Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 17
December 2nd, 2022
I swear to god I was woken up by the Red Alert siren from a Shatner Star Trek movie. One of my little quirks, I’m not a good waker-upper. You catch me in the middle of my sleep and whatever dream I was having becomes the initial conditions on reality, and it takes a minute before 1+1=2 again.
The alert stops. I don’t know exactly how long it was playing, five seconds, ten seconds, depends on how long it took to wake me up in the first place.
Orion’s alarm for radiation was the Apollo 13, airplane cockpit, shrill buzzy kind of thing.
But there’s no going back to sleep after something like that, and if for no other reason than to make sure I’m not crazy I “get up” (and by the way if you think it’s hard to get your day started when you climb out of bed, walk over to your coffee machine, and pour yourself a warm cup, you can’t even imagine what it feels like when you’re always, always, just peacefully floating wherever you are, so comfy, so warm, so easy to just close your eyes… And not a drop of coffee aboard).
“Mark, am I going crazy? I thought I just heard an alarm,” I said, no need to tell him what alarm. By the way, do you think Starfleet would change their alarm sound every few decades? Or like the captain of every ship gets to pick from a list like a phone ring tone?
“Not going crazy Alex, that shouldn’t have happened, and we fixed it on our end. Nothing to worry about.”
I’ve only got ten Skor bars left, and I’m really hungry. Eat one now and be slightly less hungry all day? Or save it for dinner and fall asleep with a not-totally-empty stomach? Ahh the glorious choices of space travel.
I eat the Skor bar. Future Alex can be angry with me; he usually is. Speaking of things future Alex is going to be angry with me about. Aside from another exciting day of septuple checking valves and gauges, I’m going to write Jess a letter. I know what you’re thinking: ‘Oh Alex no, don’t write a pathetic letter to your ex trying to win her back!’
Don’t worry! This one is going to be classy!
Red Alert! Only the first couple of tones play, and then it’s gone again. “Mark, just had it go off again. What’s up?”
“Yeah…” he draws the word out, “we’re working that, Alex. Nothing you need to worry about. This one’s a Charlie problem, you’re fine.”
Why is the flight director working a problem on the ground that I don’t need to worry about? Why does a non-standard alarm keep going off? Why isn’t Mark telling me about some error in the ship’s food rehydration system or something bonkers like that?
You know what I hate? Rhetorical questions when my life is on the line. I give the old instrument panel a once over. Nothing red and blinking leaps out at me. So that’s good. The radio controls do have a caution warning. It’s one of those triangles made of three pieces of string with an exclamation mark inside it, and then X2 besides that. Just a small icon at the top of the display.
Then it flashes clear. That’s weird. So, it’s some kind of radio problem, but I can talk to Mark just fine. Just a technical error? But why would a radio sub-system error play the Star Trek red alert sound?
Interesting thing about rhetorical questions: sometimes they have an answer. Why would a NASA engineer, someone very much like me, program in a Star Trek Red Alert sound? Answer: They thought it would be funny.
No way that went through an official approval. This has to be something buried so deep in the radio system’s code that no one even bothered to test it out.
A problem that even NASA thought wouldn’t come up, and a problem that the engineer working on it thought was funny.
Back to the bible I guess. If you’ve never seen an index that has three library-dictionary-style pages for “radio” then you’re really missing out in life.
No one is ever checking manuals in Star Trek. No one could possibly know this stupid book back to front. You always like to imagine astronauts more like the swash buckling heroes of sea stories, but this whole experience feels more like playing the world’s most complicated board game - with a gun to your head. Can you imagine what the checklists for the Enterprise would look like? Millions of pages. Yet no one is ever checking manuals.
The alarm goes off again! This time though I look up in time to see a dialogue box pop up on the radio LCD “Incoming Distress…” and it’s gone, alarm squelched by NASA. A caution triangle appears on the LCD screen, and a second later it blinks away. Someone down on the ground really has their finger on the trigger.
Radio plus Distress, oh mighty index of the ship, what wisdom can you bestow upon this lowly stow-away? Page 3,145. Nice.
Well, this is a kick in the stomach.
“Mark, why is the Orion receiving distress calls?”
There’s a very long five minute’s wait. Always pay attention to pauses. They say something. If the system had a screw loose and was throwing off random incorrect warnings, Mark would have happily spent an hour talking my ear off about it. That he needed so long to figure out what to say meant it wasn’t that, which meant it was a real distress call and NASA was trying to figure out how to tell me about it.
“Hey Alex, sorry for the delay,” Mark’s voice came back - finally.
“Not a problem, as long as you tell me what’s up.”
I can feel him sigh over the radio. “A SpaceX launch for the ISS had a chunk of space debris take out an engine. The crew saved the ship - minor miracle there, but they’re not going to be able to get to the ISS, and it doesn’t look like they’re going to be able to perform the braking burn needed for re-entry.”
“So, they’re stuck?”
“We don’t know that yet. They’ve got resupplies for the ISS but would have to do a spacewalk to get the oxygen tanks in their hold, and then they’re not the same fittings for their own systems. Their orbit isn’t great either but, depending on exactly how much drag they pick up, they could last as long as a month up there. We’re working with SpaceX, the ESA, even the Chinese space agency, and we think we can put together a rescue mission.”
Alright, so why are they calling me? “Alright, so why are they calling me?”
Long silence. “A month is on the very optimistic side of how long they have until their orbit degrades, on the very optimistic side of how long it would take to put together a rescue, and on the very optimistic side of how long they can last with the consumables they have.”
“And I assume they think I could help them. So why don’t we?”
“About a dozen reasons. The biggest one though is that we don’t have the fuel. Between making up for correction burns when the computers went down, and what the radiation storm cost us, you’re running very lean. To meet up with them, and transfer the crew over, would take more fuel than you have.”
“You told them that, and they’re still calling.”
“They have an idea that pulls off the intercept, on paper, but first it would bring you below safety margins for re-entry, still technically above the red line, but we’re talking about your fuel tanks going dry and using up the majority of what’s left over in the piping. Second there’d be no way around you doing some manual flying. You’d be making the intercept with them in space suits drifting out to you. Radar and video are just not accurate enough to handle that.”
“But that means if you so much as tap your orientation controls one too many times you won’t have enough fuel to re-enter. Also, their plan has them breathing fumes by the time they get to you. It’s a four person crew, and they won’t have time to cycle Orion’s airlock four times. You’d have to depressurize Orion, leave both inner and outer airlock doors open, and fly the ship like that for the whole intercept. Plus, your flight suit wasn’t great before, and having duct taped it up won’t have done it any favors.”
Can I be honest here? I’ve always been a bit of a fan of bad-ass last words. Voltaire was getting his head cut off for blasphemy and on the execution block they asked him if he renounced Satan and all his evils. Voltaire said, “Now’s not the time to be making enemies.”
How much of the bad-assery of famous quotes would be lost if you could hear their voices shaking as they said them? Because Christ, just objectively this was the coolest thing I’d ever said in my life, but I could barely get the words out. Come to think of it, Neil Armstrong had his own moment of performance anxiety in front of a live audience. Maybe history is lessened by having video evidence.
“Are you going to help me, or am I doing this on my own?”
*******
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 swear to god I was woken up by the Red Alert siren from a Shatner Star Trek movie. One of my little quirks, I’m not a good waker-upper. You catch me in the middle of my sleep and whatever dream I was having becomes the initial conditions on reality, and it takes a minute before 1+1=2 again.
The alert stops. I don’t know exactly how long it was playing, five seconds, ten seconds, depends on how long it took to wake me up in the first place.
Orion’s alarm for radiation was the Apollo 13, airplane cockpit, shrill buzzy kind of thing.
But there’s no going back to sleep after something like that, and if for no other reason than to make sure I’m not crazy I “get up” (and by the way if you think it’s hard to get your day started when you climb out of bed, walk over to your coffee machine, and pour yourself a warm cup, you can’t even imagine what it feels like when you’re always, always, just peacefully floating wherever you are, so comfy, so warm, so easy to just close your eyes… And not a drop of coffee aboard).
“Mark, am I going crazy? I thought I just heard an alarm,” I said, no need to tell him what alarm. By the way, do you think Starfleet would change their alarm sound every few decades? Or like the captain of every ship gets to pick from a list like a phone ring tone?
“Not going crazy Alex, that shouldn’t have happened, and we fixed it on our end. Nothing to worry about.”
I’ve only got ten Skor bars left, and I’m really hungry. Eat one now and be slightly less hungry all day? Or save it for dinner and fall asleep with a not-totally-empty stomach? Ahh the glorious choices of space travel.
I eat the Skor bar. Future Alex can be angry with me; he usually is. Speaking of things future Alex is going to be angry with me about. Aside from another exciting day of septuple checking valves and gauges, I’m going to write Jess a letter. I know what you’re thinking: ‘Oh Alex no, don’t write a pathetic letter to your ex trying to win her back!’
Don’t worry! This one is going to be classy!
Red Alert! Only the first couple of tones play, and then it’s gone again. “Mark, just had it go off again. What’s up?”
“Yeah…” he draws the word out, “we’re working that, Alex. Nothing you need to worry about. This one’s a Charlie problem, you’re fine.”
Why is the flight director working a problem on the ground that I don’t need to worry about? Why does a non-standard alarm keep going off? Why isn’t Mark telling me about some error in the ship’s food rehydration system or something bonkers like that?
You know what I hate? Rhetorical questions when my life is on the line. I give the old instrument panel a once over. Nothing red and blinking leaps out at me. So that’s good. The radio controls do have a caution warning. It’s one of those triangles made of three pieces of string with an exclamation mark inside it, and then X2 besides that. Just a small icon at the top of the display.
Then it flashes clear. That’s weird. So, it’s some kind of radio problem, but I can talk to Mark just fine. Just a technical error? But why would a radio sub-system error play the Star Trek red alert sound?
Interesting thing about rhetorical questions: sometimes they have an answer. Why would a NASA engineer, someone very much like me, program in a Star Trek Red Alert sound? Answer: They thought it would be funny.
No way that went through an official approval. This has to be something buried so deep in the radio system’s code that no one even bothered to test it out.
A problem that even NASA thought wouldn’t come up, and a problem that the engineer working on it thought was funny.
Back to the bible I guess. If you’ve never seen an index that has three library-dictionary-style pages for “radio” then you’re really missing out in life.
No one is ever checking manuals in Star Trek. No one could possibly know this stupid book back to front. You always like to imagine astronauts more like the swash buckling heroes of sea stories, but this whole experience feels more like playing the world’s most complicated board game - with a gun to your head. Can you imagine what the checklists for the Enterprise would look like? Millions of pages. Yet no one is ever checking manuals.
The alarm goes off again! This time though I look up in time to see a dialogue box pop up on the radio LCD “Incoming Distress…” and it’s gone, alarm squelched by NASA. A caution triangle appears on the LCD screen, and a second later it blinks away. Someone down on the ground really has their finger on the trigger.
Radio plus Distress, oh mighty index of the ship, what wisdom can you bestow upon this lowly stow-away? Page 3,145. Nice.
Well, this is a kick in the stomach.
“Mark, why is the Orion receiving distress calls?”
There’s a very long five minute’s wait. Always pay attention to pauses. They say something. If the system had a screw loose and was throwing off random incorrect warnings, Mark would have happily spent an hour talking my ear off about it. That he needed so long to figure out what to say meant it wasn’t that, which meant it was a real distress call and NASA was trying to figure out how to tell me about it.
“Hey Alex, sorry for the delay,” Mark’s voice came back - finally.
“Not a problem, as long as you tell me what’s up.”
I can feel him sigh over the radio. “A SpaceX launch for the ISS had a chunk of space debris take out an engine. The crew saved the ship - minor miracle there, but they’re not going to be able to get to the ISS, and it doesn’t look like they’re going to be able to perform the braking burn needed for re-entry.”
“So, they’re stuck?”
“We don’t know that yet. They’ve got resupplies for the ISS but would have to do a spacewalk to get the oxygen tanks in their hold, and then they’re not the same fittings for their own systems. Their orbit isn’t great either but, depending on exactly how much drag they pick up, they could last as long as a month up there. We’re working with SpaceX, the ESA, even the Chinese space agency, and we think we can put together a rescue mission.”
Alright, so why are they calling me? “Alright, so why are they calling me?”
Long silence. “A month is on the very optimistic side of how long they have until their orbit degrades, on the very optimistic side of how long it would take to put together a rescue, and on the very optimistic side of how long they can last with the consumables they have.”
“And I assume they think I could help them. So why don’t we?”
“About a dozen reasons. The biggest one though is that we don’t have the fuel. Between making up for correction burns when the computers went down, and what the radiation storm cost us, you’re running very lean. To meet up with them, and transfer the crew over, would take more fuel than you have.”
“You told them that, and they’re still calling.”
“They have an idea that pulls off the intercept, on paper, but first it would bring you below safety margins for re-entry, still technically above the red line, but we’re talking about your fuel tanks going dry and using up the majority of what’s left over in the piping. Second there’d be no way around you doing some manual flying. You’d be making the intercept with them in space suits drifting out to you. Radar and video are just not accurate enough to handle that.”
“But that means if you so much as tap your orientation controls one too many times you won’t have enough fuel to re-enter. Also, their plan has them breathing fumes by the time they get to you. It’s a four person crew, and they won’t have time to cycle Orion’s airlock four times. You’d have to depressurize Orion, leave both inner and outer airlock doors open, and fly the ship like that for the whole intercept. Plus, your flight suit wasn’t great before, and having duct taped it up won’t have done it any favors.”
Can I be honest here? I’ve always been a bit of a fan of bad-ass last words. Voltaire was getting his head cut off for blasphemy and on the execution block they asked him if he renounced Satan and all his evils. Voltaire said, “Now’s not the time to be making enemies.”
How much of the bad-assery of famous quotes would be lost if you could hear their voices shaking as they said them? Because Christ, just objectively this was the coolest thing I’d ever said in my life, but I could barely get the words out. Come to think of it, Neil Armstrong had his own moment of performance anxiety in front of a live audience. Maybe history is lessened by having video evidence.
“Are you going to help me, or am I doing this on my own?”
*******
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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