Back to the Moon-ARC (19 page)

“The Chinese government denies this outrageous story about any of our taikonauts being stranded on the Moon. Our recent mission was a robotic rehearsal for our planned campaign of scientific exploration of the Moon and nothing more. Any story that contradicts these facts is simply not true.”
 

The American lunar crew, minus Stetson, heard the vehement denial of the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations at the same time the rest of the country did—barely two hours after the news story broke.

“The video and audio all check out.” Leonard spoke, his voice full of derision. “Sure, the guys over at Space Excursions made this all up as a publicity stunt. I know Paul Gesling, and he would not be party to any such thing. No, the Chinese ambassador is lying.”

“What would they have to gain by lying?” Menendez responded.

“Stupidity,” Leonard said. “Honor. Plain and simple. They only want to report success and not failure. They want the world to know that they are the next superpower, and you can’t do that if you fail in something like this. Going to the Moon is the real deal, and if they have to admit they weren’t up to the job, then they lose face. Unfortunately, it may mean that some brave people are going to die up there—and they won’t get recognized as heroes by their own government, who are too afraid to admit they even exist.”

“Craziness.” Chow, visibly shaken added, “They’re up there, alone, running out of air, stranded a quarter of a million miles from home. I doubt they’ve been able to eat anything, either. If they are trapped in their suits, as this imagery suggests they might be, then they have to keep them on to survive.”

“Yeah, and better them than us,” Leonard responded.

“Oh my God!” Chow, reliving his own personal nightmare in the privacy of his thoughts, could only nod his head.

Stetson called Calvin Ross as he was preparing for his upcoming meeting with the Vice President. Ross had a data book in his safe that described the entire Chinese rocket program in some detail. The files were classified top secret, meaning that not only were they a secret important to immediate national security, but no foreign nationals could be made aware of their contents even if they had the appropriate clearance level. Some of the data contained therein had been gathered using techniques that might be compromised if the contents were made known beyond only those Americans with a true “need to know.”
 

Ross and Barbara Owen, the AA for Space Flight, were thumbing through the book, making notes, when Stetson’s call came in. Stetson was among the very few to have Ross’s cell-phone number. But Stetson was NASA’s front man for the current generation. He was the new Captain Kirk.

“Calvin, we can save these people.” Ross noted the sound of absolute certainty in Stetson’s voice.

“Save them? How?” replied Ross. “Bill, are you serious?”

“Their message says they have air for another seven or eight days. For all practical purposes, that was yesterday. We’re three days away from launch. It’ll take three days for us to get to the Moon, leaving them with one day to spare. Maybe two, if we’re lucky.”

“Wait a minute, Bill,” Ross said. “Let me put you on the speaker. Barbara is here with me.” Ross leaned forward, touched the speaker-phone button, and motioned for Owen to listen also.

“Go ahead, Bill.”

“Hi, Barbara.”

“Hi, Bill.”

“We can save them.” Stetson began to explain. “If we can find out where they are on the surface, and it looks like the
Dreamscape
crew did that for us for the most part, we can land there. Altair was intentionally overdesigned so we could land anywhere, anytime. That was one of the ways NASA originally sold the program. Apollo could only land near the equator—like we were planning to do on this trip. But we don’t have to. We launch with enough fuel to do one of the missions we weren’t planning to do for another few years. We can land anywhere on the Moon, as long as we know where to land before we launch.”

“Wait a minute,” Ross said. “Bill, you know I’m a politician, not a rocket scientist. Please explain why we’ve got to know before you go.”

“It takes energy, and in our case, propellant, to change an orbit from being around the equator to being in a circle around the lunar poles. The same is true on the Earth. That’s why it’s easier to place satellites in geostationary orbit when we launch from the equator than when we launch from the Kennedy Space Center. You can get there from Kennedy, but it takes more fuel. You’ve got to crank your circular orbit down from 28.5 degrees to zero degrees, and that takes fuel. Now, if we need to land at the lunar south pole, then we need to launch at a time that minimizes the amount of fuel we need to burn in order to get there, and that’s most easily accomplished if the rocket that originally puts us into space does part of the job. There is simply not enough fuel on the lander to do it by itself. Are you with me?”

“Yes, I think so.” Ross didn’t understand the details, but he did understand the overall concept. And he was certain Stetson and the other rocket scientists
did
understand it.

“Okay. Now, once I get there, I can land the Altair near their crash site, and we can cram them into the lander’s ascent stage and bring them home.”

“Bill.” This time Barbara spoke up. “There isn’t room on the ascent stage for your crew and their crew. Not only isn’t there room, but the combined weight will be more than can be lifted from the surface with the Altair’s engine—not enough thrust and probably not enough propellant even if there were.”

“The rocket science part we understand, Barbara,” Stetson said. “My crew won’t be with me. This is a rescue mission, and I’ll be going alone. That way we can fit all four of the Chinese in the ascent stage with me. We don’t need to bring back any rocks, and that will save weight. And we can probably offload all of the science hardware—saving even more weight.”

Ross didn’t know if the plan was feasible; he would let his engineers tell him that. But he did know that this was just the kind of thing that, if successful, would be his ticket within the administration. And it might save some lives on the way. But more importantly, it would make him, NASA, the astronauts, and the space program heroes. Heroes got money and, more importantly, votes.

“Barbara, what do you think?”

“Well, I don’t know. It sounds like it might work. But we’ll have to run the numbers.”

“Trust me, Barbara,” Stetson said. “Hell, I ran the numbers! This
will
work. But we have to know where they are, and right now the Chinese aren’t even admitting that the people Space Excursions talked to are theirs. It’s my guess that the Chinese aren’t sure exactly where they are. If we take their data and run it through a fine-tooth comb and a supercomputer, we’ll have the crash position located close enough to do the job. We’re taking the rover anyway, so if I miss them by a few miles, then I can go get them.”

“Okay. I get it, Bill.” Ross leaned toward the speakerphone, took a deep breath, and almost too eagerly replied, “Bill, you and Barbara get a team together and see if this will really work. Use whomever you need from Johnson, Kennedy, and Marshall. I’ll carry this to the Vice President as an option, but he’ll want to know yesterday whether or not we can really do it. That means I want to know for sure by tomorrow morning at eight o’clock. And I don’t like the idea of you going it alone. You’re taking a copilot with you.”

“Okay. I’ll have to pick the right crew member, then. And we’ll have to figure out something on the Altair that we can toss overboard to make up for the extra passenger.”

“Do that. By eight a.m.”

“Will do.” Stetson wasn’t quite finished. “Calvin. We must know exactly where they crashed. And that means the Chinese need to play ball yesterday. It takes time to run trajectories, and we need to know so we can tweak our launch window—before I launch. If we had their orbital-telemetry data that we could add in with the Space Excursions data, it would make life easier.”

“I’ll tell the Vice President,” Ross said.

Chapter 18

The obscenely cheery voice of the news announcer blared from the alarm clock at exactly 5:00 a.m. the next morning, awakening Stetson from the three hours of sleep he had allowed himself the night before. “Good morning, Space Coast! It’s time to get that pot of coffee brewing and for your five-day forecast.”

Stetson groaned, rolled over, and quickly turned down the volume on the old-fashioned clock radio beside his bed. He’d been up until almost two o’clock meeting with Menendez, Chow, and Leonard, as well as a hastily assembled team of engineers from three NASA field centers. They were discussing all the options that might allow for a rescue of the stranded Chinese. In the course of the discussion, they had narrowed their choices to two: one with Stetson and Chow aboard and one totally robotic. Stetson had been emphatic about needing humans on board and in the loop. The NASA director had insisted it be a minimum two-man mission. So, Bill felt it only made sense that a rescue mission should have a medical doctor along for the ride. The decision was clear then that Anthony Chow, M.D., should be the crew member that joined him.

The engineers and bureaucrats at Marshall and Kennedy favored the robotic mission. There was less risk of losing a manned crew, and it was completely boring and unimaginative. Bill had argued until he was blue in the face that robots couldn’t think on their feet, and with a potential communications delay of two or more seconds, that could be disastrous. It was clear that Stetson and his colleagues at the Johnson Space Center emphatically favored the manned mission.
 

Stetson had gone around and around with the engineers and was insistent that a person needed to be on board just in case something went wrong that only a person could fix. The counterargument favored not sending a person so as to allow one additional stranded Chinese crew member to return home without any modification to the Altair. It was too late to modify the spaceship now, since it was already packed away in the Ares V rocket on the launchpad. Any mods would have to take place either along the way or once they landed on the lunar surface. That was something robots could not do.

In Stetson’s opinion, the discussion was somewhat moot, because they didn’t know how many people were alive on the Moon. And what if medical attention could increase the number of survivors that made it home? And what if the Chinese survivors bumped the wrong control panel or accidentally changed some of the ship’s control settings? What if? No, there were just too many “what ifs” to let the mission go without one or more of its intended crew members on board.
 

And without knowing how many, if any, of these “what ifs” would rear their ugly heads, how could anyone say having the ship fly up there robotically would make any sense at all? All the arguments for or against didn’t matter anyway until safety signed off on it. Whatever the astronaut office said about mission success and mission safety was always considered to be the last word. If they said it was unsafe, then it was unsafe and would not fly. The converse was also true. And Stetson knew the rules of this game. He just had to make certain to convince them that it
was
safe and
should
fly.

As Stetson rushed through his morning routine and prepared to get his usual hot shower, he cranked up the volume on the radio and tuned it to a news station so he could keep one ear tuned in just in case. His interest and patience were soon rewarded.

“—And, in an unexpected turn of events, the Chinese government announced late last night that the astronauts on the Moon are, in fact, Chinese. The Chinese foreign minister made the announcement in a press conference while attending the World Energy Summit in Australia.”

A man’s voice, speaking Chinese, then came over the radio, followed seconds later by an English translation. “The four brave crew members of the moon ship
Harmony
are the pride of China. Our thoughts go out to their families as these heroes spend their last days making the ultimate sacrifice for their country.”

“Joining us now is Eric Harris, author of many books about space and space exploration, and an aerospace consultant. Good morning, Mr. Harris. What can you tell us about the fate that awaits the Chinese astronauts? And is there anything we here on Earth can do to help them?”

Stetson stood outside his shower, the water not yet on, listening intently. He now knew that there were four people on the Moon to be rescued. Without any modification, the Altair could bring home a crew of four—him, Chow, and two of the Chinese. He was certain that enough weight could be off-loaded to allow another person aboard. Getting more than that on the ascent stage, that part of the rocket that would lift off from the lunar surface and take the astronauts back into space, would be a bit harder—but not impossible. No, he was sure they could come back with all four—though it would be tight. The radio program continued, this time with the self-proclaimed space expert, Eric Harris.
 

“Their fate is bleak. If they don’t lose electrical power, which they shouldn’t, since their lander has both solar arrays and hydrogen fuel cells, then they won’t bake or freeze before their air runs out. Contrary to what you see in the movies, death by asphyxiation is fairly quick. In the absence of sufficient oxygen, people act normally until, and with no warning, they simply feel dizzy and then black out in a matter of seconds.”

“Sounds gruesome,” the newscaster commented.

“Well, yes. But at least it is quick. Well, in their case, not so quick, since they know it is coming.”

“What about a rescue? Have the Chinese said anything about mounting a rescue mission?”

“No. A Chinese rescue is out of the question. They simply don’t have the hardware—the rocket, the spaceship that takes them from the Earth to the Moon, the lander, and all that gear—they simply don’t have spares ready to be launched on such short notice. They might be able to get something up in a couple of months, but by that time it will be a mission to bring home the bodies, not a rescue mission.”