Back to the Moon-ARC

by Travis S. Taylor

  The President, looking calm and in control as he did when he spoke to the nation about his plans for fixing the looming fiscal crisis, stood in front of the lectern in the White House briefing room with NASA Administrator Ross at his side.

  He said, “I spoke directly with the President of China and made the offer to have NASA’s upcoming flight to the Moon be a rescue mission. He accepted our offer, and now we, and the world, need to pray for the stranded astronauts and for the success of our planned rescue attempt. I’m going to turn it over to Mr. Calvin Ross, Administrator of NASA, to provide the details.”

  Childers listened to enough of the details to get at least some understanding of what was planned and then keyed in the access code on his workstation that would allow him to speak directly with the Dreamscape.

  “Paul. This is Gary. How are things up there?” Childers asked.

  “Mr. Childers. Thanks for asking. I think your passengers are having the time of their lives—or they would be, if they weren’t thinking about those trapped Chinese astronauts. It’s a mixture of elation and sadness up here. But I don’t believe anyone will ask for a refund.” Gesling sounded like he was trying to put the best possible face on what had become of their interplanetary vacation.

  “Well, put me on the speaker. I have news.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Hello!” Gary Childers greeted his customers, still about a hundred thousand miles from home. “I have good news. NASA is going to attempt to rescue the stranded Chinese astronauts that you found on your trip. It sounds risky, and it may not be successful, but if it weren’t for you and the flight of the Dreamscape, these people would surely be dead and their deaths unknown until some future explorers found their bodies. The Chinese and the world owe you a word of thanks. Your vacation may have just saved the lives of four astronauts.”

  “Gary, thanks for telling us. You’ve got six smiling faces up here.”

  “Tell them I’m smiling, too. See you soon,” Childers said.

  Gary leaned back in his chair. He meant every damned word of what he’d said. He had just gotten the best publicity anyone could have imagined and perhaps saved some lives to boot. With that, Gary Childers was both a happy businessman and an elated human being. And he did have a big smile on his face to prove it.

  Chapter 19

  Not since Apollo 13 had so many NASA engineers been working with such urgency. Every room Stetson passed on his way to briefing room 1A was full of people pouring over printouts and busily making calculations on their laptop computers. Normally, with launch only two days away, all the analysis would have been completed long ago—checked and rechecked weeks before. Now, with so many changes in the flight, many analyses were being performed for the first time. This wasn’t in any of the simulations, so there was no backup plan to pull out and follow. This one was being created on the fly.

  As he walked down the hall, he picked up snippets of conversation.

  “…enough fuel for ascent if we remove another fifty kilograms, but…”

  “We’ve never done an aerocapture! If we’d funded that flight experiment…”

  “Shit! The lander can’t do that! Look, here are the specs and I…”

  Stetson smiled. These were good people. The best. They would figure it out. Stetson had flown combat missions, three shuttle missions, and two Orion flights to the space station. He knew what the hardware could do, and he knew the engineers would catch up with him eventually. Or so he hoped.…

  The first thing Stetson noticed when he walked into the briefing room was the presence of the four Chinese. They were standing together in the corner, conferring among themselves with their NASA liaison and translator standing a few feet away, looking anxious. Although Stetson didn’t know any of them, he could immediately tell that one of the men—they were all men—was not an engineer. He was the tallest of the bunch, and he stood slightly back from the other three, apparently listening but really watching everyone else in the room. His eyes caught Stetson’s as Bill entered the room, and then they quickly darted back to the conversation of the other three.

  He’s either a manager or a political officer or a spy, thought Stetson. And he didn’t really care for any of the possibilities.

  The conference room was long and broad, with windows that looked out at the distant launch towers at which both the pencil-like Ares I and the much larger Ares V were poised for takeoff. A simulated cherry table shaped into an ellipse sat in the middle of the room, equipped with individual power, network, and optical-fiber links at regular intervals to allow those in attendance to remain connected.

  “Bill! Come on up here. We need to get started.” It was the voice of NASA’s Chief Engineer, Tom Rowan. Rowan, the man ultimately responsible for all the technical aspects of the mission, looked like he hadn’t slept in days. His close-cropped hair was somehow matted to his head, and his clothes had that “day old with sweat” look. He also looked about ten years older than his forty-six years.

  “Tom, good to see you.” Stetson slapped him on the shoulder and shook his hand.

  “You, too. You need to meet our Chinese counterparts. They flew in last night. That’s also when we got their best data regarding the crash site. But we still don’t know why they crashed. That’s one of the items they are supposed to tell us this morning. I’ve got your coffee for you. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  With that, Rowan convened the meeting, with more than two dozen people in the room scurrying for chairs and the four Chinese taking seats directly across from Stetson. After the introductions and obligatory handshakes, the Chinese lead designer, General Xiang Li, took the microphone.

  Xiang, not looking a day over thirty-five but probably at least ten years older than that, gazed around the room, pausing briefly as he glanced at “the manager” from his group before moving on.

  “Thank you for what you are doing. My country is deeply appreciative. I believe our engineers communicated to yours all that we know about the crash. The Harmony appeared to be in perfect health as it left lunar orbit and began its descent. And then something went horribly wrong. We believed the crew to be lost until your Dreamscape heard their distress call.

  “We’re still looking at the engineering data that was being transmitted to Earth autonomously by the spacecraft up until the point at which contact was lost. It’s beginning to look like there was some sort of malfunction with its attitude-control system. The ship was beginning to rock back and forth, and it was building to a point at which the attitude-control thrusters would no longer have been able to compensate. We believe they, in fact, failed—causing the crash. We do not know why.”

  “What about communications? Did you hear from the crew?” one of the American engineers asked.

  “At first, yes. We learned that the crew survived the crash and that the ship’s hull was not breached. After only a few minutes, the link failed, and we heard nothing more. Until, of course, the Dreamscape made contact.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone? Not just about the crash, but about the mission? The launch? Why did you keep it a secret?” A female NASA engineer that Bill didn’t know by name asked the question that was on everyone’s mind.

  Xiang started to speak, but after he caught the eye of “the manager,” he paused instead. Then he said reluctantly, “That was a decision made at the highest levels, and I am not at liberty to discuss it. Please let us remain focused on the technical issues—and the rescue of our taikonauts.”

  Stetson observed the nonverbal exchange between Xiang and what he now presumed was a Chinese political officer, and he didn’t like it. He briefly fantasized about walking over to “the manager” and punching him out. At the moment, that would have to remain a fantasy…at the moment.

  A flurry of questions followed. Most of them were about the status of the remaining supplies the stranded astronauts might have in their possession and how many days they could survive before rescue.

  “Excuse me! Excuse me!” The
voice calling out was from one of the few nonengineering members of the flight-support team, Karen Williamson. Karen, who looked much like a suburban soccer mom, was the NASA psychiatrist. In her early forties, she’d worked with several crews on the International Space Station and spent time in Moscow studying the Russian cosmonauts.

  “Uh, excuse me, EXCUSE ME!” After getting everyone’s attention, she asked, “Did anyone tell the crew that a rescue attempt was being made? I mean, they are two hundred and fifty thousand miles away from home, facing—at least in their minds—certain death. Did anyone try to tell them that they shouldn’t give up hope?”

  Silence. In the room, all they could hear was the gentle hum of the air-conditioning system.

  “From the lack of response, I’d guess the answer is no.” She frowned at everyone in the room a bit dramatically. “I think someone needs to tell them that we’re going to try a rescue. Otherwise they might just decide to not prolong what they believe is inevitable…”

  The implications of her words began to sink in to those assembled.

  “Damn. That didn’t occur to me.” Stetson was the first to respond. He turned to Xiang and added, “You said you tried to talk to them and failed, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Dreamscape managed to do it. Why is that?” Stetson asked.

  “I’ve thought about that. There are two reasons. Based on the fact that their radio transmission wasn’t heard until the Dreamscape was in the radio quiet of lunar farside, we think they were using their low-power radio designed for talking to the crew from the lander during EVA. The system doesn’t have the power for us to pick up all the way back on Earth, but it did have the ability to reach the Dreamscape as it passed. And, most significantly, they are near the limb—they may barely be on the nearside after all. Direct radio communication to the Earth may be possible even without some sort of orbital relay.”

  “I see.” Stetson said. “They were probably listening to Dreamscape as she chattered with Earth during her approach. Once the ship was cut off from any radio signals from home, they were able to get through. But if they are that close to the limb, they might hear something if we had a powerful enough transmission.”

  Xiang and many in the room nodded.

  “Okay, then. Let’s use the same frequency and the most powerful transmitter we’ve got to send them a message telling them that help is on the way.”

  Rowan asked, “But if they are on the far side, how will they even receive the message? And if they do, how will we know they did? For that matter, how do we know that they haven’t already decided to kill themselves?”

  “We have to try,” Stetson answered. His face was grim. “I hope I don’t land and find only bodies.”

  “Wait a minute,” one of the communications engineers said. “We get weak signals from the Pioneers and Voyagers all the time. We can hear their low-power transmitters. You just have to know what frequency to listen to and when to point the Big Dish. If we need to, we could set up an interferometer out at the VLA. The SETI guys are probably all over this.”

  “What is the Big Dish?” Xiang asked.

  “It’s a nickname.” Bill smiled. “Arecibo, Puerto Rico. That’s where the National Science Foundation runs the largest single-dish radio receiver in the world. If they can get line-of-sight with even their low-power transmitter, then we will pick it up.”

  The engineer continued. “And Arecibo can also broadcast. They once sent a megawatt signal into deep space for Carl Sagan. The Moon is so close, if they’ve got a receiver and aren’t totally blocked by the mass of the Moon, they’ll hear it.”

  “That’s right. I seem to recall that Sagan thing back when I was a kid,” Stetson added as he thought about the problem. “Can’t we also use the Deep Space Network? Arecibo will only work when the dish has line-of-sight with the Moon. As we rotate away from the Moon, we won’t be able to listen or receive. By tying in the three DSN antennas—in California, Spain, and Australia—we should have coverage all the time.”

  “I dunno, Bill,” Rowan replied, his face showing extreme skepticism. “So, we’re going to listen for a message from people who may be dead, and if they aren’t, their extremely weak radio signal will be blocked by the mass of the Moon, making it impossible for us to hear them? And while we’re doing that at the Very Large Array and the Deep Space Network, we’re going to blast a message to them with the Arecibo antenna telling them help is on the way. And, oh yes, they probably won’t hear that message because the Moon is blocking our signal as well. Good plan, Bill.”

  “Right.” Stetson leaned forward toward Rowan and smiled as best he could. “Yes, I think that summarizes it nicely.”

  “Bill, if it were anyone but you, I’d tell them where to shove this part of the plan. But I won’t. We’ll make it happen,” Rowan said.

  Damn right you will, Bill thought to himself.

  “There’s another problem.” Xiang was speaking again. “By the time you get to the Moon, it will be night.”

  The implication of this statement was not lost to most of the space scientists and engineers in the room. Xiang continued.

  “The Moon rotates more slowly than the Earth, completing one full revolution every twenty-eight Earth days. This means that the Moon’s day is fourteen Earth days long, as is its night. Though surviving on the Moon anytime is a challenge, getting through the lunar night is particularly difficult. The temperature drops to minus three hundred eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit at night, requiring a considerable amount of power to keep things, and people, warm. Batteries capable of providing the power needed to keep a crew alive during the fourteen-day darkness period are far too heavy to fly in space. Without sunlight, solar power is useless. That’s why we didn’t plan on them being on the Moon at night.”

  “That could be bad,” Rowan commented. “What kind of power do they have? Will they have enough to keep from freezing until we arrive? Since they landed at the beginning of the lunar day, that’ll mean they will have been in darkness for a little more than three days by the time we arrive. That is a long time.”

  “It is hard to say.” Xiang replied. “If they are in their suits, and if the fuel cells survived the crash, then they could have found a way to use the various power systems on the spacecraft to keep themselves from freezing. Our engineers are quite well trained, and they know the systems of their spacecraft at least as well as your people know yours. There is a chance. Time is not on our side.”

  “Well, then,” Stetson added, “I guess we’d better get off our butts and get busy.”

  Chapter 20

  In the three days since Paul Gesling and the passengers of the Dreamscape heard the plea for help from the stranded Chinese taikonauts, the inescapable forces of gravity had been pulling them back home toward Earth. The moment of their return was now imminent, and they were busily preparing themselves for entry into the atmosphere and a not-too-distant landing on the desert runway in Nevada.

  To most of the passengers, coming directly back home and landing on the same runway from which they left seemed like no big deal. After all, didn’t airplanes do that sort of thing all the time?

  To Paul Gesling, who understood the complexities of orbital mechanics, the relative rotation of the Earth, and the effects the pull of gravity from the Moon had on his craft, it was simply amazing. Here they were, coming back from a quarter-of-a-million-mile journey to another world, and they were about to enter the Earth’s atmosphere at speeds beyond the human mind’s ability to imagine to pull off a pinpoint landing at the same spot from which they had left several days ago. The timing had to be perfect, and, from all indications, it likely would be. Nonetheless, he was nervous and continuously checking for updates on their position from the onboard computer.

  In-space acrobatics behind them, the passengers were all buckled in their seats, running through the various checklists now scrolling on the screens in front of them. True, many of their tasks were trivial and designed mostly to keep
them busy and to make sure they didn’t hurt themselves as the pull of Earth’s gravity noticeably returned. But it worked.

  Gesling was in the pilot’s seat, running through his own, less trivial, checklist. One by one, the ship’s systems were checked out and appeared to be in perfect operating condition.

  Dreamscape would enter the outermost region of the Earth’s atmosphere within the hour and be on the ground shortly thereafter.

  The Honda minivan was back in place and ready to intercept as much data as possible during the landing. The same group of engineers that had been with the operation from the beginning were again in the van, as was their leader, Zeng Li.

  Zeng was intently watching the televised coverage of the Dreamscape’s landing being broadcast live on most of the major American cable, satellite, and television news networks. The coverage was, of course, interrupted by frequent advertisements and “this just in” updates about some celebrity or another, but the clear focus was coverage of the landing of the Dreamscape and the emergence of the people who had just flown past the Moon. For a short while, most Americans would know the names of current astronauts and not just those they had read about in their history books.

  The entire Chinese team had been as taken aback as the rest of the world at the news that their country had attempted a Moon landing. When that news broke, they had been resting at their Las Vegas hotel (“resting” was a relative term). All were shocked, and one of the team had subsequently become careless. In his excitement to learn more about the failed lunar landing and its crew, and especially since he had a brother who worked for the Chinese National Space Agency, he violated protocol and used Skype to call home and speak with his brother. Though he did not mention where he was or what he was doing, merely contacting his brother had been enough to set in motion the events that would soon lead to his capture and arrest.