Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  In the scientific arena, the past decade of experience has taught us that spacecraft are an irreplaceable tool for learning about our near-space environment, the Moon, and the planets, besides being an important aid to our studies of the sun and stars. In utilizing space to successfully meet needs on Earth, we have seen the tremendous potential of satellites for international communications and world-wide forecasting, and global resource monitoring.

  However, all these possibilities, and countless others with direct and dramatic bearing on human betterment, will not be achieved without a continuation of the dream which has carried us so far and so fast: I mean the dream of exploration, of American and human expansion into space, the greatest frontier of all. In my decision today, I have taken account of the need to fully encourage and sustain that dream.

  NASA and many aerospace companies have carried out extensive design studies for the Mars mission. Congress has reviewed and approved this effort. Preparation is now sufficient for us to confidently commence a new development program. In order to completely minimize technical and economic risks, the Space Agency will continue to cautiously take an evolutionary approach in the development of this new system. Even so, by moving ahead at this time, we can have the first components of the Mars spacecraft in manned flight test by the end of the decade, and operational a short time later. But we will not set arbitrary deadlines, as some have called for; we will make decisions as to the pace of our program in the fullness of time and with the wisdom of experience.

  It is for the reason of technological robustness that I have decided against the development of the reusable Space Shuttle at this time; despite the manifest economic benefits of such a launch system if available, I am not convinced that our technology is so mature that we are ready yet to confidently tackle the huge problems posed by the project without cost overruns and delays, and many of its economic benefits should in any case be realizable from enhancements to our existing ‘throwaway’ platforms.

  It is also significant that this major new national enterprise will engage the best efforts of thousands of highly skilled workers and hundreds of contractor firms over the next several years. The continued preeminence of America and American industry in the aerospace field will be an important part of the Mars mission’s payload.

  We will go to Mars because it is the one place other than our Earth where we expect human life to be sustainable, and where our colonies could flourish. We will go to Mars because an examination of its geology and history will reflect back a greatly deepened understanding of our own precious Earth.

  Above all, we will go to Mars because it will inspire us to clearly look beyond the difficulties and divisions of today, to a better future tomorrow.

  ‘We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,’ said Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.’ So with man’s epic voyage into space – a voyage the United States of America has led and still shall lead. Apollo has returned to harbor. Now it is time to swiftly build new ships, and to purposefully sail further than our ancestors could ever have dreamed possible …

  Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1972 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1972)

  Wednesday, January 5, 1972

  … As indicated in the President’s statement, the studies by NASA and the aerospace industry of the Mars mission have now reached the point where the decision can be made to proceed into actual development of mission components. The decision to proceed, which the President has now approved, is consistent with the plans presented to and approved by Congress in NASA’s FY1972 budget.

  The Mars mission will consist of a pair of ships assembled in Earth orbit. The ships will be clusters of several nuclear-rocket propulsion modules, launched by chemical vehicles based on our proven Saturn V technology. The spacecraft will be designed in this modular form to enable different configurations to be assembled speedily: for example, to complete missions to other planets or to the asteroids. The crew will inhabit modules developed from the first ‘dry fuel tank’ Skylab space stations we intend to fly from next year. The crew will ride a new landing craft to the Martian surface.

  As the President indicated we are not going to work to a set timetable. However we hope to fly our first mission to take advantage of Mars’s opposition with Earth in 1982. This first mission will be preceded by an intensive development program including flight phases in Earth orbit. The program will include the full development of the new nuclear technology, of life support for long-duration missions, of interplanetary communications and navigation techniques, of the increased reusability and reliability of systems, and of Mars entry and landing systems. Calls for recruitment of astronauts for the new program will shortly be issued.

  To survey landing sites for the eventual manned mission a new series of Mariner unmanned photographic orbiters will be sent to Mars. These flights will replace the previously proposed Viking science platforms, which are now canceled, and so will take place within the envelope of current funding levels.

  The decision by the President is a historic step in the nation’s space program. It will transform man’s reach in space. In another decade the nation will have the means to transfer men and equipment across interplanetary space; shortly thereafter we expect such missions to be mounted as routinely as we now have sent men to the Moon and returned them safely to Earth. Not just Mars, but our sister planet Venus, the resources of the asteroid belt, and the moons of Jupiter and the outer planets will come within our compass. This will be done within the framework of a useful total space program of science, exploration, and applications at approximately the present overall level of the space budget.

  Thank you …

  Frederick W. Michaels Chronological File, 1972, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington DC

  Wednesday, January 5, 1972

  NASA Headquarters, Washington DC

  Gregory Dana had spent the day at a meeting on rendezvous techniques for the upcoming Skylab missions. He came across a number of Houston people gathered in the hallway, before a notice board.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Don’t you know? We’re going to Mars. Nixon has confirmed it at last. Look at this.’ They made way for him at the board. At first Dana could see nothing of interest to him on the board: an offer of tickets for the Cowboys vs Dolphins Superbowl, classes in TM and acupuncture (posted here, in NASA HQ!), and a bright orange sticker saying simply JESUS HEALS. But there, crowded out by the trivia, was a closely-printed piece of headed paper. It was a statement from Nixon, and a subsidiary statement from Michaels, the new NASA Administrator. Some supporting press briefing material was pinned up too: a ‘Mars mission digest,’ with simple question-and-answer chunks of information about the mission, and a few spectacular artist’s impressions of the mission’s various phases. There were even a few outlines of the modes which had been evaluated and discarded.

  There was no mention of Dana’s Venus swingby mode.

  Since that apocalyptic Phase A meeting in Huntsville back in July, Dana had heard almost nothing of the development of the Mars options. And this was the first he’d learned of the final decision – along with the Headquarters cleaning staff, and the rest of the nation. It was clear, now, that he’d been excluded from the decision-making process since July.

  What could he do about it? Write another letter to Fred Michaels?

  He felt the injustice, the stupidity of it, burn a hole in his stomach.

  Well, it was nothing to do with him any more. Maybe, at least, Jim would be able to realize some of his own dreams, in the slow unwinding of this decision.

  Dana tucked his briefcase under his arm and walked away.

  Book 2

  TRAJECTORIES

  Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 003/09:23:02

  York floated in her sleeping bag. She was dog tired, but sleep just wouldn’t come. Her lower back was sore,
and she had a stuffy headache, as if she was developing a cold. Her heart was suddenly too strong; blood seemed to boom through her ears. She missed the pressure of a pillow under her head, the security of a blanket tucked in close around her. The bag was too big, for one thing; she found herself bouncing around inside it. And every time she moved, the layer of warm air which she’d built up around her body, and which stuck there in microgravity, tended to squirt away, out of the bag, leaving her chilled.

  When she managed to relax, she had a feeling of falling. Once she almost drifted off, but then her arms came floating up, and a hand touched her face …

  She let her eyes slide open.

  She was inside her sleep locker, at the base of the Mission Module. The locker was little bigger than a cupboard, with a foldaround screen drawn across it. On the surface above her head was her overhead light, and a little comms station, and a fan. There were little drawers for personal things, like underwear; when she opened them the drawers had blue plastic nets stretched over them, to stop everything from floating away.

  A lot of light and noise leaked around the foldaround screen. She could hear the hum and whir of the Mission Module’s equipment, and the occasional automatic burn of the attitude clusters as they kept Ares pointing sunwards. With the bright, antiseptic light of the wardroom beyond her screen, and the new smell of metal and plastic, it was like trying to sleep inside an immense refrigerator.

  Apparently there had been plans to provide solid doors on the sleep lockers. She even remembered seeing a memo which talked about the need to provide privacy for astronauts ‘significantly relating,’ in the typically obscure, euphemistic doubletalk NASA employed when talking about the functions of the warm bodies they were shipping into space at such expense. But the doors had been skipped, for reasons of saving weight. So much for significantly relating.

  And now – on top of everything else – she needed a pee.

  She tried to ignore it, but the pressure on her bladder built up steadily. Christ. Well, it was her own fault; the relief tube – the Mission Module’s toilet, the Waste Management Station – was so uncomfortable she’d put off using it. Besides, she seemed to be peeing more than usual, since coming up into microgravity.

  She succumbed to the inevitable. She squirmed her way out of the bag, turned on her overhead light, and folded back the screen. When she moved, her back hurt like hell.

  After the TOI burn, the Ares modules had undergone the first of the cumbersome waltzes the crew would have to endure before the mission was done. Under the command of Stone, Apollo, containing the crew, had separated from the nose of the stack, turned around and docked nose-to-nose with the Mission Module.

  When she’d first been talked through the mission profile, waiting until after the TOI burn to do this separation and docking had seemed bizarre to York. Why wait until you were already on your way to Mars to cut loose of your main ship? But it made a kind of sense, in the convoluted, abort-options-conscious way the mission planners figured these things. If the MS-II had blown up during the TOI burn, the crew, in Apollo, could have got out and done an abort burn to get home. And if the injection burn was successful but the docking hadn’t been, the crew could use the Service Module’s big engine to blast back toward Earth.

  Anyway, after the successful docking, the crew had been able to crawl through a docking tunnel and started moving into the Mission Module, their interplanetary home-from-home.

  As long as she didn’t think about the wisdom of taking apart the spacecraft in deep interplanetary space, it didn’t trouble York.

  York let herself drift across the wardroom. She was light as a feather, and invulnerable; it was like moving through a dream. The Mission Module was a lot roomier than the Apollo Command Module had been, of course. But she was learning to move around, to operate in this environment. She’d found she couldn’t move too quickly. If she did she’d collide with the equipment, dislodging switches and maybe damaging gear. It just wasn’t a professional way to behave. She was learning to move slowly, with a kind of underwater grace.

  It wasn’t a big deal. Microgravity was just a different environment; she’d learn to work within its constraints.

  The wardroom, with its little plastic table and three belted chairs, was clean and empty, bright in the light of strip floods. The walls and floors weren’t solid; they were a gray mosaic of labeled storage drawers and feet restraints – loops of blue plastic – and there were handy little blue rectangles of Velcro everywhere. There were up-down visual cues, signs and lighting and color codes. Everything was obviously designed for zero G.

  The whole thing had the feel of an airliner’s crew station, she thought; it was all kind of pleasing, compact, well-designed, everything tucked away. Like a mobile home in space. Of course right now everything was still bright and new, every surface unmarked; it would be different after a few months’ occupancy. Much of the Mission Module’s equipment was still in stowage; the crew would spend the next few days hauling ass around the Module, configuring it for its long flight.

  The Waste Management Station was a little cubicle containing a commode, a military thing of steel and bolts and terse metal labels. She pulled across the screen, swiveled in the air, dropped her shorts and pants, and pulled herself down. Thigh bars, cushioned and heavy, swung across her legs to clamp her ass to the seat.

  She pulled a hose out of the front of the commode; the hose would take her pee to a tank, for dumping in space later. The hose justified the Apollo-era nickname, ‘relief tube,’ that the crews still used for the waste station. In a cupboard beside her there was a set of funnels, all color-coded to ensure they weren’t mixed up by the crew; hers, anyway, were of the distinctive female variety. The cupboard was already starting to stink a little, and the clear plastic of the funnels was turning yellow. Eighteen months of this.

  She fitted the funnel to the hose, clamped it over her private parts, and opened the valve to the urine store.

  There was a certain strategy to this, which involved aiming for the minimum of pain when using the device. If she opened the valve too soon, the suction would grab at her. And when it resealed itself it was liable to trap a little piece of her inside it. The way round that was to start pissing a split-second before opening the valve. But there was a danger that the funnel would just slip off, and off would float her piss in little golden globules.

  It took her a few seconds to be able to let go.

  Now she’d got set up here, she considered whether to try taking a dump. That was actually easier, mechanically, than peeing. She’d have to start up the slinger, a spinning drum under the commode. The shit would stick to the walls of the drum, and later she would turn a switch to expose the drum to vacuum, and the shit would be frozen and dried out.

  But, though she felt a pressure in her lower gut, there was nothing doing for now; she suspected it was going to take her a few days to relax enough to unclench. And besides, there was no gravity here to help her, as the guys had informed her with glee; she wasn’t looking forward to the experience.

  She took a couple of wet wipes and cleaned out the inside of the funnel. The wipes might have come out of any drug store back home, except for the strong stink of disinfectant about them.

  She unlocked herself from the john seat. She pushed her hands into the wash-basin, a plastic globe which sprayed water across her skin and out into a waste tank. One or two droplets escaped the basin and went oscillating around the john, but she swatted them out of the air easily. There was a row of towel holders on the wall, little color-coded rubber diaphragms: towels, their corners shoved into the holders, hung out in the air like flags. She dried her hands.

  She heard a noise; she turned.

  Ralph Gershon was in the wardroom, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. He was just floating, with a plastic can of Coke in one hand and a silver-gray lithium hydroxide canister in the other. The lith canisters were used to scrub carbon dioxide out of the recycled air, and they had to be checked and changed
regularly. The familiar red and white Coke can was pretty much the normal size and shape, expect for a baby-style microgravity dispenser at the top.

  Gershon held a finger up to his lips – evidently Stone was still asleep – and he held the can out toward her.

  She shook her head. ‘Too gassy.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he whispered back. ‘Coke paid a million bucks to get these cans on the Mission Module, but they just can’t get the damn mix right.’ He started to juggle with the lith and Coke cans, sending them spinning and oscillating from hand to hand. York had already observed that microgravity was like a three-dimensional playground for the guys; as soon as they’d got into the Mission Module’s big workshop area Stone and Gershon had started doing cartwheels and loops and spins, throwing bits of gear to each other like frisbees.

  Gershon’s eyes kept straying to her chest.

  She resisted the temptation to fold her arms across her T-shirt. Well, that’s it. She had a stock of sports bras, and in future she’d be wearing one every time she left her sleep cubicle. No significant relating on this damn mission.

  Gershon looked away and sipped at his Coke.

  ‘What’s with the lith cylinders?’

  He shrugged. ‘You know me. I catnap. I’m not sleepy now; I figured I might as well get ahead of myself.’ He cackled. ‘You know, I even got a little shut-eye during the docking.’

  That was true. And now, with York still unable to rest, here he was, drinking Coke and ogling her chest and getting ahead of his chores.