Moon For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  Jim mimes locking his lips and throwing the key away.

  “What was that?” K asks.

  “Nothing,” Caroline says before marching out of Mission Control. Moments later, the Eagle Heavy launches. Mission Control is tense as they collectively hold their breathe and root on their rocket, knowing something might go catastrophically wrong at any moment.

  But nothing goes wrong, and the second of three Aquilas is inserted into orbit. This one will wait in low Earth orbit. If the third Heavy launch works, then this Aquila will head to the lunar station to deposit its fuel there. If the third Heavy fails, then this Aquila will be used as the Earth Departure stage for the Griffin as they head to the Moon to get their consolation prize.

  “I can't wait to see the reaction when we roll out the third one,” K says to Jim Lovell. “They'll suddenly realize we can beat them. That'll show that cocky prick.”

  “I thought you hated me,” Hank Collins says to Kingsley. The two of them sit in folding chairs in a field a hundred yards away from the launchpad where an Eagle 9 stands vertically.

  “Not...really,” K isn't very capable of pretending to be nice.

  “So, kind of,” Hank says. Despite having the name of a 1930's detective, Hank Collins is a 30-something blogger turned pseudo-journalist-celebrity. In this day and age, people seek out the biased news that confirms what they already think, and in such a climate, the demand for journalists who won't pull their punches and will straight-up call someone out is quite high. No matter your bias or point-of-view, there's a news source for you. Want to hear nothing but stories about police brutality, there's a source for you. Want to hear nothing but stories about dirty hippies trying to get free money to sustain their laziness, there's a news source for you. Collins fits this to a T. But this kind of frank journalism has a drawback: everything becomes sensationalized, thus turning all news and commentary into a dull buzz like an old refrigerator. Every day some fairly prominent blogger or reporter calls for impeachment of the president, while another calls for him to be enshrined on Mount Rushmore. In a world of extremes, nothing stands out anymore. Hank Collins found his niche speaking for the disenfranchised and harping on any issue involving inequality. While Kingsley usually falls on the same side of most of these issues, like the absurd subsidies oil companies receive or the huge tax breaks for billionaires, he can't help but feel like there's a bulls-eye being cast on him.

  “Why'd you want me to interview you then?” Collins asks as the cameras are being set-up, and a PA coifs Hank's brown hair into a rigid sculpture.

  “This is way off the record,” K says. K leans forward and beckons Hank. Hank leans in. K whispers, “I'll do this if you treat Caroline nicer.”

  “But going after the uber-wealthy is kind of my thing.”

  “Yeah, and there's plenty of them to go around, just lay off on her and you've got yourself an interview. Deal?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Collins replies and then sits back. “We good?” Hank asks his camera guys.

  “Good.”

  “Alright,” Collins takes a minute. Then he puts on the serious TV newsman face, puffs his chest out, and unleashes a deeper more serious voice. “Yesterday, SpacEx shocked the world with a surprise launch of a third reused Eagle Heavy in as many weeks. This launch enables SpacEx to do an orbital maneuver that will allow them to beat ULA to the lunar surface. Let me ask, why take the risk? Why is it so important for you to beat them?”

  “What's wrong with winning?” K asks.

  “Well, let's just look at the risks you're taking right now. You've got a 92 year old man on your crew. What are the odds that he dies during the mission? You're launching three reused rockets in rapid succession, for what? To beat them by a day?”

  “Is that a question?”

  “Let me put it another way then. From my perspective, I see you pushing your team, launching rockets on short notice, risking that you'll destroy your launch pad, or merely have SpacEx hardware explode on TV, and it doesn't seem like there's any practical gain. But, I can imagine that you are driven by a desire to beat your own personal rival Richard Branson, and to stick it to a former employee of yours, Dexter Houston, who left SpacEx for ULA several years ago. So there's a picture painted of you seeking some kind of petty revenge and using towering rockets and risky launches as a means to achieve it. Now tell me why it's wrong.”

  “The reason for wanting to win is not personal. I'm thinking about next year, five years, ten years from now. Let me paint a picture. NASA finds some reason to select ULA, we get screwed, and we're scrambling to find funding while ULA builds a Moon base for NASA. They of course will go over budget and miss deadlines. Or, I can beat them and provide the people in charge with absolutely no cover, no credible, believable reason to pick the other guys. This is how things work when you're taking on the industry giant that's entrenched and has their lobbyists everywhere. You can't just be better. You have to be so obviously superior as to leave no doubt.”

  “What about rumors of China landing on this mission.”

  “Just rumors, they haven't said they would do it,” K replies.

  “But what if they do? What if China beats both you and ULA, what happens to that vision you just laid out?”

  “China can't beat us. We already beat them. It was called Apollo. That's all China is doing right now, Apollo 1.5. Three astronauts instead of two, still short surface stays. We did that already. What we are doing now isn't Apollo 1.5, it's Apollo 3.0. Long duration stays, permanent manned presence, reusable lunar shuttles. That's a much bigger accomplishment. These are missions that build on each other for sustainable exploration and science, not just quick jaunts across the surface.”

  “Did you watch the Shenzhou 19 launch?”

  “Even if I'm watching competitors, I'm still a giddy space nerd. It's a very exciting time for people like me. We launch tomorrow, the ULA launch is two days after that. We're gonna have three manned spacecraft in lunar orbit at the same time. I mean how cool is that? This is what we thought the '80s would be like. Well, it's finally happening.”

  “Actually, ULA is launching just a day after you. They just announced that they were moving up the launch.”

  “Really? I hadn't heard that.”

  “Just saw it on Twitter about ten minutes ago,” Hank says. K reaches into his pocket, extracts his silenced phone and discovers a dozen messages.

  “Are you gonna go ask them now why they're pushing it to try to beat me?”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “While you're at it, ask them about the decision to skip a test landing and go straight for it.”

  “I have asked them,” Hank replies. “They said that when you're confident in your hardware and have a long history of experience in space, you don't need to test as much as the new kid on the block.”

  “Did Parks say that?” K asks disdainfully.

  “He did. But for now, it seems SpacEx has the upper hand. Let me ask, if you do beat them, will you be the first one onto the lunar surface, and if so, what will you say?”

  “Honestly. The order of egress hadn't even occurred to me. And I definitely don't have a speech prepared. But if we beat ULA, then I'll probably take my first step and then say 'suck on that, Richard.'”

  Chapter 27

  “T-Minus five minutes,” Josh Yerino, the capsule-communicator (CAPCOM) says from Mission Control in Hawthorne. His words go straight into the headsets of Kingsley, Tim, Caroline, and Jim Lovell in the Griffin waiting atop an Eagle 9 at Cape Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 39a, the very same pad that launched Apollo 11-17, including Apollo 13. They are silent, waiting for launch, counting the seconds.

  There are two pads, 39A and 39B that connect to the massive VAB. These two pads were built in the mid '60s to support the massive Saturn V rockets. They were then upgraded and modified to support Space Shuttle launches. Pad 39A had seen the most use, including launching every mission to the Moon, and launched each of the fi
rst 24 space shuttle missions before Pad 39B came online. The 25th space shuttle mission was the ill-fated launch of Challenger, and the first shuttle launch from Pad 39B. After the retirement of the shuttle, and with the plan to move to the SLS, NASA knew they would not need to modify both pads for SLS use as the flight rate would not demand that they have two pads. So they decided to lease Pad 39A to private industry, with SpacEx winning the bidding war. Strangely enough, SpacEx wasn't bidding against ULA for the rights to the pad, but instead Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com founder. Bezo's space company Blue Origin hadn't done much of anything, but was trying to outbid SpacEx. Kingsley suspects that ULA was behind the move, using Blue Origin as a proxy to screw over SpacEx and squatting on the pad, thus forcing SpacEx to spend more to build their own complex.

  But SpacEx ultimately did win the lease in 2014 and had used Pad 39a as their manned launch pad since modifying it for the Eagle family. NASA chose to keep Pad 39b which they would modify for SLS use. But when President Obama canceled SLS at the tail end of his presidency, NASA no longer had a use for Pad 39B. And so ULA swept in and leased Pad 39B.

  The end result of these leases and jockeying for position is that the Griffin 3.0 of the Pegasus 3 mission sits atop an Eagle 9 at pad 39A while the Orion for Luna 100 sits atop a Delta-V on pad 39B. They are separated by less than two miles. Both of these rockets are just capable of putting their respective space capsules into LEO, but both capsules have an Earth departure stage waiting for them in orbit, waiting to send them off to the Moon.

  “T-minus four minutes,” Josh says simply in their headsets.

  “Did everyone remember their tickets?” K asks. “No going to the Moon without your ticket.” The four of them sit four abreast, pressed up near the nose of the capsule, with Tim on the far left, Kingsley to his right, then Caroline, then Jim Lovell on the far right.

  “You nervous?” Jim asks Caroline.

  “Just a little,” she obviously lies. “I've flown on one of these before, so I'm not super nervous.”

  “You shouldn't be too nervous, it doesn't help anything. Plus this rocket is tiny.”

  “Tiny?” Caroline asks.

  “Compared to the Saturn V, this is gonna be a walk in the park. Doesn't mean nothing will go wrong though.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  “Well being nervous ain't gonna make anything better,” Jim says. “Worrying doesn't accomplish anything. It's not like if you worry hard enough the problem won't happen.”

  “I try to tell her that all the time,” K chimes in.

  “Don't you guys have rockets to science,” Caroline tries to change the subject away from her nerves.

  “Well, if Challenger and Columbia taught us anything it's that the whole thing can disintegrate for a very small reason. A little rubber ring or a broken tile, that's all it takes. And there's no warning. The crew has maybe a fraction of a second to realize there's trouble before they're just doomed. We were very lucky on 13, you know we didn't ever simulate anything like that because there's not much point in doing it. You'd simulate a small thing here or there failing, but when it comes to something like a major explosion, what's the point? We never trained for what to do if say the ascent engine just won't turn on and you're stranded on the lunar surface, but that was a real possibility. You know on 13, we lost the service module but we still had the lunar module and we used it as a lifeboat and used its engines to get us back to Earth. Well, on Apollo 8, we went to the Moon without a lunar module. Had the problem happened on 8 instead of 13, then I would have said 'Houston we've had a problem,' and in 15 minutes we would have lost all power, wouldn't have been able to do anything. Things can just go catastrophically wrong at a moment's notice and you're done. So relax, it's probably gonna either go just fine, or we'll be dead and won't have time to realize what happened.”

  “Thanks, that helps a ton,” Caroline says sarcastically.

  “One minute,” Josh Yerino says. “Looks like this is it. Godspeed. K, you should see this place. I think everybody who works in the building is in here right now. We're all with you. You said you started this company to inspire people. Well you've done it. You showed us a vision of humanity being a multi-planetary species, and most people laughed or scoffed. But we ain't laughing now. We're waiting for our turn on the Mars Colonial Transporter.”

  “30 seconds,” Tim says.

  “Shoot I forgot my keys,” Kingsley jokes, patting his hands across his spacesuit. “Gotta scrub the launch, can't drive the rover without em.”

  “15 seconds,” Josh Yerino says in their headsets. The tension mounts. The view of the camera looking down on them from the instrument panel is displayed across the world, alongside the external view of the rocket with wisps of vapor trailing off the cold liquid oxygen tanks. The TV networks run this live view while frequently showing a replay of Jim Lovell driving his wheelchair into the elevator at the pad, then needing the help of two technicians to get from his wheel-chair to his rocket-chair.

  In an instant, the crew of the Pegasus 3 mission more than double in weight. The tower is cleared and they head toward the sky. It's Tim's fourth launch, Kingsley's third, Caroline's second, and Jim Lovell's fifth. “This is a lot like the Titan booster,” Jim remarks. “Like a massage. Not like the Saturn, that's more like surviving a train wreck.”

  “That's one minute,” Yerino says. “Vehicle is 6.4 kilometers in altitude, velocity of 297 meters per second, downrange distance 1.2 kilometers.”

  A loud, shrill alarm sounds in the cockpit, snapping everyone's attention to a screen flashing in red. “What's that!?” Caroline tries to ask, but she can only get “Wh-” out before she loses consciousness.

  In Mission Control Josh Yerino says “The vehicle is supersonic,” but while he is saying this, the picture of the Eagle 9 changes dramatically. Just over 60 seconds into flight, the Eagle 9 is still quite low and easily visible from the tracking cameras. The entire rocket disappears in a shower of sparks, vapor, debris, completely obscuring whatever is left. The camera view of the crew inside the capsule vanishes, and a dozen controllers have minor heart attacks while looking at their data.

  The Eagle 9 rocket stage is essentially nine engines mounted beneath a pair of pressurized propellant tanks. In early rockets, the two propellant tanks were cylindrical with hemi-spherical ends. With the high pressures involved, you don't want any right angles which would be structural weak spots (hence the rounded ends). But the hemi-spherical bulkheads at the ends of the tanks are quite heavy. In designing the second stage of the Saturn V, called the S-II, the engineers had an idea that would save a lot of weight. That idea is a common bulkhead. The two tanks would be joined together into one larger cigar-shaped tank with rounded ends, but separating the fuel from the oxidizer would be a single hemi-spherical bulkhead instead of two bulkheads with space between them. This saves a great deal of weight but also introduces a new problem: fuel and oxidizer that are kept at different temperatures are only centimeters apart, separated by a thin layer of metal.

  The Eagle 9 uses a common bulkhead to separate the RP-1 kerosene fuel in the lower tank from the cryogenically cold liquid oxygen in the upper tank. Liquid oxygen will boil at negative 297 degrees Fahrenheit, while RP-1 boils at positive 297 degrees Fahrenheit (an odd coincidence which is lost in translation to Celsius). This means that the common bulkhead of the Eagle 9, made of friction-stir welded aluminum, has to handle a temperature gradient of more than a hundred degrees across only a few centimeters.

  In this particular Eagle 9, a slight imperfection in the common bulkhead had gone undetected. The tanks are X-rayed and scanned and inspected and pressurized and tested and tested again. And through all that, this imperfection hasn't been detected. The flaw is a tiny air bubble, about the size you would find clinging to the side of your glass after pouring a fizzy drink. It might not seem like much, but this air bubble causes the aluminum all around it to be significantly weakened. This alone would not be enough of to cause a pr
oblem. However a separate issue has also occurred. The inside of the liquid oxygen tank is lined with a coating of thermal insulation, a rubber-like film only a few millimeters thick, that reduces heat flow into the liquid oxygen. On this particular Eagle 9, the application of the thermal insulation had suffered a slight flaw. The insulation is made of a mixture of three compounds, but they had not been fully mixed prior to application. Done right, they leave an even coating that quickly dries. But without the full mixing, the material draws in on itself, causing the material to coalesce into streaks. In other words, the coating was thicker in some parts and thinner in others. The difference isn't much, but when a thin layer of insulation happens to coincide with an air pocket in the aluminum common bulkhead, the result is an area of bulkhead the size of a quarter that has become brittle and weakened. With every cycle of the tank, both pressure and temperature, the brittle section gets a little closer to failure.

  During flight, the vibrations of the rocket cause small cracks to form around the air bubble in the aluminum. An especially violent split-second of vibration just after the one-minute mark causes a fracture that spreads like cracks in the surface of a frozen pond.

  The crack allows liquid oxygen to violently spray through from the bottom of the oxygen tank into the top of the kerosene tank at high speed (the oxygen being kept at a much higher pressure than the kerosene). The high pressure spray is a bit like a breach in the hull of a submarine, the liquid flies through fast enough to cut metal on its own. But this isn't water, this is pure liquid oxygen. The computers register a sudden drop in pressure in the oxidizer tank and a spike in pressure in the fuel tank within milliseconds of the leak. The size of these spikes is what sets off the alarms in the cockpit, indicating that the rocket's structure may have been compromised. But before the crew has time to actually take in this information, the situation has already dramatically worsened.