Moon For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  “If women could pee standing up, they'd write their names on stuff too,” K replies.

  “That's deep,” Hannah replies sarcastically.

  “What are we talking about?” Weller asks.

  “Writing our names in the lunar soil,” K replies. “Well that settles it. We're going for it. But no mention of this anywhere. Keep this between us. If there is a leak, I don't want ULA knowing we're gonna try to beat them, they might then suddenly find a reason to move up their landing and screw us again. No leaks.”

  “K,” Weller interjects. “I'm gonna have to tell my people, we're gonna be getting three Aquilas and three Heavys ready instead of two. I'm gonna have a lot of people working on that.”

  “Tell them one's a backup, not that we're gonna try to use all three,” K responds.

  “Yeah, I'll try, but these are smart guys. I mean, they're literally rocket scientists.”

  “And rocket scientists know that bureaucracies and committees like these come to stupid decisions and ruin their elegant plans,” K replies as he stands up and breaks the meeting.

  K walks straight from the meeting to the robotics closet where the rover drivers are vicariously picking up rocks in Sasserides Crater. K simply watches, overseeing the last hour of sample collection. Then they drive the rover back up to the Pegasus and deposit the sample collection box into a slot in one of the two cargo bays on the side of the lander. Then they driver the rover to a safe distance of about 250 meters away.

  The robotics team calls the rover Wally because of the head's resemblance to the Pixar robot character WALL-E. Whenever they refer to the rover as Wally, K is reminded of how young the team is and how old he is. He thinks of the rover's head as looking more like Johnny Five from the film Short Circuit. The two person robotics team consists of a driver and a manipulator. The manipulator controls the rover's arms and instruments. Both team members have Oculus headsets to see what Wally sees in 3D. While traversing the surface, the driver's Oculus headset is the master, any movement he or she makes will be followed by the rover. While stationary, the manipulator takes over.

  The rover's job at this moment is to document the launch of the Pegasus. It's not merely an opportunity to capture something awesome. It is rare that we get to see external views of spacecraft doing their thing, other than in film. This is also an important task in evaluating the Pegasus. If something goes wrong with the lander between now and returning to the orbiting lunar station, this footage may very well reveal the cause. This is the reason why rocket launches are so often well documented. It's also the reason that the Saturn V rocket had it's signature checker-board paint scheme, it enables tracking cameras to follow the rocket easier and also makes it quite easy to tell if a rocket is spinning.

  In order to capture the liftoff of the Pegasus, the manipulator needs to look up and follow the Pegasus lander. Might seem simple until you factor in the 1.3 light second distance to the Moon. If the manipulator tries to follow the Pegasus in real-time, he'll see the lander liftoff 1.3 seconds after launch, he'll begin looking up, but the signal to move the cameras won't arrive for another 1.3 seconds. The manipulators practiced this maneuver in this very room, using this station as a simulator and working with a 1.3 second delay. They have to begin looking up just after the countdown hits T-minus 3 seconds.

  The Pegasus lifts off on a pillar of blue-violet methane-oxygen fire. The lander pitches southward almost immediately after take off. The cameras zoom in on the bright exhaust of the mini-Raptor engines before she disappears over the southern horizon after less than 20 seconds. K walks out of the robotics closet and back into Mission Control where they monitor the Pegasus as it burns back to orbit and docks with the orbiting station about two hours later, while cruising over the near-side of the Moon. There Pegasus will wait for the crew of Pegasus 3.

  Chapter 25

  Jim Lovell drives his wheel chair up to the Pegasus simulator. He stands up and tries to climb the steps to the sim. K helps, but Jim pushes him off. It takes Jim about thirty seconds to climb eight stairs.

  “So you'll be sitting here,” K points to a seat behind the pilot's position, standing at the controls and pressed up against the window. “Caroline sits there. Tim's there, he's the pilot. And I'll be right here,” K says, standing at his spot beside the pilot.

  “A four-seater huh?” Jim says. He ignores K's motioning toward the seat and instead stands at the pilot's controls. “In my day we had a sexy little two-seater. What happened? Now everybody's driving these SUVs around,” he says with a wry smile.

  “She's a little bigger than the LEM,” K admits.

  “Well, you know we had room in the LEM for more than two people.” He presses his glasses up, then examines the instruments.

  “You wanna take her for a spin?” K asks.

  “You betcha,” Jim says.

  “You want the harness?” K asks. There's a set of bungees hanging over them. They're normally attached to the pilot and flight engineer as they stand in full flight suits at the controls thus reducing their apparent weight by about half. During powered descent, the spacecraft is accelerating and thus the astronauts will feel the weight of themselves plus their heavy suits. However, most of powered descent is done with acceleration below 1 G, so it's not necessary for them to train with the full weight of these flight suits. But now, K is offering the bungees to Jim Lovell who's struggling just to hold up his own weight, sans suit.

  “No, no, I need the exercise,” Jim says. “Lots of glass in here, not so many switches,” Jim says, examining his instruments.

  “I think the computer's probably a little different,” K replies.

  “You practically had to be a computer programmer in Apollo. You weren't just hitting a touch-screen that said, you know, recalculate orbital position. You had to sight in the stars and punch in verb-76, noun-19, and you had to speak computer.”

  “It's probably an easier learning curve these days, but you still need to speak computer. I got my start in programming,” K says. “You wanna try to land her?” K asks.

  “Sure, let's do it,” Jim says. Jim takes the controls, looks over his screens, figuring out where all his important data is.

  “Alright, here we go,” K says as the simulation begins. “Fifty kilometers high, landing site is three hundred kilometers ahead. You can see the target on this screen here, this one has your flight envelope.”

  “You know what,” Jim says. “I can't do this.”

  “What?” K asks.

  “It's one thing for an old geezer to do old tricks, but you can't teach me new tricks. Kilometers? Meters per second?” Jim jokes. “Is there a switch in here that switches everything to feet?”

  “I hope not,” K says. Jim presses the throttle forward and watches his instruments. As the Pegasus pitches over slowly, they start to see the lunar landscape ahead. “Alright,” Jim says. “That's quite a view. You know, in Apollo, the sims had a little TV in here and there was a camera that maneuvered around a plaster model of the Moon to give you a picture. Worked pretty well.”

  “You see the landing site?” K asks.

  “Oh yeah, I got this SUV under control. I haven't parallel parked in a while, but I think I can manage,” Jim says as he gets a feel for the Pegasus. The simulator jerks them as Jim maneuvers the spacecraft. “Oh boy!” Jim says as the motion-control takes him by surprise. He grips the joysticks to stabilize himself. “Alright, I might need those bungees after all.” Jim keeps focused on landing while K attaches the bungee cables to the belt loops on Jim's pants. “Boy I feel like a goober. Look at these high-waters. I look like Urkel.”

  “You know Urkel?”

  “I haven’t been in a time capsule,” Jim replies. He pitches the lander over smoothly and his landing spot is just over the horizon, outlined by a green overlay that's dotted to indicate it's beyond the horizon. The outline changes to solid lines when you get line of sight.

  “You know on 13 we had a prank plan
ned,” Jim says. “Before 11, everybody was coming up with pranks for Neil and Buzz. Things like, when you land, shout 'it's a monster-' and cut your mic. Stuff like that. But the Mission Control guys are too smart for that. So Fred and Ken and I came up with something we figured could really fool them. We got a tape recorder, and we taped the three of us talking, going through the post-landing checklist on the lunar surface. And we were gonna play the tape while making sure Ken stayed quiet up in the CSM. So it'd sound like Ken came with us and all three of us landed on the Moon and left the CSM all alone in orbit. We figured they'd believe we'd try something that reckless because, well, we're crazy enough to go to the Moon in the first place. But when they bumped Ken from the crew we didn't have time to get a new tape made with Jack, and then of course we didn't land so we didn't get a chance. Ken could have done it on 16, but he figured nobody would believe it after 13. After 12, with the lightning strike and everything still went perfect, we kinda figured the rest of the missions were just gonna be cake you know. Well how'd I do?” Jim asks as he shuts down the throttle and the Pegasus is landed near the rim of Tycho crater.

  “You missed our landing spot by seventeen meters,” Kingsley replies.

  “What's that in inches?” Jim asks jokingly, but then he stumbles backwards, nearly falling over. The bungees help, but don't do much to stabilize. K undoes the bungees and helps him find the jump seat.

  “You alright?”

  “Just a little light-headed. Not used to standing this much,” Jim replies.

  “You sure you're up for this?” K asks.

  “Is the Pope Catholic?” Jim asks. K chuckles. “No I'm serious. Is the Pope really Catholic anymore? I figured by 2020 we'd have a Mars base. No Mars base, but we do seem to have a non-Catholic Pope. Go figure.”

  “Jim, this is Exogeologist and Canadian astronaut Victor Tremblay. Victor, meet James A. Lovell,” K makes the introduction as the crew enters the conference room where Victor is preparing to bring the team up to speed on the latest in lunar geology. Victor shakes Jim's hand like he's meeting his boyhood hero.

  “They call you Canadian astronauts?” Jim asks, breaking the ice as Victor is speechless. “I would have thought they'd have their own word for it like Russia and China.”

  “Ay-stronaut?” K suggests. Jim drives his wheelchair up to the desk and Victor tries to collect himself to begin the lecture.

  “So what's new with the Moon since I last saw her doc?” Jim asks. Victor turns the lights out and the first slide appears.

  “I give you, Tycho Crater,” Victor says dramatically as he presents them with the highest resolution image of Tycho available. She's 85 kilometers wide, 4.8 kilometers deep, with this 2.25 kilometer central peak.”

  “Oh boy, I'm in trouble,” Jim Lovell mutters.

  “Pardon?” Victor asks.

  “Disregard, I'll just be sitting here doing metric conversions,” Jim replies.

  “Tycho is very young, you can see her rays draped over many lunar features. If you see the Tycho ejecta blanket on top of something, you know that the feature is older than Tycho. But how young is it? In 1970, a couple of scientists at the University of Arizona counted the craters, the number of craters is a kind of clock, showing how long a feature has been there, and based on the data they had from the Apollo 11 mare samples, they estimated Tycho to be 200 million years old. On Apollo 17, way over there, in the valley of Taurus-Littrow, they sampled what we think is ejecta ray material from Tycho and that came back as 109 million years old. You and the crew of Luna 100 will tell us the actual age.

  The rays from Tycho extend for hundreds of miles, but not equally in each direction. They are brightest streaking off to the east, south, and northwest. But no bright rays go west. It could be that the features to the west are newer and have erased those rays, but other dating techniques tell us this is not the case. Then look here, you'll notice the nimbus of white material around Tycho is twice as wide on the east as it is to the west. This tells us that the Tycho impactor did not come straight in, it was an oblique impact. We think the impactor was about 9 kilom-, I mean 5-ish miles wide. She came in low from the west, struck, and sent rays mostly toward the east.

  The average impact velocity on the Moon is 20 kilometers per second. The escape velocity of the Moon is only 2.4 kilometers per second. So a lot of the material is not going to come back down. About 109 million years ago, assuming our date from Apollo 17 is right, dinosaurs and other extinct creatures would have looked up and witnessed a massive collision, nearly as bright as the Sun for an instant. And a few days later, the Earth was showered in fist-sized ejecta.

  The four of you will show up and be the first living things to see this crime scene up close and personal. You can tell us whether we have the story right.”

  “I've seen it before. Better than this picture too,” Jim says.

  “One of the great mysteries of the Moon is the masscons, mass concentrations. It's got a lumpy gravity field. This means the Moon has inconsistent densities below the surface. You guys might be able to shed some light on this. Look at Tycho closer. What does she look like?”

  “The mold of a donut?” K asks. “Get it, cause he's Canadian,” K explains his joke to Caroline.

  “Good one,” she says sarcastically.

  “How about this,” Victor says as he clicks the presentation over to a repeating video of a slow-motion water droplet falling into a glass. “See it? It looks a bit like the impact of a drop of water, frozen in time. You have your falling drop hit, it blasts out a crater, and then the surrounding water rushes back in to fill the space and you have a new smaller drop ejected back up into the air. She looks like she froze in the middle of that process.” He clicks and the impact pauses, and then the image is juxtaposed against Tycho Crater. “We have a central peak, it's a reaction to the impact, an uplift of material. We know that when a body forms like the Earth or the Moon, the densest material falls to the core, and the lightest material goes to the surface. One theory to explain masscons is that a large impact, such as the one that created Tycho, could cause lunar mantle material to rise upward as it tries to fill this void.”

  Victor clicks to a different video. This time a glass is filled mostly with a red oily liquid and water floating on top of it. The center of the video is focused on the line separating the two liquids. A large water droplet slowly falls and impacts the water surface. It blasts out a crater and then water rushes back in to fill the void, but also, directly below the watery crater, the red oil bulges upward, creating a red bump in the terminator. The video pauses, with a central peak forming in the droplet and a red oily bulge beneath the surface.

  “Denser material, lifted up. This would cause perturbations in the gravity field and could explain lunar masscons. But there are some problems with this mantle uplift theory. For one thing, on Earth we don't have these because we have a molten core, so any big bulge like this will be quickly fixed.” He hits play and the video continues and the red bulge slowly disappears. “But if the core isn't liquid, will an impact cause an uplift like this? So we're stuck with a model that says it acts like a liquid during impact, but then the mantle freezes into a solid quickly after the impact and leaves behind this dense mantle uplift. It's certainly possible that these large scale impacts can liquify deep beneath the impact site, but we don't have much understanding of that. This is important because when we look at Mercury or Mars or other moons and bodies without molten cores, we see the same cratering processes and so figuring out how this works on the Moon will give us a more complete picture of Mars.”

  “Impacts on the Moon, as I said, are about 20 kilometers per second, on average, with no atmosphere to slow them down, these impactors hit with enough kinetic energy to completely vaporize them. You don't see much material from the impactor actually survive. You might get a shock-wave that spalls some material off the back of the impactor and small pieces might survive and you might be able to get samples of this. But when you
look at the cratering process, you have a tremendous amount of energy released because of this vaporization, we're talking about pressure on the order of a GigaPascal, or 10,000 atmospheres.”

  “What's that in slug-feet per second-squared per inch-squared?” Jim asks jokingly. Victor visibly shudders.

  “Oh god, I'm having flashbacks,” Victor replies. “Slugs and inches and, ugh, pound-force.”

  “What the hell is a slug?” Caroline asks.

  “The insane result of clinging to an outdated measurement system,” K replies. “Pounds aren't a unit of mass like a kilogram, they're a unit of weight, like Newtons. So when you need to do calculations with mass, you have to go backwards from pound-force to get to the slug for mass.”

  “Don't forget the blob,” Jim says with a smirk.

  “What's a blob?” Caroline asks.

  “That's a new one to me,” K says.

  “It's the unit of mass that's accelerated by one inch per second with one pound-force exerted on it,” Jim says. To Kingsley and Victor and Tim, this sounds like running a rusty nail across a chalkboard, and Jim drags this rusty nail while sporting a smirk.

  “Yeah, we use metric here, like every country on the planet other than the US, Liberia, and Myanmar,” K replies.

  “Hey, you just listed the only countries to put foot prints on the Moon. Let me know when you get around to putting meter prints on her,” Jim replies.

  “Anyway, we were talking about impacts on the order of a GigaPascal, or about, I think 150,000 psi if you must have Imperial units,” Victor restarts the lecture. “The impact goes through these stages. The impactor makes contact at full velocity, penetrates the surface, then you have vaporization of material that causes this GigaPascal overpressure, followed by jetting, target compression, target decompression and rarefaction, excavation, adjustment, modification, and finally ejecta deposition. The outermost footprint of the impact within the local sub-surface environment is called the transient cavity. The transient cavity is the biggest extent of the crater growth, but is not the final shape of the crater, the final crater will be much smaller because material will collapse and fall back and partially re-fill it.