November 26th, 2022

“Hi, this is the mummified corpse floating outside the Orion spaceship. I can’t tell you how curious I am about who you are! Did Orion just die in lunar orbit and you’re some kind of space salvage person in the distant future? Are you some kind of explorer and Artemis I has become one of those lost ships of the golden age of discovery? Did NASA put together a salvage mission and you’re an astronaut?

Did NASA ever end up going public with the fact that one Alex Whelm stowed away aboard Artemis I and died while trying to repair a faulty sensor causing a computer crash. Because if you’re reading this - that’s exactly what happened.

On the off chance it’s still the early 2000’s when you find this, I’d like to ask a favor. There’s this girl back in Florida, Jessica Hargrave. Could you let her know what happened to me? Let her know I’m sorry that I never really valued how she was trying to help me grow as a person, but that she did make me a better man and I can see that now. Let her know I love her, and she was in my thoughts until the end.

Also, let NASA know their repair instructions sucked!”

You’d think I would have written a goodbye note back on Earth before I left. I probably should have, this is crazy dangerous and was always going to be. Fact of the matter though, it didn’t even occur to me until I stepped into the airlock, and then writing a quick note seemed like a great excuse to avoid going out.

Inventory: You remember that little emergency tool kit? I got that and put it into the thigh pocket on my flight suit. Then I imagined being out in space, opening the case, and all the tools bursting out and floating away in different directions. So, I opened it inside Orion’s cabin, and that’s exactly what happened. Thus, I put a different tool in a different pocket until my flight suit was basically full. The wire cutters went into my right thigh pocket, an adjustable wrench went into my left thigh pocket, the mini-flashlight went into my left forearm pocket, and so on.

For extra fun, I couldn’t find any rope. Rope? You ask. Yeah, rope. See a space suit has little thrusters to let you move around. Puff, puff, puff, and you drift over to the other side of Orion. Puff, puff, pull, and you park yourself within hand distance of hatch 17. Puff, puff, puff, you fly back to the airlock safe and sound. A flight suit on the other hand lacks these things, and so the second you drift away from Orion by more than your arm’s length, you’re lost in space and will die. Thus, tying oneself to the ship would be a good idea - if I had rope. That might have been what one of those plastic ballast cubes were replacing.

Actually, if we’re going to start getting raw about things, how about the fact that the damn space suits are still not ready despite being in development since forever. That’s right folks, NASA is having a heck of a time buying space suits. Not bitter.

You’re probably curious about my legs, since I don’t have the rubber pressure pieces for them, am I just going out into space with bare legs? That would be a bad idea.

It probably wouldn’t kill me. But it could well kill my legs, and I use my legs a lot.

However, my legs are pretty undemanding all things considered. They don’t breathe and I don’t even really need to move them around much. The only real danger that space presents to them is a pressure difference. So, I’ve wrapped both my legs, and feet, tightly with duct tape. Thankfully the rubber pressure bladder underwear is easier to get on this time, and I’ve put about thirty loops of duct tape at the interface point with my legs so that it hopefully won’t leak too much.

The only other thing I’ve got with me is the leg sized air tank from the emergency atmospheric controls. I removed it and attached it to my flight suit’s air intake at my thigh. The valves are compatible, and the tank has a regulator on its valve. Yes, NASA does do a lot of things right.

I was complaining before about the airlock controls. That was also a bit unjust of me. They aren’t that complicated - if you’re a scientist - and I did figure them out.

So, time to do something stupid! I get into the airlock, seal the inner door, and start to depressurize the airlock. When pressure’s at about 50% the regulator on the tank opens automatically and starts to replace the air being lost through the ill fitting rubber pieces, with frigid air from the emergency tank. I immediately stop the decompression. Thankfully there’s a big “abort” button that’s easy to push.

I spend a few minutes feeling stupid. PV=nRT. Idiot PV equals idiot nRT.

The issue is this. When compressed gas expands, such as when it is being released from a high pressure tank into a flight suit, its temperature drops. Which means as soon as that vent on my suit opened, I got a blast of pretty chilly air.

The problem is that this isn’t a “temperature” thing, it’s an energy thing. That probably doesn’t make much sense. Let me explain. Let’s say it’s a cool day and you’re sitting out on a patio feeling cold. The cold air washes over you and sucks a bit of energy from your body. You pull your limbs in, you tighten up your collar, you put on a hat, you do what you can to reduce the energy you’re losing to the air. You have a temperature problem and you can mitigate it by insulating yourself from that temperature difference.

That’s a bit like being poor and owing the bank some money. There are transaction charges, interest, and you can’t afford to do the things you want to do. It sucks. But you cut back as much as you can and it’s a long, slow, suck that will make you miserable for months or years.

You’re probably thinking the air flowing through my suit is like that. A cool breeze on a patio. A bank loan. A temperature problem and I could put on a sweater.

No. I’ve got an energy problem. This is like being in debt to Tony Soprano and he wants his fucking money. That’s the expanding gas from a pressure vessel. It demands a certain amount of energy to expand, and it gets colder, and colder, and colder, in order to strip that energy from the space it is expanding into. I’m a nice, balmy 98.6 degrees? It blows in at a chilly 50 - fuck you, where’s my money. I get cold and drop to 95 degrees? Fuck you, where’s my money? It blows in at a frigid 30. I start going into hypothermia? Fuck you, where’s my money? It blows in at 0. It will rip energy out of my body to expand and all the sweaters in the world won’t help. I might make it a few minutes, but not long.

So… How to borrow money from Tony Soprano and live to tell the tale?

The obvious solution is to borrow a tiny amount of money. The less you borrow, the less the vig kills you. I assume vig means interest. I actually don’t know though. Not a good idea to use slang you’re not sure of, but whatever, I’m about to die.

My flight suit is losing air through the rubber joints in the bladder, if I can stop that then I won’t have to borrow as much from Tony.

The obvious solution involves the glue NASA has onboard to patch leaks in the hull. If I put some of that onto the rubber where it overlaps I can lock it in place, even if it’s not a perfect seal, it would improve things. You ever seen the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy is oiling the Tin Man and freeing up his joints? Well I’d be doing the opposite. The more glue I use, the less I can move. Plus, once I glue this together how do I get it off?

Just cut the flight suit off? Ok, but that makes leaving Orion a one shot thing. I’m in space and it would be nice to have a backup if I need it.

How about more duct tape? How much pressure can a piece of duct tape really hold? Let’s use my life to find out!

The trick is putting the duct tape on the inside of the joints. Takes some doing, but I get there eventually.

Attempt 2. This time it’s a lot better. I get to 70% vacuum before the valve opens, and then it’s an open - close - open - close kind of situation. The air’s cold. But I can probably make it a few minutes. After all, I just have to cut a cable.

However, around the same time I’m thinking about a win on that front, my toes start to hurt - a lot. The duct tape on my legs seems to be doing its job, and even my feet feel ok, but my toes are screaming. Sorry piggies…

I get a bit of luck when the outer airlock hatch opens. Just outside the hatch, on the exterior of Orion, is a panel with four spooled cables. I clip one onto a harness point on my flight suit, and I’m off. I have about the same range of motion as your ninety year old grandfather, but so long as I go slowly, I make progress.

For the first few minutes I’m actually glad for the cold air. I’m sweating. Between my air tank seeming to have a mind of its own and insisting that I hug it against my body, constantly feeling like I’m drifting away from Orion and going to die in space, and my toes insisting that some madman with a vice is trying to crush them, it’s a pretty stressful experience.

Fortunately for me, panel 17 has a simple hand operated latch to open - which I do.

Unfortunately for me, panel 17 opens into a mysterious world of wires. I’d been imagining a nice, slick, clean layout with maybe, maybe, a half a dozen different wire bundles. Actually, I was really hoping there would be exactly five bundles so I could be sure it was the middle one I needed. Oh my god, I was thinking of Star Trek. Every time they open a hatch in engineering it’s so clean and organized and nice, and that’s what I’d been thinking of. I’m an aerospace engineer and I was taking design tips from Star Trek.

There have to be at least thirty damn bundles running through this thing, and now that I’m not moving, the air blowing into my suit is freezing cold.

I’m going to need my hands, and my left is busy holding me onto Orion, so I let go of the air tank. I’m tethered to it by the air feed anyways… Nope. I grab it back. I’d just had a visions of it slowly twisting and somehow unclasping itself from the vent in my thigh and then happily spinning off into space while I asphyxiate. Ok… I sandwich it between my legs. The pen light is a life saver and I start at the top of the mess. It turns out the cable bundles are clearly labeled (thanks NASA), and it only takes a few minutes to find the third. The problem is that cable bundle 3 has at least thirty different wires, and three of them are potentially red and gold.

If I were naming them, I’d say ‘Sunflower - Crimson’, ‘School Bus - Rust’, and ‘Post-it - Brick’. So what to do? I could cut all three, but that seems needlessly risky. This is a decision that’s being made while arctic-cold air is blasting me in the face, and the madman is turning the toe crusher’s screws.

I’m going with School Bus. If it doesn’t work, and I need to come back out and cut another one, then so be it. Pen away, wire cutters out, snip, then fold up the ends of the wires so they’re not in the way, tuck the bundle of cables back as best I can, close the hatch, and bob’s your uncle.

I’m giving some serious thought to the problem of whether I should close my eyes to try and warm them up, or if they might freeze shut if I do that. The air coming into the suit is insanely cold and I’m getting brain freeze just from the air keeping me alive. I try not to blink.

Once the airlock’s pressurized I pop my helmet and spend a few minutes crying. My eyes hurt something fierce. It takes an hour to get the flight suit off and when I strip the duct tape from my legs I take every strand of hair with them. Why women do this voluntarily…

My toes are purple, throbbing, and I can’t move them. It’s hard not to look at them and imagine them turning black and dead. If I had to amputate them, the flight suit’s survival kit has a knife in it… I throw up imagining that. Pro-tip: don’t throw up in space! I’ll be smelling it for days.

I really should try to reboot the computer, but everything hurts. I think I strained my back moving myself around on the space walk, my toes are on fire, my head feels like someone took a hammer to it, and my eye balls are cold against my skull in their sockets. I’m going to bed.

Hey, here’s a funny question: if I cut the wrong wire and I need to fix it, how the heck am I going to do that? Good thoughts to have as you’re drifting off to sleep. But that’s a life-or-death problem for 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