Gold Rush, page 21
This is it, she thinks.
This is the end.
Darkness
With “the package deployed,” as mission control calls it, Dice focuses on the next phase of the Vulcan mission—transit to Earth.
The package was a hundred MiniSats and five hundred CubeSats set in racks arranged with the hollow core of a stripped-down Starship. The nose cone was shed on reaching low Earth orbit to reduce the mass being pushed to Venus. With the oversized Starship dwarfing the Dragon capsule and its service module, it looks like the combined spacecraft flew backwards to Venus. Like a tug boat pushing a multimillion-dollar luxury yacht out to sea, the Dragon was the workhorse of the mission.
As Dice soared through the cosmos, debates raged back on Earth about the deployment of satellites around Venus. From a scientific perspective, it was a no-brainer. Politically, the decision was fraught with controversy as various governments worried about how the aliens would interpret an intrusive presence around Venus. NASA adjusted the orbits to ensure all but two of the satellites would burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere before the alien craft arrived, noting that this would be highly visible and send a clear message. Still, some feared the aliens would retaliate, but against what? Tiny devices that burned up harmlessly? Others promoted an isolationist mentality and demanded that the whole mission be scrapped. Dice was surprised when the final go-ahead was given.
Originally, the plan was to release the monitoring satellites 400,000 kilometers from Venus, which is roughly the distance from Earth to the Moon.
The larger MiniSats have their own thrusters. To achieve a Venusian orbit, they needed a change in velocity of less than a meter per second. By timing when they fired and the direction they flew off in, NASA ensured they were sent on different inclinations and at intervals that would cover the whole planet from orbit. After a burn of just a few seconds, they were left to drift into place over the course of the next few days.
There was some concern about the coverage of the CubeSats as they rely on a spring-loaded deployment system within the skeleton of the Starship. Houston had Dice perform a minor burn, dropping him lower down into the gravity well around Venus to ensure the sats had the opportunity to complete a couple of orbits before the first impact.
Dice floats within his capsule, reviewing the updated plan. Now that all the satellites are deployed, he can uncouple the two spacecraft. On its current trajectory, the empty frame of the Starship upper stage will burn up harmlessly in the Venusian atmosphere.
Getting back to Earth is as simple as a three-minute burn, but that’s it. That’s all his fuel spent. Like a duck hunter hiding in the reeds on the edge of a pond with a shotgun in hand, Dice needs to lead his target. He can’t aim for Earth. He needs to aim for where Earth will be in a month’s time. NASA has sent up the adjusted burn parameters. For now, he’s monitoring the satellites, but he’ll fire his exit burn 18 hours before impact. That will have him leaving the gravitational sphere around Venus long before Comet Yakov strikes. While he’s outbound on the night side of the planet, he’ll capture and relay metrics from roughly half of the satellites from a distance of about a million kilometers. The rest will be in direct contact with Earth.
“I know I’m the pilot,” he says into the headset wrapped over his ears. A microphone sits inches from his lips. “But, honestly, I feel like more of a tourist out here. Damn, they don’t tell you about the boredom part when you sign up for these deep space missions.”
He laughs to himself and brings up the program to eject the empty Starship frame, which acted as the carriage for the satellites. His fingers glide over the touch screen. A fleeting push isn’t enough to engage a command. The system is designed to respond to a definite, sustained touch. As he brings up the mission schedule, there’s an irony not lost on him.
US spaceflight began with monkeys in Mercury capsules and engineers boasting that there was nothing for a pilot to do. Being test pilots in the US Air Force, Shepard, Glenn and Grissom demanded instruments. The engineers gave them a numbered checklist along with rudimentary controls, but even in the early ‘60s, the Mercury capsule could fly autonomously. Then came Gemini and Apollo. As the complexity increased, the role of astronauts became essential, reprogramming the Apollo Guidance Computer in flight to deal with midcourse corrections, different mission profiles, and changes to the landing site. By the time the Space Shuttle rolled out to the launch pad, a single STS launch required two and a half million precision-machined parts working together as one. The complexity was off the charts. Shuttle pilots had to train for and memorize dozens of potential abort modes. Orbital maneuvers had to be conducted with care. A mistake of even a few meters per second could result in missing a rendezvous with the International Space Station. Landing the Shuttle was dicey. Guiding the shuttle in to land was akin to flying a brick. The glide angle was twenty degrees, compared to barely three degrees in a commercial airliner. And landings were conducted without any engine power. With no ability to go around for a second attempt, the first few Shuttle missions landed on dry lake beds until the technique was perfected. And now, spaceflight is back to the Mercury mission days again. Now, Dragon, Orion, and even the aging Starliners can be flown remotely by computer. Pilots are an accessory.
Dice straps into his seat. Procedure dictates that he suits up for any powered maneuver, so he’s wearing his pressure suit. An umbilical cord leads from his right leg to an access port, providing his suit with electricity while exchanging the air, circulating oxygen, and removing carbon dioxide. He lowers the visor.
He reaches out with his black gloved hand and touches the screen. A checklist comes up. He goes through it, confirming the various steps he’s already completed. Half of the items already have ticks beside them, being confirmed by the computer system.
“And we are go for separation,” he says.
Ever since John Glenn orbited Earth in Friendship 7, astronauts have narrated their experience in space. At first, it was a matter of acting as a human-driven monitoring system, giving mission control additional information they’d otherwise miss, but then it became an unspoken convention. The Apollo astronauts talked through every action they undertook on the lunar surface, providing confirmation of the video feed. No one ever admitted as much, but it kept an easily panicked mission control happy. Ever since then, it’s become standard practice for astronauts to keep video logs narrating the finer details of life in weightlessness. Dice is no exception.
He pushes the program start button that has appeared on the screen before him. Just like in the simulator, there’s a delay of five seconds. An abort button comes up, allowing him to stop the automated sequence at any point should he need to take over manual control. And it’s tempting. Damn tempting. Dice thinks about pushing the button and manually ejecting the carriage, but the tsunami of questions he’d get from mission control isn’t worth the effort.
A series of clicks resound through the bulkhead. Sound may not travel in space, but it does travel through steel. He can feel the Dragon coming free from the lead module. He watches a video screen. Darkness grows between the two spacecraft. The Dragon initiates a preprogrammed retreat from the empty hull of the stunted Starship. It moves back to a distance of a hundred meters. Sunlight glistens off the body of the carriage. Dice can make out row upon row of empty slots in the side of the vessel.
Already, the Starship is drifting to one side. In space, everything seems stationary, but nothing is still. Both spacecraft are under the invisible influence of gravity from another world. At this distance, Venus is little more than a white after-dinner mint in the window. Over the next day, it’ll grow in apparent size, but its gravitational reach is such that the trajectory of both spacecraft is influenced by its mass. Remarkably, a mere hundred meters is enough to ensure both spacecraft are now on slightly different trajectories, never to meet again. By the time Dice fires his engine for a trans-Earth burn, a hundred meters difference will have grown to a couple of miles.
“And that’s it,” he says, opening his visor and disconnecting the umbilical cord. “Deployment and separation are complete. Vulcan is coming home.”
He opens his visor and drifts to the window and watches the way the sunlight plays on the distant hull of the empty Starship. After over a month in space, this is his first chance to get a bit of perspective on the mission. To him, the Dragon is his whole world. Now, he gets some idea of just how small he is in the scheme of things.
Suzanne told him there was media concern about his mission continuing with the presence of an alien spacecraft, but the decision to continue came down to the realization that at their closest approach, there would still be well over a million kilometers between them, not to mention both a planet and a comet separating them. Dice doesn’t feel threatened at all by the realization there’s an alien spacecraft out there somewhere in the darkness. He figures they’ll see the swarm of satellites observing the impact of Comet Yakov and miss him entirely. He sighs.
Time drags. The flight plan calls for a slight bump from Venus, with the Vulcan picking up a little speed as it falls into the gravity well. That’s supposed to save a little fuel as a contingency at the other end of the burn. He waits, watching the mission clock. Venus gets bigger in the window.
“Damn, I’d kill for a little adventure… Um, I guess being bored and alive is better than—”
Bang!
The spacecraft shudders.
The lights go out, plunging the cabin into darkness.
“Ah, Houston?” Dice asks, even though there cannot and will not be an immediate answer, not for the best part of half an hour, no matter how much he longs to hear a soothing voice on the other end of the radio.
“I think we have a problem.”
With the power out, he doubts he’s transmitting, but it’s in his training to narrate his actions, especially when troubleshooting a malfunction. His mind switches to problem-solving mode. He pulls himself around in front of the control panel, swimming through the air with ease. Repeated touches on the screen do nothing. Of course, they do nothing—there’s no power.
Like all spacecraft, the deep space variant of the Dragon is built with multiple redundant systems. Sunlight rolls around within the capsule as the craft turns to distribute heat evenly across its outer hull, but the shifting light is different. Vulcan is no longer revolving around the z-axis of the Dragon—an imaginary line running from the center of the front hatch, through the spacecraft and its service module, and out through the middle of the massive engine bell at the rear of the craft. Dice grits his teeth. The difference is subtle, barely noticeable, but it confirms his suspicion. Something struck the craft, altering its rotation, causing it to tumble slightly to one side. It’s the way the sunlight shifts around the craft that confirms his thinking. Instead of gliding around the conical shape of the capsule, it inches closer to the hatch. Regardless, Dice follows procedure.
“Checking the fuses.”
He opens a panel at the back of the cabin, but given the way the craft is turning, he’s confident he’s not going to find any problems in the electrical system. Twenty switches have been set in four rows. Each has a description of the underlying system it supports. They’re all in the on state, including the main power switch. Dice pushes all of them into their plastic housing, making sure they’re firmly in place. He cycles the main power switch on and off, talking as he does so, providing narration to a system that can no longer hear him.
“Nothing. No response. Okay, that’s good news and bad news. The good news is that nothing has overloaded. There are no short circuits or faults within the cabin itself. And the bad news. The bad news is: the problem lies outside… I’m seeing changes in the shadows. I think Vulcan has been hit by a micrometeorite. I—I need to go outside.”
Dice rummages around in the darkness, searching through one of the storage cabinets. He has to move a few canvas bags filled with food and water. With a light shove, they float to one side in weightlessness.
“I’m trying to figure out what has happened,” he says, talking himself through the problem. “With dual independent systems and redundant batteries, I shouldn’t have lost all power. I’m going to have to conduct an EVA to better assess the issue.”
To save mass, the Vulcan launched without a dedicated EVA suit. Even though Dice doesn’t have a full spacesuit, his pressure suit has an umbilical extension allowing him to roam up to fifteen meters from the hatch. The thinking was that if an unscheduled EVA was required, it would probably be related to the latch between the Dragon and the Starship frame, and that’s easily accessible from the side hatch.
Umbilicals have been used for spacewalks before. Alexei Leonov used one to conduct the first-ever spacewalk, while Aaron White used one for the first American spacewalk. It’s old school, but it’s safe. There’s no chance of floating away.
“And that brings up another problem,” he says, walking himself through the challenges before him. “Without power, I can’t depressurize the cabin to go outside. Not properly. I can vent air into space, but I can never get that air back again. And without power, carbon dioxide is going to build up in my suit. Oxygen will flow as it’s under pressure, but CO2 is going to be a bitch.”
He looks at the fuse array—if it were only that easy.
Dice looks at his hand. His fingers are trembling.
“No rush. You’re not in a rush,” he tells himself. “Slow and methodical.”
For now, Dice has breathable air around him in the cabin of his spacecraft. He knows his body produces less than a kilogram of carbon dioxide each day. Given how sedentary he is, it’s probably down around half a kilo—that’s just over a pound. In rough terms, he’s surrounded by approximately ten cubic meters of breathable air. Carbon dioxide, though, is a bitch. It doesn’t take much to poison the air, even if there is plenty of oxygen to spare. A fucking calculator would be nice about now. Dice figures he’s got an hour or so before he starts feeling the buildup giving him a headache. It’ll take three or four hours before his thinking and perhaps even his sight start to blur. Then he’ll get drowsy. The actual saturation of carbon dioxide will still be only a couple of percent, but anything above 5% would cause him to fall unconscious. At a guess, he figures that’ll take around a day. The point is—he tells himself—there’s no need for panic. Not yet.
He takes a deep breath.
Clarity. That’s what he needs. Part of him wants to hook up the umbilical extension, close his visor, vent the cabin, and rush outside, but he needs to be smart. Intelligence is all he has. Dice has to think this through and reason his way to a solution. Rushing out into space is a dumb idea. He’s going to lose a lot of air. Once he’s outside, he’s got to make sure he can do something useful, as he’ll only get one shot at a spacewalk.
“Okay, the call from Houston is: don’t panic,” he says, pretending someone down there is talking him through the incident and calming his nerves. “Work the problem. Think about your training. Think about the design of the spacecraft. Think about the emergency procedures.”
The Dragon carries four lithium-hydroxide metal-oxide canisters for emergency life support, but there’s no power. He drifts to one of the windows. Sunlight glistens off the golden solar panels extended like wings on either side of the service module.
“All right, I can do this. Power. What I need is power. If the main bus has been severed, I should have already automatically switched to battery power. The scrubbers are good for another month. They just need air flowing over them. I’ve got to get fans working to circulate the air.”
Although there’s been no progress, talking through the problem has helped settle his nerves. Dice pushes his face up against the window, trying to look down along the length of the spacecraft, wanting to make as many observations as possible before he goes outside. He remains stationary, allowing the twist of the craft to pan around. Due to the sloping angle of the capsule, he can’t see the service module, but he’s not looking for his craft. He’s looking for debris.
“Okay, there are bits of insulation out there. Fluff. Some foil catching the light. And I’ve got fine droplets. They’re green—fluorescent green in the sunlight. Ah, they’re maybe eight to ten feet from the hull. I only see them once per revolution. Looks like there’s a leak on the starboard side. Ah, I’m thinking I’m seeing coolant.”
Dice is quietly confident. He has no reason to be, but he’s unraveling the problem. Knowledge replaces uncertainty. It helps contextualize the problem. And that makes him think he can beat the odds. He’s not sure how much time has transpired since the incident, but it’s less than an hour.
“I need to go out there. And Venus. Damn. Venus is looking pretty big out the window. I mean, she’s beautiful, but she’s about the size of a basketball and only getting bigger. I’ve got to get the power restored and get the hell out of Dodge.”
Dice collects a bunch of tools, including a power drill, torque wrench, metallic duct tape, and a sharp knife that retracts into a safety hood. Cords connect the tools to his waistband.
“What are the stats on carbon dioxide within a suit?” he asks the darkness. “I’m thinking I’ve got half an hour max. It’s going to take ten minutes to depressurize the cabin. Another ten minutes to re-pressurize. That’s not going to leave much time outside, but I need to get a good look at what has happened.”
Dice closes his helmet and begins venting the cabin. He drifts in place and slows his breathing. Oxygen flows. On its return journey after passing through his suit, air will flow over the lithium-hydroxide canisters in the hull of the Dragon. Even without a fan to propel the air through the scrubber, he’ll get some effect. At least some of the CO2 will be absorbed. He only hopes that it will buy him enough time outside.
