I peel back an ear of corn, exposing the husk then the bright blue kernel hidden beneath. Without damaging the plant, I turn the cob slightly, making sure the camera gets a good view of the color.
“Jacinta Mays from Bellevue High School in Des Moines, Iowa asked, ‘Why do you grow blue corn on a red planet?’ Great question… Jorge Martinez from George Washington High School in San Diego asked a similar question. ‘Why do you color your corn blue?’
“The answer may surprise you—we didn’t. This is Native American Hopi corn from the American southwest.
“Hopi corn has a third more protein and anthocyanin, which makes it super healthy, helping us stay in shape for our mission. So forget fast food, guys. Go bug your parents. Tell them you want blue corn like the astronauts.”
I step out of the corn rows and squeeze between the trellis lattice work growing green beans and sweet peas, being careful not to catch the thin plastic oxygen cord leading to my face mask on any of the growing racks. I’ve only ever had my oxygen detach once when the tube caught on a ledge. It’s no big deal. At four percent saturation, the high carbon dioxide will bring on a splitting migraine pretty damn quick, but it’s not lethal until it hits around eight percent, and even at that level it would take a minute or so to lose consciousness.
“It’s easy to look at us here on Mars and think we’re different, that we’re somehow super special, but remember, we were all once sitting in front of wooden desks just like you. We had too much homework, not enough time to play. We had teachers we loved, subjects we hated... Stay curious. Enjoy life. Dream. Reach for the stars and one day, you may find yourself on Mars.”
I check the questions on my wrist pad.
“Okay. We’ve got time for one more. Jean Baptiste from Lycée Val de Sarthe High School in France asked, ‘Is all your food organic?’ Well, Jean, if you mean is it grown in poop? Yes.”
Jen speaks over the radio mounted in my ear. “Ah, I… Sorry to interrupt. Hedy and Scott want you back.”
“Oh, sure. All right guys, until next time, this is Cory Anderson signing off from the Eos Chaos on Mars. The core message from the red planet is eat plenty of greens... and blues.”
With the vid-cast stopped, I hit transmit, sending the video back to Houston. Each month, one of us astronauts takes a turn at creating informative videos to inspire the next generation of explorers. Although the clip is only fifteen minutes long and would take roughly half an hour to reach Earth, it will be several days before anyone back there sees it as streaming images is a low priority. My video will be cut up into packets and transmitted along with scientific and operational data over the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Once it’s reassembled, it’ll be inspected by the NASA Communications Office and then forwarded to the US Department of Education for review. Only then will the various schools be notified that their questions were answered and the clip will be available to the public.
“What’s going on?”
Jen’s quiet, which is out of character. Her terminology was vague. To anyone watching the video, it would sound like an entirely ordinary, reasonable request, but ‘want you back’ is cryptic. I’m not anywhere in particular to start with—I’m in the module right next door, not out on the canyon wall or exploring some crater.
The airlock cycles. I stash my face mask and set my oxygen cylinder to refill, remove my coveralls and enter the main module. Scott’s sitting with his leg outstretched on another chair. Someone’s signed his cast with a black marker: Alan Shepard was here.
“What’s up?”
“It’s the Chinese mission.”
“To Phobos?”
Scott nods. “Yeah.”
Lisa and Hedy are sitting at the central table next to Scott, talking as they work on the flat surface doubling as a vast computer screen. Susan has two cups of coffee. She offers me one.
“Thanks.”
Jen pulls her earpiece out as I approach.
“Bad, huh?”
“Real bad. Fatalities.”
That last word hits me like a baseball bat. Not deaths. Fatalities. There’s something horribly inhuman about detaching sentiment from words. I understand my wife’s intent, and being a surgeon she’s experienced both the triumph of saving a life and the heartache of losing one. But for me, the term feels hollow. It’s fickle. Hideous. If I’d died in the Eos while rescuing Scott, I too would have been a fatality—a brief headline in the news. In that instant, the entirety of my life would be reduced to a single fact, distilled into the tragedy of a moment and then assigned to history.
Mentally, I recall what I know about the Chinese flight plan. Their mission was for an eight month outbound flight followed by six weeks in orbit around Mars. We spoke briefly with our fellow sojourners when they first arrived high above us but as there’s no formal cooperation between the US and China, it was a one-off courtesy. Their mission called for the Huŏxīng Wŭ, a Chinese vessel designated as Mars Five, to rendezvous with Phobos and collect samples before returning to Earth.
The US media called their mission “Mars on a shoestring,” noting the Chinese had avoided the technical difficulties and outlandish cost associated with landing on Mars while still embracing the hype and nationalistic glory of conquest in space. None of us have any doubts about the courage of the taikonauts soaring around the planet, though. If anything, their flight is made more difficult by the absence of a landing as their bodies will be subject to weightlessness for the best part of two years. Being crammed into a tin can barely larger than a cargo van for that long takes astonishing mental resilience.
By the time they get back to Earth, land on the Mongolian plains bordering northwestern China and crawl out of their spacecraft, they’ll be as weak as newborn kittens. It could take years for them to fully recover from the physical toll of their mission, perhaps even decades. Oh, they’ll be able to walk within a few hours, perhaps run within a few days to a week, but space ages the body and gravity sucks—hard. Given what we’ve learned on the International Space Station, there may be some aspects of life that are never quite the same again—eyesight, odd aches, the ease with which a muscle can be strained, poor bone strength and even such obscure things as indigestion. Space flight isn’t all Buck Rogers and slick rocket packs.
As far as I’m concerned, the Chinese may have different scientific goals but they’re just as courageous. There’s something profoundly unsettling about being adrift in deep space for months on end. It’s one thing to orbit a gorgeous blue planet, with clouds swirling through a turbulent atmosphere. Azure waters, jagged mountains and lush green islands pass by with a sense of rhythm that’s both majestic and serene. It’s entirely different to stare into the endless void week after week after week. Cabin lights cause all but the brightest stars to fade from view, leaving nothing but the empty darkness beyond. Even though I flew with my wife and the rest of the Shepard crew, there were moments where I felt utterly alone. Isolated. Small. Vulnerable. Insignificant. Seeing Earth from orbit is inspiring, but the pitch black darkness that opens out into eternity is daunting. Intimidating.
Living on top of a bunch of other astronauts, with no escape except for a few short hours of sleep spaced at regular intervals artificially described as ‘days and nights’ left me mentally exhausted. When that tiny speck of red light finally resolved into an actual world, the euphoria was overwhelming.
Our initial orbit was highly elliptical, so we’d spend a day seeing Mars nicely framed in the porthole before racing in to dip our toes in the atmosphere. At our closest approach, Mars blotted out the sky, and the view seemed more like one from an airplane than a spaceship. Craters, canyons, gullies and sand dunes rolled beneath us, then we swung out again, soaring back into the darkness. After dozens of passes, aerobraking allowed us to settle into a roughly circular orbit. Seeing Demos and Phobos soar by out the window was a little unnerving, but our orbits were timed to avoid the moons.
“How many died?”
From what’s been said so
far, it’s plural, at least. I hate assigning tragedy a number, reducing lives to a mere statistic, but I have to know.
Jen speaks softly. “From what we can tell, two.”
One is too many, but somehow two gives context to the disaster—there were survivors.
Lisa says, “Houston has relayed a translation of the cockpit transcript to us, but details are sketchy.”
I can’t imagine dealing with dead bodies within the cramped confines of a space capsule. Unlike the International Space Station, there are no airlocks in which to store a corpse, so the survivors have probably sealed the bodies in spacesuits and closed the glare visors, turning their life support systems into coffins. When it comes to the US Orion, the entire cabin acts as an airlock, decompressing before the hatch opens. Given the Chinese craft is based on the Soyuz, I suspect the same holds true for the taikonauts.
Scott leans over the table, pointing at an image of Phobos moving around the planet.
“So they’re over the horizon. Out of comms, for what?”
Lisa replies, “Four hours, give or take. Three orbits per day. Eight hours each.”
I sit with my coffee, listening to the discussion.
Scott is perplexed. “I don’t get it? Why didn’t we hear from them directly? Why route everything through Houston and lose an hour with the roundtrip? They should have been talking to us while they were overhead.”
Sue offers an explanation. “Formalities. CNSA would need to approve contact, then NASA would have to provide sign off.”
Hedy’s frustrated. “On what? It’s a goddamn emergency. People have died. What the hell is there to approve?”
It was a guess on Sue’s part. She shakes her head. “I dunno.”
“What’s on TAV?” I ask, referring to the way information is sent between Earth and Mars. Text first, then audio, then video. Text is easy. It’s small. Audio is more personal, but takes exponentially more bandwidth. Video is several orders of magnitude worse again. It’s choppy, often broken into a succession of still images rather than a smooth stream—and it’s short—never more than a few minutes at a time, and normally only used for high priority messages, things like an address from the President or footage of a launch. Anything of any substance has to be split over days to reach us. There’s no Netflix on Mars.
Lisa says, “Nothing formal from Mission Control.”
Sue is still thinking along the lines of bureaucracy. “Guess they’re trying to come to grips with this as well. It’s god-knows-o’clock down there. They’re probably patching through whatever they’ve got while they scramble to wake people.”
Scott nods, agreeing with his wife.
Lisa says, “Oh. Wait. I’m getting a data feed from Houston. Looks like the Chinese Space Agency is providing NASA with raw telemetry and they’re routing it on to us.”
“With a round trip of over a hundred million miles?” I ask.
“Only way.” Lisa is pragmatic, unemotional. “The Chinese wouldn’t want to risk losing their Earth link by aligning their antenna to point at us—and, from their perspective, we’re a moving target. This is grossly inefficient but the best option given the circumstances.”
Scott leans over, wanting to see the feed. “Can you make sense of it?”
“No. I’ve never seen this format before. See these scrambled letters? They’re channel identifiers, but they’re in Chinese and don’t render properly using an English character set. I can, however, identify things like timers, counters, pressure, voltage, distances and velocities as these are stored using the Metric System.”
An array of numbers drifts across the screen in multiple rows.
I tap the glass. “Look at that.” At a certain point, the numbers spike across the whole range.
Lisa isolates that section and graphs the values. “Yeah, that’s got all the hallmarks of a catastrophic failure.”
“Can you back up a little?” Hedy has spotted something else in the cryptic numbers floating across the screen. Lisa rewinds and then inches forward toward the point where the numbers spike. “What would cause a chain reaction across multiple sensors?”
“And look at this.” Lisa fast-forwards. Immediately after the spike, almost all of the readings drop to zero.
Scott says what we’re all thinking, “That’s an explosion.”
The silence that follows is painful. It’s an astronaut’s worst nightmare. We all understand our absolute dependence on machinery. Thin metal panels, heating circuits, miles of wiring, oxygen cylinders, carbon dioxide scrubbers, batteries, fuel—whether it’s the Orion, the Huŏxīng Wŭ or Shepard base, we rely on tens of thousands of components working flawlessly to survive. At any given moment, disaster can strike with the failure of something that, on Earth, would be trivial. That series of numbers could be us.
I ask what to me seems an obvious question. “But some of them survived, right? Only two fatalities.”
Only.
Hedy, always the realist, replies, “Yeah, but for how long? Their ship is crippled, if not dead.”
Lisa interrupts the discussion. “I’ve got incoming TAV in audio.”
“Shepard, this is Jim Arbison in Houston. We’ve received notification from the Chinese government about an incident on Phobos. Like us, you’ve no doubt been reviewing the initial incident report and telemetry.”
Sue is frustrated, speaking over the top of the audio. “Get to the point, man.”
“CNSA is still assessing the damage to the Huŏxīng Wŭ but it seems an electrical short caused a flight battery to overheat, which lead to an explosion rupturing their reaction controls. Cabin depressurized roughly two seconds later.”
He pauses, and reality sinks in. Anyone not in a spacesuit, with their visor locked and already breathing from their PLS—Personal Life Support unit—would be dead. Perhaps not instantly, but depending on whether they had just inhaled or exhaled, they’d have between ten seconds and a minute of useful consciousness. Somewhat counterintuitively, it’s those who breathed out that would last longest, but still not long enough to suit up.
“The Huŏxīng Wŭ had a crew of four.”
Had.
“We don’t have a lot to go on as only basic telemetry is coming through. No video. No audio. We think two of the taikonauts were on a surface op, or had recently returned and were still in their suits.”
That’s how they survived. If they’d all been in their flight gear, the Huŏxīng Wŭ would have become a tomb.
“We’re currently running a variety of scenarios and working with CNSA to better understand the implications of the incident. We will keep you informed of progress.”
Progress sounds nice, but given the Huŏxīng Wŭ is on the other side of the solar system relative to both Houston and Beijing, progress is wishful thinking.
“For now, sit tight.”
The recording cuts out, something that’s not unusual for short burst transmissions.
“Sit tight?” Sue is incredulous. “What do they think we’re going to do? Go for a stroll? Grab a rover and head off on a Sunday drive?”
Lisa says what everyone’s thinking, “They’re dead—all of them—even those that escaped the explosion. It’s just a matter of time.”
Jen gets out in front of the discussion. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“Nothing?” I’m not so sure, but Lisa is—she’s not being harsh, simply pragmatic.
“Nothing. This isn’t Hollywood. We can’t just make stuff happen. Even if the Huŏxīng Wŭ escaped structural damage, it’s not equipped for Mars entry so they can’t get down here. Damn thing would hit the ground like a meteorite.”
For over a year, we’ve lived with the realization that there’s a very narrow margin of engineering prowess separating us from sudden death either in the bitter cold vacuum of space or within the frigid atmosphere on Mars, but I was resigned to that. To hear of it happening to someone else, though, is jarring. I feel compelled to help.
A sense of camaraderie forms whe
n you’re over a hundred million miles from the nearest gas station. Hell, somehow, a handful of fruit flies made the journey to the bio-mod, escaping the sterilization procedures our stores went through. NASA wants me to kill them whenever I can since there’s a danger they could breed profusely, but I think the high CO2 keeps them pretty sedate. They only have a lifespan of about 50 days. There must have been several generations of them already, but they don’t represent any kind of health risk and I’ve only ever seen a few. I’ve taken to giving them names—Bart, Homer, Lisa, Maggie, Marge. I can’t tell them apart, and I’ve probably called them all Bart at one point or another, but they’re alive. On Mars, life is precious. I’ve grown soft.
I ask, “And us? There’s nothing we can do for them?”
“You’re thinking the MRV? No, no, no. The Mars Return Vehicle is designed for one thing. To get us home. As soon as that engine fires, it’s on its way back to Earth. We could override the flight plan, but it’s not designed for extensive maneuvering. There’s simply not enough fuel. It’s designed to link up with the supply module and head out. That’s it.
“It’s a one way ticket. Once staging occurs, there’s no way to land. Not on Mars. Its parachutes will work fine on Earth with its thick atmosphere and lazy oceans, but here on Mars, they’d barely slow the descent. We’d be nothing but a small crater on the barren plains, a dark smudge on the rocks.”
I’m frustrated. “So what do we do?”
“Honey.” Jen rests her hand on my forearm. “You want to fix things. I get that. We all do, but some things can’t be fixed. Sometimes you’ve got to let things go. Sometimes inaction is the only course of action.”
Scott nods. He’s been quiet during the exchange, which is his way of assessing things, hearing others out. Hedy whispers something to Lisa, but she shakes her head, dismissing the point outright. I feel the discussion has been shut down before it actually got started. I’m not content to drop the issue. Lives are at stake.
Losing Mars Page 8
