Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 18
December 3rd, 2022
Want to know the most sure-fire way to rub someone’s nose in the fact they can’t do something and they’re going to die trying? Simulations. I’m not talking one or two here. I’m talking a hundred. And none of them were the famous, “let’s see how he handles this!” stuff NASA’s known for. I’m talking kid-gloved, smooth sailing, everything working absolutely perfectly. NASA let me spend all day seeing the difference between a big-balled test pilot with thousands of hours of experience, and me, the idiot stowaway.
Let me put this in context. A car goes backwards/forwards and left/right. That’s two degrees of freedom. Orion has six. It goes backwards/forwards, left/right, up/down, sideways spinny, loopy spinny, and rolly spinny - those are of course the scientific terms. Remember learning to drive and feeling like the car was a bit out of control? Three times that.
But wait, there’s more! Pulling off this intercept means I have to arrive at a specific point in space at a specific time, at a specific orientation, and I have to eyeball it. Too slow, everyone dies. Too fast, everyone dies. Wrong place, everyone dies.
Things get even more complicated though. In movies all the spinny maneuvers are depicted as using bursts of thrust. In reality Orion has three flywheels that can spin up, or brake, to impart a rotation. Those flywheels can only spin so fast though before they are, “saturated” and need to be discharged using precious thruster fuel. A real astronaut would select between the flywheel or a thruster based on how quickly they need to rotate Orion, how much capacity those flywheels had, and which way they wanted to spin. NASA’s got me on “automatic” but if I push the stick just a little too hard, or in the wrong direction, the thrusters will engage when I might be able to get the same maneuver for “free”.
Back to that car analogy. Think of this all like taking someone who’s never driven, putting four people who’ve been shot onto the back of the car, and telling the student driver he has to race them to the hospital before they die.
Then line the roads there with bazooka and speed gun wielding police officers, so the car blows up if it goes too fast. The make the car a stick shift with two different steering wheels (one steering wheel for the right two tires, and one steering wheel for the left two tires).
That’s still overly simple… I guess, then imagine this driver is lost and has to use a paper map to try and figure everything out, while driving.
Wait, I forgot I’ve got to do it in vacuum without a proper space suit, so let’s set the car’s on fire as well. Oh, and we’re almost out of gas so every tap of the pedals is precious.
Now, any chance at all I’m pulling this off?
A hundred simulated attempts and I typically doomed myself, and the four people I’m meant to be saving, at the 60% complete mark. That’s especially bad because the hard bits haven’t even started by then. The really hard part’s the last 5% or so. I know that because after the fiftieth try we started running the whole simulation through each time. Never mind the fuel, I just can’t make the intercept.
One really cool thing. A couple of the engineers stayed up all night and turned a few of the LCD instrument displays into “windows” for the simulation. So, I get to see four astronauts tethered together drifting up closer and closer to me and then drifting away when I fail to pick them up the way I should. Mark promises it actually makes it a little easier when it is out of the window.
You’re probably wondering why I don’t give up.
Scratch that, you’re probably wondering why I would even have agreed to try and do this in the first place. Simple, this is full-blown, absolute, astronaut bad-assery. This is the kind of thing where you kill yourself doing it, and god gives you a pat on the back when you get to heaven and says, “well, you’ve got balls kid, I’ll give you that.” I risked my life just to get into space, I’m happy to spend it trying some straight up science fiction coolness.
When I stop to have lunch I munch on my seventh to last Skor bar. I’m eating two a day until I pull this thing off. Turns out starvation + high focus maneuvering, is a bad combination.
Mark cut into my meal over the radio, which he doesn’t usually do.
“There are bold pilots, and old pilots, but no old, bold, pilots,” Mark says. “How many friends have you lost over the years Alex?”
“None.” My grandmother had passed a few years ago, and a distant aunt a decade before that, but I don’t think that’s what Mark’s asking about.
“I’ve lost seven. First one was just after flight school. Air Force did a pretty good job of getting us all through that alive. Matthew Troy - Zippy. God he was a funny guy. We’d go to this lounge together, fresh out of the cockpits, stinking of aviation fuel, thinking we looked just about as cool as cool got.” Mark gave a little laugh over the radio. “Shit, we couldn’t even really afford to drink there, we’d spend hours nursing a drink and Zip would just about kill me with the jokes. Sometimes we’d get lucky and find a few women interested in hearing pilot stories. Mostly though we just hung out.”
“I was so pissed with him at his funeral. I just, I remember wanting to punch the casket. How the fuck didn’t he recognize hypoxia? They trained us for that, we’d all gone through it so we could recognize it. All he had to do was push the stick down and he could have gotten below ten K in thirty seconds.”
“We were both your age. I eventually figured out that it had been easier to be angry with him than to be afraid.”
“I did some straight up dangerous things in my youth, and shit, at some point or another you realize what you’re doing and the fear hits like a mule. But when you’re young and stupid you just balls and bravado your way through the warnings until reality bites you in the ass.”
I just listen. Mark’s marching through this, he’s got something he wants to say and what, I’m going to argue with an astronaut telling me his flying stories?
“You want to know what’s actually going to happen up there Alex? You’re going to hit bingo fuel, and it won’t be like a movie. It won’t be a question of just one more burst of the thruster needed to save them and maybe by a miracle you’ve got more gas than we all thought. You’re going to come close-ish, see that it’s hopeless, and then you’ll do the right thing. You’ll do what everyone actually does in that situation. You’ll stop, and live, and let them die.”
My brain kind of wants me to object, but he keeps going before I figure out what to say.
“Now you listen to me Alex. When that happens, you stay on the radio with me. Don’t go trying to find their suit frequencies. Don’t watch them drift off from one of Orion’s windows. When we abort, you keep your eyes locked inside the ship, and you just listen to me ok. The only thing you’re going to do if you see them drifting off, or hear their voices, is spend the rest of your life having nightmares about that again, and again, and again.”
Fuck.
“If this were just a straight odds thing, what’s got the better chance of working, this rescue or NASA’s plan to send up a mission?” I ask.
“Reasonable people can disagree.”
Fuck.
“Let’s keep practicing.”
I’ve never hurt-hurt someone. I mean, I’ve hurt people’s feelings, and I’ve felt bad about it. But if I screw this up am I going to feel like I killed four people? Mark was right, fear kicks like a mule.
*******
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
Want to know the most sure-fire way to rub someone’s nose in the fact they can’t do something and they’re going to die trying? Simulations. I’m not talking one or two here. I’m talking a hundred. And none of them were the famous, “let’s see how he handles this!” stuff NASA’s known for. I’m talking kid-gloved, smooth sailing, everything working absolutely perfectly. NASA let me spend all day seeing the difference between a big-balled test pilot with thousands of hours of experience, and me, the idiot stowaway.
Let me put this in context. A car goes backwards/forwards and left/right. That’s two degrees of freedom. Orion has six. It goes backwards/forwards, left/right, up/down, sideways spinny, loopy spinny, and rolly spinny - those are of course the scientific terms. Remember learning to drive and feeling like the car was a bit out of control? Three times that.
But wait, there’s more! Pulling off this intercept means I have to arrive at a specific point in space at a specific time, at a specific orientation, and I have to eyeball it. Too slow, everyone dies. Too fast, everyone dies. Wrong place, everyone dies.
Things get even more complicated though. In movies all the spinny maneuvers are depicted as using bursts of thrust. In reality Orion has three flywheels that can spin up, or brake, to impart a rotation. Those flywheels can only spin so fast though before they are, “saturated” and need to be discharged using precious thruster fuel. A real astronaut would select between the flywheel or a thruster based on how quickly they need to rotate Orion, how much capacity those flywheels had, and which way they wanted to spin. NASA’s got me on “automatic” but if I push the stick just a little too hard, or in the wrong direction, the thrusters will engage when I might be able to get the same maneuver for “free”.
Back to that car analogy. Think of this all like taking someone who’s never driven, putting four people who’ve been shot onto the back of the car, and telling the student driver he has to race them to the hospital before they die.
Then line the roads there with bazooka and speed gun wielding police officers, so the car blows up if it goes too fast. The make the car a stick shift with two different steering wheels (one steering wheel for the right two tires, and one steering wheel for the left two tires).
That’s still overly simple… I guess, then imagine this driver is lost and has to use a paper map to try and figure everything out, while driving.
Wait, I forgot I’ve got to do it in vacuum without a proper space suit, so let’s set the car’s on fire as well. Oh, and we’re almost out of gas so every tap of the pedals is precious.
Now, any chance at all I’m pulling this off?
A hundred simulated attempts and I typically doomed myself, and the four people I’m meant to be saving, at the 60% complete mark. That’s especially bad because the hard bits haven’t even started by then. The really hard part’s the last 5% or so. I know that because after the fiftieth try we started running the whole simulation through each time. Never mind the fuel, I just can’t make the intercept.
One really cool thing. A couple of the engineers stayed up all night and turned a few of the LCD instrument displays into “windows” for the simulation. So, I get to see four astronauts tethered together drifting up closer and closer to me and then drifting away when I fail to pick them up the way I should. Mark promises it actually makes it a little easier when it is out of the window.
You’re probably wondering why I don’t give up.
Scratch that, you’re probably wondering why I would even have agreed to try and do this in the first place. Simple, this is full-blown, absolute, astronaut bad-assery. This is the kind of thing where you kill yourself doing it, and god gives you a pat on the back when you get to heaven and says, “well, you’ve got balls kid, I’ll give you that.” I risked my life just to get into space, I’m happy to spend it trying some straight up science fiction coolness.
When I stop to have lunch I munch on my seventh to last Skor bar. I’m eating two a day until I pull this thing off. Turns out starvation + high focus maneuvering, is a bad combination.
Mark cut into my meal over the radio, which he doesn’t usually do.
“There are bold pilots, and old pilots, but no old, bold, pilots,” Mark says. “How many friends have you lost over the years Alex?”
“None.” My grandmother had passed a few years ago, and a distant aunt a decade before that, but I don’t think that’s what Mark’s asking about.
“I’ve lost seven. First one was just after flight school. Air Force did a pretty good job of getting us all through that alive. Matthew Troy - Zippy. God he was a funny guy. We’d go to this lounge together, fresh out of the cockpits, stinking of aviation fuel, thinking we looked just about as cool as cool got.” Mark gave a little laugh over the radio. “Shit, we couldn’t even really afford to drink there, we’d spend hours nursing a drink and Zip would just about kill me with the jokes. Sometimes we’d get lucky and find a few women interested in hearing pilot stories. Mostly though we just hung out.”
“I was so pissed with him at his funeral. I just, I remember wanting to punch the casket. How the fuck didn’t he recognize hypoxia? They trained us for that, we’d all gone through it so we could recognize it. All he had to do was push the stick down and he could have gotten below ten K in thirty seconds.”
“We were both your age. I eventually figured out that it had been easier to be angry with him than to be afraid.”
“I did some straight up dangerous things in my youth, and shit, at some point or another you realize what you’re doing and the fear hits like a mule. But when you’re young and stupid you just balls and bravado your way through the warnings until reality bites you in the ass.”
I just listen. Mark’s marching through this, he’s got something he wants to say and what, I’m going to argue with an astronaut telling me his flying stories?
“You want to know what’s actually going to happen up there Alex? You’re going to hit bingo fuel, and it won’t be like a movie. It won’t be a question of just one more burst of the thruster needed to save them and maybe by a miracle you’ve got more gas than we all thought. You’re going to come close-ish, see that it’s hopeless, and then you’ll do the right thing. You’ll do what everyone actually does in that situation. You’ll stop, and live, and let them die.”
My brain kind of wants me to object, but he keeps going before I figure out what to say.
“Now you listen to me Alex. When that happens, you stay on the radio with me. Don’t go trying to find their suit frequencies. Don’t watch them drift off from one of Orion’s windows. When we abort, you keep your eyes locked inside the ship, and you just listen to me ok. The only thing you’re going to do if you see them drifting off, or hear their voices, is spend the rest of your life having nightmares about that again, and again, and again.”
Fuck.
“If this were just a straight odds thing, what’s got the better chance of working, this rescue or NASA’s plan to send up a mission?” I ask.
“Reasonable people can disagree.”
Fuck.
“Let’s keep practicing.”
I’ve never hurt-hurt someone. I mean, I’ve hurt people’s feelings, and I’ve felt bad about it. But if I screw this up am I going to feel like I killed four people? Mark was right, fear kicks like a mule.
*******
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
No comments have been added yet.
