November 25th, 2022

There’s opportunity in crisis. Never do two stupid things at the same time. Haste can make any crisis worse. Indecision is worse than wrong decision. The right tool for the right job. There isn’t anything duct tape can’t fix.

The thing about sayings is that you can usually find two completely contradictory ones for any situation - save and except for leading horses to water and pulling cows up trees, those two are just great.

Point is, you technically could look at my situation as a good thing. Somehow, in my button mashing, I’d managed to turn off Orion. And as we all know, the best way to fix a frozen computer is to turn it off and on again. I’d inadvertently turned it off - along with everything else for that matter. Really, at this point, I just need to find an ‘on’ button, and that should be relatively easy… right?

It gets even better from there. The frozen computer checklist is 50 pages long and involves doing things all the hell over the Orion capsule. Probably it’s about diagnosing the problem and fixing it gently instead of just doing a giant power off/on switch flip (which can’t be great for Orion).

The power restart checklist is only one page long and all of the buttons for it seem like they are on a single console, and all pretty obviously labeled. That’s nice.

What’s less nice is that the computer freeze checklist involved a lot of little, anonymous, unassuming buttons. Sure, they were buttons on a spaceship and each one had the potential to kill me in slow and painful ways. But if there was a “blow the ship up” switch you’d figure NASA would have put it behind a plastic cover, and made it red and foreboding…

All the switches on the powerup checklist look exactly as foreboding as that. Plastic protective covers over them, red and yellow caution paint around them, and a very “push this at the wrong moment and everyone dies,” feel to them.

I eat a Skor bar. 500 calories a day is a crappy diet and if I’m going to die, I’d like to do it feeling less hungry.

I feel like if this were a proper space drama there would be something I need to do before I do this. Like move ballast around the ship or rig up some kind of contraption to keep an airlock closed because the reboot cycle automatically opens it.

My problem here is that I literally don’t know how any of this stuff actually works, so I’m just a slightly well educated button masher with poor decision making skills. Well, no point to being a button masher who’s afraid to mash buttons.

“Main Breaker - Reset,” I don’t die.

“Main battery - On,” I don’t die.

“Power Dis. - Auto,” I don’t die.

Three minutes of not dying later and I flip the plastic cover open on a red button labeled “master power”, and say, “On!”

The Orion’s cabin lights flicker and come on. The computers start to hum! The LCD screens burst alive with lines of code cascading over them! I was less excited the first time I saw boobs.

When the boot up finishes, the displays flip back to the same screens they had been frozen on, this time numbers slowly ticking away. I’m reaching for the radio when a dialog box pops up on the display in front of me - and the screen freezes like that.

“Error: Comms Frequency Format” The popup box is labeled.

The contents read:

“Freq. Invalid: Alex:Faulty_ARC-5sensor_must_be_disconnected>>EVA>PANEL17>CABL_BUNDL3>CUT_GOLD+RED_WIRE>RESTART”.

I try the radio. Dead. The computer’s back in a deep freeze and I’m looking at that error message, reading it again, and again, and again.

I need another chocolate bar. Actually, I need a bourbon, but a chocolate bar is all I’ve got.

It takes me four hours to be sure of what NASA’s asking me to do. Why so long? Because I really, really, really, really, want to be wrong about my first impression of that message. I’m just not.

Question: What’s wrong with the ship? Answer: The ARC-5 sensor is faulty. It must be feeding data into the computer that’s unexpected and causing a freeze. Let’s ignore how frustrating it is that NASA’s software is doing that.

Solution: Disconnect the ARC-5 sensor. Sounds simple enough. What is the ARC-5 sensor and should one want to disconnect it, where would one go?

Among the hundreds of index pages in the emergency manual I found two entries for the ARC-5 sensor. Both entries are for checklists relating to Orion’s lunar altimeters. Ok, so it’s some kind of sensor that measures how far Orion is from the moon. Which would explain why this issue popped up in lunar orbit.

So how to disconnect it? Thus begins the real fun of NASA’s message.

You ever wonder whether it’s actually you who’s wrong and everyone else that’s right? Maybe aluminum really should be pronounced alu-min-ium. Maybe vehicle really should be pronounced Vee-hickle. Because, as much as I try, I literally can’t pronounce the phrase extra-vehicular-activity without saying it as extra-Vee-hick-u-lar-activity.

EVA. NASA wants me, the untrained button masher, to go out into space, alone, and tinker with their multi-billion dollar spaceship. I want to put that in context for you, because it kind of sounds semi-reasonable when you just say it. I mean here I am, in space, and when you’re in space, at some point, you’re going to put on a space suit and do something outside the ship, it’s almost expected, like going to Nevada and visiting the grand canyon.

But NASA literally spends years training astronauts for this. Just putting on a space suit is a two man - three hour - job that is practiced again and again and again, because it is so easy to get wrong.

I also do not have a space suit. I have a flight suit (not its official name, but the space suit is the white one, and the flight suit is the orange one). One might think they are similar, except for the color, but they are not.

Let’s say you want to spend the next five hours floating around in space in a space suit. Here’s what that suit needs to do. First of all, it has to hold pressure. It isn’t enough to just have extra air because if it leaks, those leaks are going to push the astronaut around, so it can’t do that.

Second it needs to deliver “air” to the astronaut. You’re probably thinking oxygen. But oxygen isn’t air. Air is a mixture of mostly nitrogen, a dash of oxygen, and a very, very, small percentage of CO2. Too much oxygen and not enough nitrogen? That’s actually toxic over the long haul, and explosive. Not enough oxygen? Ironically that hold your breath feeling comes from the body detecting too much CO2, not a lack of oxygen. You won’t notice it if you’re running low on oxygen, you’ll just start to get giddy, euphoric, and then… sleepy. Dead sleepy.

But that’s an easy problem, really just making sure two valves get twisted in the right ways, compared to the much bigger problem of CO2. Too much CO2 and, well it’s the plastic bag over your head experience. Anyways, in a space suit there are filters that absorb the CO2. The only other alternative is to flush out perfectly good oxygen and nitrogen just because they’re mixed in with the CO2.

A space suit has a complex nitrogen, oxygen, and CO2 filter life support system.

Space is also super hot and super cold without there being a lot of good ways to cool stuff down. Space suits have internal water systems to keep the astronaut at a comfortable temperature, and even then it’s not easy.

There’s also the whole “suit” part of things. People imagine clothing that an astronaut can put on and take off. Really though, you should be thinking mini-space ship. The ISS uses Russian space suits that are popular because they are the only ones in existence that can be put on, or taken off, by one person. They accomplish this by literally having a metal hatch on the back of the suit that you climb in and out of. From crotch to top of the head, the entire back is just metal hatch. Other space suits rely on segments with pressure seals and you kind of assemble the suit around a person.

A flight suit does absolutely none of that stuff. You’re only supposed to wear it in the Orion, and then while you’re strapped into your chair, and instead of all those systems I just talked about the flight suit plugs into Orion and it’s Orion’s systems that handle all that stuff.

It’s also not airtight. The hell you say. No, seriously.

If, and only if, you’re wearing a flight suit that was specifically fitted for you (and you haven’t been on a crash diet and losing weight like crazy), and you’re in a seated position taking advantage of the pressure from being strapped into your seat, then a layer inside the suit made up of overlapping rubber segments will hold a very low pressure seal (and leak moderately while doing so). But you’re plugged into Orion and have all the air in the world so why worry? The pressure the flight suit holds is equivalent to 30,000 feet on earth, or less than half of what you’d get on a beach.

Next problem… I kind of threw away some of those rubber segments back on Earth. Moonikin’s feet were smaller than mine, and my thighs were a lot bigger than its. So the custom made segments just didn’t fit and I tossed them.

Next. I literally don’t even know how to work the airlock. I went and looked. It doesn’t have any buttons that say either “close” or “open”. So thanks for that NASA.

So, EVA, to panel 17. The emergency operations manual, which I’m really starting to think of as a bible at this point, does have a sketch of Orion’s external panels, and there is a panel 17. It’s on the other side of the ship from the airlock, but it exists.

Now once I open that panel - and by the way I have no idea if it’s riveted, screwed, or just latched, shut - I have to find a cable bundle 3.

Question: Do you think that when I open the panel and see a bunch of bundles of cables, there will be some kind of label to tell me which is number 3? Do you think NASA intends me to find a diagram of panel 17 hidden somewhere inside this, literally, 7,482 page emergency manual before I go out there to try this? Or do you think I’m supposed to go out there and it’s the third bundle from the left, or the top which I’m supposed to work on? Because I’ve got no idea.

I can imagine the engineering classes of the future, “so there Alex was, wondering what he should do next, all the while not realizing that the answer was right there in the emergency manual if he’d just thought to look up…” Look up what?

I’m too angry to even read a book.

***

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