Mission One

by Samuel Best

  Noah watched the preparations within Mission Control from his office on the top floor of the Diamond Aerospace building. The wall of monitors across the room from his desk showed him that, ten floors below, the final steps in the launch process were being checked and re-checked, then checked again.

  Much like his New York penthouse, his office at Kennedy Space Center was a single room with a large, open floor plan. Subdued lighting gave the office more of a museum feel, with soft highlights throughout the room, unlike the uniform luminescence in Mission Control. Instead of the imposing bed of his Manhattan abode his office was dominated by an expansive redwood desk, behind which Noah sat, leaning back in his chair with his ankles crossed on the desktop. He watched the camera feeds of Mission Control with his fingers interlaced behind his head. On the surface, he remained calm and controlled. Inside, his heart beat rapidly. These were the last moments of uncertainty, where it remained to be seen whether his company would continue in prosperity or crumble into ruin.

  He was alone, having sent the investors’ proxies downstairs to one of the many empty media rooms – the rooms which, on a launch day of that magnitude, would normally have been packed to bursting with eager reporters clamoring for the best vantage point. Frank had convinced Noah to wait until the Thermal Antimatter Propulsion System had been fired successfully at least once aboard a manned vessel before shouting their success to the press. Besides, Frank added, it was better to keep their competition in the dark until the last possible moment, considering what they’d discovered in orbit around Titan. Until then, let everyone think it was just another unmanned test flight of the Orbital Launch System. Frank had proven to be very effective at getting local law enforcement to shut down the main roads leading to Kennedy – under the pretense of a Presidential visit, no less. Perhaps Frank had the sheriff on Diamond Aerospace’s payroll, or maybe he knew a secret dirty enough to buy him a few big favors.

  Noah had been unable to argue with Frank’s logic to exclude the press, despite a small bit of his soul shriveling at the thought that the historic launch of Explorer I would not be televised in real-time. However, accidents did happen, and secrets leaked. It was best if the company could control the way it revealed those secrets to the world.

  Some of his competitors were unfortunately keenly aware of the concept. MarsCorp lost a rocket early last year to a seemingly irreparable booster ignition problem – the very rocket that was supposed to have beaten Explorer I to Titan. The negative press surrounding that disaster was monstrous, and had only just begun to fizzle by the time Diamond Aerospace secretly rolled out the gargantuan Neptune III rocket that was planning to follow the exact same trajectory and timeline as MarsCorp’s doomed craft.

  And so Noah had agreed to prolonged secrecy. It hadn’t been easy keeping the launch quiet. There were a lot of rejected applicants who knew about the Neptune III rocket sitting on Kennedy’s launch pad. Naturally, the applicants had all signed rigorous non-disclosure agreements – yet there was never any accounting for the tenacity of a particularly pugnacious reporter. Ultimately, there was no way to guarantee utter secrecy, so cover stories were kept readily available. Even without security leaks, people tended to notice large rockets screaming through the atmosphere.

  If all went according to plan, the crew would learn of their additional mission mandate around the same time Noah announced the success of the thermal antimatter engine to the press. Frank was certain that Riley and his team represented the best chance the company had of completing its mission, and Noah regretted withholding the true specifics from them for so long. Yet he couldn’t risk a leak, not when he was so close to reaching his goal. Besides, they had been well-trained, with an emphasis favoring adaptation over rote protocol. They would hopefully take the news in stride, and focus more on their original goal than on the fact they weren’t told the whole story from the beginning.

  Noah was confident that the unmanned test flight cover story would hold long enough for him to be able to prove to the world that he wasn’t just another rich kid trying to squeeze his way deeper into the space industry simply because he could afford the most expensive toys. He had bigger plans. His toys just happened to be the most well-designed and safest on the market. Beyond that, he was genuinely interested in space – had been since a very early age. He wasn’t just fascinated with it from a monetary standpoint, as were his contemporaries, according to their own shameless admissions.

  Noah viewed his automated mining outposts on the moon and on Mars as stepping stones to reaching farther into space than had ever been thought possible in his lifetime. Before he died, he wanted to send a mission to the very edge of the solar system, and perhaps even beyond. When the Titan mission succeeded, he would be so far ahead of his competitors that it would take ten generations to catch up.

  MarsCorp had wanted Titan – had wanted it almost as badly as Diamond Aerospace. Yet fate gloriously intervened, and it would be Noah’s crew who got there first.

  He picked up an eight-by-ten inch black and white photograph from his desk. It was the only one of its kind. Noah had ordered the negative burned. He also had everyone who saw it fill out such draconian nondisclosure agreements that they were convinced they would be shipped off-planet on the next satellite delivery rocket if they ever spoke a word about the photo to anyone.

  It was a blurry picture, filled from edge to edge by a murky fog. If it were a color picture, the fog would be a smoggy sort of yellow – the atmosphere of Titan. However, it wasn’t the weather on Titan that captured Noah’s interest when one of his imaging techs first brought him the photograph.

  He was more interested in the mysterious object orbiting the moon – the object neither he nor any supposed expert on Earth had been able to identify.

  “Helmets on,” said Commander Riley.

  Jeff unhooked the communications feed from the back of his Snoopy hood. The Constellation Suit gloves weren’t as thick as ski gloves, but they were close, having been designed with minimal padding for the manipulation of controls during takeoff and landing while still preserving pressure integrity outside the ship. Jeff put on his polycarbonate helmet and, with minimal fumbling, attached the feed to the back. Then he rotated a metal locking ring where the helmet met the neck of the suit, forming a seal. Next, he unhooked a thin hose from the side of his chair. He attached the locking nozzle at the end to the small, faucet-like air feed input on the front of his suit. There was a slight hiss of cool air, and Jeff shivered. The inner faceplate of his helmet fogged quickly, then cleared. He was now breathing the ship’s atmosphere.

  Jeff turned in his chair to face Gabriel, who had just finished sealing his helmet.

  “Want to check me?” he asked.

  “Sure thing.”

  Gabriel reached out for Jeff’s neck, grunting with the effort it took to move more than a few inches while strapped into the chair wearing a thick Constellation Suit. He checked the seal of the locking ring and gave a thumb’s up.

  Jeff checked Gabriel’s seal, while Riley and Ming did the same in the pilots’ seats above.

  “All good?” Riley asked.

  “Seals verified,” Jeff answered.

  “Excellent. Mission Control, this is Explorer One reporting that we are go for launch. Repeat, we are go for launch.”

  “Copy that, Explorer,” Kate said over the headsets. “We’re wrapping up the final tests, and we’ll be lighting the fuse shortly.”

  Jeff grinned at hearing her voice. It was bittersweet knowledge that he would still get to hear her on his journey into space. On the one hand, it was better than not being able to speak with her at all. On the other, it was a constant reminder of how much farther away she would be with each passing second.

  Still, he considered himself lucky that the new thermal antimatter engine would make the trip to Titan in a fraction of the time it would using traditional propulsion methods. Instead of the three-year journey made by Voyager 1 in the late 1970s, Explorer would tackle the same di
stance in just under five months.

  “Jeff,” said Kate, “we’re reading an elevated heart-rate. Everything okay?”

  “Just couldn’t help remembering how I spent my last night on Earth. I don’t think my heart has slowed down since I left the base yesterday.”

  There was a conspicuous pause. “Well,” she said, “I hope you didn’t go too big. We need everyone on top of their game today.”

  “No worries here, Ms. Bishop.”

  Keep it formal and discrete, Jeff thought as he grinned. Just like we discussed.

  Of course, that didn’t mean he couldn’t slip one past the goalie every once in a while.

  Gabriel stared at him suspiciously. Jeff winked.

  “Got your speech ready?” Ming asked Riley.

  He grunted. “I was saving it for when we slid into orbit around Titan. The launch seems routine by comparison.”

  “It’s the first manned flight using a brand-new propulsion system,” said Gabriel. “One that will eventually carry humanity farther than we ever dreamed. We have to say something.”

  “Sounds like you might have some ideas,” Jeff said.

  Gabriel shrugged. “Maybe one or two.”

  “That was a good enough speech for me,” Kate said over the headsets. “Booster ignition in T-minus one minute. We have initiated final launch check.”

  “Copy that,” said Riley.

  Jeff shifted in his chair, settling deeper into the fabric. He checked his restraints, making sure they were as tight as possible. The next part was going to hurt.

  Kate rattled off her verbal checks of the various departments within Mission Control, waiting for a go or no-go signal from each. Jeff had been surprised when he realized how few people Diamond Aerospace employed in Mission Control. If it had been a NASA operation, he would have expected to see a large perimeter crowd of ground techs, engineers, and representatives from all branches of the astro-sciences on the operations floor during launch.

  “All stations are go,” said Kate. “T-minus thirty seconds. Hope you all are strapped in.”

  Jeff closed his eyes and breathed out evenly, mentally counting along with Kate’s steady voice.

  “Three. Two. One. Ignition.”

  The rocket’s four Hydra nine-engine cores ignited with a liquid rush and a deep, sonorous booooommmm, shaking the command module.

  Jeff’s vision vibrated. Above him, Riley’s helmet rattled against the top of his seat. Ming shook in the co-pilot’s chair, calm as ever.

  The pressure started in Jeff’s chest, sitting on him like a sumo wrestler as the Neptune III rocket began its ascent.

  “We have lift off!” Kate shouted over the headsets. In the background, the other techs in Mission Control whooped and hollered.

  The sumo wrestler on Jeff’s chest got heavier. Now the wrestler laid flat, smothering his entire body from toes to scalp, and pushed down hard. Jeff groaned and tried to lift his head from his seat-back, just to see if he could do it. He didn’t move an inch.

  Inside the command module, he and the others were blind to the outside world. He tried to imagine the launch as if he were standing in Mission Control, with Kate.

  He pictured the engines roaring furiously, belching flame and exhaust as the launch scaffolding broke away and the rocket climbed higher. A billowing mountain of smoke rose from the ground in the rocket’s wake, still glowing orange as it expanded to swallow the entire platform.

  “Prepare for Stage One separation,” Kate said.

  It’s too early, thought Jeff. Had they really been in the air for a minute? They would soon be in and out of the stratosphere. It had seemed like mere seconds.

  “Stage One separation initiated.”

  Ponk-Ponk!

  The two solid-fuel liquid hydrogen boosters which had clung to the main rocket like remora broke free and tumbled down toward Earth.

  “Hydra array down to thirty percent,” Ming said. The sealed Mark IV helmets muffled most of the engine roar. “Twenty.”

  The nine powerful engines carried the Neptune III rocket higher into the atmosphere. Jeff felt the vibration in his bones.

  “Prepare for Stage Two separation,” Kate said. Then, a moment later: “Stage Two separation initiated.”

  The roaring engines went suddenly silent and the vibrations calmed to a gentle shake. The rocket was merely a giant dart being propelled out of the atmosphere under its own momentum.

  The liquid oxygen booster that constituted the back half of Neptune III ejected backward with a boom of cannon-fire, slamming Jeff upward against his restraints. A split-second later, the secondary engine array ignited, crushing him back into his seat and pinning him there.

  Now it was a whole team of sumo wrestlers sitting on top of him, making it damn near impossible to breathe.

  In reality, the sensation of being crushed should have lasted less than a minute. To Jeff, it felt like an hour. He shut his eyes against the pressure, grimacing and forcing himself not to scream. He imagined his windpipe flattening and his lungs deflating in a nanosecond.

  The techs on the ground told him it would be bad. He had sat in the centrifuge accelerator during training and endured extremely high g-forces for minutes on end to give him a glimpse of what was in store.

  This was worse.

  “All systems are normal,” Kate said. “Prepare for Stage Three separation.”

  The rocket had punched into the thermosphere – the second-to-last atmospheric layer surrounding Earth. The only remaining barrier to cross was the thin exosphere, four hundred miles higher.

  “Stage Three separation initiated.”

  There was a loud BOOM as the secondary engine array separated. Four rapid-fire metallic CLANGS echoed inside the command module as the side panels of the rocket popped off and tumbled down toward Earth, revealing the orbital engines of Explorer I.

  The javelin-tipped tower jet shielding the nose of the rocket popped away like a champagne cork, and the four astronauts could finally see through the narrow strip of a window in front of the pilots’ chairs. They all took a moment to peer through the fifty-centimeter-thick fused silica and borosilicate glass, into the featureless dark sky beyond.

  Commander Riley reached for the control panel in front of him, his hand hovering over a row of three buttons.

  “Explorer,” Kate said. “Prepare to fire retro boosters on my mark. Three. Two. One. Mark.”

  Riley popped open the flip guards of all three buttons and pushed them in rapid succession. The small orbital thrusters on the back of the bell-shaped Explorer I ignited, giving the craft a final push.

  “Well done, all of you,” Kate said, the relief in her voice obvious.

  The shapeless darkness outside clarified itself into a starry landscape which, on Earth, was called the night sky.

  For the astronauts aboard Explorer I, it was their road to Titan.

  Kate stood at her desk, hands flat on either side of her keyboard, staring up at the display wall.

  Everything looked normal. The launch had been executed flawlessly. Commander Riley and his crew were set to dock with the International Space Station, where they would link up with the Thermal Antimatter Propulsion System that would get them the rest of the way to Titan.

  So why did she feel the queasiness of uncertainty in her gut? Why did her instincts tell her something was wrong?

  “Look who decided to show up after all,” Rick said, nodding toward the back of the room. He sat in his chair, rotating slowly side to side and squeezing a small rubber stress ball.

  Kate turned around and looked up at the viewing platform. Noah Bell stood in the conference room beyond, wearing his trademark gray tailored suit with scarlet pocket handkerchief, talking to Frank. Noah was clearly excited. He often used enthusiastic gestures when he spoke, and now he was moving his hands so quickly they were almost a blur. Frank nodded patiently, his hands in his pockets, waiting for his boss to take a breath.

  He finally did, and Frank said something that
gave Noah pause. Then Noah put one hand on Frank’s shoulder and pointed at the display wall with the other. He smiled.

  “Guess he’s happy with how things are going,” Rick said.

  “So far,” added Kate. She turned back to the display wall and checked the myriad of data flowing across the different sections. “Oxygen levels holding?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Rick said. “We checked that system more than any other.”

  The air cycling system had given them their biggest headache since day one. Ever since Frank and his team of designers laid out the initial plans for Explorer I and began working with the other teams to make sure it was feasible, the air systems had presented a problem. There was nothing to worry about while the crew was still in lower atmosphere, or even while they were docked with the ISS.

  The initial problems arose when they were trying to run the fuel lines for the antimatter engine too close to the oxygen compressor. During the construction phase of Explorer I, there was an obvious location for the compressor, and, independently, an efficient path to run the fuel lines with minimal directional interruptions – in other words, they wanted a straight line. Directional interruptions were opportunities for integrity failure, so these were always minimized. Yet the logical positioning of the oxygen compressor was in a perfect little hollow right next to a long run of fuel lines in the wall of the crew module.

  Instead of breaking up the lines, the design team moved the compressor to the other side of the module, forcing the use of a longer oxygen line to the pump, which feeds oxygen into the cabin. The line cooled too much before oxygen reached the pump, causing it to freeze, so the team installed a smaller secondary pump halfway down the line to combat the problem.

  The system was stable, even more so than before, because the secondary pump took a load off the main compressor, noticeably lowering the cumulative power consumption.

  The idea of an air systems failure haunted Kate’s dreams, no matter how many times she had her team check the equipment.

  “Uh, Kate…” Rick said. He spun around in his chair, facing away from her.