “How’s the water pump, Mr. Fix It?”

  I laugh. “Yeah, held together with wire and a bit of tape. I’m gonna need to get the 3D printers to build some new bearings.”

  Damn, she really is bored if she’s asking about my work.

  There are no weekends on Mars. If we take a day off, nothing gets done, which is really dumb. Take a day off and work backs up. Instead, we have ‘light duty days,’ which is a fancy name for Sundays. Sleep in ‘til nine. Three hours personal time. Half a day of work followed by a rare evening without any additional tasks from NASA.

  “Hey, what’s a botanist’s favorite musical instrument?”

  Jen humors me. “I dunno, what?”

  “A photo-synthesizer.”

  She groans, which elicits a laugh from me.

  “Okay. Okay. How about this one? Why were E. coli, penicillin and lactobacilli banned from the movie premier?”

  I can hear the reservation in her voice. “All right. I’ll bite. Why?”

  “Because they’re all major spoilers.”

  “Oh, that’s bad—even for you.”

  To my delight, Jen actually chuckles a little.

  “I should’ve been a stand-up comedian.”

  “Cory. Honey.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t quit your day job.”

  I laugh. Okay, that’s the funniest joke of all.

  An instrument panel glows before me. Back to business.

  “Temperature’s a little high. Humidity 98%. Pressure almost fifty kilopascals.”

  “And where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?”

  Jen is awesome. A measurement such as fifty kilopascals is meaningless to her without any context, so she’s giving me a little nudge.

  “Ah, Carmen is somewhere high in the Yukon, right on the border of Alaska, in the midst of a sweltering summer.”

  There’s no reply, but I know she’s nodding in acknowledgement.

  “CO2 is high—at 4%. Dialing back. I’d like to keep that below two if possible. With the bacterial outbreak under control, I’m switching to 18 hours of daylight.”

  “Copy that.” Jen isn’t really copying that or anything else I’m saying. She’s just being nice, staying on the channel while I work alone in the bio-mod.

  I squeeze between plastic trusses that flex and sway as I step forward. They rock on their mounts as though a breeze was passing through the Martian habitat. Fans circulate air within the sealed greenhouse. Grow lights simulate the warmth of the sun under a concrete sky within the dome. There’s no glass over our greenhouse as the sun is too weak this far out. Being buried beneath a rock pile is actually quite clever as it spares our plants from the rapid temperature changes between night and day, allowing more moderation. We burn through a lot of electricity in here, but it’s mostly nuclear.

  “We’re going to lose most of our wheat, but it’ll bounce back.”

  The heat from the lights strikes the back of my neck like an unrelenting summer’s day, but it’s an illusion. I won’t feel that outside the greenhouse, not on Mars. Here in the bio-mod, I can close my eyes, breathe deeply and ignore the hiss of oxygen coming from my life-support pack. For a moment, I can imagine I’m back on Earth. No one admits to daydreaming about home, but everyone does. Living on Mars is the adventure of a lifetime, but adventures are far more romantic when someone else is living them. Reality is unrelenting hard work.

  Sweat drips from my forehead, running into the corner of my eye. I wipe the back of my wrist across my brow.

  “The cherry tomatoes are ripe.”

  I pick one, rub it lightly on my shirt, shining it like an apple, and slip it under my mask. The tiny red orb pops in my mouth. One bite and a burst of flavor explodes on my tongue.

  “Oh, damn. They’re good.”

  “Bring some in for dinner.”

  “Will do.”

  I check on the kale with its purple stems and dark green leaves. Green. Such a beautiful color. My hand glides over the crop, relishing the soft textures passing beneath my fingers.

  On Earth, botany was an elective recommended to me on joining the astronaut corps. Originally, I wanted to focus on physics, but what need is there for relativistic equations on Mars? Botany got me on the roster for the red planet. Marrying a surgeon with over a hundred hours flight time on three Orion missions bought me a first-class ticket, but the realization of living on Mars is entirely different to what I expected. Being selected for the mission was like getting drunk at a wedding—everything was wonderful with the world. My workload tripled, but I didn’t care. Jen and I were in love and bound for Mars! Getting here, though, and living on the surface for the best part of a year is akin to having an epic hangover. Nothing is what it seemed back then.

  Potatoes hang from beneath a hydroponic bed. On top of the thin plastic pane, green leaves absorb the artificial sunlight. I check the health of the dangly root structure, running my hand over the fine hair-like fibers, examining the bulbs for any sign of fungus.

  I move on to the carrots, which are deep purple. They’re not as crunchy or as tasty as the orange carrots I grew up on back in Nebraska, but they’re packed with antioxidants. Tough as an old boot, but okay in a salad.

  There are no windows in the bio-mod, whi
ch has been built in the shape of a half-pipe turned upside down. Several tons of regolith have been bulldozed on top of the structure, protecting it from cosmic rays and moderating the wild temperature fluctuations, which can be as great as a hundred degrees in any given day.

  Mars isn’t Earth. I know that, but after ten months on the surface I’ve managed to largely ignore the differences except when I’m under pressure. Whether it’s a petty argument with Jen, spoken in hushed tones within the confines of our bedroom, or frustration with a faulty sensor, it’s at those times I become acutely aware we’re stuck on an alien world. Not abandoned. But not free to leave either.

  I’d never admit it to anyone, not even Jen, but nothing about Mars feels right. Gravity still sucks, but not like it used to. Thirty eight years of living in one gee ingrains clear physical expectations, etching them on the brain. On Mars, I feel lighter. Walking through the module is a strange experience, like being caught in a dream, almost like wading through water, only without any resistance. Drop a screwdriver and it tumbles rather than falls. In practice, it’s nice, but the difference hits me harder than I thought it would during training. Mars never feels quite right. It’s not normal, and that keeps me on edge.

  Mars is strange. The mission psychologists warned me about becoming SAD on Mars—being caught in a perpetual version of Earth’s Seasonal Affective Disorder. They told me, they told all of us, that living on Mars would be like being trapped in a never ending winter, and that our personalities, our temperament, our emotional thresholds and trigger points would all be lowered by the harsh Martian environment. Back then, I thought they were exaggerating—not any more.

  Mars is bleak. There may not be three feet of blinding white snow blanketing the landscape, but the color palette on Mars is narrow. Everything’s dull. All the pictures of Mars, whether taken from orbit or by rovers, show vibrant reds and oranges, but they’ve been enhanced, with the colors and brightness adjusted so they look as though they were taken on Earth, but the sunlight that falls on Mars is roughly half that which reaches Earth. Every day is overcast but there are no clouds in the sky. Every rock, boulder, mound, hill, crater, and mountain range is a ruddy beige—for lack of a better term—everything except my plants. Little did I know how therapeutic it would be working in the greenhouse—microbial outbreaks not withstanding.

  I crouch, examining the nutrient pump, adjusting the mix as Jen speaks calmly in my ear. Her voice has lost the casual, easy-going tone she had just minutes ago.

  “We have a class one emergency. All crew standby.”

  Her matter-of-fact tone is more alarming than if she was panicked. Jennifer’s words are precise, clinical, cold, impersonal. Her surgical background is coming into play.

  An emergency—could be anything from a failed electrical circuit to the loss of an entire module.

  Class one—means life or limb are in danger.

  Standby—a polite way of saying, Don’t worry, you’re not going to die, but get ready, just in case.

  “Cory Anderson standing by.”

  On Mars, everything’s recorded. Absolutely everything. Not everything is transmitted back to Earth, but outside of our bedrooms, there’s no privacy. Even in the sanctity of our private quarters there’s at least thermal and atmospheric monitoring to detect the possibility of a hull breach, while raised voices will be picked up by the overly sensitive mics in the living area. It’s not that Big Brother is watching, more that Paranoid Dad wants to get on top of any potential problems asap. Not much is sent back to Houston. Machine learning analyzes feeds and transmits anything out of the ordinary for review on Earth, with most of it converted from voice to text. Jen and I have a rule: no panting or swearing during sex, just a little giggling from behind paper-thin walls. No one’s ever said anything, but I’m sure the shrinks love that stuff.

  Class one emergencies are automatically broadcast back to Earth in full, although at this point in our orbit, it’ll be roughly an hour before Jen gets a reply from Mission Control in Houston.

  I make my way to the airlock. That I’m in the dark means there’s no immediate danger to me or the greenhouse. Jen’s on communications watch, overseeing activity within the base. Standard operating procedure dictates that during an emergency she focuses on the immediate problem. Right about now I’ve probably been classified as an auxiliary—someone outside the primary incident but someone who could be called on to assist if needed. To avoid confusion, I’m isolated from comms. Too many cooks or chiefs or chefs or whatever tend to spoil everything. If they need me, they’ll loop me in.

  I sit inside the airlock with the door to the greenhouse closed, but I don’t purge the atmosphere. With no knowledge of what’s happening, I need to ignore the impulsive desire to rush and do something, anything. As hard as it is, I sit and wait.

  There are six people on station at Shepard—three married couples. Jen and I cover botany and medical between us and share base communications. The Washingtons specialize in engineering and electronics, while the Barnes are in charge of research and exploration.

  Shepard is technically a multi-national base, with module fabrication handled by JAXA, the Japanese space agency, and a crew from the US and Europe, but in practice, day to day management is handled by NASA.

  Jen is from Varese, a small town in northern Italy, set at the foothills of the Alps, but she lived and trained in the US for over a decade. Sue Barnes is from England, although she moved around so much as a child she doesn’t call any one town home. The rest of us are Americans.

  I recall the assignments for the day. Scott and Sue Barnes are on a surface op, collecting a boomer that crashed on approach to the landing strip—a section of bare regolith a quarter mile long, meticulously cleared of rocks by JAXA bots. Sue helped design the Boomers, or boomerangs to use their official name. They’re survey balloons—a point that tripped up no end of reporters during our public briefings prior to launch. ‘So they always come back?’ The obvious answer is, ‘No.’ Inevitably, the follow up question was, ‘Why do you call them boomerangs?’ I remember shaking my head at the assumption they were literal boomerangs. What? Did the press think astronauts would stand on the surface of Mars throwing boomerangs into the frigid air? The name was a result of the shape, which was determined by engineering considerations.

  Flight is next to impossible on Mars. The atmosphere is so thin there’s no lift generated until an aircraft is traveling over MACH 1. The idea of having a plane like the SR-71 Blackbird racing down an impossibly long runway until it hits a thousand miles an hour only to creep slowly into the sky was discarded very early in the planning process. Lightweight drones? Yes. 747s or even a Cessna? Nope. Not happening.

  The dynamics of flight on Earth simply don’t work on Mars. Helicopters are worse. They simply cannot fly. Their blades would need to turn faster than the speed of sound to get airborne. On Earth, the ceiling for helicopters is around 40,000 feet, while the atmosphere on Mars equates to an altitude of about 150,000 feet on Earth, which is well above the ceiling for even the SR-71 Blackbird, which tops out around 90,000 feet. The air on Mars is just too thin to make regular flight practical.

  Even if an airplane could get off the ground, turning would be a nightmare. The air is so tenuously thin, a supersonic aircraft could bank hard, facing completely sideways, and still not actually start turning for several miles. Driving on black ice would be easier by comparison. In addition to that, the horrific amount of fuel required for supersonic flight puts aircraft out of consideration, not to mention their inability to glide safely in the event of a mechanical failure. Nope. It’s rockets and balloons for us—which ironically represents the two extremes of flight on Earth—the simplest vs the most complicated—the oldest vs the newest.

  We have rockhoppers—small drones with blades that whirl around like a kitchen blender. With twenty minutes flight time, they can cover six to eight kilometers a day before they have to land and recharge their batteries using solar panels built into their ti
ny frame. The next day, on they hop, exploring another ridge line or surveying crater walls and dried-up riverbeds. We started with twelve of them but are down to just five as they tend to crash in inaccessible areas, like on steep slopes. The boomers are the driving force behind our exploration efforts here on Mars.

  When it came to surveying the Valles Marineris, NASA settled on Montgolfiers—hot air balloons. Only even these don’t work quite the way they do on Earth. When the average air temperature is negative seventy, ‘hot’ is anything even slightly warm. Then there’s the astonishing size needed to lift scientific equipment into the impossibly thin atmosphere. Our Martian hot air balloons look more like the high altitude weather balloons on Earth—massive teardrops that dwarf their tiny payloads—a gigantic exclamation mark floating above the rocky surface, seemingly without an exclamation point. Most people, on seeing the quarter-mile long airstrip outside the base, assume it’s a runway, but it’s used exclusively for conducting repairs to deflated balloons. We can stretch three or four of them out at a time for patching and fixes. It also gives us a nice broad target when bringing them home if we’re running into headwinds. The heat within the balloons comes from burning methane and oxygen harvested from the atmosphere and subsurface water ice, and is generally in short supply, so missions have to be planned well in advance.

  The boomers are a marvel of engineering. If only the Montgolfier brothers could see how their sackcloth and paper designs, originally powered by burning wool and hay, were being used to explore another planet! The pride of 17th century France is now the pinnacle of off-world exploration, with similar designs being floated for Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, along with the moon Titan.

  The finishing touch was the boomerang itself.

  The last hurdle to solve when it came to flying on Mars was maneuverability. The Martian atmosphere is windy, but on Mars, a raging storm feels like a light breeze on Earth. Waiting on the wind to go anywhere wasn’t a viable option, not unless NASA wanted exploration to unfold at a snail’s pace.