by Jeff Pollard
Their task is to retrieve some of the instruments from the long dead Surveyor for study. On Apollo 12, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landed close to Surveyor 3 and retrieved parts of that probe for study after only a couple of years on the Moon. Surveyor 7 has been waiting for more than 50 years.
After taking many pictures and documenting the Surveyor with their chest mounted video cameras, Tim and Kingsley work quickly to remove the television camera from the Surveyor while Jim and Caroline remove the boxes containing the flight computer and communications equipment.
“Does anyone else smell gunpowder?” Caroline asks as she helps Lovell as he removes screws fastening in the flight computer.
“That's the Moon,” Jim says.
“The Moon smells like gunpowder?” Caroline asks. “Why am I smelling it?”
“Could be a suit leak,” Jim says.
“What's your pressure at?” K asks.
“It's green,” Caroline says, looking at the display on her wrist.
“Is it changing?” Jim asks.
“It seems steady,” Caroline says.
“Well keep an eye on it,” K replies. “You might have a small hole, or maybe it got into your cooling system. This stuff is sharp and abrasive, no erosion, so it can get into cracks and crevices and eat away at seals.”
“Why do you not sound very worried?” Caroline asks.
“We've got duct tape,” K says simply.
They keep a close eye for a leak as they drive back to the landing site. By the time they reach the lander they're on to hour five of the EVA.
Once back, Jim and Caroline are tasked with taking rock samples around the landing site while Tim and Kingsley unpack surface experiments. The first is a deep core drill, that they fasten to the surface with a nail-gun. Once firmly attached, they pull a small solar array out from the cargo bag, unfold it, setting it up a few meters away and running a power cord to the drill. The drill then operates autonomously, drilling slowly into the bedrock and extracting cylindrical core samples which are then sliced into one meter long segments and stored away into numbered plastic bags. On tomorrow's EVA they'll collect the samples and repack the core driller and take it to a different site. The ULA crew has an identical core driller they are going to place at three locations inside the crater while the SpacEx team is placing theirs at three location just outside the crater. Hopefully these six core samples will provide a complete picture of the pre-Tycho landscape as well as a deep understanding of the Tycho Crater's formation.
With the drill placed, they move on to their next experiment package: a prototype regolith 3D printer. They set it up near the lander, running a power cable to the leg of the lander, as it will be powered by the lander's solar cells. They start up the 3D printer and make sure it begins working correctly. The printer has a small scoop it uses to pick up loose soil and dump into its hopper. The small device is on wheels and can move once it runs out of loose soil in a given location. With the hopper filled it begins the process of converting the regolith into a printable material. If it works, in a few hours the device will drive ahead and leave behind a hollow hexagonal brick about the size of a coffee mug. Devices like this, but much larger, could one day autonomously create lunar habitats and other structures. But for now it's not much more than a simple sand-castle maker. They'll check back tomorrow and hopefully find a brick or two.
Their third task is to setup a pair of telescopes. Tim and Kingsley carry one each as they hop away from Pegasus to a safe distance. The two telescopes share a single power source and communication device. They setup the unfolding solar array, point the dish at the Earth, then setup the twin tele-operated telescopes. One telescope will be pointed at the Earth continuously, providing a hell of a time-lapse of the Earth as it goes through its phases. The other will be available to students. The twin telescopes aren't super powerful, but they do offer interference free viewing with no hazy atmosphere to deal with. The ULA team has an identical telescope they will also point at the Earth, providing binocular vision with the two eyes more than 50 km apart.
Kingsley and Tim back away from the telescopes slowly, making sure not to get any dust on the solar cells or the telescopes machinery. The planned lifetime of the telescopes depends mostly on how long they can operate before the abrasive lunar dust jams up their mechanics.
With this done, they're on to hour seven of the EVA. They head back to the lander and meet Caroline and Jim as they deposit a bag of rock samples into a cargo hold on the side of the lander. Then they climb the ladder back up to the Pegasus porch. Caroline's suit pressure is holding just fine and shows no signs of a leak. They inspect her suit all around, finding no sign of a problem, then they back themselves up to the backpack ports and head inside, their first EVA complete.
Then it is time for rest. There are four beds, consisting of little more than hammocks that are suspended across the Pegasus cabin like a pair of a bunk beds. It had been a very long day. When the four of them woke up to begin their day, they weren't yet in lunar orbit. Now they're in hammocks above the lunar surface after a seven hour EVA. And yet, sleep would not come easily. They lay quietly, trying to force themselves to sleep with little success. That is until Commander Bowe begins snoring.
“Well I guess one of us is gonna sleep,” Lovell whispers.
“Why gunpowder?” Caroline asks.
“We don't really know,” K replies.
“The Moon smells like gunpowder and nobody knows why? How come that's not the big mystery we're trying to solve?”
“We're not astrodogs,” K replies. “The center of the Milky Way smells like raspberries. The ozone layer smells like geraniums. Smell is the product of a molecule with a certain key shape fitting into a certain lock shape in our bodies. It's just a chemical signature and the experience of smell is just an illusion created in your brain. So it doesn't really matter what it smells like.”
“But why gunpowder?” Caroline asks.
“You know the smell after it rains?” K asks.
“Yeah.”
“That's called petrichor. It's caused by chemicals, oils, that build up when there's no rain for a while. When the rain comes it dissolves those chemicals and releases them into the air. But the Moon has no liquid to dissolve anything, so you've got billions of years of chemicals being pulverized and turned to powder and just sitting in vacuum with no exposure to liquid or even air. And then suddenly these chemicals are in the presence of water vapor and oxygen and they react. Regolith is not chemically inert, because it hasn't had a chance to react with anything. So it's stuck in a permanent dis-equilibrium that's shattered when we come around and start sniffing. The Moon rocks that get back to Earth don't have the smell anymore, it dissipates quickly, so it's pretty hard to study. They'll have to study it on the surface, probably be one of the first things they study at the base we're hopefully building in the next two years.”
“It's too bad we couldn't bring Neil's ashes,” Lovell says quietly. The three of them lay awake, staring at the ceiling. Shades cover the windows to keep out the light. For some the 300+ hour long days on the Moon's non-polar regions would cause outright madness.
“Why couldn't we?” Caroline asks.
“They scattered his ashes at sea,” K replies. “Tim brought the rings Travis was going to use when he was engaged. Meteorite rings. He's going to leave them on the surface somewhere.”
“That's nice,” Caroline says quietly.
“FYI,” K says. “I'd rather my ashes not become litter somewhere. As nice as it would be to have brought Neil up here one last time, I really don't want the Moon to become a crematorium. It's going to be hard enough to distinguish bone dust from lunar soil.”
“You want to keep the Moon pristine and untouched so it can be studied? Good luck with that. It's gonna be dirtied up real fast and you're one of the main reasons why,” Lovell says.
“What do you want to do with your body after you die? I would have thought ashes scat
tered on Mars would have been the best bet,” Caroline says.
“Encased in carbonite and turned into a statue,” Kingsley jokes.
“No, but seriously, what do you want to happen? It's not exactly out of the realm of possibility that one day somebody will ask me what to do with you, I'd like to have some idea.”
“Jesus, I don't know,” K replies.
“I'm gonna be buried with Marilyn,” Jim says. “We've got the plots picked out and everything.”
“There's a mausoleum in Monaco that already has my name on it,” Caroline adds.
“That's morbid,” K says.
“Hey, death is a part of life, you can ignore it if you want, but it's coming,” Caroline replies.
“Can't I just hope that they'll figure out eternal life before I die? Just let me keep thinking that,” K says.
“I used to think, sorta like that,” Lovell says. “You can't be thinking about how you're gonna go when you're doing carrier landings. You'll get distracted and then you're on your way out real fast. But when just about everyone you knew has died and just about all that's left are people whose births you can remember, death loses that stigma.”
“So really, what should I say if they ever ask me what to do with you?” Caroline asks.
“Do I need an answer right now?” K asks.
“You gonna think of something better tomorrow? You want me to keep asking you for months? Just pick something now and you can go back to pretending to be immortal.”
“Have you thought of names for the twins?” K asks.
“You trying to change the subject?”
“Yes,” K replies.
“Do you know the genders yet?” Lovell asks.
“Boy and a girl,” Caroline replies.
“Luke and Leia?” K says.
“Doesn't that make you Darth Vader?” Jim Lovell asks.
“I was thinking Selene for the girl. She's the Greek Moon goddess.”
“I like that. Selene Pretorius,” Jim Lovell says.
“Well, not Pretorius,” Caroline says. “Technically she would be Her Serene Highness, Selene Caroline Alexandra Junot, the-”
“Duchess of Hawthorne,” Kingsley interjects.
“Something like that,” Caroline replies.
“Can't she get a different adjective than Serene if her name is Selene?” K asks.
“And for the boy?” Lovell asks.
“Haven't picked a name. Maybe that should be your job,” Caroline says to K.
“Well he's going to be a Pretorius, no titles, no seven middle names.”
“Princely?” Lovell suggests.
“I've made almost that exact joke,” Caroline replies. “Queensley. So what should I do with your corpse?” Caroline changes the subject back.
“Alright. How about you freeze my body just before I die. Then launch me into space and send me out of the solar system bound for Gliese 581g. I can go faster than Voyager. I'll be the ambassador for humanity.”
“A frozen guy clinging desperately to the belief that he'll never die,” Caroline says indignantly.
“Seems a fitting metaphor for humanity right?” K asks.
In the morning (mission/Hawthorne time), the crew is awoken by an alarm playing the Radiohead song “Sail to the Moon.” Commander Bowe is the first to actually rise. He begins the day by pouring out packets of powdered instant coffee into mugs and filling them with hot water from a dispenser built into the side wall. Breakfast consists of bacon, a variety of fresh fruit, and dehydrated egg powder that is only really tolerable when combined with ample quantities of hot sauce.
After breakfast, they quickly fix their hair and make themselves presentable for a series of video conferences, the first with the Vice President, Lorne Walken.
Unbeknownst to the crew, blogger Hank Collins had published a story that morning and it was rapidly spreading. Headline: “SpacEx Believes Hackers Have Sabotaged Three Missions.” The article cites no named sources, but sums it up all up by saying, “Either they've been compromised or they are delusional to the point that they think they can do no wrong. In either case, the outlook for them is bleak. Can America or NASA or the President reasonably hand them tens of billions of dollars after this revelation? I think not.”
By the time they were finishing the brief call with the Vice President, ULA President Parks was already talking to the press about it, ostensibly during the ULA press conference about the Luna 100 mission. “This just illustrates again that SpacEx is a reckless company, run by newcomers who can't be trusted. Kingsley is on record making fun of the lengths to which we harden our computers to interference as if we were being wasteful. Looks like the dot-com bubble just struck again.”
Once they finished with Walken, Hammersmith interrupts the crew to bring them up to speed on the breaking story before they do the next interview and get ambushed.
“Parks,” K says. “I wasn't talking about hardening against hacking. They literally spend millions on making guidance computers as perfect as possible. Meanwhile it's far cheaper to just use a bunch of redundant computers you can buy off the shelf and it's statistically less likely to have all four fail than your one single-failure-point expensive computer. That has nothing to do with hacking.”
“The public won't understand that and you know it,” Hammersmith replies. “Don't get bogged down in the specifics of what he says, don't answer the questions you're asked. Answer the question you wish you were asked.”
“I know, I know,” K says, having heard this advice for the thousandth time.
“Are you sure we should do the interview?” Hammersmith asks.
“Yeah, I'm up for it,” K replies.
“Are you upset that China beat us back to the Moon?” Anderson Cooper asks with his trademarked ability to ask a pointed question while still seeming sympathetic.
“They didn't beat us. They're redoing Apollo. Which is great, nothing against them, it's a tremendous accomplishment. But don't forget, America beat them by fifty years. They're doing Apollo 1.5, it's the same basic infrastructure and mission plan but with updated technology. They get three people to the surface for a few days and that's it and it's all expendable hardware. I'm talking to you from the surface of the Moon in a lander that's landed twice now, and we can simply refuel her and keep using her. And we're not limited to a few days. Reusable landers, lunar orbiting stations, and soon we'll have permanent habitats, pressurized rovers, and resource utilization. This is Apollo 3.0, we're creating a permanently manned presence off-Earth, that's two generations removed from what Apollo did. So absolutely nothing against what they've accomplished, but they didn't beat us by any means.”
“Why didn't you bring along an American flag to plant in the ground?”
“Well we didn't bring a South African flag either, or a Monacan, or an American. This isn't a flags-and-footprints mission. Do we really need to plant a flag every time we go outside? Do we really want the Moon to be just covered in thousands of flags in a few years? This isn't the World Cup, this is the Cosmos. We have better things to do with that payload mass and the time it takes to plant the flags. We're doing real science, setting up experiments, drilling core samples.”
“Do you have any comment on the allegations that SpacEx has been the victim of hacking and how that might impact your chances of securing the NASA contracts to build this Moon base, if we do in fact go forward with the Moon base?”
“We do have evidence of hacking, we are bombarded all the time by hacking attempts, foreign agents trying to steal plans and information. That's true of any important corporation or agency. Just ask the DoD about Chinese hackers. The real serious allegation is that hackers have succeeded in sabotaging missions, and for that we have no evidence, nor do we believe it to be the case.”
“So are you calling Mr. Collins a liar, is his article a fabrication?”
“I think Mr. Collins may have spoken to people in our cyber-security department and
those guys are constantly working to thwart external threats and maintain security, and those guys take their jobs seriously. So I think Mr. Collins may have talked to some over zealous IT guys who are perhaps a little on the paranoid side. Which is actually a pretty good trait for what's ostensibly a high-tech guard. So perhaps in the cyber-security department they're worried about sabotage, but on the rocket side, we're not aware of any such sabotage or hacking that's gotten anywhere close to actual flight hardware.”
“So Hank Collins' article is not accurate?”
“Indeed,” K says. Caroline gives him a look while he finishes the interview.
“Why did you lie?” Caroline asks as they prepare to get suited up and go on the day's EVA.
“I can't say we were hacked,” K replies.
“You didn't have to lie though,” Caroline says.
The Day 2 EVA begins with a check-up on the 3D printer. It has rolled along and produced four hexagonal bricks in its incredibly slow wake. Next up a visit to the automated core-sample drill. Kingsley and Tim extract the meter long core samples which are sealed in plastic and numbered as they come out of the back of the drill, and they carefully load them into the sample container in the side of the lander. They pack up the drill and put it on the rover. The whole crew loads up on the rover and begins a traverse to the north, stopping along the way to examine any interesting formations or rocks they happen upon. They set up the drill and set it to run until the next day when they'll return to collect the samples and then move the drill to a third location. The third drill location will be to the south, right at the edge of Tycho Crater rim, thus giving them three core samples from locations at three different distances from the crater in roughly a straight line. Meanwhile the Luna 100 crew is doing the same inside the crater. They head back toward the Pegasus at hour four, taking their time to examine and collect samples, arriving back at the lander during hour six. They carefully load up their sample collections into the Pegasus and then spend their remaining oxygen-time on closer study of the lunar crust material found beneath the thin layer of regolith using a compressed air tool to spray away the loose dirt, and also placing a set of laser-reflecting mirrors a few hundred meters away from the lander which will be used to very precisely determine the distance between the Earth and Moon. With that done, their second EVA is finished and they head back inside for dinner.
