Nathan H. Green's Blog
December 5, 2023
December 11, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 26
December 11th, 2022
Today’s the day we find out if Orion’s fancy heat shield works. This is the part of the mission that was so dangerous that NASA didn’t want real people aboard Orion. Now we’ve got five.
I’m back to being this quantum function, both alive and dead at the same time, just waiting to be observed to determine my state.
I decided to write this entry before we re-enter. You’ll know what’s become of me from the news, and this is the moment to end this diary. The more I think about things, the more I feel I’ve been thinking about life wrong.
It doesn’t matter what happens next.
Good luck, or shitty luck, however those quantum functions resolve, I’m not some particle with either an up-spin or a down-spin waiting to be observed. The Alex Whelm who had shitty luck and didn’t get accepted to astronaut training is the same Alex Whelm who pulled off an impossible intercept and spoke with the President of the United States.
What I’ve done are just the details of some combination of opportunity, luck, and means. They’re not who I am. I’m every thought in my head whether that’s from something I watched, something I read, or something that popped into my head and made me laugh at random. I’m the imprint in an old pair of my shoes. I’m a voice.
Maybe that voice goes and does great things, maybe that voice goes and does nothing, but it’s the same voice no matter what.
I’m the same Alex who realized he could sneak aboard Artemis I and saved Dragon’s crew, but I’m also the same Alex who skipped a VR gaming session and just kept working his job at NASA.
Why didn’t things work out with Jess? Because we weren’t right for each other. There was nothing wrong with me, there was nothing wrong with her, we just didn’t fit. What about Sarah? Who knows. Once we’re down on the ground though, and I’ve had a chance to shave, shower, and brush my teeth, I’ll ask her if she’d like to go mountain biking together some time and get my ass kicked. We probably won’t fit either, and that’s ok.
But I know enough about myself to know that I’m a person who asks a girl out even when he thinks it’s hopeless. But her saying yes, or no, isn’t something I need to know the answer to in order to be happy or know who I am. There will be a time to ask, and I will. This just isn’t it.
Maybe the heatshield fails, maybe we all burn up on re-entry. Or maybe I land and spend the next two months doing endless interviews as the big damn hero. But I’m still just Alex, the same guy who got rejected for his dream job and dumped by his girlfriend.
We spend so much time judging ourselves by what we’ve done and how luck turned out, that we fail to see the person under it all. We see celebrities who are only exceptionally lucky, or have an exceptional talent at one thing, and transmute them into omnipotent beings. They’re not, I’m not.
So take it from the quantum entangled versions of a guy who both saved the lives of four people stranded in space, who saved the Orion mission from a critical computer glitch; and at the same time from the guy who snuck aboard a ship he had no business being on, and then changed absolutely nothing because that ship burned up on re-entry. Hero, and loser, at the same time, at the same moment, the outcome to be decided by forces outside of my control.
None of that stuff matters. That’s why it’s ok that it be decided by a roll of the dice. What matters isn’t how things turn out, what matters is who we are, what we try to do, and how we try to do it.
So fate, chance, god, quantum entanglement, whatever you want to call it: do what you must, I’m good.
*
Sad the story’s over? Want more? I’m Nathan H. Green a corporate lawyer who left his firm job of 8 years to write. It has been a hell of a journey for me and in the last two years I’ve put out three full length novels, a novella, and Artemis I Has A Stowaway.
Follow me on reddit (u/authornathanhgreen) for updates about what comes next and, buried at the bottom of my posts is a free audio drama time travel story.
If you want to get really wild, check out one of my books! Woe to the Victor came out last week and is getting amazing reviews.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
Today’s the day we find out if Orion’s fancy heat shield works. This is the part of the mission that was so dangerous that NASA didn’t want real people aboard Orion. Now we’ve got five.
I’m back to being this quantum function, both alive and dead at the same time, just waiting to be observed to determine my state.
I decided to write this entry before we re-enter. You’ll know what’s become of me from the news, and this is the moment to end this diary. The more I think about things, the more I feel I’ve been thinking about life wrong.
It doesn’t matter what happens next.
Good luck, or shitty luck, however those quantum functions resolve, I’m not some particle with either an up-spin or a down-spin waiting to be observed. The Alex Whelm who had shitty luck and didn’t get accepted to astronaut training is the same Alex Whelm who pulled off an impossible intercept and spoke with the President of the United States.
What I’ve done are just the details of some combination of opportunity, luck, and means. They’re not who I am. I’m every thought in my head whether that’s from something I watched, something I read, or something that popped into my head and made me laugh at random. I’m the imprint in an old pair of my shoes. I’m a voice.
Maybe that voice goes and does great things, maybe that voice goes and does nothing, but it’s the same voice no matter what.
I’m the same Alex who realized he could sneak aboard Artemis I and saved Dragon’s crew, but I’m also the same Alex who skipped a VR gaming session and just kept working his job at NASA.
Why didn’t things work out with Jess? Because we weren’t right for each other. There was nothing wrong with me, there was nothing wrong with her, we just didn’t fit. What about Sarah? Who knows. Once we’re down on the ground though, and I’ve had a chance to shave, shower, and brush my teeth, I’ll ask her if she’d like to go mountain biking together some time and get my ass kicked. We probably won’t fit either, and that’s ok.
But I know enough about myself to know that I’m a person who asks a girl out even when he thinks it’s hopeless. But her saying yes, or no, isn’t something I need to know the answer to in order to be happy or know who I am. There will be a time to ask, and I will. This just isn’t it.
Maybe the heatshield fails, maybe we all burn up on re-entry. Or maybe I land and spend the next two months doing endless interviews as the big damn hero. But I’m still just Alex, the same guy who got rejected for his dream job and dumped by his girlfriend.
We spend so much time judging ourselves by what we’ve done and how luck turned out, that we fail to see the person under it all. We see celebrities who are only exceptionally lucky, or have an exceptional talent at one thing, and transmute them into omnipotent beings. They’re not, I’m not.
So take it from the quantum entangled versions of a guy who both saved the lives of four people stranded in space, who saved the Orion mission from a critical computer glitch; and at the same time from the guy who snuck aboard a ship he had no business being on, and then changed absolutely nothing because that ship burned up on re-entry. Hero, and loser, at the same time, at the same moment, the outcome to be decided by forces outside of my control.
None of that stuff matters. That’s why it’s ok that it be decided by a roll of the dice. What matters isn’t how things turn out, what matters is who we are, what we try to do, and how we try to do it.
So fate, chance, god, quantum entanglement, whatever you want to call it: do what you must, I’m good.
*
Sad the story’s over? Want more? I’m Nathan H. Green a corporate lawyer who left his firm job of 8 years to write. It has been a hell of a journey for me and in the last two years I’ve put out three full length novels, a novella, and Artemis I Has A Stowaway.
Follow me on reddit (u/authornathanhgreen) for updates about what comes next and, buried at the bottom of my posts is a free audio drama time travel story.
If you want to get really wild, check out one of my books! Woe to the Victor came out last week and is getting amazing reviews.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
December 10, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 25
December 10th, 2022
Imagine that you’re Barack Obama and you’ve just won your first presidential election. It’s election night, the results are in, and you’re buzzing. How long do you keep feeling that way? All night for sure. And I bet you wake up the next morning walking with a hell of a swagger. But within 72 hours he put the milk into the cabinet and cereal into the fridge, started washing his hair with body soap instead of shampoo, or realized he was out of toilet paper only after using the bathroom, and instantly felt like a doofus.
Because for me I spent about four hours being the swash-buckling, space-pirate, hero then became the guy at a dorm-room party where he doesn’t know anyone else and smiles along to inside jokes and shorthand he doesn’t get.
As a side note, I don’t know what a swash is, nor what buckling is - assuming it isn’t a reference to buckles?
It’s kind of embarrassing to even admit that after 24 days of being totally alone I kind of miss the solitude. Big hero to socially awkward engineer in four hours. Breaking more records every day up here.
It does make me wonder about the future of humanity though. Orion is spacious compared to the Apollo capsule, yet it still has as much privacy as that dorm-room party would. It could well take centuries before we get up to Star Trek level population densities on spaceships. So does that mean the only people going out and inhabiting strange new worlds are all going to be extroverts out of necessity?
Could Mars end up being THE night club destination of the future and Earth just filled with people who wear headphones and type on their laptop whenever they go to Starbucks?
In movies they always show really spacious ships going to Mars, but no one bothers thinking about the mass involved in so much structure for so few people. The reality is that every cubic inch of space has a cost in terms of structural mass which in turn means more mass in the structural elements that support it, which means bigger, heavier engines, and more fuel for all of that stuff, and then the extra fuel to lift that extra fuel. With spaceships: mass breeds mass.
When we do go to Mars, every square inch of that spaceship is going to be necessary, and Alex Whelm getting some alone time isn’t NASA’s idea of necessary.
Anyways, I’m not some masochist who just likes to tell people about his insecurities, flaws, and embarrassing personality quirks for fun. I’m only telling you about this because it is necessary context. You’ve got to understand that when Mark gets on the radio and tells me that Jess would like to talk with me, there are four sets of eyes that pivot around to look at me.
Sarah gathers everyone together and pushes them to the bunks and just out of sight - but absolutely not out of earshot. I take the call with a live studio audience of god only knows how many.
“Hey Alex. How are you doing?”
It’s been months, but hearing her voice is like there’s a well trod path of neurons in my brain that lights up and it really could have been yesterday that we broke up. Or were dating.
I tell her about my toes. She doesn’t know what to say back to that, so I make a joke about never liking thong sandals anyways. My brain chooses that moment to present me with a very vivid imagined image of her rolling her eyes in response.
“Did you ever watch Love is Blind? It’s on Netflix,” she asked.
“I’m aware it exists… But I haven’t seen it.” Why do I talk like that? I’m honestly trying to be helpful. What I meant to communicate was, ‘I’ve seen the icon and know the idea, but haven’t watched it.’ Instead, I went for brevity and technical accuracy and the words just come out like a challenge, or like I’m too good to watch something like that. How often do you think Barack Obama says something he feels like an idiot for a quarter second after he finishes saying it? That’s what they should ask Michelle about in interviews. “What’s something Barack did that he’s still embarrassed about?”
“The producers gave me a call. They’d like to sit down with us when you get back, pitch an idea to us.”
“I don’t think that’s really for me,” I say. There’s a long silence on the other end, a few minutes of even more awkward conversation, and Jess gets off the radio.
This is probably worth saying because, given what you know about me and relationships, it might not be obvious, but I did understand she was asking me to give things another chance. At least, I think that’s what she was asking. She was right? You know what: doesn’t matter. In my head she asked me to get back together, and I said no.
Why? Because Jess was right to break up with me. I’ve lived my whole life thinking that when you get dumped it’s because you did something wrong, or should have done something differently, or you’re just not good enough for the other person. But that isn’t it.
People break up because they don’t like the other person. I’m a Hawaiian pizza, and not everyone likes Hawaiian pizza. I’m not going to pick off my chunks of pineapple and hope she doesn’t notice the little juicy divots left on me. I need someone who loves Hawaiian pizza. Yeah sure, there are easy-to-love lucky folks out there who are pepperoni pizzas, but I’m done regretting the fact that I’m not one of them.
People like Hawaiian pizza too!
“Whatcha writing?” Sarah asks.
I jumped, and fumbled the pad that I’m writing this out on. If you think jumping on Earth is embarrassing, try doing it in zero-g. You just kind of… spasm in space. Despite my repeated objections, she reads the whole thing before giving the pad back.
She doesn’t say anything, but she’s got this look on her face like she’s thinking about saying something and is close to laughing at her own joke.
People suck. And are the best. Maybe Orion crashes tomorrow and I’ll never have to feel embarrassed again.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
Imagine that you’re Barack Obama and you’ve just won your first presidential election. It’s election night, the results are in, and you’re buzzing. How long do you keep feeling that way? All night for sure. And I bet you wake up the next morning walking with a hell of a swagger. But within 72 hours he put the milk into the cabinet and cereal into the fridge, started washing his hair with body soap instead of shampoo, or realized he was out of toilet paper only after using the bathroom, and instantly felt like a doofus.
Because for me I spent about four hours being the swash-buckling, space-pirate, hero then became the guy at a dorm-room party where he doesn’t know anyone else and smiles along to inside jokes and shorthand he doesn’t get.
As a side note, I don’t know what a swash is, nor what buckling is - assuming it isn’t a reference to buckles?
It’s kind of embarrassing to even admit that after 24 days of being totally alone I kind of miss the solitude. Big hero to socially awkward engineer in four hours. Breaking more records every day up here.
It does make me wonder about the future of humanity though. Orion is spacious compared to the Apollo capsule, yet it still has as much privacy as that dorm-room party would. It could well take centuries before we get up to Star Trek level population densities on spaceships. So does that mean the only people going out and inhabiting strange new worlds are all going to be extroverts out of necessity?
Could Mars end up being THE night club destination of the future and Earth just filled with people who wear headphones and type on their laptop whenever they go to Starbucks?
In movies they always show really spacious ships going to Mars, but no one bothers thinking about the mass involved in so much structure for so few people. The reality is that every cubic inch of space has a cost in terms of structural mass which in turn means more mass in the structural elements that support it, which means bigger, heavier engines, and more fuel for all of that stuff, and then the extra fuel to lift that extra fuel. With spaceships: mass breeds mass.
When we do go to Mars, every square inch of that spaceship is going to be necessary, and Alex Whelm getting some alone time isn’t NASA’s idea of necessary.
Anyways, I’m not some masochist who just likes to tell people about his insecurities, flaws, and embarrassing personality quirks for fun. I’m only telling you about this because it is necessary context. You’ve got to understand that when Mark gets on the radio and tells me that Jess would like to talk with me, there are four sets of eyes that pivot around to look at me.
Sarah gathers everyone together and pushes them to the bunks and just out of sight - but absolutely not out of earshot. I take the call with a live studio audience of god only knows how many.
“Hey Alex. How are you doing?”
It’s been months, but hearing her voice is like there’s a well trod path of neurons in my brain that lights up and it really could have been yesterday that we broke up. Or were dating.
I tell her about my toes. She doesn’t know what to say back to that, so I make a joke about never liking thong sandals anyways. My brain chooses that moment to present me with a very vivid imagined image of her rolling her eyes in response.
“Did you ever watch Love is Blind? It’s on Netflix,” she asked.
“I’m aware it exists… But I haven’t seen it.” Why do I talk like that? I’m honestly trying to be helpful. What I meant to communicate was, ‘I’ve seen the icon and know the idea, but haven’t watched it.’ Instead, I went for brevity and technical accuracy and the words just come out like a challenge, or like I’m too good to watch something like that. How often do you think Barack Obama says something he feels like an idiot for a quarter second after he finishes saying it? That’s what they should ask Michelle about in interviews. “What’s something Barack did that he’s still embarrassed about?”
“The producers gave me a call. They’d like to sit down with us when you get back, pitch an idea to us.”
“I don’t think that’s really for me,” I say. There’s a long silence on the other end, a few minutes of even more awkward conversation, and Jess gets off the radio.
This is probably worth saying because, given what you know about me and relationships, it might not be obvious, but I did understand she was asking me to give things another chance. At least, I think that’s what she was asking. She was right? You know what: doesn’t matter. In my head she asked me to get back together, and I said no.
Why? Because Jess was right to break up with me. I’ve lived my whole life thinking that when you get dumped it’s because you did something wrong, or should have done something differently, or you’re just not good enough for the other person. But that isn’t it.
People break up because they don’t like the other person. I’m a Hawaiian pizza, and not everyone likes Hawaiian pizza. I’m not going to pick off my chunks of pineapple and hope she doesn’t notice the little juicy divots left on me. I need someone who loves Hawaiian pizza. Yeah sure, there are easy-to-love lucky folks out there who are pepperoni pizzas, but I’m done regretting the fact that I’m not one of them.
People like Hawaiian pizza too!
“Whatcha writing?” Sarah asks.
I jumped, and fumbled the pad that I’m writing this out on. If you think jumping on Earth is embarrassing, try doing it in zero-g. You just kind of… spasm in space. Despite my repeated objections, she reads the whole thing before giving the pad back.
She doesn’t say anything, but she’s got this look on her face like she’s thinking about saying something and is close to laughing at her own joke.
People suck. And are the best. Maybe Orion crashes tomorrow and I’ll never have to feel embarrassed again.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
December 9, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 24
December 9th, 2022
You know, the very least the universe could do is let me die in peace. Why the hell does my body have to hurt so much? Why does everything have to be so loud? Just let me pass out and fade into nothing.
At the very least I could be warm, it’s freezing cold. And too damn bright for that matter. Oh man if this is that white tunnel, I’m going to be in trouble for so much stuff. Anyways, I complain too much. Just give it a few more seconds and I’ll be dead.
Why is it so bright? I open my eyes to investigate and I’m greeted with a Godzilla-stomping-Tokyo headache.
No wonder it was so loud. Four Dragon Sovereign astronauts are busy packing away space suits and yammering away with NASA on the radio like they’d never had a mission to space before.
Sarah Covington’s floating above me, like an angel descending down from heaven. Her eyes are so green. “It’s ok now. Get some rest,” she says. I don’t have to try too hard to oblige.
It takes a few hours, but eventually I get up. I got a call from the President of the United States of America. Seemed like a nice guy. Better yet, it was for doing something good. You know the weird thing about a call from the President? There was no point to the call. I mean, I think it’s a recognition thing, and it sounds cool, but the Queen tapping you on the shoulder with a sword at least has some kind of legal effect. The President giving you a pat on the shoulder is much more awkward. Was he expecting me to say something profound? Was I expecting him to say something profound? When it’s over, the only thing that’s different is you get to say, “I got a call from the President of the United States of America. Seemed like a nice guy.”
I figured since he must have made hundreds of calls like this, and I’d only ever been on the receiving end of one, I’d let him take the lead. I did make a joke about staying on Kamala’s good side. He seemed like he got it. Nice guy.
Onto important things: I did find out why that safety line I was swinging didn’t work: it did. It wrapped around the tether between two of the Dragon’s crew, and if I’d given it long enough to actually “catch” they would have been just fine. Me throwing myself out of an airlock, without any air, on the vague hope I might catch them, was totally unnecessary and actually slowed them down getting into Orion. My bad.
On the other hand, Sarah, first name basis now, said it was “the bravest thing she’s ever seen.” I spent a half an hour grinning uncontrollably after that.
One of Dragon’s crew is a doctor. Unfortunately for me he’s an “immune system specialist”, but NASA managed to talk him through a two hour physical for me. He says I’m going to lose a couple of toes, but what does he know, the toes aren’t part of the immune system. Besides, it’s two small ones. This whole space-pirate thing is feeling a bit too piratey for me… Arrr..
It also looks like I escaped brain damage (don’t say it). When I passed out, I kept breathing and what little residual oxygen was in my suit, blood, and brain seems to have held me over for the four minutes it took for Sarah to wrestle me back into Orion and reconnect my air. Lucky for me I didn’t stop breathing because all the medical supplies needed for manual ventilation were back on Earth, just like the food.
Just for laughs, and because there wasn’t much else to do, everyone took a turn on the computer game for the intercept that NASA sent up. Sarah got an 85%, her crew’s pilot got a 97%, no one else broke the 60’s. Not bad for a space-felon.
Once we’d turned in, I just couldn’t sleep. I read for a while, but I couldn’t get into Dune anymore in space than I could back on the ground. I wanted to like it, but my mind kept drifting. So I drifted out of my sleep cubby and over to the command console. Sarah was already there, looking out the same window I’d used to sight her and her crew.
“You ever notice how crazy bad people want something they think they can’t have?” she asked.
I’m basically the poster-child for that. “Best, and worst, thing about humanity. We’ve got a drive.”
“My family, we didn’t have anything when I was growing up,” she said. “But my high school did a senior trip to Europe every year, and from the first week of grade 9 it was the only thing me and my friends wanted. We talked, we planned, we saved. It was the first time in my life I’d really had a mission. It was my first time getting on a plane. I knew planes could crash, I was a little nervous during the takeoff, and landing, but I’d never seriously thought about a crash. Same with the Dragon. It wasn’t until we were working the numbers and they kept coming back bad again, and again, and again, that I really thought I might die doing this.”
I wish I knew what to say. I’d had bad hours, maybe a bad day, Sarah had been marinating in mathematically certain death for a week. “I want to fight a bear.” It feels more blurty out of my mouth with every heartbeat that follows it. “When I’m old I mean. Dying of cancer or something, basically sure to die. I don’t want to die in a hospital bed after circling the drain for weeks. I want to die quick, doing something wild. I don’t want to look back on my life and feel like I ever passed up something amazing just because it had some danger attached to it. When you’re 90, how do you want to go?”
“Switzerland. Really nice meal, a couple of pills, and drift off gently,” she paused, thinking, “but if my last thought was ‘well that was a blast,’ I think that would mean I’d lived a pretty good life.”
“Did you ever see the Star Trek episode where Worf gets paralysed?” I asked.
“I was just thinking the same thing!” she said. “Sometimes I wonder if we’re just not cut out for the modern world. Like our brain just has this old software that’s struggling to keep up with what we’re trying to do with it. Like running a whole spaceship using an excel spreadsheet. And maybe that’s why death is such a hard topic, we just can’t get the spreadsheet to figure out a good way to think about it. That probably sounds a bit crazy…”
It does not. Not at all.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
You know, the very least the universe could do is let me die in peace. Why the hell does my body have to hurt so much? Why does everything have to be so loud? Just let me pass out and fade into nothing.
At the very least I could be warm, it’s freezing cold. And too damn bright for that matter. Oh man if this is that white tunnel, I’m going to be in trouble for so much stuff. Anyways, I complain too much. Just give it a few more seconds and I’ll be dead.
Why is it so bright? I open my eyes to investigate and I’m greeted with a Godzilla-stomping-Tokyo headache.
No wonder it was so loud. Four Dragon Sovereign astronauts are busy packing away space suits and yammering away with NASA on the radio like they’d never had a mission to space before.
Sarah Covington’s floating above me, like an angel descending down from heaven. Her eyes are so green. “It’s ok now. Get some rest,” she says. I don’t have to try too hard to oblige.
It takes a few hours, but eventually I get up. I got a call from the President of the United States of America. Seemed like a nice guy. Better yet, it was for doing something good. You know the weird thing about a call from the President? There was no point to the call. I mean, I think it’s a recognition thing, and it sounds cool, but the Queen tapping you on the shoulder with a sword at least has some kind of legal effect. The President giving you a pat on the shoulder is much more awkward. Was he expecting me to say something profound? Was I expecting him to say something profound? When it’s over, the only thing that’s different is you get to say, “I got a call from the President of the United States of America. Seemed like a nice guy.”
I figured since he must have made hundreds of calls like this, and I’d only ever been on the receiving end of one, I’d let him take the lead. I did make a joke about staying on Kamala’s good side. He seemed like he got it. Nice guy.
Onto important things: I did find out why that safety line I was swinging didn’t work: it did. It wrapped around the tether between two of the Dragon’s crew, and if I’d given it long enough to actually “catch” they would have been just fine. Me throwing myself out of an airlock, without any air, on the vague hope I might catch them, was totally unnecessary and actually slowed them down getting into Orion. My bad.
On the other hand, Sarah, first name basis now, said it was “the bravest thing she’s ever seen.” I spent a half an hour grinning uncontrollably after that.
One of Dragon’s crew is a doctor. Unfortunately for me he’s an “immune system specialist”, but NASA managed to talk him through a two hour physical for me. He says I’m going to lose a couple of toes, but what does he know, the toes aren’t part of the immune system. Besides, it’s two small ones. This whole space-pirate thing is feeling a bit too piratey for me… Arrr..
It also looks like I escaped brain damage (don’t say it). When I passed out, I kept breathing and what little residual oxygen was in my suit, blood, and brain seems to have held me over for the four minutes it took for Sarah to wrestle me back into Orion and reconnect my air. Lucky for me I didn’t stop breathing because all the medical supplies needed for manual ventilation were back on Earth, just like the food.
Just for laughs, and because there wasn’t much else to do, everyone took a turn on the computer game for the intercept that NASA sent up. Sarah got an 85%, her crew’s pilot got a 97%, no one else broke the 60’s. Not bad for a space-felon.
Once we’d turned in, I just couldn’t sleep. I read for a while, but I couldn’t get into Dune anymore in space than I could back on the ground. I wanted to like it, but my mind kept drifting. So I drifted out of my sleep cubby and over to the command console. Sarah was already there, looking out the same window I’d used to sight her and her crew.
“You ever notice how crazy bad people want something they think they can’t have?” she asked.
I’m basically the poster-child for that. “Best, and worst, thing about humanity. We’ve got a drive.”
“My family, we didn’t have anything when I was growing up,” she said. “But my high school did a senior trip to Europe every year, and from the first week of grade 9 it was the only thing me and my friends wanted. We talked, we planned, we saved. It was the first time in my life I’d really had a mission. It was my first time getting on a plane. I knew planes could crash, I was a little nervous during the takeoff, and landing, but I’d never seriously thought about a crash. Same with the Dragon. It wasn’t until we were working the numbers and they kept coming back bad again, and again, and again, that I really thought I might die doing this.”
I wish I knew what to say. I’d had bad hours, maybe a bad day, Sarah had been marinating in mathematically certain death for a week. “I want to fight a bear.” It feels more blurty out of my mouth with every heartbeat that follows it. “When I’m old I mean. Dying of cancer or something, basically sure to die. I don’t want to die in a hospital bed after circling the drain for weeks. I want to die quick, doing something wild. I don’t want to look back on my life and feel like I ever passed up something amazing just because it had some danger attached to it. When you’re 90, how do you want to go?”
“Switzerland. Really nice meal, a couple of pills, and drift off gently,” she paused, thinking, “but if my last thought was ‘well that was a blast,’ I think that would mean I’d lived a pretty good life.”
“Did you ever see the Star Trek episode where Worf gets paralysed?” I asked.
“I was just thinking the same thing!” she said. “Sometimes I wonder if we’re just not cut out for the modern world. Like our brain just has this old software that’s struggling to keep up with what we’re trying to do with it. Like running a whole spaceship using an excel spreadsheet. And maybe that’s why death is such a hard topic, we just can’t get the spreadsheet to figure out a good way to think about it. That probably sounds a bit crazy…”
It does not. Not at all.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
December 8, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 23
December 8th, 2022
06:00 Alex Whelm wakes up, eats one of his last three Skor bars, and uses the head. Today’s the day.
I’m making progress on the intercept. And Mark’s nothing but compliments and back pats, but 98%, 99%, 98%, 98%, 99%, 100%, 97%, 99%, 98%, 99% is still fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, pass, fail, fail, fail, fail. NASA wanted to do this if I got two out of my last ten. I got one out of my last ten.
Dragon Sovereign's crew are god even knows how many thousands of miles away right now. They’re going to be tethered together, Captain Covington probably at the lead of the line, So imagine for a second what they need to do here. They’re on the exterior of the Dragon Sovereign. The Earth is below them, the stars above, but that is absolutely it. There’s not so much as a glimmering reflection of Orion to guide them. This whole thing is going to be done on GPS. The four of them, literally right now, are probably working out if they’re doing it “1, 2, 3, GO”, or “1, 2, GO!” to jump off the Dragon capsule with as much force as their legs can muster. Then it’s a computer controlled, GPS guided, burn towards a black patch of space that I need to get to exactly as they reach it.
Time to get dressed. I’ve got two Skor bars left. I eat them both. I’m not fucking this thing up because I’m hungry. I also use the head again. After this it’s peeing in my pants time as I don’t want to be distracted by a full bladder.
Good news, bad news. I’ve learned some lessons about duct taping my legs up. I tape each of my toes individually, then the webbing between them from around my ankle, then all the way up the legs just like before. Bad news - the hair on my legs managed to grow back since I did this last.
NASA walks me through the computer inputs needed in order to tell Orion that I’m going to depressurize her intentionally. I have to confirm that I’m really sure I want to do this, three times, and enter a password “Admin_Overide” (seriously NASA?) to do it.
Alright. Off to the races. A few NASA directed keystrokes and a klaxon alarm sounds, then gets softer, and softer, and softer, as the air drains from Orion. My toes still fucking hurt. Mostly the tips. But it’s way less bad than last time. My legs don’t exactly feel great either. But that might just be the duct tape.
I disconnect my air feed, float over to the airlock, through the already open inner door, and open the outer airlock door. Earth’s on the other side of Orion so it’s nothing but stars. Three breaths and the air inside my helmet is muggy and unsatisfying. Breathing faster isn’t going to help, and I hold my breath for fear of condensation. But by this point I’m back at the pilot’s seat and reconnect to the air supply. Damn, fresh air is sweet. Then I strap in. Learned that lesson well. Now wait.
I don’t have to wait long. Orion shakes and a rumble propagates through my back from the blast of her engine. And it stops. Ok. Show-time.
NASA’s ground based radar is pretty good, so they’ve got a heading on my targets and, very gently, using the ships flywheels, I bring Orion about to the right heading. Just like the simulator, except this time I actually rotate as Orion does, and I’m looking up at the ships window, not down at the LCD screen. Mark was right though, it actually doesn’t make much difference.
Gotcha. four little dots moving in a line, all shining their flashlights at me to make them easier to see. Just like the simulations though, the intercept needs to be corrected in basically every which way. I’m going too fast, coming in too “high”, and I think I’m too far to the left, but that’s harder to tell right now.
The “fast” is the biggest issue, no way to fix that without spending fuel, and the sooner I do it the less fuel it needs. -0.3 m/s. Better. -0.1 m/s. Better. -0.05 m/s Better… maybe a bit too much though. Let’s wait and see.
I work the “left” and “high” problems, and again that’s fuel, but it has to be spent. Ok, the basic intercept looks ok-ish. I need to let this play out a while longer though. I’ve used up 73% of available fuel. The original vectors were not as well aligned as I would have liked.
They’re about a hundred meters away now. The window helps. 3D and depth perception - if I fully turn my head to the window so I can put both eyes onto them. Orion’s rolling and tumbling a little, and I use flywheels to correct that. I’m getting close to saturated on twisty and loopy, and that’s going to limit my options later.
Ok, this bucking bronco is settled for the moment, and I’m into last-chance for course correction territory. I was right, I slowed down just a smidge too much before. +0.06 m/s, and I think I’m bringing them in just a bit too far to the right, +0.1 m/s.
Master alarm, 96% of fuel is gone.
Welcome to the 90% stage. 50 meters to go.
So, at this point if I do nothing, what happens is that they end up somewhere near the window that I’m looking at them through. I’m feeling like they’ll pass in front of the nose cone by a couple of feet. That’s no good. What I need to do is rotate Orion around so that they come right up to the airlock and the abundance of handholds around it. I’ve got to use some fuel for that unfortunately. Flywheels saturated. 98% of available fuel gone now. And my options for getting this done are narrow, and narrowing by the second.
As I rotate Orion I lose sight of my targets. Remember when I said this was the hardest part? Yeah. I’m watching the artificial horizon to make my numbers. Ok. Spinny is aligned.
I look out the airlock. Fuck. They’re coming in too low. I trigger a -0.1 m/s burn. Bingo fuel. Fuck. They’re going to miss. By like 2 fucking meters. It’s, nothing. It’s twenty fucking seconds if I’d been faster to see the distance. It’s four lives.
I unstrap and disconnect my air feed. The galley is close and its got those 1 kg ballast blocks. I grab two (one in each hand) and kick off for the airlock. Orion’s got four safety cables that unspool from the panel right outside the outer airlock. I start unspooling one.
Dragon’s crew is about 30-40 yards out. Crawling along. I tie off the end of the safety harness to the test weight and throw. Wow. That’s a spectacular miss. My body’s calibrated throw stuff in Earth gravity where it is going to fall down from the second it leaves the hand. I threw way, way, way too high, my body assuming it would just start to drop like everything else I’ve ever thrown since I was throwing my pacifier away.
Ok, 25-30 yards. I’ve got one more test block. By the way, I’ve been breathing. The air inside my helmet is thick and hot and starting to fog the inner surface of the glass dome. I hold my breath, but it isn’t like I just took a deep lungful of clean air, I’m breathing trashy re-breathed, air and I’m already dying to hook myself back up to the proper flow.
I’m going to push this one, two handed. Granny basket time. I shoot!
So, back in high school I made some life choices involving lots of science and math courses, and no gym courses. Why? Because in addition to being a jackass, Mr. Popolopolus was right, that he’d seen children who could whip my butt. I missed again.
The air situation is getting bad. I couldn’t tell my lungs to hold my breath any longer and I’m just gasping. I’ve never felt like this: never. My body just knows it’s dying unless it gets air and every instinctive warning system I have is screaming that at me. My heart’s thundering in my ears, my head wants to split open, and my lungs are on fire. I pull out the third cable. Let’s try something different this time - because I’m out of ballast. I start swinging the tether, like a lasso, extending it out as I do. Dragon’s crew is going to pass close, I just have to get the cable into range and if it completes a rotation in less time than it takes them to transition through its rotational plane, I’m guaranteed a hit. The inside of my helmet’s visor is fogged. I’m down to outlines of the world. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to find my air hose like this. My hand’s shaking, like, shaking wrong, like the muscles are too tired to do what I’m asking them, but… I haven’t been doing much with them. Fuck I’m tired… I just need to get some air, to rest…
The outlines of dragon’s crew are starting to pass the line I’m spinning, it didn’t work. I don’t know why. It just didn’t. They just keep drifting past.
Three options. A) I go to sleep right here and now, and we all die. B) I go back to my chair and try to reconnect my air feed. 50/50 I get there. But Sarah and her crew die.
I go with option C. I fumble the last tether and clip it onto my flight suit, and push off at the four slightly brighter splotches in my visor. Maybe they can grab onto me and climb in.
Wow, did I just kill myself? I think I just killed myself. Actually, this is probably better than fighting a bear. It’s hard to think, my thoughts are all fuzzy and weird. I close my eyes. At least I won’t be guilty. This is better. It’s ok, I can just die. It’s ok.
*******
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
06:00 Alex Whelm wakes up, eats one of his last three Skor bars, and uses the head. Today’s the day.
I’m making progress on the intercept. And Mark’s nothing but compliments and back pats, but 98%, 99%, 98%, 98%, 99%, 100%, 97%, 99%, 98%, 99% is still fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, pass, fail, fail, fail, fail. NASA wanted to do this if I got two out of my last ten. I got one out of my last ten.
Dragon Sovereign's crew are god even knows how many thousands of miles away right now. They’re going to be tethered together, Captain Covington probably at the lead of the line, So imagine for a second what they need to do here. They’re on the exterior of the Dragon Sovereign. The Earth is below them, the stars above, but that is absolutely it. There’s not so much as a glimmering reflection of Orion to guide them. This whole thing is going to be done on GPS. The four of them, literally right now, are probably working out if they’re doing it “1, 2, 3, GO”, or “1, 2, GO!” to jump off the Dragon capsule with as much force as their legs can muster. Then it’s a computer controlled, GPS guided, burn towards a black patch of space that I need to get to exactly as they reach it.
Time to get dressed. I’ve got two Skor bars left. I eat them both. I’m not fucking this thing up because I’m hungry. I also use the head again. After this it’s peeing in my pants time as I don’t want to be distracted by a full bladder.
Good news, bad news. I’ve learned some lessons about duct taping my legs up. I tape each of my toes individually, then the webbing between them from around my ankle, then all the way up the legs just like before. Bad news - the hair on my legs managed to grow back since I did this last.
NASA walks me through the computer inputs needed in order to tell Orion that I’m going to depressurize her intentionally. I have to confirm that I’m really sure I want to do this, three times, and enter a password “Admin_Overide” (seriously NASA?) to do it.
Alright. Off to the races. A few NASA directed keystrokes and a klaxon alarm sounds, then gets softer, and softer, and softer, as the air drains from Orion. My toes still fucking hurt. Mostly the tips. But it’s way less bad than last time. My legs don’t exactly feel great either. But that might just be the duct tape.
I disconnect my air feed, float over to the airlock, through the already open inner door, and open the outer airlock door. Earth’s on the other side of Orion so it’s nothing but stars. Three breaths and the air inside my helmet is muggy and unsatisfying. Breathing faster isn’t going to help, and I hold my breath for fear of condensation. But by this point I’m back at the pilot’s seat and reconnect to the air supply. Damn, fresh air is sweet. Then I strap in. Learned that lesson well. Now wait.
I don’t have to wait long. Orion shakes and a rumble propagates through my back from the blast of her engine. And it stops. Ok. Show-time.
NASA’s ground based radar is pretty good, so they’ve got a heading on my targets and, very gently, using the ships flywheels, I bring Orion about to the right heading. Just like the simulator, except this time I actually rotate as Orion does, and I’m looking up at the ships window, not down at the LCD screen. Mark was right though, it actually doesn’t make much difference.
Gotcha. four little dots moving in a line, all shining their flashlights at me to make them easier to see. Just like the simulations though, the intercept needs to be corrected in basically every which way. I’m going too fast, coming in too “high”, and I think I’m too far to the left, but that’s harder to tell right now.
The “fast” is the biggest issue, no way to fix that without spending fuel, and the sooner I do it the less fuel it needs. -0.3 m/s. Better. -0.1 m/s. Better. -0.05 m/s Better… maybe a bit too much though. Let’s wait and see.
I work the “left” and “high” problems, and again that’s fuel, but it has to be spent. Ok, the basic intercept looks ok-ish. I need to let this play out a while longer though. I’ve used up 73% of available fuel. The original vectors were not as well aligned as I would have liked.
They’re about a hundred meters away now. The window helps. 3D and depth perception - if I fully turn my head to the window so I can put both eyes onto them. Orion’s rolling and tumbling a little, and I use flywheels to correct that. I’m getting close to saturated on twisty and loopy, and that’s going to limit my options later.
Ok, this bucking bronco is settled for the moment, and I’m into last-chance for course correction territory. I was right, I slowed down just a smidge too much before. +0.06 m/s, and I think I’m bringing them in just a bit too far to the right, +0.1 m/s.
Master alarm, 96% of fuel is gone.
Welcome to the 90% stage. 50 meters to go.
So, at this point if I do nothing, what happens is that they end up somewhere near the window that I’m looking at them through. I’m feeling like they’ll pass in front of the nose cone by a couple of feet. That’s no good. What I need to do is rotate Orion around so that they come right up to the airlock and the abundance of handholds around it. I’ve got to use some fuel for that unfortunately. Flywheels saturated. 98% of available fuel gone now. And my options for getting this done are narrow, and narrowing by the second.
As I rotate Orion I lose sight of my targets. Remember when I said this was the hardest part? Yeah. I’m watching the artificial horizon to make my numbers. Ok. Spinny is aligned.
I look out the airlock. Fuck. They’re coming in too low. I trigger a -0.1 m/s burn. Bingo fuel. Fuck. They’re going to miss. By like 2 fucking meters. It’s, nothing. It’s twenty fucking seconds if I’d been faster to see the distance. It’s four lives.
I unstrap and disconnect my air feed. The galley is close and its got those 1 kg ballast blocks. I grab two (one in each hand) and kick off for the airlock. Orion’s got four safety cables that unspool from the panel right outside the outer airlock. I start unspooling one.
Dragon’s crew is about 30-40 yards out. Crawling along. I tie off the end of the safety harness to the test weight and throw. Wow. That’s a spectacular miss. My body’s calibrated throw stuff in Earth gravity where it is going to fall down from the second it leaves the hand. I threw way, way, way too high, my body assuming it would just start to drop like everything else I’ve ever thrown since I was throwing my pacifier away.
Ok, 25-30 yards. I’ve got one more test block. By the way, I’ve been breathing. The air inside my helmet is thick and hot and starting to fog the inner surface of the glass dome. I hold my breath, but it isn’t like I just took a deep lungful of clean air, I’m breathing trashy re-breathed, air and I’m already dying to hook myself back up to the proper flow.
I’m going to push this one, two handed. Granny basket time. I shoot!
So, back in high school I made some life choices involving lots of science and math courses, and no gym courses. Why? Because in addition to being a jackass, Mr. Popolopolus was right, that he’d seen children who could whip my butt. I missed again.
The air situation is getting bad. I couldn’t tell my lungs to hold my breath any longer and I’m just gasping. I’ve never felt like this: never. My body just knows it’s dying unless it gets air and every instinctive warning system I have is screaming that at me. My heart’s thundering in my ears, my head wants to split open, and my lungs are on fire. I pull out the third cable. Let’s try something different this time - because I’m out of ballast. I start swinging the tether, like a lasso, extending it out as I do. Dragon’s crew is going to pass close, I just have to get the cable into range and if it completes a rotation in less time than it takes them to transition through its rotational plane, I’m guaranteed a hit. The inside of my helmet’s visor is fogged. I’m down to outlines of the world. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to find my air hose like this. My hand’s shaking, like, shaking wrong, like the muscles are too tired to do what I’m asking them, but… I haven’t been doing much with them. Fuck I’m tired… I just need to get some air, to rest…
The outlines of dragon’s crew are starting to pass the line I’m spinning, it didn’t work. I don’t know why. It just didn’t. They just keep drifting past.
Three options. A) I go to sleep right here and now, and we all die. B) I go back to my chair and try to reconnect my air feed. 50/50 I get there. But Sarah and her crew die.
I go with option C. I fumble the last tether and clip it onto my flight suit, and push off at the four slightly brighter splotches in my visor. Maybe they can grab onto me and climb in.
Wow, did I just kill myself? I think I just killed myself. Actually, this is probably better than fighting a bear. It’s hard to think, my thoughts are all fuzzy and weird. I close my eyes. At least I won’t be guilty. This is better. It’s ok, I can just die. It’s ok.
*******
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
December 7, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 22
December 7th, 2022
You ever think about quantum physics? I love thinking about quantum physics. First of all, I don’t care what you say: it’s magic. Its rules are so non-intuitive and untethered from comparison or analogy that you have to simply brute force learn it. Secondly, I’m an aerospace engineer and I eat differential equations for breakfast, but quantum physics has some screwed up mathematical symbols. Looks like runes more than math.
Third, and this is the part that’s relevant to me right now, it’s all about possibilities and probabilities. And kind of like geometry contains hidden truths, there’s these truths to quantum physics as well. Today I’m two things at once. I’m the Alex Whelm who saved four members of Dragon Sovereign, and I’m the Alex Whelm who screwed up and let them die. I’m both, I’m neither, I’m a probability function that collapses into one of two states tomorrow once we observe what happens.
Even if my chances of doing this are one in a hundred, I could be the one-in-a-hundred guy that pulled it off. I don’t have to be the loser who can’t handle the guilt of failing. But right now, I’m both, and neither. Once we observe what happens that other Alex, the Alex who could have been, is going to be a distant memory, a hypothetical like when you imagine how your life might have been different had you won the lottery.
By the way, for those interested, 97%, 99%, 97%, 98%, 94%, 96%, 98%, 99%, 96%, 99%, 96%, 96%, 96%, 96%, 99%. Instead of pausing simulations we’re doing a long-winded thrust by thrust debrief after each one now.
We’ve also started to get real serious about tomorrow’s schedule.
Here’s how it breaks down:
06:00 - Alex Whelm wakes up eats breakfast and uses the head - lesson learned.
06:10 - Alex Whelm gets back to frantically practicing.
09:00 - The Dragon crew start putting on their space suits.
10:32 - The Dragon crew switch to internal suit air and exit their craft starting their count-down to suffocation.
10:47:14 - Dragon crew kick off, using up essentially every drop of their suits’ thruster fuel.
13:34 - Alex Whelm gets his flight suit on and wraps up his legs - and toes individually this time - in duct tape. When he’s ready, he slowly depressurize Orion, and pops the outer and inner airlocks open.
14:12:52 - Artemis I does a computer-controlled entry burn into Earth’s orbit
14:15 - Rescue operations begin.
14:36 - Rescue operations end.
15:00 - cocktail reception.
That step at 13:34 has NASA in knots. When the computer froze and NASA told me to do an EVA, it was pretty simple for them: the only way to fix the issue was an EVA, and they only had so many characters in the message they could send me. Since the details were for me to figure out, no one at NASA had to sign off on them. Now someone down there has to put their personal stamp of approval on my duct tape leg wrapping work.
Even better, the air feed that plugs into the flight suit’s thigh is only long enough to reach the inner airlock door. To open the outer door, I’ll have to disconnect it, depressurize, open the door, and reconnect my air feed.
Why not just use the auxiliary air tank when doing that? Because I’d still have to disconnect and reconnect in vacuum. I can’t use that auxiliary tank for the whole intercept. Plus, it would be nice to have that actually connected to the emergency systems so the ship can be repressurized quickly.
Anyways, I’m going to have to make do with the residual air in my suit for about thirty seconds, and NASA loathes the idea. The entire mission, and the lives of five people, turns on connecting a valve in vacuum and I’ve only got a few seconds to do it.
Also, NASA screwed up. Makes sense I guess, they were busy with a bunch of things. So, when Captain Sarah Covington sent down her goodbye messages, someone groundside forwarded the one addressed to me, probably thinking it was just coordinating for tomorrow.
“Alex, if you’re seeing this it means the intercept didn’t work.” She was floating in the Dragon Sovereign capsule. Her hair was pulled back into a mid-length braid, just loose enough that it had the right kind of volume. I’ve got short hair but even I’ve got space hair at this point - every strand wants to just point straight away from my head. I’ll tell you something though, bald is going to be THE fashion choice in space.
She wasn’t wearing any makeup, but that was a good look on her, made her look a little nerdier, a little more real than the perfection of a headshot.
I stopped the video and sent a message to NASA. If they sent the other videos out by accident that could be a problem for Sarah. Now look, I know I’m not supposed to watch this… But am I seriously not going to watch this?
Two Alex’s in quantum state, one who does the right thing and respects Sarah’s privacy, and the other… Sorry good Alex, you get to be erased from existence with the click of the play button.
“I saw your interview,” she went on. “You get it, and how you feel about space, it’s the same as how I feel about it. How we all feel about it. This is something that’s worth dying to do and we knew that when we first signed up, when we strapped in. This is how we wanted to spend our lives, and the only difference you’ve made is that over the last week is that we’ve had hope.”
Her eyes looked swollen, I’m probably the last one of these that she recorded.
“This intercept, I’ve been over it a hundred times with my pilot and ground crew, this would really push a trained pilot with thousands of hours of experience. It would have been nice if we’d pulled it off, but this was always a long shot and everyone knew it was asking way too much of you. No one blames you, Alex. No one. If there’s a heaven, then I want to see you there in another fifty or sixty years, and I’ll buy you a drink and give you that hug I owe you.”
“Don’t blame yourself. I hope you live a good life Alex. Seriously. That’s the only thing I want for you, ok?”
That’s the message.
Great, she’s magnanimous too. If I think of my virtues and vices and weigh them against one another then Captain Sarah Covington would need to…. I don’t know… murder puppies in her spare time, if she was going to have the same bad/good ratio as me. Probably the entire crew of the Dragon Sovereign is the same. Accomplished, wonderful, dedicated, just amazing people who devoted their lives to doing an amazing thing. And who the hell am I? The asshole who stowed away.
Mark was wrong. If I don’t pull this off, I’m going to be having nightmares about it for the rest of my life no matter what I keep my eyes on.
*******
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
You ever think about quantum physics? I love thinking about quantum physics. First of all, I don’t care what you say: it’s magic. Its rules are so non-intuitive and untethered from comparison or analogy that you have to simply brute force learn it. Secondly, I’m an aerospace engineer and I eat differential equations for breakfast, but quantum physics has some screwed up mathematical symbols. Looks like runes more than math.
Third, and this is the part that’s relevant to me right now, it’s all about possibilities and probabilities. And kind of like geometry contains hidden truths, there’s these truths to quantum physics as well. Today I’m two things at once. I’m the Alex Whelm who saved four members of Dragon Sovereign, and I’m the Alex Whelm who screwed up and let them die. I’m both, I’m neither, I’m a probability function that collapses into one of two states tomorrow once we observe what happens.
Even if my chances of doing this are one in a hundred, I could be the one-in-a-hundred guy that pulled it off. I don’t have to be the loser who can’t handle the guilt of failing. But right now, I’m both, and neither. Once we observe what happens that other Alex, the Alex who could have been, is going to be a distant memory, a hypothetical like when you imagine how your life might have been different had you won the lottery.
By the way, for those interested, 97%, 99%, 97%, 98%, 94%, 96%, 98%, 99%, 96%, 99%, 96%, 96%, 96%, 96%, 99%. Instead of pausing simulations we’re doing a long-winded thrust by thrust debrief after each one now.
We’ve also started to get real serious about tomorrow’s schedule.
Here’s how it breaks down:
06:00 - Alex Whelm wakes up eats breakfast and uses the head - lesson learned.
06:10 - Alex Whelm gets back to frantically practicing.
09:00 - The Dragon crew start putting on their space suits.
10:32 - The Dragon crew switch to internal suit air and exit their craft starting their count-down to suffocation.
10:47:14 - Dragon crew kick off, using up essentially every drop of their suits’ thruster fuel.
13:34 - Alex Whelm gets his flight suit on and wraps up his legs - and toes individually this time - in duct tape. When he’s ready, he slowly depressurize Orion, and pops the outer and inner airlocks open.
14:12:52 - Artemis I does a computer-controlled entry burn into Earth’s orbit
14:15 - Rescue operations begin.
14:36 - Rescue operations end.
15:00 - cocktail reception.
That step at 13:34 has NASA in knots. When the computer froze and NASA told me to do an EVA, it was pretty simple for them: the only way to fix the issue was an EVA, and they only had so many characters in the message they could send me. Since the details were for me to figure out, no one at NASA had to sign off on them. Now someone down there has to put their personal stamp of approval on my duct tape leg wrapping work.
Even better, the air feed that plugs into the flight suit’s thigh is only long enough to reach the inner airlock door. To open the outer door, I’ll have to disconnect it, depressurize, open the door, and reconnect my air feed.
Why not just use the auxiliary air tank when doing that? Because I’d still have to disconnect and reconnect in vacuum. I can’t use that auxiliary tank for the whole intercept. Plus, it would be nice to have that actually connected to the emergency systems so the ship can be repressurized quickly.
Anyways, I’m going to have to make do with the residual air in my suit for about thirty seconds, and NASA loathes the idea. The entire mission, and the lives of five people, turns on connecting a valve in vacuum and I’ve only got a few seconds to do it.
Also, NASA screwed up. Makes sense I guess, they were busy with a bunch of things. So, when Captain Sarah Covington sent down her goodbye messages, someone groundside forwarded the one addressed to me, probably thinking it was just coordinating for tomorrow.
“Alex, if you’re seeing this it means the intercept didn’t work.” She was floating in the Dragon Sovereign capsule. Her hair was pulled back into a mid-length braid, just loose enough that it had the right kind of volume. I’ve got short hair but even I’ve got space hair at this point - every strand wants to just point straight away from my head. I’ll tell you something though, bald is going to be THE fashion choice in space.
She wasn’t wearing any makeup, but that was a good look on her, made her look a little nerdier, a little more real than the perfection of a headshot.
I stopped the video and sent a message to NASA. If they sent the other videos out by accident that could be a problem for Sarah. Now look, I know I’m not supposed to watch this… But am I seriously not going to watch this?
Two Alex’s in quantum state, one who does the right thing and respects Sarah’s privacy, and the other… Sorry good Alex, you get to be erased from existence with the click of the play button.
“I saw your interview,” she went on. “You get it, and how you feel about space, it’s the same as how I feel about it. How we all feel about it. This is something that’s worth dying to do and we knew that when we first signed up, when we strapped in. This is how we wanted to spend our lives, and the only difference you’ve made is that over the last week is that we’ve had hope.”
Her eyes looked swollen, I’m probably the last one of these that she recorded.
“This intercept, I’ve been over it a hundred times with my pilot and ground crew, this would really push a trained pilot with thousands of hours of experience. It would have been nice if we’d pulled it off, but this was always a long shot and everyone knew it was asking way too much of you. No one blames you, Alex. No one. If there’s a heaven, then I want to see you there in another fifty or sixty years, and I’ll buy you a drink and give you that hug I owe you.”
“Don’t blame yourself. I hope you live a good life Alex. Seriously. That’s the only thing I want for you, ok?”
That’s the message.
Great, she’s magnanimous too. If I think of my virtues and vices and weigh them against one another then Captain Sarah Covington would need to…. I don’t know… murder puppies in her spare time, if she was going to have the same bad/good ratio as me. Probably the entire crew of the Dragon Sovereign is the same. Accomplished, wonderful, dedicated, just amazing people who devoted their lives to doing an amazing thing. And who the hell am I? The asshole who stowed away.
Mark was wrong. If I don’t pull this off, I’m going to be having nightmares about it for the rest of my life no matter what I keep my eyes on.
*******
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
December 6, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 21
December 6th, 2022
While trying to connect one of the oxygen tanks they’d been bringing up to the ISS, one of the tanks they’d need to use themselves if they were going to make it a month, a valve had failed. They stopped the leak pretty quickly and hadn’t lost so much air that they’d suffocate. But the exhaust had changed their orbit.
So, orbital dynamics is a super cool subject. Imagine a satellite orbiting the Earth in a perfect, circular, orbit. Question, how do you increase the satellite's altitude? Let me just give you the correct answer and then let’s talk about the wrong answer. The right answer is that you thrust in your direction of travel, which adds energy to the orbit, you haven’t changed your position, but like someone giving you a push on a swing, when you go up to the other side of Earth, you go higher. So now, on the opposite side of the planet, and at the peak of this “swing” you thrust again, again along the direction of travel. This balances out the orbit and now you’re on a new, higher, circular orbit.
What if you point the thruster “down” at the ground and fire? Well, what you’ve really done there is changed your position, without changing your orbital velocity. The orbital path is going to be different, imagine that like squeezing a loop of metal, the edges you squeeze go in, and the edges you didn’t squeeze go “up”.
When the oxygen tank vented it pushed Dragon Sovereign “up” and away from Earth.
Doesn’t sound like a problem, does it? The problem comes later, when Dragon Sovereign passes through the narrower part of its orbit and finds itself closer to Earth’s atmosphere than it would have been. That means more drag. And that means an already marginal orbit is now completely unsustainable. Dragon Sovereign’s crew doesn’t have a month. They don’t even have a week.
I’m on a new sleep schedule. I was up until about 0500 last night running the simulator again and again, then passed out, and I’ve been back at it since I woke up at “noon”.
“Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey,” Mark chimed over the radio, he’d gotten a good nights sleep it sounded like.
“We’re sending you a software update on the simulator Alex; we’re going to be doing this a bit differently for the rest of the day.”
And you know what? Under the new simulator setup, I passed! Which isn’t saying much. See how we’re doing it now is that they’ve turned the flight simulator into a turn based RPG. The simulator pauses, I spend five minutes talking through what we’re going to do with NASA, the simulator unpauses, I do the thing we talked about, and the simulator pauses again, and we talk through what I actually just did and what I’m going to do next.
It took three hours to get through a twenty minute intercept, but we got it done with fuel to spare. Next time through we got it done in two hours. Then an hour and a half. Then an hour and ten minutes. Then an hour. They took the training wheels off and I crashed and burned at 96% completion.
The problem is, the last 5% is the hardest part. And not by a little. What Dragon’s crew needs is some kind of magnetic grapple. The human arm is basically the shittiest intercept device for spaceships you can imagine. If your closing speeds are much over a half-meter per second, or your distance from a handhold is much over a half-meter, there’s literally no way to hold on. For context orbital speed is 7,660 m/s, and the circumference of the ISS’s orbit is 42,650,000 meters. So we need to be 99.99% the same speed, and 99.999999% the same position, or the intercept is pooched.
Imagine someone being such a jerk that on a four million dollar purchase they rejected it because you were short a penny. That’s space. Biggest jerk in the world.
I’m also deliberately antagonizing NASA. They deserve it though, and I need something to churn in the back of my mind instead of anxiety. So, situation: I have now been a stow-away aboard Artemis I for 21 days. In that time I have not had a shower, nor have I shaved, brushed my teeth, used deodorant, or applied cologne.
If I pull this off, then in two days I’ll be meeting one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. Excuse me, I should rephrase that. In two days stow-away, turned space-pirate, turned heroic space-hero, Alex Whelm will heroically swoop in to save the life of a spectacularly beautiful, accomplished, woman (and her crew). Did I mention: hero?
I do this and even if we hate each other, they’re going to be making romance novels with the two of us on the covers for decades. If I could get just a tad closer to looking like the cover art on one of those books, or at least smelling like it, I’d very much appreciate it.
So, how can I clean up a bit? Well there are no razors aboard Artemis I as there wasn’t supposed to be a crew. There is however a knife in the survival pack of my flight suit. I’ve proposed that I sharpen that bad boy up to a razor’s edge: by holding it bare-handed and scraping the blade repeatedly against a piece of ceramic piping I found in the galley, sending microscopic bits of stone and steel into the air as I do. And then straight razor shave my face and throat without the benefit of a mirror, shaving cream, or ever having straight-razor shaved before.
NASA is, obviously, dead set against every aspect of my plan from the motivations to the execution.
“You’re the ones who had Captain Covington flirt with me,” I keep pointing out to them. It’s not a real argument, like I said, I’m just trying to annoy them a bit. I also re-raised the question of how it wasn’t workplace sexual harassment. Mark was quick to point out that I don’t actually work for NASA anymore.
To which I was quick to reply, “well then you’re not the boss of me and I can shave!”
That observation led to its own fun, and I’m happy to report that I am, again, officially a NASA employee. I even got a raise. A small one. Astronauts get paid shit, even the space-hero ones.
Anyways, upon being rehired, NASA issued me my first order as an employee: no shaving. They thought they won this round. What they forgot is that my one big failing was being unemployed. Now I’m the employed space-pirate turned heroic space-hero gallantly swooping in to save Captain Covington. So I’ll have a beard, Leonidas had a beard.
“In your mind, you look like Gerard Butler?” Mark asked.
Space-spoilsport.
*******
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
While trying to connect one of the oxygen tanks they’d been bringing up to the ISS, one of the tanks they’d need to use themselves if they were going to make it a month, a valve had failed. They stopped the leak pretty quickly and hadn’t lost so much air that they’d suffocate. But the exhaust had changed their orbit.
So, orbital dynamics is a super cool subject. Imagine a satellite orbiting the Earth in a perfect, circular, orbit. Question, how do you increase the satellite's altitude? Let me just give you the correct answer and then let’s talk about the wrong answer. The right answer is that you thrust in your direction of travel, which adds energy to the orbit, you haven’t changed your position, but like someone giving you a push on a swing, when you go up to the other side of Earth, you go higher. So now, on the opposite side of the planet, and at the peak of this “swing” you thrust again, again along the direction of travel. This balances out the orbit and now you’re on a new, higher, circular orbit.
What if you point the thruster “down” at the ground and fire? Well, what you’ve really done there is changed your position, without changing your orbital velocity. The orbital path is going to be different, imagine that like squeezing a loop of metal, the edges you squeeze go in, and the edges you didn’t squeeze go “up”.
When the oxygen tank vented it pushed Dragon Sovereign “up” and away from Earth.
Doesn’t sound like a problem, does it? The problem comes later, when Dragon Sovereign passes through the narrower part of its orbit and finds itself closer to Earth’s atmosphere than it would have been. That means more drag. And that means an already marginal orbit is now completely unsustainable. Dragon Sovereign’s crew doesn’t have a month. They don’t even have a week.
I’m on a new sleep schedule. I was up until about 0500 last night running the simulator again and again, then passed out, and I’ve been back at it since I woke up at “noon”.
“Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey,” Mark chimed over the radio, he’d gotten a good nights sleep it sounded like.
“We’re sending you a software update on the simulator Alex; we’re going to be doing this a bit differently for the rest of the day.”
And you know what? Under the new simulator setup, I passed! Which isn’t saying much. See how we’re doing it now is that they’ve turned the flight simulator into a turn based RPG. The simulator pauses, I spend five minutes talking through what we’re going to do with NASA, the simulator unpauses, I do the thing we talked about, and the simulator pauses again, and we talk through what I actually just did and what I’m going to do next.
It took three hours to get through a twenty minute intercept, but we got it done with fuel to spare. Next time through we got it done in two hours. Then an hour and a half. Then an hour and ten minutes. Then an hour. They took the training wheels off and I crashed and burned at 96% completion.
The problem is, the last 5% is the hardest part. And not by a little. What Dragon’s crew needs is some kind of magnetic grapple. The human arm is basically the shittiest intercept device for spaceships you can imagine. If your closing speeds are much over a half-meter per second, or your distance from a handhold is much over a half-meter, there’s literally no way to hold on. For context orbital speed is 7,660 m/s, and the circumference of the ISS’s orbit is 42,650,000 meters. So we need to be 99.99% the same speed, and 99.999999% the same position, or the intercept is pooched.
Imagine someone being such a jerk that on a four million dollar purchase they rejected it because you were short a penny. That’s space. Biggest jerk in the world.
I’m also deliberately antagonizing NASA. They deserve it though, and I need something to churn in the back of my mind instead of anxiety. So, situation: I have now been a stow-away aboard Artemis I for 21 days. In that time I have not had a shower, nor have I shaved, brushed my teeth, used deodorant, or applied cologne.
If I pull this off, then in two days I’ll be meeting one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. Excuse me, I should rephrase that. In two days stow-away, turned space-pirate, turned heroic space-hero, Alex Whelm will heroically swoop in to save the life of a spectacularly beautiful, accomplished, woman (and her crew). Did I mention: hero?
I do this and even if we hate each other, they’re going to be making romance novels with the two of us on the covers for decades. If I could get just a tad closer to looking like the cover art on one of those books, or at least smelling like it, I’d very much appreciate it.
So, how can I clean up a bit? Well there are no razors aboard Artemis I as there wasn’t supposed to be a crew. There is however a knife in the survival pack of my flight suit. I’ve proposed that I sharpen that bad boy up to a razor’s edge: by holding it bare-handed and scraping the blade repeatedly against a piece of ceramic piping I found in the galley, sending microscopic bits of stone and steel into the air as I do. And then straight razor shave my face and throat without the benefit of a mirror, shaving cream, or ever having straight-razor shaved before.
NASA is, obviously, dead set against every aspect of my plan from the motivations to the execution.
“You’re the ones who had Captain Covington flirt with me,” I keep pointing out to them. It’s not a real argument, like I said, I’m just trying to annoy them a bit. I also re-raised the question of how it wasn’t workplace sexual harassment. Mark was quick to point out that I don’t actually work for NASA anymore.
To which I was quick to reply, “well then you’re not the boss of me and I can shave!”
That observation led to its own fun, and I’m happy to report that I am, again, officially a NASA employee. I even got a raise. A small one. Astronauts get paid shit, even the space-hero ones.
Anyways, upon being rehired, NASA issued me my first order as an employee: no shaving. They thought they won this round. What they forgot is that my one big failing was being unemployed. Now I’m the employed space-pirate turned heroic space-hero gallantly swooping in to save Captain Covington. So I’ll have a beard, Leonidas had a beard.
“In your mind, you look like Gerard Butler?” Mark asked.
Space-spoilsport.
*******
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
December 5, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 20
December 5th, 2022
I’m a bit of everything today. I’m a bit relieved. I’m a bit sad; I mean I’d have really liked to have the right stuff to be able to pull off the rescue myself, and I clearly don’t. I’m a bit angry with myself that Sarah, that Captain Covington, had played my feelings as effectively as a brain surgeon poking my gray matter with a stick. I’m a bit, what’s the word for when you’re lying to yourself to make yourself feel better? Anyways, I’m a bit of that as well.
I’ve kept doing the simulation, but now it’s because it’s the only video game within ten thousand miles, so why not play it?
After the luxury of eating two entire Skor bars a day my stomach is used to being spoiled, and by the time lunch rolls around, I’m ravenous. NASA’s been pretty quiet today.
Before I turned in last night Mark and I “had a drink”. He’d had a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and I’d had a bladder of room temperature water.
“Isn’t flirting kind of cheating? Talk about workplace sexual harassment. Who heard?” I asked - Mark having promised me we were not on Mission Control’s speakers.
“Sorry kid. On the plus side, there’s a whole control room full of engineers down here who are feeling a lot better about some of their own embarrassing memories.”
“John Glenn would have flirted back,” I said.
“John Glenn was married to the same woman for 73 years. Believe me, you’d have made it way worse if you’d tried flirting back. Captain Covington… Well, check your data uploads, you’ll see.”
I checked. Mark had sent me Captain Covington’s headshot and CV from SpaceX. If you’re going to be made a fool of, at least it’s by the best. She’d gotten her PhD. at 25. Ion engine design. She held a dozen patents on related technologies. She mountain biked, spoke three languages.
“She probably takes guys out for a jog on a first or second date to see how well they handled having a woman kick their ass,” he said.
“Yup. Either she’s dating Elon, or she’s got to find a guy who doesn’t mind being worse at everything.”
Anyways, I’m feeling a tiny bit better about the situation knowing that I got manipulated by Super Woman.
You know, the really interesting thing about this video game is that it isn’t really a skill thing when you get right down to it. Yeah, eyeballing the astronauts is a hand-eye coordination task, but it’s ultimately based on how many pixels per second they’re moving on the display and in what direction. I add some marker lines to the LCD screen (which are erasable?) and attack the whole thing a bit more logically.
One of the biggest problems I’ve been having is that I haven’t appreciated just how important it is to zero out rotation with each movement I make. If you’re trying to judge how something else is moving, while you’re rotating, it’s next to impossible. Yeah, you use more time, and more fuel, to kind of perfect a roll, but it’s an investment. The big lesson from Captain Covington was that if you get flustered as you’re doing this, you make one little mistake, it cascades.
I actually hit 85% completion, for the very first time, on one of my runs.
“You hit 100% on that thing and I’ll take you up in a T-38 when you’re back,” Mark promised.
You’d think he’d buy me a drink. You’ve probably seen the movies about the Apollo program and imagine there’s some bar in Huston where the astronauts like to go for drinks after a tough day of training. The days of the hard drinking astronaut passed away with the Soviet Union, just a different era now. Now they’re all fitness buffs, and an indulgence would be something non-organic.
Today’s also a pretty big day on the mission calendar: return powered flyby. I get all strapped in for it, and yeah, the moon looks amazing. There’s a bit of, I don’t know exactly what, doubt maybe. Hesitation? The feeling that I’m being a bit of a nerd for getting such a kick out of something? This is the second time Orion’s swooped down towards the moon like this and I feel a little like the people who lean over to an airplane window to watch the landing.
I really should just get comfortable with the fact that I’m a nerd. Even though I’m going to avoid prison, I’ll never find another job where I get to be with my own kind: space nerds. I suppose I could apply at SpaceX.
Shit… You think I might end up working the convention scene? ‘Meet the Artemis I Stowaway! - Just $10”. There I’ll be, fifty years old, wearing a worn out orange flight suit, getting my picture taken for ten bucks a pop.
I really hate my brain sometimes. I’m an arm’s length from the moon and I’m feeling embarrassed that I’m such a nerd for enjoying myself, and debating between a bleak space-nerd-less future, vs. a bleak space-nerd-filled future. Why can’t I just enjoy the moment every once in a while?
I have my Skor bar for dinner. I’m still hungry after eating it. When I get back, I want a tomato. I just want to bite into it and have the juice explode into my mouth and run down the side of my face and feel my teeth dig into vegetable. I’m so sick of just grinding sugar between my teeth.
Falling asleep when you’re starving is an extra special hell. Nights are always a bit tough for me. Back on Earth I end up laying awake most nights thinking about all the things that are wrong in life. Tonight’s topic of self-recrimination is that I hadn’t been able to beat the simulator. That’s really a mixed bag though. Mark’s talk about guilt, and regret, and anxiety, hit home and he had no idea this was how I spent most nights. Really, it’s for the best. Better to have a gnawing vague anxiety about lacking piloting skills (when I’m not a pilot) than actually try to do something, fail, and kill four people because of it.
My brain’s starting to feel heavy when Mark gets onto the Radio. “Alex, Dragon Sovereign has had an incident. A rescue mission from Earth’s out of the cards. You’re up.”
I threw up. Calories I needed.
*******
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
I’m a bit of everything today. I’m a bit relieved. I’m a bit sad; I mean I’d have really liked to have the right stuff to be able to pull off the rescue myself, and I clearly don’t. I’m a bit angry with myself that Sarah, that Captain Covington, had played my feelings as effectively as a brain surgeon poking my gray matter with a stick. I’m a bit, what’s the word for when you’re lying to yourself to make yourself feel better? Anyways, I’m a bit of that as well.
I’ve kept doing the simulation, but now it’s because it’s the only video game within ten thousand miles, so why not play it?
After the luxury of eating two entire Skor bars a day my stomach is used to being spoiled, and by the time lunch rolls around, I’m ravenous. NASA’s been pretty quiet today.
Before I turned in last night Mark and I “had a drink”. He’d had a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and I’d had a bladder of room temperature water.
“Isn’t flirting kind of cheating? Talk about workplace sexual harassment. Who heard?” I asked - Mark having promised me we were not on Mission Control’s speakers.
“Sorry kid. On the plus side, there’s a whole control room full of engineers down here who are feeling a lot better about some of their own embarrassing memories.”
“John Glenn would have flirted back,” I said.
“John Glenn was married to the same woman for 73 years. Believe me, you’d have made it way worse if you’d tried flirting back. Captain Covington… Well, check your data uploads, you’ll see.”
I checked. Mark had sent me Captain Covington’s headshot and CV from SpaceX. If you’re going to be made a fool of, at least it’s by the best. She’d gotten her PhD. at 25. Ion engine design. She held a dozen patents on related technologies. She mountain biked, spoke three languages.
“She probably takes guys out for a jog on a first or second date to see how well they handled having a woman kick their ass,” he said.
“Yup. Either she’s dating Elon, or she’s got to find a guy who doesn’t mind being worse at everything.”
Anyways, I’m feeling a tiny bit better about the situation knowing that I got manipulated by Super Woman.
You know, the really interesting thing about this video game is that it isn’t really a skill thing when you get right down to it. Yeah, eyeballing the astronauts is a hand-eye coordination task, but it’s ultimately based on how many pixels per second they’re moving on the display and in what direction. I add some marker lines to the LCD screen (which are erasable?) and attack the whole thing a bit more logically.
One of the biggest problems I’ve been having is that I haven’t appreciated just how important it is to zero out rotation with each movement I make. If you’re trying to judge how something else is moving, while you’re rotating, it’s next to impossible. Yeah, you use more time, and more fuel, to kind of perfect a roll, but it’s an investment. The big lesson from Captain Covington was that if you get flustered as you’re doing this, you make one little mistake, it cascades.
I actually hit 85% completion, for the very first time, on one of my runs.
“You hit 100% on that thing and I’ll take you up in a T-38 when you’re back,” Mark promised.
You’d think he’d buy me a drink. You’ve probably seen the movies about the Apollo program and imagine there’s some bar in Huston where the astronauts like to go for drinks after a tough day of training. The days of the hard drinking astronaut passed away with the Soviet Union, just a different era now. Now they’re all fitness buffs, and an indulgence would be something non-organic.
Today’s also a pretty big day on the mission calendar: return powered flyby. I get all strapped in for it, and yeah, the moon looks amazing. There’s a bit of, I don’t know exactly what, doubt maybe. Hesitation? The feeling that I’m being a bit of a nerd for getting such a kick out of something? This is the second time Orion’s swooped down towards the moon like this and I feel a little like the people who lean over to an airplane window to watch the landing.
I really should just get comfortable with the fact that I’m a nerd. Even though I’m going to avoid prison, I’ll never find another job where I get to be with my own kind: space nerds. I suppose I could apply at SpaceX.
Shit… You think I might end up working the convention scene? ‘Meet the Artemis I Stowaway! - Just $10”. There I’ll be, fifty years old, wearing a worn out orange flight suit, getting my picture taken for ten bucks a pop.
I really hate my brain sometimes. I’m an arm’s length from the moon and I’m feeling embarrassed that I’m such a nerd for enjoying myself, and debating between a bleak space-nerd-less future, vs. a bleak space-nerd-filled future. Why can’t I just enjoy the moment every once in a while?
I have my Skor bar for dinner. I’m still hungry after eating it. When I get back, I want a tomato. I just want to bite into it and have the juice explode into my mouth and run down the side of my face and feel my teeth dig into vegetable. I’m so sick of just grinding sugar between my teeth.
Falling asleep when you’re starving is an extra special hell. Nights are always a bit tough for me. Back on Earth I end up laying awake most nights thinking about all the things that are wrong in life. Tonight’s topic of self-recrimination is that I hadn’t been able to beat the simulator. That’s really a mixed bag though. Mark’s talk about guilt, and regret, and anxiety, hit home and he had no idea this was how I spent most nights. Really, it’s for the best. Better to have a gnawing vague anxiety about lacking piloting skills (when I’m not a pilot) than actually try to do something, fail, and kill four people because of it.
My brain’s starting to feel heavy when Mark gets onto the Radio. “Alex, Dragon Sovereign has had an incident. A rescue mission from Earth’s out of the cards. You’re up.”
I threw up. Calories I needed.
*******
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
December 4, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 19
December 4th, 2022
While I was sleeping, NASA was doing the math on this. Option A: Rescue mission from Earth - but can they get a rescue mission off the ground before the crew burns up or suffocates? Option B: I fly the Orion over and pick them up - but can I learn to fly the Orion in four more days?
Us engineers love to quantify things. Everything is about percentages and decision matrixes, and ratios. The only real X factor in all this is how good a pilot I am. When does Option B become the better choice than Option A? NASA’s decided that I’ll keep practicing and just before we’d have to commit, if of the final ten simulations immediately before, I successfully pulled off the intercept twice, then Option B is a go. 20% chance of success is the better option.
The whole thing is about math. Figuring the odds between two long shots and putting four lives on the best option.
There is good news though. You know how they say your brain re-organizes stuff while you sleep? Yesterday I was typically hitting bingo on fuel at about 60% completion, a good night’s sleep under my belt and I started the day in the high 70’s. This is more like driving than I thought. You’ve got to be thinking where you want to be in five minutes and thinking about how the ship is moving and how you can just kind of ease her into where she needs to be later. ‘Now’ matters a lot less than ‘later’. Also, even though I use way too much fuel doing it, I’m occasionally making the intercept at the end of the simulation.
So, I’m feeling a lot better while I’m eating lunch than I was when I was going to bed.
“Alex,” the radio came alive with Mark’s voice. “We’ve got a request from the commander of Dragon Sovereign to talk with you, wants to thank you for all your hard work.”
So, you’d have to know Mark, spend a few hours talking about him, but there’s something weird with his voice. He sounds, well he sounds like he’s smiling.
“Hi Alex, this is Captain Sarah Covington,” ok, I see the problem. They miscast Scarlet Johansen as the voice in Her. They ought to have cast Captain Sarah Covington. Her voice sounds like a cup of spiked hot chocolate feels.
So, first name basis? She called me Alex, but what was her other option? Mr. Whelm?
“Hi Captain Covington. How are you doing over there?” The nerds in NASA’s mission control room probably all just cringed hearing my voice waver at that. Literally the stupidest question you could ask someone stranded in a space capsule.
“Call me Sarah, and we’re ok for now. NASA’s been keeping me updated on your simulation performance. You’re a fast learner, but that Orion, what a beast.”
I am a fast learner, aren’t I? I’m grinning.
“Thanks…” oh fuck, I don’t know what to say next. What do you say next? This is weird, the silence is dragging on too long, I’ve got to say something, anything.
“I was thinking,” she says, and I exhale a lungful of air saturated with anxiety. “Walk me through a simulation live. I’d like to see what kind of stick and rudder man you are.”
I’m a stick and rudder man? At least, in space, no one can see you blush.
NASA cues up the simulation, again, and I start. Walking her through my steps as I fly.
“Coming around to 152 degrees long,” I say, Dragon’s crew is going to be coming from about that angle and my first roll is to get them in sight on my display. Finding them’s a bit tricky, at this distance they look like four stars in a line and the only difference is that they’re four stars that are moving. I’ve got to rotate Orion around and then pitch and yaw a bit until I can see them.
“That’s a nice smooth rotation, really impressive Alex, you’re a natural at this,” she says. I’m not. I came damn close to having thrusters engage as I was a little heavy handed on the stick. She’s just trying to help my confidence. Right? I mean if your life depended on someone doing a difficult task, you’d try to build them up a bit. Right? Feels nice though.
“Ok, establishing on 152 degrees Long. I don’t see the crew…” I say and check out the status on my flywheels. Pitch is saturated from some earlier maneuvers, and yaw’s at about 50%. Probably better to desaturate pitch for this. But… that means up?
“Pitching up 5 degrees,” I say, and pull back on the stick. The simulation plays a little rumbling noise to let me know I’ve just used thrusters. Fuck. I’m also drifting a bit longitudinally, not much, but I’ll have to do something to stop it.
“Can you see us?” Sarah asks.
I pitch down, this time the flywheel helps, braking gently to give me the rotational change I need, and I very gently try to correct the longitudinal position so I’m back on 152 exactly. “No…” I say. This is really, really, hard, you’ve got to keep your eyes on the gimbals while at the same time looking at the star field for something far from obvious.
Wait, got them!
“Gotcha!” I say and tap the orientation lock button on the flight controls, letting the computer keep Orion aligned on this heading. And I let out a long breath.
“You’re doing amazing Alex, I’m going to have to give you a big hug when we get onboard.”
Wait… what? This is flirting right? She’s flirting with me. Is she flirting with me? Why is she flirting with me? Do I flirt back? How do I flirt back?
The four little dots of light are growing bigger as they make their way across the starfield in my view. This is one of the trickiest parts of this thing. I’ve got to eyeball the intercept. Here’s the way to think about this. Imagine you’re driving along the highway and you see someone on an on-ramp speeding up to merge. Because you’re a jerk I guess, you want to get right along side them when they reach the bottom of the ramp. So, brake, speed up, or steady as she goes? And remember, a small change now has as big an impact on the intercept as a big change later. For fuel savings this is the big moment. Now just do that in three dimensions instead of 2.
“+1m/s,” I say and fire Orion’s rear thrusters. I overdid it. I can see right away that was a sloppy choice, “-0.3 m/s” I say and reverse. Ok, better.
“What, you don’t want a hug when I get there?” Sarah asks. She is doing that playful hurt voice thing girls do. What the hell is this?
We’re something like 200 meters out now, I can distinctly see all four astronauts as people. Next problem though, that merge I was telling you about? It looks like I’m going to be nose to nose with them, but instead of being in the lane beside them, I’m on the other side of the highway… I think.
“Hey, don’t ignore me, Mark!” Sarah snaps.
“0.3 m/s lateral delta-v,” I say and trigger off the thrusters. The ship slides to the side in the simulation. Way too much. Shit. Way way too much. “-0.2 m/s lateral delta-v,” I say and correct things.
The master alarm sounds. I’ve used 80% of the fuel I’ve got for this thing. Shit. I’m like at 50% complete. Fuck. How am I doing so badly?
“I’m not ignoring you! I’m busy!”
Fuck, now I’ve snapped at her. Shit. I should have flirted, said something smart and playful about the kiss. That’s what a cool astronaut would have done. Mark probably…
“Don’t you yell at me! I’ve been nothing but nice to you and you’re fucking this whole thing up and you’re going to get me killed and you are yelling at me!?”
God, this is the worst day of my life. Focus, focus, focus, how do I unfuck this fuel situation? The four astronauts are drifting along my field of vision just kind of slipping away from me. There’s a little bit of vertical drift, I’m sure of that, and I can fix it. “-0.05 m/s vertical delta-v”, Orion’s thrusters fire.
The monitor blanks, “simulation failed” appearing on the screen. I no longer have enough fuel to pull off the intercept, and the computer knows it. 55% completion.
“Alex,” Sarah’s voice is different. The emotion’s gone, flirty, angry, hurt, none of any of that. It isn’t even like when she said hello, she’s just, flat, like she is on the phone with a bank. “Sorry. I needed to know how pressure would affect you, and that was the best I could think of. It’s nothing personal, pressure hits everyone differently. And you should take a breath, we’re going to scrap this plan for you to come get us, rescue from Earth’s the better option. You’re just not cut out for this.”
You want to know the worst part? My first reaction was to feel relieved. I’m ashamed about a lot that happened today, but that’s the worst bit. I was right before, this is the worst day of my life.
*******
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
While I was sleeping, NASA was doing the math on this. Option A: Rescue mission from Earth - but can they get a rescue mission off the ground before the crew burns up or suffocates? Option B: I fly the Orion over and pick them up - but can I learn to fly the Orion in four more days?
Us engineers love to quantify things. Everything is about percentages and decision matrixes, and ratios. The only real X factor in all this is how good a pilot I am. When does Option B become the better choice than Option A? NASA’s decided that I’ll keep practicing and just before we’d have to commit, if of the final ten simulations immediately before, I successfully pulled off the intercept twice, then Option B is a go. 20% chance of success is the better option.
The whole thing is about math. Figuring the odds between two long shots and putting four lives on the best option.
There is good news though. You know how they say your brain re-organizes stuff while you sleep? Yesterday I was typically hitting bingo on fuel at about 60% completion, a good night’s sleep under my belt and I started the day in the high 70’s. This is more like driving than I thought. You’ve got to be thinking where you want to be in five minutes and thinking about how the ship is moving and how you can just kind of ease her into where she needs to be later. ‘Now’ matters a lot less than ‘later’. Also, even though I use way too much fuel doing it, I’m occasionally making the intercept at the end of the simulation.
So, I’m feeling a lot better while I’m eating lunch than I was when I was going to bed.
“Alex,” the radio came alive with Mark’s voice. “We’ve got a request from the commander of Dragon Sovereign to talk with you, wants to thank you for all your hard work.”
So, you’d have to know Mark, spend a few hours talking about him, but there’s something weird with his voice. He sounds, well he sounds like he’s smiling.
“Hi Alex, this is Captain Sarah Covington,” ok, I see the problem. They miscast Scarlet Johansen as the voice in Her. They ought to have cast Captain Sarah Covington. Her voice sounds like a cup of spiked hot chocolate feels.
So, first name basis? She called me Alex, but what was her other option? Mr. Whelm?
“Hi Captain Covington. How are you doing over there?” The nerds in NASA’s mission control room probably all just cringed hearing my voice waver at that. Literally the stupidest question you could ask someone stranded in a space capsule.
“Call me Sarah, and we’re ok for now. NASA’s been keeping me updated on your simulation performance. You’re a fast learner, but that Orion, what a beast.”
I am a fast learner, aren’t I? I’m grinning.
“Thanks…” oh fuck, I don’t know what to say next. What do you say next? This is weird, the silence is dragging on too long, I’ve got to say something, anything.
“I was thinking,” she says, and I exhale a lungful of air saturated with anxiety. “Walk me through a simulation live. I’d like to see what kind of stick and rudder man you are.”
I’m a stick and rudder man? At least, in space, no one can see you blush.
NASA cues up the simulation, again, and I start. Walking her through my steps as I fly.
“Coming around to 152 degrees long,” I say, Dragon’s crew is going to be coming from about that angle and my first roll is to get them in sight on my display. Finding them’s a bit tricky, at this distance they look like four stars in a line and the only difference is that they’re four stars that are moving. I’ve got to rotate Orion around and then pitch and yaw a bit until I can see them.
“That’s a nice smooth rotation, really impressive Alex, you’re a natural at this,” she says. I’m not. I came damn close to having thrusters engage as I was a little heavy handed on the stick. She’s just trying to help my confidence. Right? I mean if your life depended on someone doing a difficult task, you’d try to build them up a bit. Right? Feels nice though.
“Ok, establishing on 152 degrees Long. I don’t see the crew…” I say and check out the status on my flywheels. Pitch is saturated from some earlier maneuvers, and yaw’s at about 50%. Probably better to desaturate pitch for this. But… that means up?
“Pitching up 5 degrees,” I say, and pull back on the stick. The simulation plays a little rumbling noise to let me know I’ve just used thrusters. Fuck. I’m also drifting a bit longitudinally, not much, but I’ll have to do something to stop it.
“Can you see us?” Sarah asks.
I pitch down, this time the flywheel helps, braking gently to give me the rotational change I need, and I very gently try to correct the longitudinal position so I’m back on 152 exactly. “No…” I say. This is really, really, hard, you’ve got to keep your eyes on the gimbals while at the same time looking at the star field for something far from obvious.
Wait, got them!
“Gotcha!” I say and tap the orientation lock button on the flight controls, letting the computer keep Orion aligned on this heading. And I let out a long breath.
“You’re doing amazing Alex, I’m going to have to give you a big hug when we get onboard.”
Wait… what? This is flirting right? She’s flirting with me. Is she flirting with me? Why is she flirting with me? Do I flirt back? How do I flirt back?
The four little dots of light are growing bigger as they make their way across the starfield in my view. This is one of the trickiest parts of this thing. I’ve got to eyeball the intercept. Here’s the way to think about this. Imagine you’re driving along the highway and you see someone on an on-ramp speeding up to merge. Because you’re a jerk I guess, you want to get right along side them when they reach the bottom of the ramp. So, brake, speed up, or steady as she goes? And remember, a small change now has as big an impact on the intercept as a big change later. For fuel savings this is the big moment. Now just do that in three dimensions instead of 2.
“+1m/s,” I say and fire Orion’s rear thrusters. I overdid it. I can see right away that was a sloppy choice, “-0.3 m/s” I say and reverse. Ok, better.
“What, you don’t want a hug when I get there?” Sarah asks. She is doing that playful hurt voice thing girls do. What the hell is this?
We’re something like 200 meters out now, I can distinctly see all four astronauts as people. Next problem though, that merge I was telling you about? It looks like I’m going to be nose to nose with them, but instead of being in the lane beside them, I’m on the other side of the highway… I think.
“Hey, don’t ignore me, Mark!” Sarah snaps.
“0.3 m/s lateral delta-v,” I say and trigger off the thrusters. The ship slides to the side in the simulation. Way too much. Shit. Way way too much. “-0.2 m/s lateral delta-v,” I say and correct things.
The master alarm sounds. I’ve used 80% of the fuel I’ve got for this thing. Shit. I’m like at 50% complete. Fuck. How am I doing so badly?
“I’m not ignoring you! I’m busy!”
Fuck, now I’ve snapped at her. Shit. I should have flirted, said something smart and playful about the kiss. That’s what a cool astronaut would have done. Mark probably…
“Don’t you yell at me! I’ve been nothing but nice to you and you’re fucking this whole thing up and you’re going to get me killed and you are yelling at me!?”
God, this is the worst day of my life. Focus, focus, focus, how do I unfuck this fuel situation? The four astronauts are drifting along my field of vision just kind of slipping away from me. There’s a little bit of vertical drift, I’m sure of that, and I can fix it. “-0.05 m/s vertical delta-v”, Orion’s thrusters fire.
The monitor blanks, “simulation failed” appearing on the screen. I no longer have enough fuel to pull off the intercept, and the computer knows it. 55% completion.
“Alex,” Sarah’s voice is different. The emotion’s gone, flirty, angry, hurt, none of any of that. It isn’t even like when she said hello, she’s just, flat, like she is on the phone with a bank. “Sorry. I needed to know how pressure would affect you, and that was the best I could think of. It’s nothing personal, pressure hits everyone differently. And you should take a breath, we’re going to scrap this plan for you to come get us, rescue from Earth’s the better option. You’re just not cut out for this.”
You want to know the worst part? My first reaction was to feel relieved. I’m ashamed about a lot that happened today, but that’s the worst bit. I was right before, this is the worst day of my life.
*******
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
December 3, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 18
December 3rd, 2022
Want to know the most sure-fire way to rub someone’s nose in the fact they can’t do something and they’re going to die trying? Simulations. I’m not talking one or two here. I’m talking a hundred. And none of them were the famous, “let’s see how he handles this!” stuff NASA’s known for. I’m talking kid-gloved, smooth sailing, everything working absolutely perfectly. NASA let me spend all day seeing the difference between a big-balled test pilot with thousands of hours of experience, and me, the idiot stowaway.
Let me put this in context. A car goes backwards/forwards and left/right. That’s two degrees of freedom. Orion has six. It goes backwards/forwards, left/right, up/down, sideways spinny, loopy spinny, and rolly spinny - those are of course the scientific terms. Remember learning to drive and feeling like the car was a bit out of control? Three times that.
But wait, there’s more! Pulling off this intercept means I have to arrive at a specific point in space at a specific time, at a specific orientation, and I have to eyeball it. Too slow, everyone dies. Too fast, everyone dies. Wrong place, everyone dies.
Things get even more complicated though. In movies all the spinny maneuvers are depicted as using bursts of thrust. In reality Orion has three flywheels that can spin up, or brake, to impart a rotation. Those flywheels can only spin so fast though before they are, “saturated” and need to be discharged using precious thruster fuel. A real astronaut would select between the flywheel or a thruster based on how quickly they need to rotate Orion, how much capacity those flywheels had, and which way they wanted to spin. NASA’s got me on “automatic” but if I push the stick just a little too hard, or in the wrong direction, the thrusters will engage when I might be able to get the same maneuver for “free”.
Back to that car analogy. Think of this all like taking someone who’s never driven, putting four people who’ve been shot onto the back of the car, and telling the student driver he has to race them to the hospital before they die.
Then line the roads there with bazooka and speed gun wielding police officers, so the car blows up if it goes too fast. The make the car a stick shift with two different steering wheels (one steering wheel for the right two tires, and one steering wheel for the left two tires).
That’s still overly simple… I guess, then imagine this driver is lost and has to use a paper map to try and figure everything out, while driving.
Wait, I forgot I’ve got to do it in vacuum without a proper space suit, so let’s set the car’s on fire as well. Oh, and we’re almost out of gas so every tap of the pedals is precious.
Now, any chance at all I’m pulling this off?
A hundred simulated attempts and I typically doomed myself, and the four people I’m meant to be saving, at the 60% complete mark. That’s especially bad because the hard bits haven’t even started by then. The really hard part’s the last 5% or so. I know that because after the fiftieth try we started running the whole simulation through each time. Never mind the fuel, I just can’t make the intercept.
One really cool thing. A couple of the engineers stayed up all night and turned a few of the LCD instrument displays into “windows” for the simulation. So, I get to see four astronauts tethered together drifting up closer and closer to me and then drifting away when I fail to pick them up the way I should. Mark promises it actually makes it a little easier when it is out of the window.
You’re probably wondering why I don’t give up.
Scratch that, you’re probably wondering why I would even have agreed to try and do this in the first place. Simple, this is full-blown, absolute, astronaut bad-assery. This is the kind of thing where you kill yourself doing it, and god gives you a pat on the back when you get to heaven and says, “well, you’ve got balls kid, I’ll give you that.” I risked my life just to get into space, I’m happy to spend it trying some straight up science fiction coolness.
When I stop to have lunch I munch on my seventh to last Skor bar. I’m eating two a day until I pull this thing off. Turns out starvation + high focus maneuvering, is a bad combination.
Mark cut into my meal over the radio, which he doesn’t usually do.
“There are bold pilots, and old pilots, but no old, bold, pilots,” Mark says. “How many friends have you lost over the years Alex?”
“None.” My grandmother had passed a few years ago, and a distant aunt a decade before that, but I don’t think that’s what Mark’s asking about.
“I’ve lost seven. First one was just after flight school. Air Force did a pretty good job of getting us all through that alive. Matthew Troy - Zippy. God he was a funny guy. We’d go to this lounge together, fresh out of the cockpits, stinking of aviation fuel, thinking we looked just about as cool as cool got.” Mark gave a little laugh over the radio. “Shit, we couldn’t even really afford to drink there, we’d spend hours nursing a drink and Zip would just about kill me with the jokes. Sometimes we’d get lucky and find a few women interested in hearing pilot stories. Mostly though we just hung out.”
“I was so pissed with him at his funeral. I just, I remember wanting to punch the casket. How the fuck didn’t he recognize hypoxia? They trained us for that, we’d all gone through it so we could recognize it. All he had to do was push the stick down and he could have gotten below ten K in thirty seconds.”
“We were both your age. I eventually figured out that it had been easier to be angry with him than to be afraid.”
“I did some straight up dangerous things in my youth, and shit, at some point or another you realize what you’re doing and the fear hits like a mule. But when you’re young and stupid you just balls and bravado your way through the warnings until reality bites you in the ass.”
I just listen. Mark’s marching through this, he’s got something he wants to say and what, I’m going to argue with an astronaut telling me his flying stories?
“You want to know what’s actually going to happen up there Alex? You’re going to hit bingo fuel, and it won’t be like a movie. It won’t be a question of just one more burst of the thruster needed to save them and maybe by a miracle you’ve got more gas than we all thought. You’re going to come close-ish, see that it’s hopeless, and then you’ll do the right thing. You’ll do what everyone actually does in that situation. You’ll stop, and live, and let them die.”
My brain kind of wants me to object, but he keeps going before I figure out what to say.
“Now you listen to me Alex. When that happens, you stay on the radio with me. Don’t go trying to find their suit frequencies. Don’t watch them drift off from one of Orion’s windows. When we abort, you keep your eyes locked inside the ship, and you just listen to me ok. The only thing you’re going to do if you see them drifting off, or hear their voices, is spend the rest of your life having nightmares about that again, and again, and again.”
Fuck.
“If this were just a straight odds thing, what’s got the better chance of working, this rescue or NASA’s plan to send up a mission?” I ask.
“Reasonable people can disagree.”
Fuck.
“Let’s keep practicing.”
I’ve never hurt-hurt someone. I mean, I’ve hurt people’s feelings, and I’ve felt bad about it. But if I screw this up am I going to feel like I killed four people? Mark was right, fear kicks like a mule.
*******
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
Want to know the most sure-fire way to rub someone’s nose in the fact they can’t do something and they’re going to die trying? Simulations. I’m not talking one or two here. I’m talking a hundred. And none of them were the famous, “let’s see how he handles this!” stuff NASA’s known for. I’m talking kid-gloved, smooth sailing, everything working absolutely perfectly. NASA let me spend all day seeing the difference between a big-balled test pilot with thousands of hours of experience, and me, the idiot stowaway.
Let me put this in context. A car goes backwards/forwards and left/right. That’s two degrees of freedom. Orion has six. It goes backwards/forwards, left/right, up/down, sideways spinny, loopy spinny, and rolly spinny - those are of course the scientific terms. Remember learning to drive and feeling like the car was a bit out of control? Three times that.
But wait, there’s more! Pulling off this intercept means I have to arrive at a specific point in space at a specific time, at a specific orientation, and I have to eyeball it. Too slow, everyone dies. Too fast, everyone dies. Wrong place, everyone dies.
Things get even more complicated though. In movies all the spinny maneuvers are depicted as using bursts of thrust. In reality Orion has three flywheels that can spin up, or brake, to impart a rotation. Those flywheels can only spin so fast though before they are, “saturated” and need to be discharged using precious thruster fuel. A real astronaut would select between the flywheel or a thruster based on how quickly they need to rotate Orion, how much capacity those flywheels had, and which way they wanted to spin. NASA’s got me on “automatic” but if I push the stick just a little too hard, or in the wrong direction, the thrusters will engage when I might be able to get the same maneuver for “free”.
Back to that car analogy. Think of this all like taking someone who’s never driven, putting four people who’ve been shot onto the back of the car, and telling the student driver he has to race them to the hospital before they die.
Then line the roads there with bazooka and speed gun wielding police officers, so the car blows up if it goes too fast. The make the car a stick shift with two different steering wheels (one steering wheel for the right two tires, and one steering wheel for the left two tires).
That’s still overly simple… I guess, then imagine this driver is lost and has to use a paper map to try and figure everything out, while driving.
Wait, I forgot I’ve got to do it in vacuum without a proper space suit, so let’s set the car’s on fire as well. Oh, and we’re almost out of gas so every tap of the pedals is precious.
Now, any chance at all I’m pulling this off?
A hundred simulated attempts and I typically doomed myself, and the four people I’m meant to be saving, at the 60% complete mark. That’s especially bad because the hard bits haven’t even started by then. The really hard part’s the last 5% or so. I know that because after the fiftieth try we started running the whole simulation through each time. Never mind the fuel, I just can’t make the intercept.
One really cool thing. A couple of the engineers stayed up all night and turned a few of the LCD instrument displays into “windows” for the simulation. So, I get to see four astronauts tethered together drifting up closer and closer to me and then drifting away when I fail to pick them up the way I should. Mark promises it actually makes it a little easier when it is out of the window.
You’re probably wondering why I don’t give up.
Scratch that, you’re probably wondering why I would even have agreed to try and do this in the first place. Simple, this is full-blown, absolute, astronaut bad-assery. This is the kind of thing where you kill yourself doing it, and god gives you a pat on the back when you get to heaven and says, “well, you’ve got balls kid, I’ll give you that.” I risked my life just to get into space, I’m happy to spend it trying some straight up science fiction coolness.
When I stop to have lunch I munch on my seventh to last Skor bar. I’m eating two a day until I pull this thing off. Turns out starvation + high focus maneuvering, is a bad combination.
Mark cut into my meal over the radio, which he doesn’t usually do.
“There are bold pilots, and old pilots, but no old, bold, pilots,” Mark says. “How many friends have you lost over the years Alex?”
“None.” My grandmother had passed a few years ago, and a distant aunt a decade before that, but I don’t think that’s what Mark’s asking about.
“I’ve lost seven. First one was just after flight school. Air Force did a pretty good job of getting us all through that alive. Matthew Troy - Zippy. God he was a funny guy. We’d go to this lounge together, fresh out of the cockpits, stinking of aviation fuel, thinking we looked just about as cool as cool got.” Mark gave a little laugh over the radio. “Shit, we couldn’t even really afford to drink there, we’d spend hours nursing a drink and Zip would just about kill me with the jokes. Sometimes we’d get lucky and find a few women interested in hearing pilot stories. Mostly though we just hung out.”
“I was so pissed with him at his funeral. I just, I remember wanting to punch the casket. How the fuck didn’t he recognize hypoxia? They trained us for that, we’d all gone through it so we could recognize it. All he had to do was push the stick down and he could have gotten below ten K in thirty seconds.”
“We were both your age. I eventually figured out that it had been easier to be angry with him than to be afraid.”
“I did some straight up dangerous things in my youth, and shit, at some point or another you realize what you’re doing and the fear hits like a mule. But when you’re young and stupid you just balls and bravado your way through the warnings until reality bites you in the ass.”
I just listen. Mark’s marching through this, he’s got something he wants to say and what, I’m going to argue with an astronaut telling me his flying stories?
“You want to know what’s actually going to happen up there Alex? You’re going to hit bingo fuel, and it won’t be like a movie. It won’t be a question of just one more burst of the thruster needed to save them and maybe by a miracle you’ve got more gas than we all thought. You’re going to come close-ish, see that it’s hopeless, and then you’ll do the right thing. You’ll do what everyone actually does in that situation. You’ll stop, and live, and let them die.”
My brain kind of wants me to object, but he keeps going before I figure out what to say.
“Now you listen to me Alex. When that happens, you stay on the radio with me. Don’t go trying to find their suit frequencies. Don’t watch them drift off from one of Orion’s windows. When we abort, you keep your eyes locked inside the ship, and you just listen to me ok. The only thing you’re going to do if you see them drifting off, or hear their voices, is spend the rest of your life having nightmares about that again, and again, and again.”
Fuck.
“If this were just a straight odds thing, what’s got the better chance of working, this rescue or NASA’s plan to send up a mission?” I ask.
“Reasonable people can disagree.”
Fuck.
“Let’s keep practicing.”
I’ve never hurt-hurt someone. I mean, I’ve hurt people’s feelings, and I’ve felt bad about it. But if I screw this up am I going to feel like I killed four people? Mark was right, fear kicks like a mule.
*******
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
