Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 8
November 23rd, 2022
Yeah, the computer is definitely frozen.
That’s really bad because it’s the computer that’s going to fire the engines to get me home and ensure I don’t die a slow, agonizing, death in the cold of space orbiting the moon.
‘That’s impossible! Those computers are triple redundant and can’t just freeze!’ NASA would probably be saying that right now, if the computer wasn’t frozen and they could. But if it’s totally impossible, then why does that double phonebook thick emergency procedures manual have a section for it?
The other thing is, NASA must be trying to fix this. They must have a way to reboot Orion from the ground and have their own fifty page checklist they’re working through. If I start pushing buttons - which they explicitly told me not to do - I might mess up their reboot procedures. Right? I mean that makes sense to me. Maybe they need Sec. Bus. C to not be 0 (or, more accurately B. Sec. C.) and I screw everything up for them.
I eat another Skor bar, and I really think I’m starting to form a negative association here.
Anyways. Reality check. This is the second day the computer is frozen. If NASA have a fifty page checklist that’s about a page per hour. Eventually they’re going to run out of things to try.
I take a hard look at the emergency checklist. The computer failure section is fifty pages long and on first reading I understood about 15% of it.
Take step 47(r) for example. “Set Sec. Bus. C. > 0” I spent three hours looking for a button labeled “Sec. Bus. C.”, “S. Bus. C”, “S.B. C”, “Sec. B. C”, or “Sc Bs C”. Closest I found was “B. Se. C.” I’m pretty sure the reason I’m not seeing the options and buttons it’s telling me to mess with is because they are in sub-menus of the LCD display. Which may, or may not, be working.
A real astronaut would look at this checklist and go “well we can’t do that, that’s in the broken display, so skip it and move on. Me, I go hunting around Orion for anything that looks remotely like it would fit the bill. Because I don’t know what I don’t know. Wonderful.
If I close my eyes and imagine what Mark would be saying to me right now, it’s pretty easy: “Look Alex, just sit tight, we’ve got every computer engineer at NASA working this. I’ll let you know if there’s anything you can do to help.”
It’s pretty hard to imagine Mark saying, “Alright Alex, I’ve got some bad news, we can’t get this fixed from our end and we’re going to need you to take your best shot at that emergency manual. Boy, I wish I could give you some help figuring it out, but you’re just going to have to do your best. Now just start poking at stuff blindly and fingers crossed!”
Fuck.
And I know for sure what Jess would say. “No! Alex, no, seriously. You break half the stuff you try to fix. You’ve got to stop taking things apart!”
My apartment back on Earth was a two bedroom place. One for me to sleep in, the other for ‘projects’. Jess hated the project room. I really just don’t think she ever trusted me. To Jess, whether something worked or not wasn’t as important as the integrity of the manufacturer’s seal. I think she always thought that when I fixed my tv it meant it could randomly burst into flames, or a hacked soda stream machine could somehow poison us.
In fairness there were a lot of things that broke that I failed to repair. But I almost never took something that was working and broke it through an improvement attempt.
You want to know the biggest problem with relationships? In engineering when Part-A fits into Part-B that’s the same thing as saying that Part-B fits into Part-A. In a relationship Person-A can really love Person-B, but Person-B doesn’t have to love Person-A back. Or, as Jess said, Person-B doesn’t have to be “compatible” with Person-A, even though Person-A thinks he is compatible with her.
You know, I’ve set another record - longest without communications with Earth. I can imagine it now, a classroom of engineers a hundred years into the future, “now remember, no matter what you tell people, they can generally wait patiently for no more than 48 hours before they start pushing buttons and trying to save themselves. Just look at Alex Whelm, who made it 51 hours and 28 minutes before he doomed himself by trying to fix things.
I try distracting myself with some science fiction. I get about half-way through Dune, and I rage quit. He can see the future?! Boy wouldn’t that be a useful skill for me to have in my current situation! I’m a damn aerospace engineer and I can’t figure out what to do when the computer on a damn spaceship freezes? That’s the big problem with fiction. You can ask yourself, “what would Insert Heroic and Brilliant Protagonist Here do in this situation?” But you’re not gambling with their life, you’re gambling with your own.
Near as I can figure there does have to be a tipping point that’s based on time. After some time X NASA will have exhausted all it’s good options for repairs and me, incompetently pushing buttons, will become the statistical best bet. 48 hours. It doesn’t sound like that long. But I’m also supposed to be doing correction burns and every day without the computer is a day I get further and further off course.
I’m going to get some sleep, and in the morning, I start pushing buttons.
***
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
Yeah, the computer is definitely frozen.
That’s really bad because it’s the computer that’s going to fire the engines to get me home and ensure I don’t die a slow, agonizing, death in the cold of space orbiting the moon.
‘That’s impossible! Those computers are triple redundant and can’t just freeze!’ NASA would probably be saying that right now, if the computer wasn’t frozen and they could. But if it’s totally impossible, then why does that double phonebook thick emergency procedures manual have a section for it?
The other thing is, NASA must be trying to fix this. They must have a way to reboot Orion from the ground and have their own fifty page checklist they’re working through. If I start pushing buttons - which they explicitly told me not to do - I might mess up their reboot procedures. Right? I mean that makes sense to me. Maybe they need Sec. Bus. C to not be 0 (or, more accurately B. Sec. C.) and I screw everything up for them.
I eat another Skor bar, and I really think I’m starting to form a negative association here.
Anyways. Reality check. This is the second day the computer is frozen. If NASA have a fifty page checklist that’s about a page per hour. Eventually they’re going to run out of things to try.
I take a hard look at the emergency checklist. The computer failure section is fifty pages long and on first reading I understood about 15% of it.
Take step 47(r) for example. “Set Sec. Bus. C. > 0” I spent three hours looking for a button labeled “Sec. Bus. C.”, “S. Bus. C”, “S.B. C”, “Sec. B. C”, or “Sc Bs C”. Closest I found was “B. Se. C.” I’m pretty sure the reason I’m not seeing the options and buttons it’s telling me to mess with is because they are in sub-menus of the LCD display. Which may, or may not, be working.
A real astronaut would look at this checklist and go “well we can’t do that, that’s in the broken display, so skip it and move on. Me, I go hunting around Orion for anything that looks remotely like it would fit the bill. Because I don’t know what I don’t know. Wonderful.
If I close my eyes and imagine what Mark would be saying to me right now, it’s pretty easy: “Look Alex, just sit tight, we’ve got every computer engineer at NASA working this. I’ll let you know if there’s anything you can do to help.”
It’s pretty hard to imagine Mark saying, “Alright Alex, I’ve got some bad news, we can’t get this fixed from our end and we’re going to need you to take your best shot at that emergency manual. Boy, I wish I could give you some help figuring it out, but you’re just going to have to do your best. Now just start poking at stuff blindly and fingers crossed!”
Fuck.
And I know for sure what Jess would say. “No! Alex, no, seriously. You break half the stuff you try to fix. You’ve got to stop taking things apart!”
My apartment back on Earth was a two bedroom place. One for me to sleep in, the other for ‘projects’. Jess hated the project room. I really just don’t think she ever trusted me. To Jess, whether something worked or not wasn’t as important as the integrity of the manufacturer’s seal. I think she always thought that when I fixed my tv it meant it could randomly burst into flames, or a hacked soda stream machine could somehow poison us.
In fairness there were a lot of things that broke that I failed to repair. But I almost never took something that was working and broke it through an improvement attempt.
You want to know the biggest problem with relationships? In engineering when Part-A fits into Part-B that’s the same thing as saying that Part-B fits into Part-A. In a relationship Person-A can really love Person-B, but Person-B doesn’t have to love Person-A back. Or, as Jess said, Person-B doesn’t have to be “compatible” with Person-A, even though Person-A thinks he is compatible with her.
You know, I’ve set another record - longest without communications with Earth. I can imagine it now, a classroom of engineers a hundred years into the future, “now remember, no matter what you tell people, they can generally wait patiently for no more than 48 hours before they start pushing buttons and trying to save themselves. Just look at Alex Whelm, who made it 51 hours and 28 minutes before he doomed himself by trying to fix things.
I try distracting myself with some science fiction. I get about half-way through Dune, and I rage quit. He can see the future?! Boy wouldn’t that be a useful skill for me to have in my current situation! I’m a damn aerospace engineer and I can’t figure out what to do when the computer on a damn spaceship freezes? That’s the big problem with fiction. You can ask yourself, “what would Insert Heroic and Brilliant Protagonist Here do in this situation?” But you’re not gambling with their life, you’re gambling with your own.
Near as I can figure there does have to be a tipping point that’s based on time. After some time X NASA will have exhausted all it’s good options for repairs and me, incompetently pushing buttons, will become the statistical best bet. 48 hours. It doesn’t sound like that long. But I’m also supposed to be doing correction burns and every day without the computer is a day I get further and further off course.
I’m going to get some sleep, and in the morning, I start pushing buttons.
***
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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