by Kaz Morran
Although, on second thought, there were things you could do to a simulated crew that you couldn’t do to a real community. Not ethically, anyway.
He took in the chorus of bird songs and insects and wondered what it’d be like to live somewhere like this place, Cape Tribulation. Maybe he’d find out. If he did poorly in this final-round, he could flee into the rainforest, find a nice little spot populated by psychotropic frogs, plant a flag, and dig in for a long ride through the universe within. He wouldn’t get to ride a rocket to space, but it’d be better than going back to Japan to face the detectives and accusations.
5
One year ago:
“Sorry, can you just turn your mic up a bit?”
“How’s that?”
“And look directly into your webcam, okay? Good. Ready?”
Taiyo cleared his throat and sat up straight. “Ready.”
“Now just relax and wait for your cue.”
“Got it.”
Dr. Shieling: Hello, the universe! You’re listening to Spatial Dimensions with me, Gareth Shieling, and your co-host, Jesus Cardoza. … What’s that, JC? We have a guest?
Cardoza: You bet your astrolabe we do, Doc. Joining us from across the Pacific and across spacetime via the magic of a free app is Japanese grad student, the man with a plan, Taiyo Yamazaki.
Yamazaki: Hi. Nice to—
Dr. Shieling: Welcome to the show, Taiyo.
Yamazaki: Thanks for having me.
Dr. Shieling: So, Taiyo, you’ve proposed a rather interesting way to study this rogue planet thing, Tabaldak, is that right?
Cardoza: A gas giant, brown dwarf, failed star-planet thing. Stick that nomenclature in your pipe and flush it.
Dr. Shieling: Hardy-har.
Cardoza: What do you call it, Taiyo?
Yamazaki: Well, it’s right on the border between planet and star. More massive than Jupiter, but not massive enough to fuse hydrogen into helium and generate nuclear reactions like the Sun does. By the IAC’s definition, that makes Tabaldak a brown dwarf.
Dr. Shieling: Like Jesus, here.
Yamazaki: Tabaldak is actually more of a bruised, reddish-purple color.
Dr. Shieling: You didn’t have to bring race into it. I was talking about him being a failed star.
Yamazaki: I’m sure he has a lot of potential.
Cardoza: And a lot of participation awards to prove it.
Dr. Shieling: Anyway … Tell us Taiyo, what’s so hard about observing Tabaldak and its moons?
Yamazaki: The Tabaldak system is titled eighty-three degree relative to the plane of the solar system ecliptic. Basically, Earth goes around the Sun’s equator, but Tabaldak is heading in from north to south, which leaves us with only a tiny window of observation. Plus, of course, Tabaldak is moving farther and farther away from the Sun. If we’d discovered it sooner—
Dr. Shieling: But we’re lucky to see anything at all.
Yamazaki: And this chance isn’t going to last.
Cardoza: Oh, God, it’s terminal. How long do we have?
Yamazaki: Twelve years at most. After that, not only will the difference in orbital inclinations will be too great, but Tabaldak will simply be too far and too dim to observe. The window of observation will be closed.
Dr. Shieling: Twelve years to build, launch, and get something out there to observe those moons.
Cardoza: But our man, Taiyo Yamazaki, has a plan.
Yamazaki: Well, my team at ISAS does.
Cardoza: ISIS? Are you a terrorist, son? Does Japan have terrorists?
Yamazaki: No, no, no. ISAS is the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. It’s the primary research and academic body under JAXA.
Dr. Shieling: The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Right.
Cardoza: First, Taiyo, can you talk a bit about why this is such a hard observation. I mean, putting all that ecliptical incline stuff aside for a second, how hard can it really be to look through a telescope? Either you see little green men on Tabaldak’s moons or you don’t, right?
Yamazaki: So, you’re in LA, and I’m in near Tokyo. Imagine I put two little Christmas tree LEDs right up to a Tokyo Dome floodlight. It’d be pretty hard to distinguish between the LEDs and the floodlight. Now imagine I set the LEDs moving so they only just graze the top pole of the floodlight every so often, but I don’t tell you how often or how fast they’re going or at what angle. Then I get the whole triple-body floodlight-LED system zipping through space at twenty thousand kilometers a second. And you’re moving too, way over across the Pacific in LA, around your own even-bigger floodlight, and you’re spinning while you’re doing it. Now tell me the mass, orbital period, eccentricity, period of rotation, orbital path, speed, axial tilt, diameter, radius, surface area, inclination, volume, core composition, density, age, origin, temperature, pressure, reflectivity, apparent brightness, magnetism, and radiation of my two little LEDs. Individually. They’re different. Don’t confuse the two. And most importantly, I want to know the stability and chemical composition of their atmospheres—what gases hover around them, and in what layers and ratios, the changeability, densities, and what that might mean for conditions on the surface of those LEDs—in particular, I want to know if there could be little microorganisms living there.
Dr. Shieling: You’re trying to spot something across vast chasms of space and time that we couldn’t even see right in front of our eyes unless we were looking through a high-powered microscope.
Yamazaki: It’s an engineering challenge. But engineers like a challenge.
Dr. Shieling: And these moons, Gluskab and Malsumis—I know I’m not saying them right. It seems like we get a lot of conflicting info about them.
Cardoza: Yesterday they were socialist utopias. Today they are radioactive wastelands. Nobody knows what’s going on out there.
Yamazaki: And that’s why we need to get out there and have a look.
Dr. Shieling: Nice segue. Tell us about your spacecraft.
Yamazaki: It’s called MONSTAR-X.
Cardoza: Awesome.
Yamazaki: The Microlensing Oort cloud Nuclear Space Telescope for Astrobiological Research and Exploration.
Cardoza: Wow. How long did it take you to grind out that acronym?
Dr. Shieling: Wow, what a shitty question, JC. Let the man speak.
Yamazaki: [laughs] First, I want to be clear that this is only a concept. It only exists on paper.
Cardoza: Got it.
Yamazaki: Tabaldak is far. Out in the Oort Cloud, somewhere around ten thousand AU. Ten thousand times farther from the Sun than Earth is. One-point-five trillion kilometers.
Cardoza: Sure, but what’s that in ‘Mercan?
Yamazaki: Off the top of my head, I’d say that’s at least a hundred miles.
Dr. Shieling: Probably.
Yamazaki: We simply do not have a propulsion system to get us there. Not in twelve years. Not in our lifetimes.
Dr. Shieling: But ... ?
Yamazaki: But for viewing really distant objects, astronomers have a cheat. A hack.
Dr. Shieling: Go on.
Cardoza: Something really massive like a galaxy cluster has enough gravity to bend the light of whatever distant object lies behind it and refocus the image in front.
Dr. Shieling: Gravitational microlensing.
Yamazaki: Right. Astronomers have gotten lots of great pictures and data by zooming in on the deep universe this way. Now, obviously there’s no massive galaxy cluster between us and the outer solar system, but we do have the Sun.
Dr. Shieling: But does the Sun have enough mass to bend light?
Yamazaki: It does. And lucky for us, since the Sun’s gravitation is nowhere near as strong as the gravity of a whole cluster of galaxies, the focal point isn’t way out somewhere billions of light years away like the focal points of galaxy clusters.
Dr. Shieling: It’s not here on Earth either, though.
Cardoza: Good thing, or we’d be bugs under a magni
fying glass.
Yamazaki: A magnifying glass is a good analogy, actually. The solar foci—the point where light passing from behind the Sun is focused and magnified in front of it—starts at five hundred and fifty AU. Still far, but a lot closer than Tabaldak’s ten thousand AU. By comparison, Pluto is about forty AU. Voyager 1, the furthest spacecraft we’ve ever sent, is currently around one-fifty AU from home, and it left Earth close to half a century ago.
Dr. Shieling: Can you speak a bit about the quality of the images we’d get back using the solar lensing method? What kind of magnification and resolution are we talking about?
Yamazaki: Depends on the telescope we put out there, and tons of other factors, but in the thesis, we figure you’d basically be able to put together something as good as Google Maps for the surfaces of Tabaldak's moons, and in multiple wavelengths.
Cardoza: Hot damn, son! That’s worth more than a participation award.
Yamazaki: I’m not the first to think of using the solar foci as a lens, but I think the architecture my team laid out is the only one that uses a liquid mirror, and magnetic shielding, plus—
Dr. Shieling: I presume it’d take more than a few years to build this thing.
Yamazaki: Presuming anyone builds it at all. JAXA rejected our proposal, so odds aren’t looking good.
Cardoza: Those filthy whores.
Dr. Shieling: But as a concept …”
Yamazaki: Yeah, if it did get built … Assuming a bare minimum of five years of construction, we’d it’d have six or so years to get out to five-fifty AU.
Dr. Shieling: Is that why they rejected the proposal?
Yamazaki: Well …
Dr. Shieling: Plenty of other media have covered the controversy around the project, so please don’t feel like you have to get into here. We can even edit this part out of the podcast if you want. JC and I are totally cool with manipulating public perception.
Yamazaki: No, no. I appreciate the chance to clarify. I don’t know how much I can really say without pissing off the wrong people and digging myself deeper, but the truth is— The official reason, they said, was that the propulsion system we proposed isn’t feasible. But they refused to elaborate. We were pretty sure we’d come up with an approach using a hybridized nuclear electromagnetic pulsed plasma thruster that, to be honest, we thought could revolutionize space travel.
Dr. Shieling: Do you still think that now?
Yamazaki: I’m not sure. Maybe I was a bit too optimistic. The potential is still there—yes, it could get a spacecraft around the solar system, or out of the solar system, in record time. But it was naive to think something so radical could be put together in such a short time.
Dr. Shieling: Is that mainly because of technical issues?
The science and tech is well-established. Everything in our proposal is based on existing technology or slight modifications. No new physics or materials needed.
Dr. Shieling: But people hear the word nuclear …
Cardoza: The other N-word. People don’t like to hear that word.
Dr. Shieling: Hence the controversy.
Yamazaki: Well, the controversy went a little further than that. There were accusations. Totally unfounded, of course. Alleged whistleblowers—completely false allegations.
Cardoza: You know what? Fuck them.
Dr. Shieling: Any idea why someone would want to sabotage this?
Yamazaki: I really wouldn’t want to speculate, but you know how it is. We proposed something big. Something that could’ve really shaken things up.
Dr. Shieling: And you’re not talking about the public’s reaction if your spacecraft discovers life on another world.
Yamazaki: No. There’s a lot of money on the line when big things happen. Careers on the line. Geopolitics is on the line.
Dr. Shieling: Do you feel under threat personally? Might the repercussions go beyond your career?
Yamazaki: Um. Yes. I do. But I really can’t say any more.
Dr. Shieling: But I understand you’re thinking about applying to be an astronaut?
Yamazaki: I already have, actually.
Cardoza: Whoa.
Dr. Shieling: Well, congratulations.
Yamazaki: Hold on. I only applied. I cleared initial screening, but there’s a long, long way to go before congratulations are in order.
Dr. Shieling: So, I guess whatever those repercussions might be, they don’t affect your future prospects too much.
Yamazaki: We’ll have to wait and see. A lot’s going on behind the scenes I can’t control right now, and things can move pretty slowly in Japan. They tend to be compartmentalized, though, so with a little luck, I’ll be riding a rocket up on out of here before they can find the documents to keep me grounded.
Dr. Shieling: Well, Taiyo Yamazaki, here’s hoping you get to fly your own design.
Yamazaki: It’s robotic, but maybe they’ll let me push start.
Cardoza: Godspeed to that.
Dr. Shieling: A big thanks to Taiyo Yamazaki of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science for being on the show.
Yamazaki: Thank you for having me.
6
Not one star or cosmic wanderer decorated the night sky, and the only photons of human gadgetry came from the dull embers of a mosquito coil.
“It’s a different world here,” Taiyo said from his seat in the plastic patio chair. If not for the mournful cry of insects, the sultry air might have extinguished all trace of a world beyond the bungalow porch. “Compared to back home, I mean.”
He wondered what creatures had come to life around the camp that his human senses had no hope of detecting in the dark. Maybe he’d find out: He had to pee, and the bathroom was across the clearing. He’d have to go before bed.
He felt Nel’s arm brush his from the chair next to him. “It’s still Earth,” she said and took a sip of iced tea.
He told her a bit about his birthplace, Sendai, a small city of a million people 350 kilometers up the coast from Tokyo. She’d heard of it:
“Isn’t that where that tsunami was, about ten or fifteen years ago?”
“I was sixteen,” he said. Nel would’ve been in high school then, too.
He thought she had nothing else to say, but a minute later when Kristen left him and Nel alone to go mingle down at the fire pit, Nel told him about a summer job she'd had as a sixteen-year-old helping out a Mars-analog project at the Haughton impact crater on Devon Island.
“Devon’s as Mars-like as it gets.”
Taiyo tried to respond less like an idiot this time and more like a man. He deepened his voice— “Sounds like a pretty fucking rough experience.” —And he sounded like a pretty fucking dumb douchebag.
She didn’t seem to mind. Punctuated with bouts of silence, neither awkward nor forced, they continued talking while the other candidates came and went, getting ready for bed. Someone turned on the light in the dorm room, and a yellow glow seeped through the curtains.
He tugged at the collar of his undershirt. The temperature had fallen with sundown, and his sweaty clothes now clung, adding to the chill.
“On most maps the name is Resolute, but we call it Qausuittuq,” she said of her hometown, a village of 200 located thousands of kilometers from the nearest paved road and known for being the world’s coldest and most northern permanent settlement. “In Inuktitut, the name means ‘the place with no dawn.’”
“There’s got to be a certain poetic romanticism to being so isolated.”
“No,” she said. “Mostly gravel and ice.”
“I bet the whole town is like family,” he said, hoping she didn’t come back with some horrific tale of isolation madness.
“It’s the people that make a place home.”
“Still. It must be tough living up there.”
Nel looked over at him and blinked without expression. “We had central heating,” she said. He watched her absently rubbing the tattoos that ringed her wrists and fin
gers. “Up in the Arctic isn’t so different than down here in Australia. White and grey, not green and brown. Bears, not crocodiles.”
He parted his lips to speak but decided it was better not to say how different he thought that sounded. He’d only end up blurting something dumb or speaking from the clichéd picture in his head of her little round face bundled in a parka.
“So, that summer doing the Mars thing on Devon Island was just a one-off thing?” he said.
“A one-night stand,” she replied, flashing only the slightest hint of a mischievous grin.
“I thought the Sun didn’t set in the summer.”
“You think too literally.”
She’d also worked as a guide for wealthy Americans on polar bear hunts until the Canadian government banned the export of kills. “The Americans can still hunt, but they don’t want to if they can’t bring home the trophy.”
“Seems like it’d be a bit awkward bringing a dead polar bear on the plane, anyway,” he said.
He turned his chair so he could see her face. Her expression stayed blank as she leaned back and stretched her legs under the table. He now pictured her in a baggy hoodie and jeans—not a parka or a blue jumpsuit, too cool to laugh at his jokes.
He’d have to try harder.
“You got Amazon Prime up in the Arctic?” he asked.
She made a sharp, reflexive noise that might’ve been a laugh. He’d take it.
“We’re working on it,” she said.
“The telecom thing?”
“You read my bio.”
“Perhaps.”
