Space For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  “Ewww,” the three passengers exclaim at once.

  “Yeah, I think I'm gonna leave my helmet on for a little while longer,” Tim says.

  “Shrimp Empanadas don't smell so great the second time around huh?” Kingsley asks from the safety of his pressurized helmet. The passengers try to ignore the smell as they play with their gloves and helmets floating in zero-g. Caroline takes off her cap holding in her hair and covering her ears. Her blond hair floats freely away from her head in every direction.

  “Oh boy,” Caroline says as she corrals her hair back down.

  “You probably want to stow your hair until we're sure we've got all the puke,” Kingsley says. K takes his helmet off, leaving it floating in front of him as he takes off his gloves. He puts his gloves inside his helmet and then stows his helmet and gloves under his seat. There is a spot on the bottom of each crew couch where the helmet can screw into just as it does to the suit. That way they don't have to keep track of free-floating helmets and gloves as they get in and out of their suits.

  Arnold is first out of his straps, floating up out of his seat and into the open space of the cabin above the crew couches. He floats to one of the four small circular windows in the side of the Griffin capsule. He looks out and finds just the blackness of space. Richard Branson heads to a different window and finds that he's flying high over the eastern Mediterranean.

  “Wow,” Branson says quietly.

  “I don't see anything! Are we still in a simulator?”

  “Our universe is just a simulation,” Kingsley replies.

  “Really?” Arnold asks.

  “Ever heard of the double slit experiment?” K asks, looking up at Arnold floating over him.

  “I'm not big on lesbian porn,” Arnold replies.

  Commander Bowe turns to Kingsley and says extremely seriously, “He's got space dementia.” Kingsley chuckles and shakes his head. It's a joke about the extremely realistic film Armageddon, which is so ridiculous that NASA trains new employees by having them watch it to see how many inaccuracies they can find.

  “Griffin, Hawthorne,” K says as he starts undoing his straps.

  “Go ahead Griffin.”

  “How did first stage return go?” K asks.

  “First stage splashed down safely, should be recovered within the hour,” the call comes back on the radio.

  “What was the splashdown velocity?” K asks.

  “Ten-point-one meters per second, over.” Kingsley's jaw drops as he hears that.

  “What?” Commander Bowe asks.

  “I can't believe that,” K says.

  “What?”

  “He did a powered descent anyway,” K says.

  “What's the normal splashdown velocity?” Bowe asks.

  “About fifteen meters per second,” K replies. “The powered descent profile was for the first stage to slow down to a stop and a hover at five meters altitude to simulate a landing. Then it would cut the engine and free fall that five meters. A five meter free-fall takes about a second, and so it would splashdown at about ten meters per second.”

  “So he did it anyway after you told him not to?”

  “Yep,” K says.

  “Well it worked didn't it?” Bowe asks. “Go easy on him.”

  “I don't know about that, he disobeyed an order,” K says. “I wish I had been there to see that,” K says.

  “See what?” Caroline asks as she floats up out of her seat, over top of K and Bowe with her hair tied back now.

  “Remember stage separation?” K asks. “At that point, we were about 80 kilometers high, going up at quite a speed. We left that first stage behind and went on our way on the second stage, getting into orbit, but while we were doing that the nearly empty first stage, with its engines off kept on going by itself,” K says as he gets his last strap undone and floats slowly up out of his seat. “It continued up to about 100 kilometers high and then started to fall back down, while going about 2,000 mph horizontally. It came back down, hitting the thickening atmosphere, being scorched by the friction of going mach 3.” K reaches the top of the capsule grabbing a small rail and steadying himself as he looks out the docking window, seeing the horizon, the Indian sub-continent and perhaps Australia as just a sliver.

  “Small cold-reaction jets around the outside fired to keep the whole thing oriented properly, upright. It would have slowed and slowed by friction and then just a few thousand feet up, the center engine fired up, using just the last bits of fuel we didn't use from those tanks. That center engine slowed it as this twelve story building fell toward the ocean. And rather than crashing into the sea, it slowed on that single pillar of flame from that center engine, until just 15 feet above the sea, it came to a stop, hovering.”

  Caroline grabs the railing and steadies herself next to the other docking window.

  “Then the engine cut out and it fell fifteen feet and into the water rather gently. And it's still there, bobbing up and down, still vertical, those heavy engines on the bottom keep it oriented upright, sticking a good forty feet out of the water. It would have been quite a sight; a twelve story building falling out of the sky and do that. It's a sight out of this world. Something that would have been indistinguishable from the gods only a hundred years ago. I wonder what the curious whales and dolphins poking their faces out of the sea thought of that.”

  “You sound like Carl Sagan,” Caroline says, pushing away from the window and floating slowly away.

  “I wish,” K mutters.

  There wasn't much time to look out the small windows, as another burn was quickly approaching. With the crew strapped back in, Bowe piloted the Griffin the rest of the way to rendezvous with the ISS using a series of Hohman transfers. From his seat, Kingsley watches the ISS grow from a dot to a huge orbital complex on the live feed from the two video cameras on either side of the docking port. The use of two cameras actually gives the Griffin computer binocular vision, so it is better able to judge distances. Commander Bowe engages the auto-dock computer and sets its target to a point in space, ten meters below the nadir (Earth-facing) docking port on the Harmony module. The Harmony was built in Turin, Italy by the European Space Agency before being transferred to the cape and launched by the shuttle on STS-120. It's a cylinder 7.2 meters long and 4.4 meters in diameter. The Harmony has six common berthing mechanisms, one at each end of the cylinder, and four in a ring around the outer wall. Bowe and Kingsley watch the telemetry carefully, waiting for something to go wrong so they can override the computer. However it works flawlessly, accomplishing an approach in impossibly smooth fashion.

  “And we are parked,” K says on the radio.

  “Roger, deploying arm now,” NASA Astronaut Michael Hopkins says from his control station in the Destiny module. The Destiny, another US module, is mounted to the aft port of the Harmony module, where the Griffin currently sits a few meters below the common berthing mechanism port. On the other end, the Destiny is attached to the aft port of the Unity module, which was the first U.S. Component of the space station and it connects the US side to the Russian side.

  Hopkins carefully operates the CanadaArm2. Attached on one end to the S0 Truss atop the Destiny module, the free end heads away from the station, astride the Griffin module. The end of the arm has a camera inside its grappling mechanism and Hopkins watches that camera as he finds the grappling point inside the exposed service bay on the side of the Griffin. Fellow Expedition 38 crew members Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazansky, both of the Russian Space Agency, help Michael keep an eye on the other cameras, but he is more than capable of handling the task himself.

  Hopkins' control station consists of two laptops, two joysticks, and three screens with dedicated camera feeds. He focuses mostly on the center camera feed which shows the view from the CanadaArm2's business end. To the left of that screen is a view from the station of the side of the Griffin. To the right, a view from another point on the station of the Harmony common berthing mechanism, where he will attach the Griffin in a fe
w moments. With his hands on each joystick, he maneuvers the dexterous arm out alongside the Griffin, then closes in on the attachment point straight in from the side. The center of the CanadaArm2's view includes a graphical overlay which he lines up with a target built into the Griffin attachment point. Hopkins has no trouble, and captures the Griffin.

  “Griffin, I have you now,” Hopkins says. From inside the capsule, they don't hear a thing, nothing to let them know the station has actually taken hold of their spacecraft.

  “Roger, our flight computer is now in passive mode, we're go for docking,” Kingsley replies. Hopkins brings the Griffin in with the arm, positioning it against the Earth-facing docking port. The crew of Griffin 7 look up through the docking windows and see the black sky completely disappear, replaced by the shadowed metallic skin of the Harmony module. There's a dull thump as they make contact.

  “Contact light,” Kingsley says.

  “Talkback is green,” Bowe says.

  “Deploying,” K says, mentally crossing his fingers. Docking might seem like an easy, low stress activity, no more complicated than parking a car in a garage. However, it is much more complex. The two docking mechanisms, two pieces of machinery built thousands of miles apart, a decade apart, need to work together flawlessly. To make matters worse, the Harmony port has been in space for some years now, going from the extreme cold of the darkness of space, back to the extreme heat of direct sunlight over and over, a cycle it goes through a number of times per day. Think of the stress on the metals, the expansion and contraction, and yet it needs to remain in exact enough specifications that it can flawlessly mate with a new piece of hardware.

  The first Skylab mission in 1973 experienced a lot of trouble when they tried to dock their Apollo CSM to the Skylab. The perfectly lined up approach and docking was all for nothing as the docking mechanisms simply bounced off each other, sending both spacecraft floating away from each other once more. It took many attempts, and if they couldn't get it right, the launch of the Apollo would have been for nothing as they would have had to return to Earth without docking. Luckily they had an experienced astronaut on board. Pete Conrad was the third man to walk on the Moon, and he was able to achieve docking by continually applying thrust while the docking mechanisms were in contact, finally getting the two mechanisms to lock together.

  But as K deploys the locks of the Griffin docking mechanism it's all green lights.

  “Houston, this is Griffin 7, we are berthed,” Commander Bowe radios. There is an audible sigh of relief through the cabin.

  “Lady and Gentleman and Barbarian, this is your co-pilot,” Kingsley says in his pilot voice again, “we've reached our cruising altitude of 412 kilometers, and a velocity of 17,240 miles per hour. The pilot has turned off the fasten seat belt sign and you are now free to move about the cabin.”

  Richard Branson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Caroline the Duchess of Monaco begin taking off their spacesuits, which is a difficult and time-consuming process. They trained to do this on the ground, but in space it is actually more difficult. Every movement results in an opposite movement, and they quickly find themselves floating away, rotating and flailing as they try to stay in control. They laugh as they get into more and more precarious positions like some galactic game of twister.

  Meanwhile, Kingsley and Tim still have some work to do to closeout the Griffin spacecraft, putting it into hibernation so they can wake it up and use it to take them home in two weeks. They shut down a number of systems, leaving essential systems in passive modes, and finally get the Griffin down to it's sleeping state. In the event of an emergency, such as an impending collision with orbital debris from a Chinese anti-satellite test or a sudden loss of control in the ISS or any of a number of emergencies, the crew would have to return to their Griffin capsule and head home within a matter of minutes, and thus the Griffin will always be poised to be a lifeboat for its two week stay at the station.

  With the Griffin lulled to sleep, they float out of their seats. The passengers are still working on removing their spacesuits as Kingsley and Tim are ready to start disrobing themselves.

  “I'm having a bit of trouble,” Arnold says with his head stuck in the upper chest of his space suit. Tim and Kingsley work as a team to help Arnold and then Richard to get out of their suits while Caroline manages to get out of hers on her own. With their suits off, they put their two part suits into their empty seats, and strap them in, securing their suits in place for their two week stay. The empty suits look a bit like ghostly astronauts. Their helmets and gloves are already securely stowed away beneath the seats. Approximately forty minutes after docking, the crew of Griffin 7 are finally ready to enter the space station.

  To mark this historic occasion, the first time a private company has sent people to a space station, Kingsley has brought several cameras on board. Each member of the crew is given a small camera mounted on a headset, giving a point-of-view shot. There is also a pair of hand held HD cameras on board. Kingsley gives one to Tim, and holds the other one, waiting until the hatch is opened to give it to the crew of the ISS to use amongst themselves.

  All of the cameras are broadcasting their feeds via WiFi back to the Griffin, which is beaming the signals along with the standard Griffin down-link via the SpacEx relay network of satellites and ground stations. The views are open to the public via a SpacEx live stream being broadcast on the Internet, and some of the footage will shortly be seen on news broadcasts worldwide. Public interest in this event is greater than it has been for any other space mission in decades. NASA has rarely been interested in drawing attention to their missions with a few exceptions. There was of course the doomed Challenger flight featuring the teacher-in-space. Then there was the return to space of John Glenn in 1998. But beyond that, there's not been a lot of interest. It takes the Griffin 7 mission to really give public interest a spark, as it is quite a significant first, marking the opening of the commercial space industry, but also featuring four celebrity-astronauts, and there's nothing the public likes much more than celebrities.

  These two factors alone might have given this mission quite a spot in the public eye, but Kingsley's insistence on the use of several cameras, including some quite heavy HD equipment will mean that this is one of the most well documented space mission in history. Kingsley knows that making SpacEx cool will mean bookings, and with all of the doubt about NASA's plans and the possibility that NASA will never use any of the commercial crew programs, it's imperative that SpacEx generate interest from the private sector. That means K might be competing for the attention of billionaires. They might be first, but ULA isn't far behind. The first manned CST-100 flight is supposed to launch in eleven days. Then a second manned flight to the ISS in the coming months would accomplish what Griffin 7 has just done. SpacEx is not far ahead.

  “All cameras running?” K asks.

  “Hurry up, I have to pee,” Caroline says, clenching her legs together awkwardly.

  With all of the cameras up and running, it's time to open the hatch. There are two hatches, one that opens into the station, and the Griffin hatch which opens into the capsule. The space station crew open their hatch first, then knock on the outer Griffin hatch. Kingsley and Richard hold onto a railing lining the hatch to anchor themselves. They turn a knob in the center of the hatch, releasing clamps along the sides. They pull and the hatch gives way, opening into the capsule. A slight whistle marks the breaking of the seal as the cabin pressures weren't quite exactly equal.

  Kingsley is first to see through the open hatch, finding Michael Hopkins floating above him. He appears upside down to Kingsley. Michael extends his hand through the open hatch for an historic handshake.

  “Wait,” K says. He takes his HD camera that he's been documenting the opening of the hatch with, and slowly guides it toward the hatch, letting go. The camera floats across and Oleg Kotov plucks it out of the air and turns it around. With Tim filming from the other side, Kingsley and Michael shake hands, marking the opening of
the International Space Station to the public.

  Kingsley and Michael link up, floating ear-to-ear, smiling for pictures. K then guides himself through the port and into the Harmony module. They didn't establish a proper order or procedure for who would go next, but Richard Branson pushes his way forward and is the next through. Arnold follows, then Caroline, and Tim is last. Tim places his HD camera against a piece of Velcro, anchoring it to a wall of the Harmony, and then joins his comrades. The new eight person crew poses for pictures, shaking hands, greetings all around.

  “Are we good, is that enough pictures?” Caroline asks through a gritted smile.

  “What's your hurry?” K asks. Caroline keeps that smile plastered on while clenching her legs together tighter. “Let's do some more funny poses,” K says.

  “Oh god,” Caroline mutters. Arnold poses for a picture, holding Kingsley's legs in his hands up over his head, like he's using Kingsley as a club to hit Richard Branson, who cowers away from the impeding blow.

  “Okay you boys have fun, will somebody tell me where the restroom is?” Caroline asks.

  “There's one in the Zvezda and one in the Tranquility,” Kingsley replies simply.

  Caroline looks around the Harmony module. While externally a cylinder, it's quite rectangular on the inside, bright white, very clean, like a laboratory, as is all of the US side of the station. The Griffin is docked on the “bottom” of the Harmony module, which is the aft end of the central core of station modules. At the front end of the cylindrical Harmony is a small blue signs that says “To Destiny.” To one side there is hatch leading to another module with a sign that says “To Kibo,” which is the Japanese experiment module. Opposite to that hatch is another open hatch and a sign that says “To Columbus,” which leads to the Columbus Laboratory module. Caroline looks up, finding another hatch on top of the Harmony, but this one leads nowhere. It's another docking port that the Griffin or the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle can dock with.