Back to the Moon

by Travis S. Taylor

  Paul checked the crew’s vitals and faces. They were all fine and appeared to be having the times of their lives.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have now passed through nine hundred eighty thousand feet, so feel free to unbuckle yourselves and move about the cabin.” He added a little chuckle at the end to keep the mood light. Why not let them have their fun while the Dreamscape refilled its tanks at the orbiting depot to which it was now attached?

  Maquita performed her mission then, which was to use external cameras to video all docking and landing procedures throughout the mission. She sat at her seat guiding the external cameras via the touch-screen panel at her station.

  After the Dreamscape’s tanks were full, Gesling set about the undocking process to detach from the depot and take up station a few kilometers away for the “night.” He and the passengers would close the covers on their windows, darken the interior of Dreamscape, and try to get eight hours of sleep. He doubted that many would be able to sleep, but they’d been awake for almost eighteen hours and definitely needed a rest.

  At Space Excursions’ Nevada Spaceport, Gary Childers was jubilant. After the press conference, he granted no less than eight one-on-one interviews with various media outlets and was basking in the free and positive news coverage. Childers knew the value of free publicity, and he was definitely getting more than he had imagined possible. The Dreamscape and her passengers were in space and getting ready to go to the Moon.

  In just a few hours, Gesling would awaken the passengers, run through his final checklist, and ignite the rocket engine that would take the Dreamscape out of Earth orbit and toward the Moon. The trip to the Moon would take a little more than three days.

  Childers knew that once the main engine fired, they would be committed. The trajectory they would fly was called “free return” for a very good reason. Like Apollo 13, but hopefully without the peril, the spacecraft would fly by and around the Moon one time, not going into orbit, but rather looping behind the Moon and then coasting back to Earth. The main engine would fire again when the Dreamscape was ready to brake and again be captured into Earth orbit—after completing its historic journey around the Moon. The next flight, assuming there would be customers for it, would fire braking thrusters and enter orbit around the Moon. But that was the future. At the moment a “free return” was still a groundbreaking accomplishment for private industry.

  Childers wasn’t nervous about this aspect of the trip. He would only get nervous after Gesling brought the ship back to Earth orbit and prepared for landing. Getting from orbit to the ground was the part that haunted Childers. He remembered the Columbia space shuttle accident—he was at the Kennedy Space Center when STS-107 was supposed to land, and he would never forget the look on the faces of the ground crew when the ship didn’t appear on schedule and they realized something must have gone horribly wrong. Their faces still haunted him, and the vision of his beloved Dreamscape breaking up high in the atmosphere was his nightmare. He was confident in his ship, his team, and in Paul Gesling—but he wouldn’t really relax until the ship was safely home and the passengers giving their own interviews on all the news networks.

  At his home in Houston, Bill Stetson watched the interview with Gary Childers as he sipped a cold Long Island iced tea. Sitting with his wife, during their last evening together before he was to leave for Florida, Stetson, too, was jubilant.

  “That man ought to be running NASA,” said Stetson.

  Terry, his wife of twenty-two years, looked up from the image of Gary Childers centered on their television screen, placed her head in the crook of Stetson’s outstretched arm, and said simply, “Oh?”

  “He’s got what most managers at NASA lost years ago—guts. This man risked his personal fortune to start a company and do something that even most governments couldn’t do. He’s sending people to the Moon. Now, granted, he’s not landing, and that’s a damned sight harder. But he is sending people to the Moon. If we had more leaders like him, I’d be going to Mars next week instead of the Moon.”

  “And how long would that take you away from me?” she asked.

  “Well, about three years.”

  “I see,” she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste and snuggling a little closer to her husband. “Bill Stetson, you will not be away from me for three years. Having you gone for a month will be too long as it is.” She looked him in the eyes and moved her head forward until her lips were only a few inches from his.

  “The kids won’t be back for another two hours. Fred and Linda took them out to get dessert, and that means we have this great big house all to ourselves until they get back.…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Hmm. Well, Mrs. Stetson, whatever shall we do to keep ourselves occupied while the kids are away?”

  Inching her way still closer to the husband she was about to lose for a month, the man who was about to be separated from her by a quarter of a million miles, she replied, “We’ll think of something.”

  “Mission control, this is Stetson.” He leaned in and kissed his wife softly but quickly. “We are go for launch.”

  Chapter 16

  The three-day trip to the Moon passed quickly. Gesling observed that simply looking out the windows as the Earth diminished in size and the Moon grew ever larger was enough to keep most of the passengers mesmerized for hours at a time. Mealtime continued to be a mixture of eating and playing, though the personal aerial acrobatics had lost some of its luster after the initial thrill of their weightless experience had worn off.

  Gesling also noted that, true to form, Mbanta did hit on both Bridget Wells and Maquita Singer. Wells was obviously offended and now did everything in her power to keep away from the Sudanese millionaire. Singer, who also refused Mr. Mbanta’s advances, acted like nothing at all had happened. She chatted with him no differently than she did any other passenger. Mbanta also acted as if nothing had happened and even seemed somewhat puzzled by Wells’s avoiding him. Gesling chalked that one up to the two being from radically different cultures. Mbanta was born to wealth and privilege and considered casual sex to be nothing more significant than a dinner date. Wells, on the other hand, had much more conservative moral views and wouldn’t dream of having a casual relationship with anyone, let alone someone she hardly knew, and especially since she was married.

  They were only about an hour away from passing within one hundred miles of the lunar surface as they began the looped trajectory that would take them behind the Moon to their closest view of ten miles up and then back around and toward the Earth. Gesling left the pilot’s seat, pushing off from it like a swimmer in a competition, and floated back to be among the passengers.

  “You’d better get your cameras ready. We’re going to be passing close to the surface, and you are going to be able to get some awesome pictures. Bridget, keep the telescope running continuously.”

  “Roger that, Paul,” Wells responded. “I’m not going to waste my precious few minutes looking at the Moon through a viewfinder. The telescope is on auto as planned. I’m going to be looking out the window.”

  “I’ll get copies of pictures from Dreamscape’s sensors,” Dr. Graves added.

  To Gesling’s surprise, the other passengers also decided to forgo taking pictures. They appeared to prefer savoring the moment.

  “Sounds good to me. I’ll be up front.” Gesling pushed off and floated his way back to the command chair. Unfortunately, his sightseeing opportunities would be limited. He had to monitor the close-approach trajectory and make sure that they were where they were supposed to be. There wasn’t much he could do if the ship was off course, but he might be able to do enough to avert catastrophe if he was paying attention and something did go wrong.

  Gesling settled into his chair and affixed his earpiece in place. It was time for him to check in with the ground crew. After activating the voice link, he began speaking, “Rob? Are you on console? This is Paul.”

  The 1.3-second delay in hearing a re
sponse from home was short, but nonetheless maddening. Radio travels at the speed of light, and at the Earth-Moon distance it took 1.3 seconds for Gesling’s voice to reach the ground and another 1.3 seconds for the return signal to get back to the Moon and Gesling’s earpiece. It was enough of a delay for Gesling to consider it truly annoying.

  “Got ya, Paul. Thanks for checking in. You’re right on time.” The response came from Rob Anderson, Gesling’s longtime friend and colleague, who would be working console for fully one-third of the Dreamscape’s mission to the Moon.

  “Control, you should see it. The Moon is an incredible place. We’re coming up on our closest approach, and then we’ll be in radio blackout. Anything in the telemetry that I should know about before then?” Gesling was starting to feel like a tourist, and he wasn’t afraid to voice his own excitement at being this close to the Moon.

  “Paul, the telemetry is clear. You should be fine for the time you’ll be behind the Moon. We do have a request. Keep the radio on while you’re out of line-of-sight. We got a request from some scientists in New York to look at how sharply the carrier signal cuts off as you pass behind the Moon—something about a theory that the Moon has a low-pressure atmosphere and that how the signal drops out will either confirm or disprove their theory. You know Gary. He’s always eager to help out—especially if he gets some kind of credit for doing so.”

  “I’m sure there were dollar signs in his eyes,” Gesling responded. “Sure thing. I’ll turn up the squelch in my headset so I don’t get blasted by the static.”

  “Enjoy the show,” Anderson said.

  “Right,” Gesling said. “I intend to. Dreamscape out.”

  With that, Gesling settled back in his chair and took in the magnificent vista that was before him. He could clearly see the mountains and plains, as well as the craters and maria that made up the desolate lunar landscape.

  “Nice view,” he said to himself. “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you on the good Earth.” Paul muttered to himself the words of Frank Borman. He laughed. Hell, it was August.

  Twenty minutes later, Gesling again rose from the command chair and pushed off to “swim” with the passengers. All five were looking out the windows, watching the surface of the Moon pass beneath them in stunned silence. Gesling didn’t want to interrupt their ogling, but he did need to apprise them of their pending passage behind the Moon and the fact that they would soon be out of radio contact with the Earth.

  “Ahem.” Gesling cleared his throat to get their attention. “If I may interrupt you for just a moment, I need to tell you something.”

  Surprisingly, all five of the tourist astronauts looked away from the windows to hear what he had to say.

  “We’re about to fly behind the Moon. Since radio can’t go through the Moon, we’ll temporarily lose contact with ground control. So, if you need to send a message home or are expecting any messages, you’ll have to wait until we regain radio contact.”

  They had been briefed about this before, of course, and, after hearing what he had to say, they one by one looked back out of the windows. Seeing this, Gesling decided it was time for him to do the same.

  Moments later, the quietness, for Gesling at least, was interrupted by the sound of static from his earpiece.

  “Shit!” said Gesling, realizing that he’d forgotten to turn up the squelch to mute the static resulting from the interrupted communications signal as the Dreamscape went behind the Moon. As his finger went to make the adjustment, he heard something in the static.

  “Mumble mumble STATIC mumble STATIC Emergency! Please help! Mumble mumble mumble” came to his ear as he sat in stunned disbelief. Were they getting some weird bounce of radio signals off of Jupiter or something? Impossible. That would require a receiver antenna the size of the one in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

  Paul quickly looked around to see if one of passengers was calling him or playing some sort of obvious practical joke. They were all still intently looking at the Moon and totally unaware of what he’d just heard in his earpiece.

  “Mumble STATIC SOS! This is the crew of the Chinese exploration ship Harmony calling for help! We’ve crashed and are mumble mumble STATIC STATIC mumble mumble mumble…” Gesling quickly came out of his surprised shock and sent the audio he was receiving to the main speakers so all aboard Dreamscape could hear and hopefully catch some of the words he was missing. He also made sure the data recorders were still functioning so there would be a record of what was happening.

  From the speakers came “Mumble STATIC crew of the Harmony calling mumble mumble crashed and we need assistance!”

  That got everyone’s attention. Five heads turned toward the front of the Dreamscape. Singer was the first to ask, “What is that? Did someone just call for help?”

  “Yes. Listen up. I can’t make out everything that’s being said, but it sounds like there are people down there.”

  “Ridiculous!” Thibodeau replied.

  “Shh!” Wells scolded him, holding a finger to her lips.

  “Mumble mumble mumble can you hear us? Please, please, can you hear us?” The voice was unmistakably that of a woman with a Chinese accent.

  Gesling made sure the microphone was open and replied, “Hello? This is the Space Excursions liner Dreamscape. What is the nature of your emergency? And who the hell are you?”

  “Mumble mumble. You do hear us! We’re the crew of the Chinese exploration ship Harmony. We crash-landed seven days mumble mumble mumble air for another eight, maybe mumble days mumble mumble only this low-power transmitter and mumble mumble home mumble mumble mumble mumble STATIC.”

  “Harmony! This is Dreamscape. We lost some of that. Please repeat how many days of air you have remaining.”

  Gesling heard only static.

  “Can we help them?” It was the voice of John Graves. Graves had floated to the front cabin and was positioned just behind Gesling.

  “I don’t see how we can do anything,” replied Gesling, looking out the front window of the Dreamscape. “We’re not designed to land on the Moon. Hell, we can’t even brake into orbit to stay and look around for them. They didn’t tell us where they landed, but it has to be somewhere either here on the far side or near the limb. We’d not have heard their signal otherwise. They must have been monitoring our transmissions and used our loss of signal as their window to try and reach us. That was a very low-power signal—almost totally lost in the noise.”

  “The telescope!” Bridget snapped her fingers and swam to her seat, buckling herself in. “Where do I look?”

  “Who knows?” Gesling looked exasperated. He was used to doing something in a crisis, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about this one. He looked around the interior of the Dreamscape and at the five expectant faces staring back at him.

  “We’ll be out of radio blackout in a few minutes. I’ll relay the news. The audio transmission will automatically downlink back to Nevada. I just need to tell them to listen to it.”

  “Captain Gesling,” Thibodeau said gravely. “If there’s nothing we can do, then who can?”

  The question hung in the air for several minutes, sticking in everyone’s ears like molasses.

  “We can look for them!” Bridget said over her shoulder.

  “Needle in a haystack,” responded Gesling, audibly but in a hushed tone. “I don’t think there’s a damn thing anyone can do. Those people are as good as dead.”

  “Yes, there is.” Graves smiled and swam his way to his seat. “Captain. Could you relay all the radio signal-strength data to my seat plus our orbital ephemeris data?”

  “Of course! Good thinking, John.” Paul knew exactly what the engineer was on to. He swam to his pilot’s seat and flashed through several screens of icons until he found the radio data, mission time down to the hundredth of a second, and the orbital data. “There, John. You should have it.”

  “Right,” John replied. All Paul and the o
thers could do was sit and wait. Well, mostly. Paul continued to broadcast, trying to get a response from the Harmony. Bridget had the telescope on maximum zoom, scanning across craters wildly. The others looked out the windows and through the ship’s cameras at the monitors on their seats.

  “Bridget.” Mbanta swam up and interrupted her. Paul looked over his shoulder at the two to make certain there was no “friction” between them. But there was none. “Can you turn the gain of the telescope down to a minimum and reduce the brightness?”

  “Uh, yes, I can.”

  “Okay, do that, and also go to a wide zoom angle,” he told her.

  “Wide zoom angle?”

  “Zoom out,” Dr. Graves added.

  “Oh, alright. There. Now, why did I do that?” she asked.

  “Because, my dear,” Mbanta said, “if they are in the sun, then their ship will glint at us.”

  “I see. So, I’ll scan and look for glints?”

  “Great idea, Sharik,” Maquita Singer agreed.

  “Let me know if you find anything,” Paul ordered.

  “Roger that.”

  “Paul!” Graves called.

  “Yes, John?” He swam his way to the fat engineer’s seat. “Got something?”

  “Well, I once made about seventy million dollars off of a video game that involved fighting aliens on a Moon base on the far side of the Moon. I put into the game a lot of detail regarding how to calculate orbits and such.”

  “Really? Had no idea about that.”

  “Well, at any rate, the signal was strongest when we were here.” Graves pulled up the time-of-flight view of their orbital location that each of them had as a screensaver at their respective stations. Graves pointed out their location and then continued. “The antenna-beam angle was simple to figure. I designed a satellite-phone network for communications in Africa once, made millions. So, our antenna was covering this footprint on the surface of the Moon, and from the signal strength we could narrow their location down to this spot here.”