Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  Geena said, “Maybe the Russians’ Energia—ninety tons to LEO—”

  “Junk,” Jays said bluntly. “The Energia was a piece of shit, even before they closed down the production lines. Believe me, I went out there for an Apollo-Soyuz anniversary event, and I saw what’s left of it. Energia is not an option.”

  “Okay,” Frank said. “Well, alternatively we have those old studies of Shuttle-derived vehicles…”

  Geena knew about some of that. There might have been the Shuttle-C, an unmanned throwaway variant of the Shuttle, capable of orbiting seventy or eighty tons. But the cost advantage would have been minimal compared to existing systems like the Titan IV, so that too got canned in 1990.

  “But,” said Frank, “there was another baby I worked on called Shuttle-Z. Looked like the Shuttle on steroids: your regular solid rocket boosters and external tank, but then a cargo element that was fatter than the external tank, with four Shuttle main engines. Could have sent a hundred and thirty tons to LEO. One hell of a bird. But that would have meant a lot of changes to the processing and launch facilities, so it wasn’t economical either.”

  Jays said, “If we got to sit around and wait for Shuttle II—VentureStar, or whatever the hell they call it now—”

  “Yeah. We’ll never get anywhere. But what about reviving the Saturn V production lines? Have you seen those studies?…”

  “Enough.” Geena held up her hands. “Let’s get real, guys. In a few weeks we aren’t talking about a new heavy-lift vehicle, or rebuilding the Saturns, or Shuttle-derived vehicles, or any of that. And we ain’t going to get an OTV. We have to think in terms of what we’ve got. We have to develop an architecture based on Shuttle and the available low-lift expendables.”

  “Off the shelf and to the Moon.” Frank grinned.

  “And what,” Jays said quietly, “about cost?”

  Geena took a deep breath. What she was about to say went against years of ingrained NASA cultural orientation.

  “Forget about the cost.”

  Frank spluttered. “What?”

  “I know. It’s hard. But cost isn’t going to be a factor here. Timescale is all. It’s a mind game, guys. The rules are, assume you can spend what you like, but all you can do is requisition existing components.”

  “Umm.” Frank pulled at his lip. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…” He pulled over another napkin, and sketched Earth and Moon, this time as two spheres. He drew tight circular orbits around each of Earth and Moon, then a figure eight around the two worlds.

  “Let’s be specific about what we have to achieve here. If we are restricted to the current fleet of medium-lift vehicles, we have to consider Earth orbit rendezvous. Several launches, by the Shuttle and other vehicles, carrying up the components of the mission, to be assembled there. Probably using Station as a refueling shack.

  “First of all we need propellant for the TLI burn.” He drew a little arrow, at the Earth end of the figure eight. “Translunar injection. We coast for three days to the Moon. We need our habitat vehicle to keep us alive. Then LOI: lunar orbit insertion, another burn, which we have to carry fuel for, to place us in orbit around the Moon. Next, into the lander. A deorbit burn, descent, soft-land standing on your rockets. More fuel, of course. Ascent back to orbit, maybe using the same engines—maybe not, like Apollo. Rendezvous in lunar orbit. Then the trans-Earth injection, coast back to Earth, probably aerobrake to orbit and have Shuttle come pick you up.”

  “Pretty much like Apollo,” Jays said.

  “Well, the rules of celestial mechanics haven’t changed. Almost certainly this architecture is going to provide us with the minimum-weight configuration. You could consider direct-ascent, for instance, where you take your whole ship, transfer habitat and all, down to the surface…But we ran some studies a few years ago along these lines, about how light, how cheap you could get. It wasn’t encouraging.”

  “Stick to what you have,” Geena said.

  “Let’s start with the lander. Everything else is going to scale to that. Now, the old Apollo Lunar Module was around sixteen tons, full up weight. But that included a surface shelter for six man-days on the Moon, effectively. And there were a lot of structural costs in the mass estimates, because of the split between ascent and descent stages, and the nature of the design. We did some studies that showed you could cut that to maybe a quarter.”

  Jays snorted. “Bull hockey. Believe me, that old LM was just a bubble of aluminum. Those Grumman guys shaved it thin.”

  Frank grinned. “Old man, that bird will look like a Chevy compared to what I’ll show you now.” He quickly sketched an Apollo LM, the familiar spidery descent stage, the bulbous ascent stage. “The whole thing stood maybe twenty-three feet tall. Now look at this.” Alongside he sketched something that looked like a scale model of the Apollo descent stage. “There,” he said. “Six feet tall. Nothing but fuel tanks, legs and a rocket engine. The structural integrity is actually expressed through the tanks themselves.”

  Jays looked closely. “No ascent stage?”

  “You use the same engine for ascent as for descent. You refuel on the surface, from an unmanned tanker.”

  Geena, looking at the blurred little sketch, said uneasily, “Where’s the cabin?”

  That wolf grin again. “What cabin?” And Frank sketched on two stick figures with space helmets, side by side, standing on the platform, holding onto some kind of rail. “We call it the open cockpit design.”

  “Jesus,” Jays breathed.

  “Well, we had to keep the weight down,” Frank said. “It was a strong, closed design.” He sighed. “But we never got to build it, of course. And we couldn’t do it now in a couple of weeks. So I guess we can’t use any of this.” He made to crumple the napkin, but Geena covered his hand to stop him.

  “Hold it. What about the Shoemakers?” Henry’s unmanned sample-return probes. Two flight models and a fully functional test model, now sitting in a white room at JPL, unused, canceled, requirements deleted.

  Frank put her through another of those long silences of his.

  Then he said, “In fact, the Shoemaker design borrowed from some of the conceptual work we did on the manned lander. Building the structure around the tanks, for instance. But now—shit, you’re talking about using the Shoemakers to put humans on the surface?”

  “Why not? Those sample-return packages must be heavy. The mass estimates are—”

  “Comparable.” Frank pulled his lip thoughtfully.

  “But,” Jays said, “those robot probes are designed to land themselves. What’s the pilot going to do?”

  Geena took a deep breath. Here I go breaking another piece of NASA conditioning. “Jays, it doesn’t matter. Not for this mission. If this would work, if the Shoemakers would get us there, we should accept giving up control.”

  “Oh, sure. And would you fly this thing?” Jays asked. “Would you risk your ass on some hacked-over piece of shit that was meant to be unmanned, ride it down in your space suit, without even piloting it, for Christ’s sake?”

  Geena thought it over. Realistically, if I push this through, then this isn’t an academic question. It really could be me. With no abort options or training or—She forced a grin. “Hell, yes. Wouldn’t you?”

  Jays was thoughtful. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “That’s the honest truth. I don’t know. And I’ve been there.”

  “We could probably give you some control,” said Frank. “I’m not too familiar with the Shoemaker’s specs…some kind of override option during the final powered descent. Just in case you found yourself coming down on a crater wall or some such. But—” He shook his head. “I got to tell you I don’t see any way we could get those crates man-rated. Not in the timescales you’re talking about.”

  “Well, I accept that,” Geena said. “Here’s another break with the culture. This isn’t going to be a safe mission.”

  “That’s for sure. Just figuring out the abort options will be—”
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  “There may be no abort options, for long stretches of the profile,” Geena said. “But it doesn’t matter. Not this time.”

  Frank eyed her. “It seems that somebody wants to go to the Moon, real bad.”

  She said, “We’re all going to have to think out of the box on this. If you can make this fly, we’ll go anyhow, and accept the risk.”

  Jays thumped the table. “Damn it, I’ve waited since 1961 to hear someone say that. If we’d been grown-up about the risks, accepted our casualties, we’d be orbiting fucking Jupiter by now.”

  Geena saw Frank blanch. It was a common enough view, but Frank had spent a working lifetime being coached in the opposite direction. She leaned forward to cut Jays off.

  “Suppose we can make the lander work. What about the rest of it?”

  Frank looked warily at Jays, before turning back to Geena. “Well, we’re still in trouble. We never did build that handy Orbital Transfer Vehicle, so we got nothing to push us from Earth to Moon.”

  “But we do have the PAM-Ds,” said Geena. “And the IUS.” The Payload Assist Modules and Inertial Upper Stages were small boosters carried into orbit in a Shuttle’s payload bay, to boost satellites to geosynchronous orbit, or send interplanetary probes on their way.

  Jays laughed. “The ‘I’ in IUS used to stand for ‘Interim,’ because it was only supposed to be operational until the OTV came along. When they found out they would be flying it in the 1990s, they figured they’d better change the name.”

  Frank said, “The PAMs won’t work. Sorry. They’re spinners. That is, they depend on spinning for stabilization and thrust-vector control.”

  “And we couldn’t modify them—”

  “Not quickly. Besides, the performance of those solids sucks. It would make for a huge translunar injection propellant load. You’d need a lot of IUSs to—”

  Geena said, “What other upper stage could we use?”

  Frank eyed her skeptically. “That’s the spirit. But I think we have a hole here. What we need is a Service Module like Apollo’s, or an OTV, but we don’t have either of those.”

  Jays growled, “We don’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We aren’t the only players here. I remember the security briefings we got during Apollo. I’m talking about ’67 or ’68. The CIA got worried the Russkis were getting close to a manned circumlunar flight, because they launched this thing called a Zond and reentered it. That was why we bumped Apollo 8 up to a lunar orbit mission; it was slated as an Earth-orbit flight.”

  “Oh,” Frank was nodding now. “Oh, you’re right. The Russians were testing an upgraded lunar-mission Soyuz, complete with a new Service Module stage called a Block-D. They launched it on a Proton booster. It all fit in with their lunar landing plans, that they scrapped when their N–1 booster kept blowing up on them.”

  Geena smiled. “And the Block-D—”

  “Is still flying. They use it as an upper stage on their commercial Proton launcher.”

  “And so—”

  Frank started to sound quietly excited. “And so we could use that, along with a beefed-up Soyuz, as the equivalent of the old Apollo Command Service Module. In fact, since the Block-D is a kerosene-oxygen, it should have a better performance than Apollo did. For the old Zond missions the stage must have imparted about ten thousand feet per sec. With the added mass of our lander outbound—” He scribbled on another napkin. “You’re looking at plenty of gas for both the lunar orbit insertion and Earth-return burns.” He looked at Geena, eyes wide. “What are we missing? Suddenly this is too easy.”

  Jays nodded vigorously. “Soyuz to the Moon. Has a ring to it, doesn’t it? Of course they’re still flying that baby up to Station, but it’s an Apollo-era ship. Shit, I think it predates Apollo.” He laughed. “And believe me, if you find yourself flying one of those, it will make riding down to the Moon without a cockpit look like a cakewalk.”

  Geena said, “So now we just have to figure how to get that combination on the way to the Moon.”

  Jays said, “The highest performance stage we’ve got is the Centaur.”

  Frank shook his head. “Won’t work. Liquid hydrogen. It would take a couple of them—and we’d have to launch on Titan IVs—but anyhow the LH2 on the first one would boil away before we could launch the second. Those stages are only designed for a couple of hours on orbit.”

  “How about the IUS?” Jays asked. “They can go up on Shuttles or Titans.”

  Frank pulled his lip. “Their performance is poor compared to the Centaur.”

  Jays grinned. “So take more. Four, maybe?”

  Frank scribbled quickly. “Actually, three would do it. Hmm. I guess you could launch the first on a Shuttle, second on a Titan, and the third on another Shuttle, then use that orbiter to assemble the stages.”

  Geena said, “And the Soyuz—”

  Frank put down his pen. “Easy. Send it up unmanned with the Block-D on a Proton, like they did with Zond. Autodock to Station—”

  “We’ll need the Progress autodock module, then.”

  “Yeah. Transfer the crew from Station. Then haul over to the IUS assembly, dock—and go to the Moon…”

  Geena asked, “You think the Russians would agree?”

  Jays said, “You told us you could command the resources this would need. Anyhow,” he said, eyeing her, “I hear you have contacts of your own over there. Maybe that could, umm, smooth the way.”

  He was right, of course. Although it added another layer of complication. Not only was she going to have to campaign for this ridiculous lashed-up lunar mission, but she was also going to have to get her ex-husband and her Russian lover to work together on it…

  Frank, frowning, started to sketch in a Soyuz on his napkin: a pepperpot, with fragile solar wings.

  “Holy shit,” he said respectfully. “Maybe it will work. I think we could do it.”

  “Hell, of course we can do it,” Jays boomed. “Makes you think, though. What did we learn in all those years of flying Shuttle, all those billions of bucks, to help with this, when the chips are down? I’ll tell you. Diddley.”

  Geena said to Frank, “Can you turn this into some kind of formal recommendation?”

  Frank said, “For what audience?…Never mind. We can cover that when we have the material. We have a lot of studies to do. The conversion of the Shoemakers. Looking into the IUS. Figuring out the Soyuz option. Confirming the mass estimates. Figuring out what you’d need on the surface—what about EVA suits, for Christ’s sake?—and then there’s the operational stuff. Assembly at the Station. Who and how? Looking at the launch manifest for Shuttle and Titan and Proton, figuring out what can be bumped…” He looked at her nervously. “You know, it doesn’t pay to go into these things just one chart deep.”

  “I understand. I’ll start pulling strings. If,” she said heavily, “you think you can do it.”

  “Oh, I can do it.” He grinned. “After all, everything’s off the shelf.”

  Jays said, “You say you put forward this kind of proposal a few years ago.”

  “Yeah,” said Frank. “An internal study. A little less improvised, of course—”

  “What happened?”

  “It was too expensive. We aimed to get back to the Moon for less than a billion bucks. We still found we came in at nearer two billion.”

  Jays belched. “Hell,” he said. “Speaking as an old Air Force man I can tell you that’s the cost of one B–2A Spirit bomber. A return to the Moon, for that. What a waste. What a fucking waste.” He grabbed the empty bottles. “Where’s the waitress? You want another?”

  They all did, and before the waitress could clear the tables, Geena took the napkins Frank had sketched on, and folded them carefully, and put them away.

  They stayed for more beers, long into the night, and the Outpost got steadily more raucous.

  24

  …There was a quake in Seattle, in fact, on June 1st, the day before Joely Stern moved there. />
  For a vet of L.A. like her, it sounded like no big deal: Richter five or six, hardly enough to slosh the water in the bathtub, even if it did send enough dilute mud out of Elliott Bay to flood the Waterfront Park and knock out the streetcars. But it sent the locals into a spin, coming so soon after the Rainier eruption.

  And anyhow just then Joely had bigger problems on her mind.

  Like negotiating her pay at Virtuelle, which still hadn’t been settled even when the company’s big eighteen-wheeler had turned up at her apartment block in L.A., and the movers had loaded up everything, right down to her car, for God’s sake.

  She had gone in pitching at eighteen hundred bucks a week, but the executive who hired her, in the end, managed to lowball her to fourteen hundred. And on top of that she would lose twenty percent to the employment agency Virtuelle were recruiting her through, which in turn meant that she was engaged not as a staff employee but as a perma-lancer, no health benefits or pension or stock options. And by the time Uncle Sam had taken his cut she was left with little more than eight hundred a week, which felt like a defeat, even if it was more than she had earned in her twenty-seven years…

  But she went to Seattle anyhow.

  She spent a day exploring, and she immediately fell in love with the place.

  She liked its topography, the way it was folded over the compact hillsides above its bay. She liked being able to drive from snow-capped mountains to a yacht-filled Sound in half a day. She liked the Elliott Bay Book Company, whose boast to stock every book in the world she was not able to invalidate with her standard three-title test set.

  Work was a little iffy, though.

  Virtuelle’s campus—all paid for by the unexpected profitability of the world’s first successful virtual reality E-zine—was a carpet of neat quadrangles of grass, separating three-story office buildings like children’s blocks, gleaming blue glass, identical save for their red numbering. The bottom story of each building was an open car lot, so that the buildings were fat, top-heavy boxes held up there by skinny little beams of reinforced concrete, all of it a little rickety in the eyes of a Californian.