by Jeff Pollard
“Sergei's alive,” Caroline says.
“Copy that,” K replies. Caroline tries to help Sergei up, but he shakes his head rapidly, waving her off. He's rigid, unmoving.
“Sergei seems injured, maybe paralyzed,” Tim says. Caroline approaches Richard Branson. His suit looks flat, deflated. She takes a deep breath then slightly opens the gold visor.
“Richard is deceased,” Caroline says. She doesn't say any more about what she saw, the slack face, the blank open eyes. She closes the visor again and realizes that the back of his helmet is dented and breached. Whatever force it took to do this much damage to the back of his helmet was probably enough to cause a severe head injury. That and the compromised helmet would have been very difficult to seal, especially if no one can hear you speak. Caroline hopes he was unconscious after the crash and didn't have to spend his last moments in terror, losing air, losing pressure, and totally cut off from the people just feet away who might be able to help.
“Let's go,” Tim mouths to Sergei and points to the hatch. Sergei nods his head, swallowing hard. Tim and Caroline maneuver Sergei onto his back and pull him out, his limp legs drag along behind him. “We're bringing him too,” Tim says to Caroline, referring to Richard. With Sergei out, they go back for Richard.
Caroline and Hadara pull Richard along by the shoulder straps, leaving a wake in the lunar dust where his legs scrapes along.
Tim and Dexter stand on either side of Sergei, his arms around their shoulders, and they carry him toward the Pegasus.
Soon all six reach the Pegasus. It takes a team effort to get Branson and Sergei up to the porch and into the airlock, but one-sixth gravity aides them.
The six wait for the airlock to fill with air. When it reaches pressure, they all remove their helmets and for the ULA crew, this is the first time they have been able to speak to anyone in hours. The silence is broken by an avalanche of words. Tim Bowe instructs everyone to take off their suits as he switches from his EVA suit to the simpler light-weight pressure suit.
“What about Richard?” Hadara asks.
“Leave it on him,” Tim replies.
“Fucking glad you guys showed up,” Dexter says as he takes off his gloves. “When we were about to crash I was hoping I'd die immediately. I was even thinking Dick was the lucky one cause he didn't have to die slowly when he ran out of air. Guess he wasn't so lucky after all.”
Once they are all inside the cabin, Commander Bowe evacuates the air-lock and then dumps all of their suits on the lunar surface, shedding weight. Then he waits once more for the airlock to repressurize. This is time-consuming but necessary as their fuel margin is so slim that the excess weight of just a few hundred pounds could doom them all.
Tim enters the crowded cabin, finding Caroline sitting in the corner, crying inconsolably. Hadara sits with her arm around Caroline, trying to comfort her. “What'd I miss?” Tim asks.
“You left Kingsley behind?” Dexter asks. “How could you let him do that?”
“It was his idea,” Tim says.
“I was ready to die out there,” Dexter says.
“Kingsley's a lot of things,” Sergei says, “Nerd, dork, geek, cocky, but I did not see martyr coming.”
“I don't want his god damn sacrifice on my conscience, like some fucking albatross,” Dexter says. “Think of it, every time you look up at the Moon, I'll have to think about dead-ass Kingsley.”
“Oh,” Tim says, realizing something.
“Oh?” Dexter asks.
“You think he sacrificed himself,” Tim says.
“He didn't?” Dexter asks.
“Don't you remember the EAGLE?” Tim asks.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Dexter asks.
“What's this Eagle?” Sergei asks.
“Emergency Ass Guided Lunar Ejector,” Tim replies.
“You can't be serious,” Sergei replies.
“Dead serious,” Tim says. “I've always told Kingsley that he shouldn't give things goofy names for this exact reason. Can you imagine if Challenger was named Space Shuttle Kick-Ass? Think about the news reports.”
“So what the hell is emergency ass rocket?” Sergei asks.
“It's part of the rover,” Tim replies. “Imagine a Go-Kart, aluminum tube frame, very light, but instead of a mini-car, it's a rocket. This sits on the rover. Remove a few pins and it comes free. It's got a few hundred kilos of monopropellant in a spherical tank in the middle, a few thrusters, a joystick, and there you have it. Barely any fuel really. But if all you have for payload is the mass of a couple of people in space suits and this metal frame, you can get to lunar orbit. Theoretically.”
“You can do this?” Sergei asks, astonished.
“I mean, it's never been done before. And, uh, this things has no computers, no guidance, no radar, no compass obviously.”
“Why obviously?” Sergei asks.
“Compasses don't work on the Moon, dumb-ass,” Dexter replies.
“So it's a real seat-of-the-pants flying experience,” Tim says. “And we're talking all manual flight, you and two joysticks, oh and getting your center of gravity right is not easy since the two people are a huge portion of the mass of the thing. So if you lean forward, the center of gravity is thrown off. So really it's two joysticks and two butts that need to steer thing. That's why he called it ass-guided.”
“And that can work?” Sergei asks.
“Hey, it's Kingsley, if he pulls this off it'll only be like the fifth most unlikely thing he's done,” Tim says, lying, hoping to inspire some confidence into Caroline.
“So if Lovell and Kingsley are gonna ass-rocket their way to orbit, why is she crying?” Dexter asks.
“She's not exactly crazy about the plan in which the father of the twins she's carrying tries to launch into lunar orbit on a rocket-go-kart of his own design,” Tim says. “I think we've all seen enough Home Improvement to know how that goes.”
“But why'd she just start crying when we got here?” Dexter asks. Caroline has her head down, sobbing, unable to weigh in.
“Remember what you said when we first got inside?” Hadara asks Dexter. “Something about how much it would suck to die while you slowly run out of air?”
“Add the fact that K and Jim need to manually fly into a pretty precise orbit,” Tim says, “otherwise we won't be able to get to them before they run out of oxygen...”
“So I'm the asshole,” Dexter says.
“Just get over here and try not to make anyone else cry,” Tim says as he stands at the pilot's controls. Caroline's clearly not going to be a ton of help as the flight engineer, so Tim has pressed Dexter into that role. Dexter defected from SpacEx well before the Pegasus was on the drawing board, but it uses a descendant of the same computer and control systems that Dexter trained on for years. He puts on his headset to radio Kingsley and Jim. “You guys still with us?”
“Roger,” Kingsley says as he and Jim remain sitting in the rover's front seats at the rim of the crater. K and Jim listen as Tim Bowe and Dexter Houston get the Pegasus ready for the impending launch window, timed so they can quickly meet up with the orbiting SpacEx fuel depot and the Griffin spacecraft docked to it. If timed correctly, they'll launch after the Marie Juliette flies silently overhead and the Pegasus will fly up after it, catching up to it over the lunar far-side. Assuming they have enough fuel. Once they reach the space station, they'll get the Griffin ready to go as quickly as possible, depart the space station, then fly over the near-side of the Moon, heading toward Tycho Crater, watching and waiting for Kingsley and Jim to manually rocket to orbit. If Kingsley and Jim can manually pilot the EAGLE to a close approximation of the Griffin orbit, then maybe they can be plucked from lunar orbit before their oxygen runs out. Reaching them eventually wouldn't be too difficult a task as long as they don't blast off and take a wrong turn or fail to make orbit. But they don't have the luxury of time.
Dexter counts down to the launch win
dow.
“Hang on guys, we'll be back before you know it,” Tim Bowe says to his comrades on the crater rim.
K and Jim watch carefully as the Pegasus lifts off and then pitches over to the south, heading away from them. The voices of Tim and Dexter crackle and then the radio grows silent.
“Got a landmark?” K asks.
“Indeed,” Jim replies. They'll need to launch in the same direction as the Pegasus, so watching the Pegasus disappear gives them an exact heading.
“What's your oxygen level?” K asks Jim.
“Just over two hours,” Jim says. It takes about 90 minutes to orbit the Moon, so they have about that long to wait for the Griffin to come back around before they ignite the EAGLE.
“Yeah, me too,” K says, seeing 1:58 on his wrist display. “Just sit tight, I'm gonna get her ready.” K gets down and removes pins holding the EAGLE to Wally. The tubular frame rests on top of the rover. K reaches under the monopropellant tank, presses and holds a firm button, and after five seconds he can feel a pop resonate through the device. The button opened the seal holding the monopropellant in the center spherical tank, and with the seal broken, the tank pressurizes the thrusters.
“Let's see if she works,” K says. Lovell presses the stick forward for just an instant and the four thrusters simultaneously fire a jet of gas.
“Looks good,” Lovell says.
“You sound skeptical,” K replies.
“You really think this is gonna work?” Jim asks.
“The engineers do good work, I assume they did their due diligence.”
“Engineers,” Lovell says derisively. “They think test pilots are just bags of meat that get in the way of their machinery, clogging up the gears. Trust me, engineers are often wrong.”
K climbs up, heading for the pilots seat. “Scoot over, I'm flying.”
“Bull-you-know-what,” Lovell replies. “You're an engineer, I'm a test pilot.”
“I designed the thing,” K replies.
“So? What's that got to do with flying?” Lovell asks. “You know on Apollo, we came up with this instrument bay, the SIM Bay, put it in the side of the Service Module. It wasn't part of the original design, but now here we were, with guys walking on the Moon and a guy in orbit with nothing to do, so they figured, let's put some cameras and some sensors, a small satellite, put some stuff in here so the CMP (Command Module Pilot) has something to do. Well we needed to be able to open this SIM bay, but it had to be sturdy because the wall of the service module is exposed during launch, so you can't just have some floppy door. So they were getting ready for Apollo 15, and they were going to install this SIM bay, and the engineers said they'll just put such-and-such amount of shaped charge, you know, explosive. And once you're in space, you hit a button and the shape charge blows and it'll shear off the connection here and the panel bay will just pop straight off in this direction and slowly float away at such and such velocity. They showed me some math they did, and the vector diagram and the metal sheering force chart and all that, and I nodded along, yeah sure, I see that. And then I asked them, have you tested it? Know what they said?”
“Stop talking meatbag?” K asks.
“They said, we don't need to test it. We did all this math, charts, diagrams, it'll work. I say, we should still test it anyway. Oh come one, we're busy with such and such we don't need to test something simple like this. And we go on like this arguing, and finally I say, you know how much this mission costs? Do you want to be the guy who's fault it is that this mission failed? So they reluctantly set up the test, they put a CSM mockup in the vacuum chamber, and they had this net around the service module to catch the panel. So we evacuate the chamber and then they hit the button. We go in, and sure enough the door is gone. We look around...don't see it anywhere. It's not in the net. So we're looking all over the chamber, all over the floor. And then I hear a gasp, an audible, oh shit, and this guy is staring straight up. The panel was embedded in the ceiling of the chamber, which was like a hundred feet tall, it was a big chamber, and there's this piece of metal sticking in the ceiling, totally not where it was supposed to go. And then I look at the Service Module and realize that the bay cover had clipped this quad-thruster, and basically destroyed it, smashed the thing, and if this happened in space, that thruster would have just gone crazy, they might have lost control of the spacecraft. But hey, you got math on a page that says what you think will happen, so I've got all the confidence in the world in you. Now give me the the damn throttle.”
“You really think you'd be better at this than me?” K asks.
“Have you ever done this in a simulator?” Jim asks.
“We don't have a sim for this,” K replies.
“Well I flew the LLTV, so yeah, I think I will be,” Jim replies. The Lunar Landing Training Vehicle is most known as the hover-jet that nearly killed Neil Armstrong. “That thing was harder to fly than the actual LEM, by a long-shot. But I never crashed one.”
“Didn't they ground them after Neil's crash?”
“So? You got the time?”
“Seventy eight minutes till launch,” K replies, looking at his wrist display.
“This could be it you know. Anything you wanna do in what may be our last two hours in this life?”
“Maybe we should meditate, you know, conserve oxygen,” K replies. “LSD would be nice. Maybe not during launch.”
“Who do you think is gonna play me when they turn this into a movie?” Lovell asks. “You think Hanks again?”
“They're not gonna wait twenty years like they did with Apollo 13. This is gonna be a movie next summer. I'm gonna say Leonardo DiCaprio will play both of us.”
“What will it be like?” Jim asks. “You know, if they don't get to us in time.”
“Inert gas hypoxia,” K says. “It won't be like with too much carbon dioxide, we've got plenty of juice left in the scrubbers. It'll be a lack of oxygen and the suit will just be full of nitrogen. Not painful. If you just go into a room of pure nitrogen, you'll lose consciousness in about a minute. But we're not going to go from 20% to 0% oxygen instantly, so it might be a bit different. Dizziness, euphoria, drowsiness. Or maybe nothing. It's been proposed as the most humane way to execute people, but it's not used because the people that are concerned with humanness don't tend to execute people. Actually inert gas hypoxia killed two people in the shuttle Columbia. Before the first launch, March '81, they filled the engine compartment with nitrogen before an engine test, prevents fires from spreading since there's no oxygen to burn if something goes wrong. Well five technicians went in after they gave the all clear, and all five of them lost consciousness. Must have happened without much warning for none of them to get out of there or yell for help. Another technician stumbled across them and two of them ended up dying. NASA can go to the Moon but they didn't think to ventilate a room full of nitrogen.”
“So will I have enough time for my life to flash before my eyes?” Lovell asks. “That's a lot of flashing I gotta do you know.” Lovell says.
“From loss of consciousness to brain death is about seven minutes.”
“Oh that's plenty of time,” Lovell says reassuringly.
“EAGLE, Hawthorne,” Sylvia, CAPCOM, calls on the radio. They will remain in radio contact with Earth as long as they are near Wally. But the EAGLE does not have the ability to communicate with Earth or any spacecraft, featuring only a beacon radio signal that broadcasts their position.
“Go Hawthorne,” K replies.
“I think you'd like to know that Pegasus has reached orbit, they should be closing in on the station soon. We're on schedule, no change to your liftoff time.”
“Copy that,” K says.
“We've got some family members here that would like to speak to Jim, and we can connect you to Caroline if you want.”
“Roger that,” K says. “You better have something good to say, this is going in the movie,” K says to Jim.
“Put me on the
spot why don't you,” Jim replies. Lovell talks to his wife Marilyn as well as some of their children and grandchildren. K speaks with Caroline briefly. The family members exchange platitudes and walk a fine line between saying goodbye and pretending that they'll make it back okay.
“Alright we'll give you guys some time to relax before your burn,” Sylvia says as they cutoff the family thirty minutes before scheduled liftoff.
Lovell looks over and finds Kingsley's eyes closed.
“What are you doing?” Lovell asks.
“Meditating.”
“You do that stuff?” Lovell asks.
“Clears the mind.”
“How do you do it?” Lovell asks.
“Just close your eyes, relax everything. Then imagine leaving your body, looking at yourself from the outside. Then I usually rotate the mind's eye so that floor becomes the ceiling. But that's a bit different out here. You'll start to feel your body dissolving. You become the disembodied soul or the ego or whatever you want to call it. At least, that's what it does for me.”
They both go silent, eyes closed, disappearing into their minds.
Kingsley envisions the launch, getting up into orbit, the Griffin approaching and maneuvering to them, Tim at the controls while Caroline reaches out the airlock for the EAGLE and they climb aboard, leaving the EAGLE in orbit. They head back to Earth, all eight of them packed into the Griffin, re-enter, powered landing in Hawthorne. SpacEx wins the big contract since ULA screwed up so dramatically. They get tens of billions of dollars to launch all the hardware to the Moon: inflatable habitats, giant solar farms, pressurized rovers, greenhouses, 3D printers, lunar oxygen extraction plants, they finish out the lunar orbiting station with three or four landers, a BA330 or two. All the while SpacEx is using these launches to further perfect reusability, further develop hardware in preparation for Mars.
First they'll send Griffins to land on Mars unmanned, delivering small rovers, testing out in-situ methane and oxygen production so they can make the fuel for a future return journey. This Moon program will give them so much money that Mars will be a foregone conclusion. First manned mission to the Martian surface in ten, maybe twelve years. Then they'll get to work on the Mars Colonial Transporter. A giant craft capable of delivering a dozen or more people to the Martian surface, as well as tonnes of cargo, refilling its tanks with methane and oxygen made on Mars, and flying unmanned back to Earth for a powered landing in Texas where it will be reused. Of course, to get the MCT in space will require a huge rocket, no Eagle Heavy will do, this will be the monster rocket he's been dreaming of for years. Fully reusable and more powerful than a Saturn V. Give me enough money and time and I'll make this thing work, and with enough MCTs going back and forth to Mars, building a Mars colony will be inevitable. That's what awaits Kingsley in lunar orbit after he's rescued.
