November 24th, 2022

So, Jess was right. I’m fucked. Fuckety, fuck, fuck, fucked.

You’d think I’d be more pissed off about having killed myself than the 4.2 billion dollar Orion capsule that I’ve broken. But I’m feeling way worse about the capsule right now. Isn’t that weird? Like who cares about an already semi-broken ship compared to their own life? Well, actually Captain Picard would. What would he do in this situation?

“Computer, lights!”

Nope. Still pitch black.

So, what happened is this: I woke up feeling pretty good - considering. I’d basically talked myself into the idea that if Artemis had a button to blow itself up, that button would be pretty clearly labeled as such.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about my time at NASA, it’s that NASA loves to argue with itself about safety issues. I certainly don’t want to say they try to make things idiot proof, but aerospace engineer proof? Actually, that’s worse, idiots don’t break out screwdrivers, soldering irons, and raspberry pi setups when they want to jerry rig something.

Anyways, as long as I’m being kind of semi-reasonable with what I do, I’ll be ok. Right? Wrong. But at the time I thought I was on the right path.

I tried one last call to NASA telling them what I’m about to do, on the off chance they can listen but not be heard, or on the off, off, off chance that they’ve been messing with me and this is when the joking stops.
Nothing. Alright. Frozen Computer Emergency Procedure “Step 1: P. Mod. S. > On.”

I’m saying it aloud, like it’s somehow more official that way. There is a P. Mod. S. button, I’m just not sure whether a little red LED in its center means it’s on or off. I push it. The little red LED in the button’s center starts to blink.

I say some things that are unfit for publication, then push the button again and it goes back to a solid red LED. Whatever jackass though blinking was a good option for an indicator light should be shot. Flashing if 50% more off than a solid light, but it’s 100% more attention grabbing. Which wins? I’m calling solid light “on”, but at this point if I break this thing then NASA has no one but itself to blame.

By the fifth step my back is just plastered with sweat, and by the seventh my fingers are shaking so badly I’m having to use extra effort to making sure I don’t hit anything around the buttons I’m aiming for.

You know what it feels like? Imagine you were dying and there were a thousand shot glasses in front of you, each filled with a slightly different colored liquid. Twenty of the glasses have a cure if you drink them in the right order, the rest have poison. And you have to pick the magenta shot… Now the lilac… Now the falu one…” What’s falu? Exactly.

“RTZ Mn > I” I say. Push. The Orion shuts down. Total black. No more blinking console lights, no more LCD screens, no more cabin lights. Blackness. I can’t even see my hands. It just so happened the Orion’s windows don’t have a view of the sun for this step, so the only lights are from pin prick stars shining in through Orion’s small windows.

The emergency manual hadn’t warned me this was going to happen. We were right in the middle of a procedure. I couldn’t even see well enough to try and find the button to push it back to where it was.
By the way: space problems. I was “sitting” in the commander’s chair, but that’s a euphemism. Really, I was floating against a twisted, zig zagging, chair that different parts of my back and legs and butt would bump into every few seconds at random. If it wasn’t for the seat belt… i guess it’s actually a harness… anyways if I wasn’t strapped in, I would have just slowly drifted away. In space, chairs suck.

You want to know something else that sucks? Drifting through a totally dark Orion capsule on your way to a bulkhead that you can’t see but you’re going to bump into at any second, all without any feeling of motion. If it hadn’t been for Orion’s windows, and the points of starlight out of them, I would have completely lost my orientation and thrown up.

What should have taken about 20 seconds with light ended up turning into a half hour ordeal. But I eventually did find a flashlight.

If NASA ever wants to pull a really good prank on astronauts, turn off the lights, and have the cabin speakers play what sounds like something scurrying over metal. Even absent the sound, the capsule is spooky as hell.

When I unpress “RTZ Mn” nothing happens, guess it can’t just be “unpressed”.

So, question time. Do I keep going through the computer freeze checklist, or am I now into the total power loss checklist?

I eat a Skor bar, in the dark. I don’t want to waste those flashlight batteries. It’s been a long day so I also might as well get some sleep and come at this fresh tomorrow.

***

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