Moon For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  “Thank you, Mrs...” Caroline accepts the glass of lemonade and deftly tries to extract a last name.

  “And you?” Marilyn doesn't seem to notice, moving on to Kingsley.

  “No thank you, Mrs. Lovell,” K says. K then looks to Caroline and sees her eyes go wide as she realizes who the old man is.

  “So what can I do for you Mr. P,” James A. Lovell Jr. asks.

  “No, I think it's a matter of what I can do for you,” K replies.

  “Oh yeah, what's that? You gonna give me an electric car, you want an astronaut to make it look cool,” Jim asks. “They used to give us all corvettes back in the day.”

  “No, I was thinking of a little vacation,” K says. “Tycho Crater, ever heard of it?”

  “Is that in California?” Marilyn Lovell asks.

  “It's on the Moon dear,” Jim says seriously without looking away from Kingsley.

  “The Moon?! You can't go to the Moon, Jim.”

  “Not to be a downer or anything, but I'm with her,” Caroline says. “If he can't walk, how is he gonna walk on the Moon, or survive re-entry for that matter?”

  “What do you say Jim?” K asks, unphased. Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo 13 and veteran of Apollo 8, Gemini 12, and Gemini 7 sits upright in his wheel-chair, taking on a very serious demeanor.

  “K, you can't be serious, he's gotta be 85 years old,” Caroline whispers. Jim Lovell rises slowly out of his chair, takes a jerky step forward, and stands up straight at attention.

  “For your information, I'm 92,” Jim Lovell says. “I just have one question.”

  “What's that?”

  “The mission, it's not called Pegasus 13 is it?”

  “So who is it?” Brittany Hammersmith asks. Kingsley looks over his team standing before him in his office.

  “Jim Lovell,” K says dramatically.

  “That's good,” Brittany says with a chuckle. “Seriously. Who is it?”

  “Jim Lovell,” K says, sitting down.

  “Kingsley, come on, he can't do it,” Brittany Hammersmith says.

  “He's perfect,” K replies. “He's been in space, he's flown Gemini, Apollo Command and Lunar Modules, he's trained for walking on the Moon. He's even done the geology training. He's famous, and if we can make Pegasus 3 be the last chapter of the story of Apollo 13, that trumps everything.”

  “He won't survive liftoff,” Brittany replies. “I mean, are you going to wheel him up to the rocket?”

  “He'll be fine in space,” K says.

  “What about on the Moon?” Tim asks. “In a heavy suit, even if it's only one-sixth gravity, that's a stiff, cumbersome thing. What if he falls?”

  “I think he'll do fine,” K replies.

  “We've only got six weeks to train him,” Josh Yerino says.

  “You realize he's been around the Moon twice before right? At one point he had the world record for time spent in space. There was a Gemini mission where he was the commander and Buzz fucking Aldrin was his right-seater. Things go slightly differently and he's commander of Apollo 11 instead of 13. Would anyone here be criticizing me if I said we were gonna take Neil Armstrong to the Moon?”

  “Neil Armstrong's dead,” Brittany replies.

  “You know what I mean. And as far as six weeks of training...he'll be more capable before we do any training than anybody else will be with six weeks of training. You want to take Tom Hanks instead?”

  “Can he even walk?” Tim asks.

  “A little,” K replies.

  “You saw him, what do you think?” Brittany asks Caroline, who's been silently listening this whole time. Everyone looks to her, including Kingsley, not knowing where she will come down on this.

  “I think he should do it,” Caroline says.

  “A little birdie told me you're running for governor,” K says to Brittany Hammersmith as she enters a conference room at SpacEx HQ.

  “By a little birdie, do you mean Twitter?” Brittany asks as she sits across from him and her assistant places a cappuccino in front of her.

  “That would be the birdie,” K replies. “Any truth to that?”

  “I'm considering it. I had an interesting conversation, that's all.”

  “You're not jumping ship are you?” K asks.

  “Of course not. Just listening when people have interesting proposals,” Brittany replies.

  “Why didn't they call me?” K asks. “I could govern this shit.”

  “You're not jealous are you?” Brittany asks.

  “Course not. So when's this presentation starting?” K asks.

  “The lunar synodic period is 29.5 days and its sidereal period is 27.3 days,” Josh Yerino says to all the higher-ups. “The station's orbit precesses over the Moon once every 27.3 days, because that's how long it takes for the Moon to rotate once in relation to the background stars, that's what sidereal means. But the solar period is 29.5 days, so it takes 2.2 more days for the Moon to complete a full rotation relative to the Sun, which is because the angle to the Sun is slowly changing as the Moon goes a 12th of the way around the Sun every synodic period. But our lunar space station's orbit is fixed relative to the stars, not to the Sun.”

  “Do you understand this?” Hannah asks K as she feels like she's back in Calculus class again.

  “Need me to draw you a picture?” K asks. “Hey Josh, you might want to spruce it up, a bit, we've got people here that don't speak nerd.”

  “For any given site, the station will pass overhead every 13.7 days, that's 27.3 divided by two. So if it goes over a site on the full Moon one day, then 13.7 days later it'll go over the same spot at roughly lunar midnight. But this day-night situation cycles because the side-real period is 2.2 days shorter than the synodic period. So for every solar day, or roughly every month, the target landing site will have shifted 2.2 earth-days backwards in the lunar day. In other words, if in January you pass over the landing site in the middle of the lunar day, 7 Earth days after sunrise and 7 Earth days prior to sunset at that spot, then in February you pass over it about 5 Earth days after sunrise and 9 Earth days prior to sunset.

  Our orbital station is in position to give us a good landing date in August at Tycho. Moving up to June means we're shifting two lunar cycles back. Here's the point. If they land on the 6th of June, we can't beat them unless we do an extra Heavy launch to get fuel there to do a plane-change for the whole depot.

  That was a really deft move by ULA,” Josh says. “Without a costly plane change, the only way we beat them, is by going a full side-real period earlier, which would be May 14th, and they knew we had no chance at doing that. So basically, without a plane-change, and assuming they aren't delayed, they win.” Josh lets the revelation sink in. “So now we need to decide if we want to beat them, and if so, is it worth an entire extra Eagle Heavy launch in order to do it?”

  All eyes turn to Kingsley.

  “Can we do an extra Heavy?” K asks Weller, head of propulsion.

  “Well, first off,” Weller says, “we don't have the new hardware to do two Eagle Heavy launches in time for a June landing, let alone three. We're pressing used Eagle 9s into service to make those Eagle Heavys, and we've never done that before. We've launched reused Eagle 9s, but not in a Heavy configuration, and never with important payloads. Getting three used Eagle 9s to work together is a challenge we're up for figuring out. But getting nine used Eagle 9s to all work together on short notice is a little crazy.”

  “Can we do it?” K asks.

  “Yes, absolutely,” Weller replies. “We can. It's possible. But with the success rate we have on used Eagle 9s, do we really want to make this mission depend on nine of them instead of six? How much more risk are we willing to take?”

  “Kingsley, does it matter if they get there a week before us?” Brittany asks, not seeing why this would be worth the effort.

  “Clearly they think it helps them to beat us,” K replies.

  “But if we do it at ro
ughly the same time and we do it way cheaper, that's going to be the deciding factor,” Brittany replies.

  “So you say, but their actions speak louder than your logic,” K replies. “And before we get caught up in a debate of just how corrupt congress is willing to look in picking the more expensive option, let's do the math so we know what the risks are exactly,” K replies. “Our re-used Eagle 9s have been successful in 51 of 54 launches, right?”

  “Right,” Weller replies.

  “So they work 94% of the time. Take that to the sixth power and you get, what?” K asks.

  “689 billion,” Hannah replies then immediately realizes that's not the right answer and look back down to the calculator app.

  “71%” Weller says.

  “And to the ninth power?” K asks.

  “Rounding up, 60%,” Weller replies.

  “Alright,” K says, upbeat, “We're talking about a 71% chance of success of six working compared to a 60% chance of nine working. We're making a giant fuss over 11%,” K says.

  “But,” Weller interrupts K's wishful thinking. “That assumes 51 of 54 is representative of the odds. But those 54 have all been launched on a 'it's ready when it's ready basis, not under deadlines or fast tracked. You gotta figure that knocks down the success rate a peg or two. Then we're not launching them individually, we're launching them as a Heavy, something we haven't done yet. We don't know what effect that might have.”

  “True,” K admits, “but 51 of 54 is also the record we have so far. Some of those failures were when we had less than 20 reused launches under our belts. Now we've done this 50+ times so maybe of the next 54, 53 of them will work.”

  “I don't like the sound of this Kingsley,” Brittany says. “Sounds like unnecessary risk taking to me.”

  “Actually,” K says. “There's no risk. Get three Aquila upper-stages ready, get three reused Heavys ready. Try to launch all three. If all three Aquilas are put up, then we can do the plane-change and we can beat them. If we have a problem with one of the three, then we can still go and land, we just can't do the plane-change and so they'll beat us. So if anything, there's no added risk, it's added redundancy. What are the odds of two reused Heavys working as compared to at least two of three Heavys working? Put like that, it'd be dumb not to launch three of them.”

  “Okay, that makes sense,” Brittany replies. “I can get behind that. They're all three delivering the same payloads, so if any two of the three work, we still have a mission. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, I'm with you on this,” Brittany says. “Weller?”

  “It's not that simple,” Weller replies. “We've only got a few weeks. If we focus and we launch two Heavys, we've got a decent shot at getting them both to work. But if we're racing to get three to work on such a short deadline, I have to think that we just won't be able to focus enough to get all three of them up to a flight-ready state. If anything, rushing to get three might very well cause us to lose two of the three Heavys. I would rather we do two and get them right than try to race to do three.”

  “He's got a good point too,” Brittany says, turning back to K. “What if we're playing into their hands?” Brittany asks. “They picked the landing date, right? They're not constrained by an orbiting station that's already there, they could have picked any day. They picked this day. Are they manipulating you?”

  “Don't I pay you to figure that shit out?” K asks Brittany.

  “I don't think reading minds is in my job description,” Brittany counters testily. “So I ask again, what if they're manipulating you? You said they picked a date that we couldn't get to without a plane-change. Why not make it a few days earlier than that. If they said June 2nd instead of June 6th, would we be able to do a plane-change to catch up with them?”

  “No,” Josh Yerino says immediately, having done those calculations ahead of time.

  “You implied they choose the landing date based on the optimum date to screw us over, but picking June 6th instead of June 2nd means they either weren't anticipating that we could or would do a plane change, or they're counting on you trying to pull a risky stunt in order to try to beat them,” Brittany says. “Think about it. They announce a date, and then we go out of our minds trying to launch nine used rockets as fast as we can. That sounds like the ingredients for a shit sandwich we're gonna have to eat in front of Congress when we try to explain that our rockets are fine, it's us that's the problem.”

  “Or maybe they couldn't do it before June 6th,” K replies.

  “I don't think that's it,” Weller replies. “By skipping Apollo 10 and going straight to Apollo 11,” Weller says, “they're not cramming in more launches, they're just growing a bigger set of balls and counting on their hardware working.”

  “What if it's a bluff?” Hannah asks. “They say they're gonna land, we go crazy trying to beat them, and then they're like, never mind, this was always a test-landing, and then we just blew up a bunch of rockets for no reason.”

  “They can't revert to a test-landing without taking a big PR hit. After the big announcement, they can't not land,” K replies. “Anybody else have any theories about how they're getting me to walk into a trap?”

  “You're the one that suggested they picked the date specifically to screw with us,” Brittany replies.

  “No I didn't, he did,” K points to Josh.

  “Okay, but you were thinking it, I know you,” Brittany says.

  “I mean, you got me there, I was thinking it,” K admits.

  “So you're saying they picked the date to screw with us, but also that this plane-change idea wouldn't occur to them?” Brittany asks incredulously.

  “If anything,” K replies, “they figure they won by going in June and waiting to announce until after our test landing so we can't forgo the test like they did, and that this orbital launch window stuff didn't even occur to them. Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance.”

  “And I'm saying don't be naïve,” Brittany replies, “we're not talking about MySpace and Facebook jockeying for position in the market. We're talking about rocket companies. We've got a lot of smart people working for us.”

  “But Parks?! You think that guy even knows what a plane-change is?” K asks.

  “Maybe not, but I'm sure they have enough crayons to explain it to him,” Brittany replies.

  “That would take a lot of crayons,” Josh mutters, thinking back on how much he worked on trying to get his lesson on orbital precession to its clearest and simplest form, and still failing to make it easily digestible.

  “So you want to concede the race to ULA,” K says to his CFO.

  “I'd rather they beat us by four days than see an Eagle Heavy blow up on TV,” Brittany replies. “Plus, if we do another Heavy, that's more cost to pile on to our actual mission price, that hurts our standing.”

  “Barely, they're reused rockets, we have them already, it'd just be launch costs, we're talking about maybe fifteen million tops. Isn't it worth it to pay an extra fifteen million to beat them?” K asks.

  “I don't know, what if NASA is telling the truth and they honestly don't care about timing? Then no, it's not worth it, it hurts our main advantage, that we're the cheaper option,” Brittany replies.

  “This discussion is way over my head,” Josh Yerino cautiously chimes in. “But I just want to say that there's something perhaps we're overlooking here.”

  “What's that?” K asks.

  “Well, the timing of their announcement, poaching Richard Branson, the timing of their landing in relation to the orbit of our station...these things all indicate that they have someone on the inside.”

  “You mean a spy,” K replies.

  “Yeah, a spy. And I think we've all been assuming that Branson was the spy, he was the one that told them our timeline and then sold us out,” Josh says. “But what if it isn't Branson? What if it was someone else inside SpacEx that arranged this. I mean, do you think
it was as simple as calling up Branson and talking him into switching sides? The timing of his defection is just too good. Maybe Branson was a pawn in this and there's another source.”

  “Why would someone be a spy?” Hannah asks. “It's not like this is the cold war.”

  “Everybody has a price,” Kingsley says ominously. “So why do you say this?” K asks Josh. “How does the idea of there being a spy change our decision?”

  “I think we're all being a little paranoid,” Brittany Hammersmith says dismissively.

  “One man's paranoia is another man's caution,” K replies.

  “I don't want to spoil our spy movie,” Weller says, “but I need to know if I'm racing to do two or racing to do three Heavy launches.”

  All eyes turn back to Kingsley.

  “You all know I want to go for it. Anybody gonna convince me otherwise?” K asks.

  “You sure you're doing this for the right reasons?” Brittany asks.

  “What would the wrong reason be?” K asks.

  “Selfishly wanting to get to the Moon before Richard Branson or Dexter Houston. If you didn't know them, if you weren't flying on the mission personally, would your stance be the same?” Brittany asks.

  “Anybody else?” K asks. “Weller?”

  “Yeah boss?”

  “You're the head of propulsion. If it's your call, what do you do?” K asks. Weller takes a long pause. While Weller has been vocal about the danger of pushing to three launches, Kingsley suspects that much of his arguing is actually motivated by Weller trying to cover his own ass. That way he could always say 'I told you so,' and not get the blame for a failure. But now K has seemingly put the decision on Weller. He doesn't know if K will take his answer in this moment as the final decision or not.

  “I'd go for it,” Weller finally breaks his silence. Brittany rolls her eyes and scoffs.

  “Is this another instance of men writing their names in the snow with piss and calling it history?” Brittany asks Hannah.