Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 4
November 19th, 2022
I probably should have been telling you about the moon.
Ever buy one of those “gardening for idiots” kits where you just take it home, add the exact amount of water shown on an included plastic measuring cup, then watch in amazement as a little green shoot get bigger every time you look away? That’s kind of like what it was like watching the moon get bigger. And bigger. And bigger.
There are four really big days on the mission calendar. The first was launch. The last is “landing”, or as I like to call it, ‘finding out just how smart those folks in heat shield design really are’. But between those two you’ve also got entry into lunar orbit and exit from lunar orbit. Entry is coming up.
Now look, you don’t stow away on a spaceship and spend the rest of your life in jail (actually saying that phrase aloud kind of puts a cold lump in my stomach. I am probably going to have to ask Mark to get me a lawyer and give me an estimate on the damages for all this). Anyways… You don’t do that without absolutely, annoyingly, “Alex, you’ve got to stop talking about space!”, loving this stuff.
And lunar insertion is really, really, cool. Imagine that NASA is some kind of famous sharpshooter. To pick one famous example at random: the hunter Orion. And Orion takes an arrow from his belt, points up at the moon, and fires.
For five days that arrow flies straight up towards the moon, or more accurately, where the moon is going to be, but Orion’s not trying to actually hit the moon. No, that would be too easy. Orion’s real target is just off to the moon’s side, so that the arrow passes into the exact right window for a powered flyby and entry burn.
An accountant would appreciate the game NASA’s playing. Artemis I only has so much fuel onboard and it’s all about the best lunar orbit to require the smallest change in energy to enter, and exit, it. Changing velocity to enter, or exit, an orbit kind of sucks from a fuel use perspective. But what would really, really, “uh we don’t have enough fuel to do this and are going to die in space” suck, would be missing our marks and having to change position as well.
How close did Orion have to be to hit its marks in space six days away from him? If you imagine a regular arrow range, and you imagine that Orion had an arrow the width of a human hair, and he was aiming for a bullseye the size of a grain of sand, that would be about fifty times easier a shot to make than this one.
In fairness to Orion in this competition - NASA cheated and used a few correction burns along the way. In fairness to NASA, they haven’t been very big correction burns.
So, what happens when that “powered flyby burn” hits the day after tomorrow? I’ll strap into my seat to get ready for the nine-g acceleration. Just kidding. You’ve seen Neil Armstrong bouncing around on the moon, right? That’s the moon’s gravity on the surface, those are the kinds of forces we’re working with. You try for a hair-on-fire flyby and the slingshot’s rope breaks and you fly off into space.
People always over-estimate how much force is required to do things in space. A half an hour of nice slow, sub 1-g acceleration has a bigger impact than a minute of blackout inducing, 9-g madness.
NASA’s doing their best to keep me busy, but I can only check so many readouts before this little voice in the back of my mind starts yammering away. I wonder if I could ask Mark to find out what Jess thinks about this whole thing. I mean look, I can guess what she thinks. Her ex has gone off and done exactly the kind of thing she thought was dumb, only this time he’s gotten himself into a world of trouble. But it is a little impressive right? She probably wouldn’t admit that to Mark though.
Maybe I could give her a call or write a letter. I think I need a distraction. Dinner time.
I’m starting to regret not just packing butter. I hate everything about chocolate bars. They’re too sweet, they make my teeth ache, and they’re just calories that do nothing for you.
Look, I get it, no one wants a lecture on their diet. I swear this isn’t some hippie mumbo jumbo about kombucha or whatever the hell. I’m an aerospace engineer and I think like one. So what’s the engineering approach to food?
First you identify your objectives, 1. All the calories and nutrients you need. 2. The alleviation of hunger. 3. Taste. Now you impose your constraints on those requirements: A. Money. B. preparation time. C. limiting calories to daily requirement.
My problem, on Earth anyways, with chips, and chocolate, and soda, was that they are way too calorie expensive. I’ve got a 2K daily budget to work with and I could easily consume 500 calories a day of liquids that would do nothing to alleviate hunger. Yeah, they taste nice, but there are three factors, and “junk” food gets 25% on the test.
Leafy green vegetables get 66%, you can probably guess where they lose points. But when you start playing with some veggie recipes - for example chop up cauliflower, add some olive oil, salt, and pepper, and bake at 350 for 19 minutes on parchment paper. That’s reasonably tasty actually. Overall score 85%
Sweet potatoes as well, same cooking instructions but this time cooked for 32 minutes, and damn… 93%.
Anyways I attacked my diet as an optimization problem. I figured out every food with an 80% or higher score, then priced them all out in terms of cash and calories, and bing bang boom, I had me a diet.
Jess never got into the spirit of that system.
For this mission I’d picked Skor bars (7%) because of their caloric density per gram. But they are doing nothing to make me feel full. At least I’m not weak from hunger.
I wonder what Jess is having for dinner.
*****
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 probably should have been telling you about the moon.
Ever buy one of those “gardening for idiots” kits where you just take it home, add the exact amount of water shown on an included plastic measuring cup, then watch in amazement as a little green shoot get bigger every time you look away? That’s kind of like what it was like watching the moon get bigger. And bigger. And bigger.
There are four really big days on the mission calendar. The first was launch. The last is “landing”, or as I like to call it, ‘finding out just how smart those folks in heat shield design really are’. But between those two you’ve also got entry into lunar orbit and exit from lunar orbit. Entry is coming up.
Now look, you don’t stow away on a spaceship and spend the rest of your life in jail (actually saying that phrase aloud kind of puts a cold lump in my stomach. I am probably going to have to ask Mark to get me a lawyer and give me an estimate on the damages for all this). Anyways… You don’t do that without absolutely, annoyingly, “Alex, you’ve got to stop talking about space!”, loving this stuff.
And lunar insertion is really, really, cool. Imagine that NASA is some kind of famous sharpshooter. To pick one famous example at random: the hunter Orion. And Orion takes an arrow from his belt, points up at the moon, and fires.
For five days that arrow flies straight up towards the moon, or more accurately, where the moon is going to be, but Orion’s not trying to actually hit the moon. No, that would be too easy. Orion’s real target is just off to the moon’s side, so that the arrow passes into the exact right window for a powered flyby and entry burn.
An accountant would appreciate the game NASA’s playing. Artemis I only has so much fuel onboard and it’s all about the best lunar orbit to require the smallest change in energy to enter, and exit, it. Changing velocity to enter, or exit, an orbit kind of sucks from a fuel use perspective. But what would really, really, “uh we don’t have enough fuel to do this and are going to die in space” suck, would be missing our marks and having to change position as well.
How close did Orion have to be to hit its marks in space six days away from him? If you imagine a regular arrow range, and you imagine that Orion had an arrow the width of a human hair, and he was aiming for a bullseye the size of a grain of sand, that would be about fifty times easier a shot to make than this one.
In fairness to Orion in this competition - NASA cheated and used a few correction burns along the way. In fairness to NASA, they haven’t been very big correction burns.
So, what happens when that “powered flyby burn” hits the day after tomorrow? I’ll strap into my seat to get ready for the nine-g acceleration. Just kidding. You’ve seen Neil Armstrong bouncing around on the moon, right? That’s the moon’s gravity on the surface, those are the kinds of forces we’re working with. You try for a hair-on-fire flyby and the slingshot’s rope breaks and you fly off into space.
People always over-estimate how much force is required to do things in space. A half an hour of nice slow, sub 1-g acceleration has a bigger impact than a minute of blackout inducing, 9-g madness.
NASA’s doing their best to keep me busy, but I can only check so many readouts before this little voice in the back of my mind starts yammering away. I wonder if I could ask Mark to find out what Jess thinks about this whole thing. I mean look, I can guess what she thinks. Her ex has gone off and done exactly the kind of thing she thought was dumb, only this time he’s gotten himself into a world of trouble. But it is a little impressive right? She probably wouldn’t admit that to Mark though.
Maybe I could give her a call or write a letter. I think I need a distraction. Dinner time.
I’m starting to regret not just packing butter. I hate everything about chocolate bars. They’re too sweet, they make my teeth ache, and they’re just calories that do nothing for you.
Look, I get it, no one wants a lecture on their diet. I swear this isn’t some hippie mumbo jumbo about kombucha or whatever the hell. I’m an aerospace engineer and I think like one. So what’s the engineering approach to food?
First you identify your objectives, 1. All the calories and nutrients you need. 2. The alleviation of hunger. 3. Taste. Now you impose your constraints on those requirements: A. Money. B. preparation time. C. limiting calories to daily requirement.
My problem, on Earth anyways, with chips, and chocolate, and soda, was that they are way too calorie expensive. I’ve got a 2K daily budget to work with and I could easily consume 500 calories a day of liquids that would do nothing to alleviate hunger. Yeah, they taste nice, but there are three factors, and “junk” food gets 25% on the test.
Leafy green vegetables get 66%, you can probably guess where they lose points. But when you start playing with some veggie recipes - for example chop up cauliflower, add some olive oil, salt, and pepper, and bake at 350 for 19 minutes on parchment paper. That’s reasonably tasty actually. Overall score 85%
Sweet potatoes as well, same cooking instructions but this time cooked for 32 minutes, and damn… 93%.
Anyways I attacked my diet as an optimization problem. I figured out every food with an 80% or higher score, then priced them all out in terms of cash and calories, and bing bang boom, I had me a diet.
Jess never got into the spirit of that system.
For this mission I’d picked Skor bars (7%) because of their caloric density per gram. But they are doing nothing to make me feel full. At least I’m not weak from hunger.
I wonder what Jess is having for dinner.
*****
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
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