The Martian Race

by Gregory Benford

  She had the intelligence not to manufacture a public persona. Astronauts were by design sharp, crisp, automatically outgoing, shining with health, and always pressured. This she let carry her, staying inside her friendly but reserved carapace.

  The worst of the public angle was the curveballs the media kept throwing her. In the middle of an absolutely innocuous talk with a worldwide morning magazine show, the kind-faced, motherly interviewer suddenly turned sharklike with, “And what do you say to those Asians who believe the Consortium is indulging in the worst sort of racism?”—apparently, by not having an Asian in the crew. Raoul, she was told, didn't really offset the Caucasian bias since he was an American citizen.

  She countered by pointing out that Latinos were really mixtures of Caucasoids and Mongoloids, two of the three major racial groups. The interviewer shot back that the Consortium had no Negroid, the new “in” word for black.

  Most embarrassing was the way she learned that Airbus was suing the Consortium over some tiny technicality. This took advantage of the legendary American habit of settling issues in court rather than by negotiation. A judge handed down a restraining order commanding Axelrod to stop development of the Venture—Axelrod's choice for the name—pending some obscure legal finding.

  Julia had to field a probing, sneering interviewer who trotted out this news, hinting that the Consortium had stolen technology from both NASA and from the poor, media-neglected Airbus team.

  He ignored the fact that, in classic Chinese form, Airbus was letting few media teams within miles of their facilities. Julia somehow managed to stutter and fake her way into a commercial break, then was missing when they came back on the air.

  The order was dissolved within a week beneath the media glare. NASA gave a press conference to confirm that Axelrod was paying for everything the Consortium mission used. Airbus was thrown out of court.

  Though Axelrod could not prove it, Airbus was still tying the Consortium in legal knots.

  Suddenly the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating Axelrod's finances.

  A senator started complaining about technology transfer and safety. The Consortium vehicles were being launched on private rockets that were developed with NASA, right down to the solid launch assist boosters. Some vital U.S. secrets could leak—to whom, the senator did not say.

  Since the primary international antagonist of the United States was the Chinese, who were half of Airbus, this made no real sense—but got lots of coverage anyway.

  The tension between the two sides spilled out into the open, with tit-for-tat press conferences and incessant mike-in-the-face goading. The media had one great axiom: You fight it, we write it.

  Axelrod proved too smart for them, though, by trotting his “Marsnauts” out when they were obviously tired, gaining sympathy. He even went along with the media term “NASAnauts” for the bland astronauts who were criticizing the Consortium. In all, Julia was grateful to be kept out of the fray, which just kept building.

  Still, it had not escaped anyone that many Europeans and Chinese would like to take all that Mars Prize money away from the Consortium. And from the U.S., since the Americans put the most in the pot.

  Nationalist rivalry got worse, like a grudge soccer match between whole continents.

  Axelrod didn't find everything he needed on NASA's shelves. The Consortium had to fabricate important components. That proved comparatively easy, though expensive. Axelrod grumbled and paid. Mating the fresh cut-metal parts with the conventional wisdom of decades proved harder.

  The NASA designs were pricey, the engineering incomplete, and what hardware that did exist needed modification. The habitat had to be cut down, reengineered, and simplified—after all, they were no longer running under the ludicrous zero-g orthodoxy, which complicated everything from the kitchen to the toilets. Flying with 0.38 g made life simpler, but many standing NASA methods developed for the space station now had to be scrapped. Connectors, electronics, systems integration—all had to be done with a fresh vision, to meet a stepped-up deadline.

  It was legendary in aerospace that gear got built faster in the dry, lonely techno-outposts where there was nothing else for the engineers to do: China Lake, Rockman, Palmdale, White Sands, other forlorn dustbowls. So Axelrod's teams had bought space and people in all those places, and the metal and composites grew apace in splendid dry isolation.

  Crews for the space station were normally selected ten to twelve months before launch. Fine, so long as the equipment was ready. Here it wasn't. More headaches.

  The Consortium had to squash together development and training, a feat unheard of since the Apollo days.

  Single-system training came first, weeks of working with instructors who were building the payload and landing systems while they trained the astronauts. It was a field day for overachievers.

  The confusions would have been comic if lives had not been on the line.

  Mission simulations came next, bringing all four crew together in the habitat-cockpit mock-up. Here they practiced everything that could go wrong and the few things that could go right—endlessly.

  For starters, nobody had ever built a combo habitat and cockpit. The two functions had diametrically opposed demands. Habitats should be comfy and convey largeness; cockpits should be rugged and tight. They had to fly the bulky hab and land it on Mars, but return would be in the ERV, already in place.

  The habitat-lander was a big aluminum and steel tuna can with a central cylinder that served to reach the air lock at its base. The top level was living quarters, the bottom held their Mars exploration equipment and the cockpit. There were no side windows, nothing looking straight ahead, where the craft would slam into the Martian atmosphere at speeds of several kilometers per second. Viktor would have to fly using TV screens alone. Fair enough; aerobraking required senses of flow speeds, spiking temperatures, and pressures, not eye-balling.

  Four months before nominal launch date, joint integrated simulations began in earnest. To this grueling party everybody got invited: operation control, flight director, habitat monitors, techs—eighty-six people in all.

  In a way, a whole-systems exercise was a game. The crew wanted to make no errors, while the flight director tried to make them die in dozens of different ways.

  Their flight director, the ever-smiling Brad Fowler, had left NASA three years before for private consulting and many more bucks. Axelrod had topped whatever he was getting and then some, by all accounts. Brad was happy to be back running a real program of exploration, though he tried hard not to show that too much.

  “Must admit,” Viktor said, “systems personnel are best money can buy.”

  Julia countered, “Best, period. Half these guys quit NASA to come here.”

  The others were from private corporations that were essentially NASA feeder outfits. It was an open secret that NASA's stand-down from Mars had sent the whole organization into a tailspin from which morale might never recover. If not Mars, what was the point of having a space agency? That had simplified Axelrod's problems immensely. People would sign on just to have a hand in getting to Mars, even for jobs that were below their capability ratings.

  So here they all were, one happy gang all wanting to go to Mars, and a dozen times a day dying in the simulators. Brad Fowler smiled at them every day, obeying a standard NASA commandment: Thou shalt smile, but not grin. Confidence, not arrogance. His teeth shone like a white flag against skin as weathered as beef jerky, from decades in the Houston heat. He gave them the same opening mantra, “Morning, all. The tougher we are on you here, the easier it'll be on Mars.”

  Each time Julia thought to herself, Yeah, right, you sadist. Even though she knew what he said was true.

  The rules of the simulation game were, no Challenger-level disasters. Nothing beyond their control, when the only response possible was to say your prayers. Sure, those events could happen, but there was no point in simulating them.

  Instead, they got what Julia thought of as i
nstant obstacles.

  Failure of a subsection of the electronics board. Fuel pump shutdown. Cryo malf. Leak in the vector-keeping system lines. Big-time pressure drop.

  Miss the first sign and that wedged you against the clock, trying to restart a procedure while fluids spurted out into space or pumps locked up nice and tight. One of these—or all three—come at you while the habitat is scooping deep on its first gulp of the Martian upper atmosphere.

  In a typical “exercise,” Viktor was trying to fly an avionics structure that more nearly resembled a refrigerator than an airplane. Raoul was performing mechanical CPR on the fuel feeds that had just redlined. Julia and Marc were running backup, taking over problems that the others had discarded as nonessential.

  That didn't mean they couldn't kill you, only that they wouldn't do so right now.

  Like, say, a pesky waffle in their aerodynamic trim. Sure, there was plenty of theoretical backup on this, books full of Navier-Stokes three-dimensional flow-field solutions for their aeroshell shape. They also inherited thick studies of how the reacting flows of appropriate CO2 chemistry worked out with the preliminary thermal protection system (TPS, in NASAspeak). No problem there.

  But when Viktor handed off the problem to Julia as he struggled with the Mach window, she couldn't find the right operating regime for their vector-control jets. Viktor had to take it over and fly the bird by hand, not even looking at the overshoot trajectory plots that an anxious ship computer kept flashing up on his right-hand screen.

  No matter that they had bought from NASA a “robust 3-D Conceptual Fluid Dynamic code capable of radiating, turbulent, and dusty flow simulations.” Viktor had fifty-eight tons at his back and no wings to lift them out of trouble. He had to skate on the filmy upper blanket of CO2 by feel more than by numbers.

  So when the vector problem grew to fatal levels, he snatched it back from her and tried to correct the sliding yaw the whole craft was developing. The simulation was good. It yanked them around, buffeted them like a bad roller coaster, meanwhile yowling in their ears like a drumroll from hell. Not a great aid to abstract thinking.

  Running out of luck got to be a habit. Engines went out at just the worst moment, when they were pulling maximum g's. Headwinds maxed up to kill their lifting speed. Boards went dead, running lights and all, just before a critical command had to pass through them.

  Nothing in nature said that only one thing had to go wrong at once, after all.

  Brad reminded them of that far more often than he needed to. Maybe there was a bit of the smiling sadist in him.

  Maybe NASA had selected him for that. Or Axelrod had.

  Every time they failed to recover from a malf, they looked at each other, knowing that the feed camera was showing their dismay to the whole goddamn team outside. Everybody was thinking the same thing: if this were Mars, they'd be dead. Little chunks of red stuff spattered across the already red planet.

  They needed their coffee breaks.

  A few months of this and maybe the magic point would come. NASA termed it “crystallization”—when a crew thought as one, knowing when and how to do the right things at just the right times. So that they didn't get in one other's way, blundering through the complex, interacting systems commanded from the tight little cockpit.

  Crystallize too early and a crew got cocky, bored. Too late and they couldn't fly at all, because they weren't seasoned.

  Hitting the right point as the launch window started to open was why Brad Fowler's job was more like an artist's than an engineer's.

  Or a psychotherapist's.

  Viktor had started his career during the slow revival of the Russian space program, post-Mir. His father had worked on keeping Mir aloft, laboring in the mission control center that was a brooding mausoleum hulking beside a pothole avenue. Though his father had been a flight controller, to make ends meet he had to drive a taxi in his off hours.

  After Mir, Russian cosmonauts had lawyers and contracts and agents, in a parody of neocapitalism. They got bonuses for doing EVAs and running orbital experiments. Viktor was already used to doing telecasts from orbit endorsing snack foods and sweaters. Russian institutions had a long habit of covering over embarrassing lapses and outright failures, so the Consortium's up-front attitude—if it doesn't work, let's hear pronto, then fix it—had been delightful.

  At night he lay in bed with Julia and could talk about things like this, things that to another, ordinary woman would have been petrifyingly dull. But to Julia it was the world she lived in, his experience in it different and strange and movingly sad. What she thought of it did not matter. What did was that she heard and felt through his halting, awkward English the pain of a life lived in tougher places, harder times.

  Hearing it helped him. And her.

  But all the wonderful, warm communication only served to offset the complexity and strain of their working days, which now stretched to fill all but sleep. And sometimes it invaded sleep itself. She would awaken to find Viktor pacing, moody and unable to speak. Sometimes she felt that way herself, for reasons she could not name.

  But they helped each other through those times and emerged in the morning whole and sometimes even rested. Able to smile for the cameras that sometimes got through security and dogged their footsteps as they fetched the morning Houston Times.

  The tragedy of Mir and the International Space Station alike was that they did not confront the deep problem of living in space.

  Instead, they camped in space. They used disposables, taking in food and air and dumping their waste, never closing the loop.

  Only when it became embarrassingly obvious that the ISS had nothing much to do did NASA's attention turn to the obvious next goal: systems for true exploration, Mars. Recycling water and air, separation of solid waste, air chemistry—these had gotten worked out in orbit with painful slowness.

  Centrifugal gravity was a simpler matter. In 2008 the method got a simple trial in orbit, standing off the ISS a few kilometers for safety, keeping astronauts—NASAnauts—in fractional g for a year.

  They performed so well that the zero-g faction in the JSC Life Science Directorate had tried to suppress further work, fearing for their jobs. All they had learned from four decades of endless study of zero g was that it was a bad idea. But after the fractional-g trials the cat was out of the zero-g bag. There were at least some 0.38 g orbital studies to support Axelrod's leap to the simple configuration they would fly to Mars and back.

  After all, this wasn't even what the media called rocket science— an interesting cliché misnomer, for rockets are engineering miracles, not scientific ones—tricky but not exactly challenging the limits of knowledge. It was Newtonian mechanics, and as long as the cable deployed all right between the upper stage of the booster and the habitat, all that remained to do was give each a burst from the hydrazine thrusters and spin the habitat about the dead weight of the empty upper stage shell at a few revolutions per minute.

  Maybe the best fresh aspect of the Consortium was the absence of paperwork. In Julia's experience, every flight up to the space station produced more paperwork mass than the payload weight. Axelrod cut all that.

  “No point in a bunch of Cover Your Ass memos if we fail,” he said happily. “Point isn't the paper we generate, but the paper we lose— thirty billion dollar bills.”

  Then, as far as Julia was concerned, petty geopolitical and personnel matters lost their importance. Harry, her father, collapsed in a golf game.

  He was diagnosed with one of the newly emerging killer viral diseases, the zoonosis class that migrated from animals to humans, fresh out of the African cauldron. They traced it back to the hunter's camp in west Africa he and the park rangers had found—Harry's spite trip. The animals the poachers were butchering harbored a viral disease ready to make the leap to humans. Harry's prognosis, in the long term, was grim—five years at best. Short term? Nobody knew. He could be dead in a month, if myriad details of blood chem went wrong on him. For starters, he was embark
ing on an intensive drug regime.

  She got the news from her mother, Robbie. Julia had been lucky to have a mother who had dreamed of space and had married a biologist. Not just a loving, loyal husband, but one whose mind wandered to other planets. In those ancient days, the 1970s, the manned space program was solely short shuttle trips. Harry had enthusiastically supported Robbie's astronaut training, postponed his academic future so they could live near JSC, and worked for the exobiology group at NASA.

  Her concession to the family was to return to Australia for the birth of Bill, then Julia. Toward the end of her leave for Julia, her mind full of the upcoming resumption of her career, she turned the wrong way into the path of a pickup truck. In the accident, the top of her femur was pushed through her shattered hip joint. Five months in hospital and then a long rehab.

  After that she walked with a limp. The folks at NASA were sorry, and offered her a desk job, but her career in space was finished. She was repelled by the idea of becoming a bureaucrat, and with Harry, decided to stay in Australia. Harry snagged a position at the University of Adelaide and they settled into the academic life.

  Julia had caught the space bug early on from her mother. An old videotape of the “Martian Chronicles” was her favorite movie. When grown-ups asked what she wanted to do when she grew up, she always said primly, “I'm going to swim in the canals of Mars.” That earned her little amused murmurs and a pat on the head. By the time she learned that there were no canals, it had become her mantra.

  When she was fourteen, Harry and Robbie's old NASA connections got them invited to the celebrations surrounding the July 1997 Mars Pathfinder probe arrival: Back to the Red Planet!