Moon For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  Now it's Pegasus 2's time to prove what it can do. It rendezvoused with SS Marie Juliette at a nearly polar, 86-degree-inclined 150 km circular orbit early Sunday morning Hawthorne-time. The station completes an orbit of the Moon in just over two hours, spending half of that time over the lit Earth-facing-side and the other half sailing quietly over the darkened far-side and out of radio contact. The Pegasus took on propellant around midnight, on the day-side. Then she undocked at around 9 am Monday morning, just as the station and lander were over the lunar North Pole and heading south across the lit face. Pegasus 2 burned to lower itself to a 30 by 150 km orbit soon after undocking. It descended from 150 km to 30 km, zooming over its target landing site at just 45 kilometers. It reached perilune, the lowest point in its orbit, about an hour later and over the lunar South Pole. The Pegasus 2 burns its engines quickly before it disappears around the far-side, flying low over the South Pole. Before it goes into radio-darkness, the burn is complete and the orbit is circularized at 30 km.

  Pegasus 2 reappeared just after 11 am Hawthorne-time above the lunar North Pole, scooting along the surface at 30 kilometers high and 1600 m/s, or over 3500 mph. With no real atmosphere, a spacecraft could orbit the Moon at any altitude that didn't intersect the ground (see also: splat). Imagine flying over the cratered Moon at an altitude of just a few hundred feet while traveling at over 3000 mph. Though the lunar masscons perturb most orbits and the slightest perturbation would ruin your low altitude joy-ride pretty quickly.

  The other effect of no atmosphere is that landing on the Moon must be done entirely with rocket thrust, no parachutes, no drag to slow you down. To land, the Pegasus must point her engines down-range, in the direction of motion, and burn to slow down, shedding 3500 mph of speed and then throttling down and descending on a pillar of flame down to a soft touchdown. In spacecraft terms, the maneuver requires 2.2 km/s of delta-v (change in velocity). Returning to lunar orbit requires another 2.2 km/s of delta-v. All that changing of velocity is the reason why the Pegasus lunar lander has a mass of 21 tonnes, but when she returns to lunar orbit and has expended most of her fuel, she will be reduced to just 6 tonnes, making her mass before landing more than 70% propellant.

  Pegasus 2 prepares to begin its long landing burn while flying past Hadley Rille, the landing site of Apollo 15, as well as the landing site of Luna 2, the Soviet spacecraft that was the first man-made object to land (not impact) the Moon. Ahead, the Appennine Mountain range, which includes the Moon's highest mountain, Mons Huygens, which reaches an altitude of 5.5 km or about 18,000 feet. Past the mountain range, the Pegasus 2 crosses the lunar highlands that separate the seas on near-side of the Moon. She flies near Mare Vaporum (the sea of Vapours). On Pegasus 3, the landing approach will be shifted slightly to the west due to a different landing target. That approach will take the spacecraft over the Fra Mauro Highlands, the intended landing site of Apollo 13 that was eventually reached by Apollo 14. Pegasus flies past Fra Mauro about 400 km off to the west, coasting at 3500 mph and ready to begin its powered descent.

  “Still no sign from Branson,” Missie Schwinghammer tells Kingsley as he stands alongside the Flight Director.

  “Don't care,” K replies, staring at the incoming data. There are several camera crews and photographers around Mission Control. This new space race has generated a lot of interest in the media.

  “Did you read this article?” Caroline asks, looking at a tablet.

  “What article?” K plays dumb. Caroline turns the tablet around to show him. “Yeah, it's dumb, don't bother reading it.”

  “Why?” Caroline asks.

  “It's a waste of time.”

  “Not why shouldn't I read it. Why is it dumb?” Caroline asks.

  “The author is an idiot,” K replies.

  “Hank Collins?” Caroline asks. “He's not an idiot. You know he's in the press room behind us right? You guys don't credential idiots.”

  “Just don't bother,” K reiterates, but this only makes Caroline more curious about the article's content.

  Why You Should Be Rooting For China

  Hank Collins

  Before we get swept up in nationalism and blindly root for our team of astronauts against the Chinese team of taikonauts, we should examine the teams. SpacEx is nominally in the lead, with the earliest planned landing (although we don't yet have a solid date on the ULA landing, but they are behind SpacEx as their unmanned test landing is still two months away). The SpacEx team looks on paper like a dream of international cooperation. There's a Brit, a South African, an American, and a Monocan. There's a woman and two African-Americans (though that might be misleading). I don't need to say much about Kingsley, he's a self-made billionaire, inventor, world-mover. He seems more deserving of walking on the Moon than any Apollo astronaut, after all, none of those guys designed the Saturn V or the Apollo or the LM. Richard Branson practically invented space tourism, and that was the third or fourth act in a long career in business and daredevilry.

  At least, that's what the media tells you. In reality, the main accomplishment for Pretorius and Branson is tricking us all into thinking that they're geniuses while they turn old ideas into what seems like innovation. Chalk it up to billionaires capitalizing on the efforts of others in some kind of galactic ego trip. Branson's big idea was to do what NASA already did back in the '50s, fly sub-orbital space planes. Kingsley's big idea is to make rockets really really really cheap, like 5 million dollars a piece cheap. Nearly twenty years later and the cost for a re-used rocket launch is still more than 25 million dollars. So yeah, don't hold your breath for me to get down on my knees and worship these geniuses.

  Timothy Bowe is the real hero of the mission. He flew Blackhawks in combat for multiple tours of duty, displaying bravery at every turn as he flew dangerous rescue missions with little regard for his own safety. It takes a special kind of person to witness your best friend shot down and to unflinchingly fly right into the lion's den, close to an enemy you know has the ability to shoot you down, and not to just fly by, but to land and rescue your fallen comrades. But Bowe plays it off as just doing his job. That's a commander I can get behind.

  So why am I rooting for China?

  Caroline Junot, the Duchess of Valentinois.

  She is scheduled to be the first woman to set foot on the Moon. This is a landmark moment in history. And yet it belongs to a Duchess who hasn't truly worked a day in her life. I'm sure people will defend her by saying she has written some children's books and that she serves on multiple charities and hosts fundraisers. But those aren't real jobs. Those are hobbies for rich people. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying she's a bad person, or a poor role model. However, what message does it send that all of the first fifteen men on the Moon were all men with the right stuff (test-pilots, brilliant engineers, a lunar geologist), while the first woman on the Moon is a duchess that was born rich and pretty and then by virtue of her royal gifts landed herself a man that gave her the Moon?

  How many brilliant, gifted, brave, female pilots and engineers and astronauts and lunar geologists do we have? Right now NASA is training two dozen female astronauts for lunar missions, all of whom have at least a master's degree in science or engineering, in addition to some other qualifications. You want a woman with a masters in spacecraft systems engineering and a masters in exogeology? NASA has three of them training to go to the Moon right now.

  Contrast this flight crew with two billionaires and a duchess with the crew slated to put China on the Moon. These three people have the rightest of the right stuff. They rose to the top in a nation of 1.4 billion people. If China wins and Shenzhou 20 is the successor to Apollo 17, then Liu Yang will be the first woman on the Moon. Before she became the first Chinese woman in space, flying on Shenzhou 9 in 2012, she was a pilot in the People's Liberation Army Air Force. She flew again on Shenzhou 15, her second visit to the Tiangong space station. She has spent more than five months in space. Can you imagine how many other astronauts, male an
d female, she has had to outperform in order to be where she is?

  What a great lesson for the young girls watching the first lunar landing in nearly 50 years: be born a beautiful duchess and you can achieve great things!

  “Don't listen to that asshole, I told you, he's just a click-bait cock-stain on the fabric of the web,” K says, sitting next to Caroline. She turns off the tablet and sits up straight, absorbing the words.

  “He's right,” Caroline says stoically.

  “He's really not,” K replies, but feels like Caroline isn't listening.

  “I shouldn't be the first woman on the Moon,” Caroline says.

  “I'll tell you why that's wrong,” K announces, standing up, towering over Caroline. “First off, you practically invented space tourism, you were a passenger on the first commercial flight of SpaceShipTwo and Griffin. Nobody else has that distinction.”

  “You and Richard both did that.”

  “But those are our companies, you're like the patron, like the queen that commissions art and therefore we have Rembrandt and Mozart. Without the royalty that love art and patronized it, we wouldn't have those great works. Not everyone can be Mozart, the world needs patrons too.”

  “You're out of your depth,” Caroline replies.

  “Okay, I don't know shit about art, but I know that Liu Yang isn't Mozart. If anything, you deserve it more because you made your way, just like me, just like Richard. Liu Yang got there because China said they wanted to put a woman in space and held a competition to find a couple of women to put in the program. It's not that she got ahead by being great, she got there because of affirmative action.”

  “That's nuts, I'm sure there's institutionalized sexism at every level that prevent women from rising in the ranks and that's why they need to take supposed token measures to let a woman in. But look deeper and if anything, there should be more women and she would have been one of them anyway.”

  “Fine,” K says. “Even if I concede on those points, then I'll just fall back on the idea that it doesn't matter who the first woman is. If you were Duke Charles, the sixteenth man on the Moon, nobody would say a word about you being a shitty role-model. It's just because you happen to be the first woman and so they apply higher standards. It's just a quirk, a wrinkle in the schedule, it doesn't mean anything.”

  “It's symbolic and you know that,” Caroline says dismissively.

  “So are you backing out of the mission?” K asks.

  “You could send Sylvia,” Caroline says. “She's definitely earned it.”

  “She's earned the right to be the commander of a Moon mission, which she'll do, we've got plenty of missions coming. Your seat is a passenger seat, your mission is to prove that a tourist can make this trip. If we were pretending you were the co-pilot, that would be a shitty symbol, just as it would be patronizing to scrub you and give Sylvia a passenger's seat just because she has a vagina.”

  “I'm gonna go talk to Mr. Collins,” Caroline says.

  “No no no, don't engage the click-bait, it doesn't matter what you say, just by giving him quotes he wins. Don't feed the trolls.”

  “I'm gonna talk to him.”

  “You really want to see what happens in the click-bait-sphere when you get in a fight with a writer. There's a saying from when newspapers were a thing: don't pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”

  “What makes you think I'm going to disagree with him?” Caroline asks as she heads for the door.

  “Powered descent has initiated,” guidance says. “There's Hell Crater, we're right on the money.” The twin mini-Raptor engines of the Pegasus 2 had activated and were now slowing the lander down. In about 5 minutes she would either be landed, crashed, or aborted.

  Caroline jumps up from her seat at the back of the control room and joins Kingsley, watching the video feeds coming from the lander.

  “Hell Crater?” Caroline asks.

  “It's named after a Hungarian Jesuit Priest named Maximillian Hell,” Kingsley replies.

  “I didn't realize there were people named Hell.”

  “Actually he changed it to Hell. It was originally Höll. He was the third of twenty-two children, so perhaps he changed his name to Hell and became celibate as a way of sticking it to his parents for having experienced life with nineteen younger siblings.”

  “That could do it.”

  The view from the lander's bottom camera shows the nozzle of one of the engines, but with no visible flame, and the clearly defined south rim of Hell Crater as the lander passes over it. Hell is a very well-defined younger crater that's 32.6 km across and 2.2 km deep. The Pegasus is feeling about 80% of Earth gravity from the acceleration generated by the engines. Ahead of Hell Crater is a smaller, shallower crater, called Hell A. It's one of nineteen satellite craters of the larger Hell crater. The Moon is so heavily cratered that rather than having distinct names for every little crater, many smaller ones are simply named for the nearest large feature and given a letter to distinguish it. Hell A is still a good-size crater more than 20 km across, but very shallow. These craters are part of the Deslandres plain, the remnants of a massive and ancient crater that has practically been erased by eons of impacts.

  The bottom camera sees beyond Hell A, to the south rim of Ball Crater. Ball is 41 km across and nearly 3 km deep. The lander can't see it, but beyond the 3 km high rim of Ball's south rim is a short highland plain followed by a 3 km drop off into a wide, flat plain that is actually the floor of an enormous ancient crater. This is the target landing site; the middle of the Sasserides Crater. Sasserides is 90 km across, but is so old that its rim is barely visible in most places. Its floor is a flat plain that provides a nice and easy landing target. This landing site was selected because it is only 70 km from the north rim of Tycho Crater, which is Pegasus 3's landing site and should be an easy drive for the rover that will be deployed after landing.

  But for the moment, the landing site 100 km downrange is obscured by the southern rim of Ball crater. Without notice, all the camera and data feeds drop out.

  “Loss of signal,” a controller calls out.

  “No shit,” the flight director mutters. The view and data returns, but then goes away again before anyone can get out a sigh of relief.

  “Comms, what the hell is going on? Is there a malfunction or is the dish pointed in the wrong direction?” the Flight Director calls out.

  “Is it still landing?” Caroline asks K.

  “It's on auto-pilot, it should just continue on with the landing.”

  The signal comes back again and the controllers scan their data quickly as they expect it to disappear again at any second. The feed from the camera on the front of the capsule (which is pointed almost straight down at the lunar surface as the Pegasus is still basically horizontal) shows the interior of Ball Crater. The lander is just about to reach the southern rim that climbs 3 km into the sky.

  “Guidance, how we looking?” K asks anxiously.

  “Looking good, altitude is 9 km, plenty of room to stretch your legs,” Guidance returns.

  “90 seconds to landing,” Tim Bowe says, sitting beside Kingsley and staring with complete focus not on any camera view, but on the flight telemetry: altitude, velocity, sink rate, fuel remaining, time to landing, etc.

  The signal is lost again a few seconds later.

  “Comms, what are we doing?” Flight shouts.

  “We're checking everything!”

  “I think we're losing signal whenever we pitch up, I think the dish on the Pegasus isn't responding quickly enough to the changes,” Tim says.

  “Alright, well I hope it's that simple of a problem,” K replies.

  “60 seconds to landing,” Tim says, watching the clock which is the only data he has. “45 seconds.” They wait in silence, not knowing the status of the lander that's landing itself with no supervision.

  “Oh come on, don't do this to me,” K says.

  The data returns.
“Alright, we're at 4 kilometers high,” Tim quickly reads off the data. “Velocity of 160 m/s, distance to landing site is 24 kilometers, everything's on the money. 30 seconds to landing.”

  “Flight, Guidance!” the Guidance controller shouts in alarm.

  “Yeah, go!”

  “I've got a GDC Override!” Guidance calls out. Just then, the data cuts out once more.

  “Override? We never got a warning! Which override?”

  “OR-1250,” Guidance replies.

  “What the hell is OR-1250?” Tim asks.

  “Are we go on that?” Flight asks.

  “I don't have the data! I didn't get any warnings, it just overrode it by itself. It's not supposed to do that!”

  “Somebody talk to me,” the Director shouts anxiously.

  “What was the radar reading at LOS?” K asks Tim calmly.

  “It was around 3.6 km,” Tim replies.

  “What was the LRF at?” K asks.

  “I don't have that on here,” Tim says.

  “Who has LRF data!?” K shouts.

  “20 seconds to landing,” Tim replies. The screens are still blank.

  “What the hell is going on?” Caroline asks K.

  “LRF!? Who has it? Guidance?” K asks.

  “Hold on. Okay, the last transmission shows LRF . . . off-scale low,” Guidance calls back, rattled by the sudden crisis.