People would kill for a seat on an Artemis mission, I only had to play dead.

You’d think it would be almost impossible to remove the NASA approved test dummy aboard Artemis I, who NASA actually named Moonikin, slap on some makeup and a plastic face mask, fake the sensor feeds Moonikin was supposed to be recording, and put myself into its place. It turns out it’s way easier to do that than getting accepted into astronaut training. I should know, I’ve tried both and only succeeded at one.

The plastic mask I was wearing to mimic Moonikin’s face didn’t have eye holes, so before launch I was blind as a bat. The helmet muffled most of the sounds. So, all I could really hear was the short, professional, mumbles of the ground crew working through final items on their checklists, and their bootie clad footsteps on Orion’s deck. Well, that and the sound of air blowing into my suit. There’s an intake valve on my flight suit’s thigh that feeds all the way up to the helmet.

I don’t know whether to call that valve being active NASA’s big mistake, a massive waste to the US taxpayer, or my evil inspiration.

See me and David, one of my buddies working on the Moonikin sensor package, were slaughtering digital zombies after work back in July and chatting. I had been correctly pointing out that Sisko had a Starfleet education on theory of combat and tactics, and David had been incorrectly pointing out that Holden had proven adaptability in commanding classes of ships he wasn’t trained on, so would have an edge if put in command of a Star Destroyer.

I was racking up a double-digit headshot shooting streak when talk turned to work and David started complaining about how the turbulent airflow into Moonikin’s flight suit was reducing the sensitivity of the sensors he was designing. I asked why they were even bothering with that, it wasn’t like a dummy needed to breath, and David said, and I’m quoting him here, “NASA’s acting like Moonikin is alive.”

While my digital brain was getting devoured by a zombie, it felt like the normal world full of complexity, disappointments, and bad luck had just been turned sideways and there was suddenly this narrow, but clear, path ahead: I could stow away on Artemis I.

We all get evil ideas sometimes. Part of being civilized means not giving in to those temptations, or just having a laugh about them when they’re really clever. Just because the idea of stowing away seemed like it could work didn’t mean I’d really do it.

But then came the mission delays. Every time they pushed back the launch I thought about it, I planned a little more. A part of me wanted to do this, and week, after week, after week of delays it kept poking at me.

Eventually I had a plan to sneak on, but not off, and that little voice in the back of my head asked, “what if we roll the dice? If you sneak on, and it launches, then it was meant to be. If you sneak on and they delay again, then you shot your shot.”

Yeah, not great logic, but that was what convinced me.

The blast-off was pretty cool. It was smoother, and shorter than you’d think, but that probably had something to do with the adrenaline. You know your endocrine system’s going a bit wonky when you’re riding a rocket into space and jonesing to do some pushups.

I wish I could tell you about how spectacular it was seeing the curvature of the earth, or night turning into an even darker night, or the stark intensity of the stars, but I kept my Moonikin mask on the whole time. I was worried that if NASA found out while they could still abort the mission, they would. Technically once they ignited the engines any kind of abort would have a multi-billion dollar price tag affixed to it, but NASA makes weird choices sometimes.

I might be the only astronaut (am I an astronaut? Is it a title which must be bestowed, or a descriptor of those who have done?), anyways I might be the only person whose heart rate actually slowed down during blast-off. I was just so crazy relieved that I’d actually pulled this off, that I wasn’t thinking right.

In retrospect that’s probably when NASA officially realized something was wrong. Moonikin (the manakin I bumped from this mission) was rigged up with seventy five different sensors including vibration and acceleration. I’d recorded a few hours of “normal” readings from those sensors - sorry David - and was feeding that back into the system. When the launch kicked off, David and the rest of his team would have been asking why Moonikin thought nothing was happening.

Do I feel guilty about that? More than you’d think. A few years ago, I accidentally ran a red light, and I’d put fifty bucks on Leclerc to win the World Drivers Championship through a European sports betting website, but prior to hitching a ride on a multi-billion dollar spaceship I had no business being on, that was the extent of my criminal activities. And I agonized about the legality of that bet. Jess had said I needed to be less uptight about that kind of stuff though.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, I’ve read that book too, and unfortunately I’m not a space pirate. I didn’t commandeer command of Artemis I: this mission is fully automated/remote controlled and I’m more cargo than commander. Further I wasn’t in international waters when I snuck on board, so maritime law does not apply. In fact, what I am is a felon, though I am the first felon to travel into space. Space felon.

But I’ve got a lot of great excuses for my felonious conduct! First of all, I’m not hurting anyone. No offense to David, but Moonikin’s value really isn’t that big, and I can tell them anything that Moonikin could.

Next is the pure, unadulterated, waste of this “unmanned” mission. 4.2 Billion dollars. That’s what this launch is costing - just for the launch. The development costs of the Orion are an order of magnitude above that. Artemis I is a fully functional spaceship. It has every bell and whistle that the manned missions are going to have.

I feel badly about throwing away the junk they give out at conferences. NASA wanted to throw away a stack of hundred dollar bills six miles high.

The only reason Artemis I wasn’t supposed to be manned was because when NASA sat down and did the math on the risks of all this, and they started adding up a brand new - giant - rocket (the SLS rocket), a brand new (with a ton of design and construction issues) spaceship, a long mission too far away from Earth to abort or send help, the numbers just came up a bit too scary for them to risk lives.

There’s also the heat shield. When I get back to Earth the heat shield is what’s going to get me back down through the atmosphere safely, you’ve seen the movies. Anyways Artemis I has the biggest heat shield ever made, and NASA’s nervous about it. Biggest risk of the whole mission.

I happen to know the folks on the heat shield’s design team. They’re smart cookies. Smart enough for NASA to bet the lives of trained astronauts on? No. Just smart enough for me to bet my life on them.

A lot of people think the rocket blast-off is the coolest part of space travel. Not even close. It’s all about the heatshield. Back in the 50’s when they were trying to figure out how to get nuclear warheads back into the atmosphere from space, there was a lot of debate about making them pointy and aerodynamic so they could “fly” back down like a plane.

They eventually figured out that, like most physics, it’s all about conservation of energy. That giant rocket that launches things into space? All that fuel is getting converted into the kinetic and potential energy of the spaceship (and a bunch of waste heat, sound, and light, but let’s ignore that for a moment). When you want to get back to the ground, that rocket’s worth of energy has to be shed, and the heat shield converts kinetic and potential energy into heat allowing a nice, soft, touchdown.

If you imagine the SLS rocket’s plume of fire being blasted onto the heat shield, you’re in the ballpark of the kinds of energy that shield needs to deal with. It’s crazy cool stuff.

Long story short, NASA doesn’t trust the heat shield, they don’t trust Orion, they don’t trust their 4.2 billion dollar SLS rocket, so they made a fully functional test mission where the only missing ingredient was someone brave (pronounced “dumb”) enough to risk their life aboard, and I’m the dummy taking over for Moonikin.

After the launch there’s about fifteen minutes of total euphoria. Again, the adrenaline. It worked: I’m in space! I spend about ten minutes just playing with a floating, zero-g Skor bar. You want a fascinating time in zero-g, try spinning something along its longitudinal axis and watch instabilities quickly transform the rotation into one about its normal axis. For the non-engineers. If you start it spinning around its length it will change to spinning end over end.

If you want to see something weird, watch adults trying to learn new basic skills they never picked up in childhood, they act just like babies. There’s giggling (when do adults giggle?), there’s clumsy, handsy, grabbing. There’s wide eyed wonder at the basic operation of the world. Jess didn’t know how to use a broom when we met, grow up living the good life and you’ve got maids for that. When I handed her a broom for the first time, she held it out, at arms length, perpendicular to the ground, with both hands a foot apart on the shaft, and then basically pivoted at the hips and tried to ‘sweep’ that way. Most damn adorable thing you’ve ever seen. Anyways, I can feel my face smiling as I play with the Skor bar.

But after that I start feeling bad for the Moonikin team. They’re not thinking that some space felon has come along and is feeding them fake data. They’re down on the ground thinking they screwed up, or something broke, and a ton of work they put into this project has been a very public, very embarrassing, failure.

If there’s a victim here, it’s them. The good news is I don’t have to keep them waiting long. An hour and a half after launch and Artemis I kicks again with the trans-lunar injection burn. 18 minutes of gentle thrust and I’m on my way… Committed. Artemis I no longer has enough fuel to turn around and come home. We’re going to the moon and there’s not a thing NASA can do about it!

It was time to fess up. If I was a real astronaut, they would have given me a headset tied into the ship’s computer. As is, I use a handheld backup from the commander’s console.

Click. “Mission Control, this is Alex Whelm aboard Artemis I. Over.” Click.

When they put me on trial for this, I hope I get to see the video of the control room right now.

***
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 instagram (@authornathanhgreen), my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen), sign up on my website to be part of my daily mailing list (www.authornathanhgreen.com).

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.