Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 21
December 6th, 2022
While trying to connect one of the oxygen tanks they’d been bringing up to the ISS, one of the tanks they’d need to use themselves if they were going to make it a month, a valve had failed. They stopped the leak pretty quickly and hadn’t lost so much air that they’d suffocate. But the exhaust had changed their orbit.
So, orbital dynamics is a super cool subject. Imagine a satellite orbiting the Earth in a perfect, circular, orbit. Question, how do you increase the satellite's altitude? Let me just give you the correct answer and then let’s talk about the wrong answer. The right answer is that you thrust in your direction of travel, which adds energy to the orbit, you haven’t changed your position, but like someone giving you a push on a swing, when you go up to the other side of Earth, you go higher. So now, on the opposite side of the planet, and at the peak of this “swing” you thrust again, again along the direction of travel. This balances out the orbit and now you’re on a new, higher, circular orbit.
What if you point the thruster “down” at the ground and fire? Well, what you’ve really done there is changed your position, without changing your orbital velocity. The orbital path is going to be different, imagine that like squeezing a loop of metal, the edges you squeeze go in, and the edges you didn’t squeeze go “up”.
When the oxygen tank vented it pushed Dragon Sovereign “up” and away from Earth.
Doesn’t sound like a problem, does it? The problem comes later, when Dragon Sovereign passes through the narrower part of its orbit and finds itself closer to Earth’s atmosphere than it would have been. That means more drag. And that means an already marginal orbit is now completely unsustainable. Dragon Sovereign’s crew doesn’t have a month. They don’t even have a week.
I’m on a new sleep schedule. I was up until about 0500 last night running the simulator again and again, then passed out, and I’ve been back at it since I woke up at “noon”.
“Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey,” Mark chimed over the radio, he’d gotten a good nights sleep it sounded like.
“We’re sending you a software update on the simulator Alex; we’re going to be doing this a bit differently for the rest of the day.”
And you know what? Under the new simulator setup, I passed! Which isn’t saying much. See how we’re doing it now is that they’ve turned the flight simulator into a turn based RPG. The simulator pauses, I spend five minutes talking through what we’re going to do with NASA, the simulator unpauses, I do the thing we talked about, and the simulator pauses again, and we talk through what I actually just did and what I’m going to do next.
It took three hours to get through a twenty minute intercept, but we got it done with fuel to spare. Next time through we got it done in two hours. Then an hour and a half. Then an hour and ten minutes. Then an hour. They took the training wheels off and I crashed and burned at 96% completion.
The problem is, the last 5% is the hardest part. And not by a little. What Dragon’s crew needs is some kind of magnetic grapple. The human arm is basically the shittiest intercept device for spaceships you can imagine. If your closing speeds are much over a half-meter per second, or your distance from a handhold is much over a half-meter, there’s literally no way to hold on. For context orbital speed is 7,660 m/s, and the circumference of the ISS’s orbit is 42,650,000 meters. So we need to be 99.99% the same speed, and 99.999999% the same position, or the intercept is pooched.
Imagine someone being such a jerk that on a four million dollar purchase they rejected it because you were short a penny. That’s space. Biggest jerk in the world.
I’m also deliberately antagonizing NASA. They deserve it though, and I need something to churn in the back of my mind instead of anxiety. So, situation: I have now been a stow-away aboard Artemis I for 21 days. In that time I have not had a shower, nor have I shaved, brushed my teeth, used deodorant, or applied cologne.
If I pull this off, then in two days I’ll be meeting one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. Excuse me, I should rephrase that. In two days stow-away, turned space-pirate, turned heroic space-hero, Alex Whelm will heroically swoop in to save the life of a spectacularly beautiful, accomplished, woman (and her crew). Did I mention: hero?
I do this and even if we hate each other, they’re going to be making romance novels with the two of us on the covers for decades. If I could get just a tad closer to looking like the cover art on one of those books, or at least smelling like it, I’d very much appreciate it.
So, how can I clean up a bit? Well there are no razors aboard Artemis I as there wasn’t supposed to be a crew. There is however a knife in the survival pack of my flight suit. I’ve proposed that I sharpen that bad boy up to a razor’s edge: by holding it bare-handed and scraping the blade repeatedly against a piece of ceramic piping I found in the galley, sending microscopic bits of stone and steel into the air as I do. And then straight razor shave my face and throat without the benefit of a mirror, shaving cream, or ever having straight-razor shaved before.
NASA is, obviously, dead set against every aspect of my plan from the motivations to the execution.
“You’re the ones who had Captain Covington flirt with me,” I keep pointing out to them. It’s not a real argument, like I said, I’m just trying to annoy them a bit. I also re-raised the question of how it wasn’t workplace sexual harassment. Mark was quick to point out that I don’t actually work for NASA anymore.
To which I was quick to reply, “well then you’re not the boss of me and I can shave!”
That observation led to its own fun, and I’m happy to report that I am, again, officially a NASA employee. I even got a raise. A small one. Astronauts get paid shit, even the space-hero ones.
Anyways, upon being rehired, NASA issued me my first order as an employee: no shaving. They thought they won this round. What they forgot is that my one big failing was being unemployed. Now I’m the employed space-pirate turned heroic space-hero gallantly swooping in to save Captain Covington. So I’ll have a beard, Leonidas had a beard.
“In your mind, you look like Gerard Butler?” Mark asked.
Space-spoilsport.
*******
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
While trying to connect one of the oxygen tanks they’d been bringing up to the ISS, one of the tanks they’d need to use themselves if they were going to make it a month, a valve had failed. They stopped the leak pretty quickly and hadn’t lost so much air that they’d suffocate. But the exhaust had changed their orbit.
So, orbital dynamics is a super cool subject. Imagine a satellite orbiting the Earth in a perfect, circular, orbit. Question, how do you increase the satellite's altitude? Let me just give you the correct answer and then let’s talk about the wrong answer. The right answer is that you thrust in your direction of travel, which adds energy to the orbit, you haven’t changed your position, but like someone giving you a push on a swing, when you go up to the other side of Earth, you go higher. So now, on the opposite side of the planet, and at the peak of this “swing” you thrust again, again along the direction of travel. This balances out the orbit and now you’re on a new, higher, circular orbit.
What if you point the thruster “down” at the ground and fire? Well, what you’ve really done there is changed your position, without changing your orbital velocity. The orbital path is going to be different, imagine that like squeezing a loop of metal, the edges you squeeze go in, and the edges you didn’t squeeze go “up”.
When the oxygen tank vented it pushed Dragon Sovereign “up” and away from Earth.
Doesn’t sound like a problem, does it? The problem comes later, when Dragon Sovereign passes through the narrower part of its orbit and finds itself closer to Earth’s atmosphere than it would have been. That means more drag. And that means an already marginal orbit is now completely unsustainable. Dragon Sovereign’s crew doesn’t have a month. They don’t even have a week.
I’m on a new sleep schedule. I was up until about 0500 last night running the simulator again and again, then passed out, and I’ve been back at it since I woke up at “noon”.
“Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey,” Mark chimed over the radio, he’d gotten a good nights sleep it sounded like.
“We’re sending you a software update on the simulator Alex; we’re going to be doing this a bit differently for the rest of the day.”
And you know what? Under the new simulator setup, I passed! Which isn’t saying much. See how we’re doing it now is that they’ve turned the flight simulator into a turn based RPG. The simulator pauses, I spend five minutes talking through what we’re going to do with NASA, the simulator unpauses, I do the thing we talked about, and the simulator pauses again, and we talk through what I actually just did and what I’m going to do next.
It took three hours to get through a twenty minute intercept, but we got it done with fuel to spare. Next time through we got it done in two hours. Then an hour and a half. Then an hour and ten minutes. Then an hour. They took the training wheels off and I crashed and burned at 96% completion.
The problem is, the last 5% is the hardest part. And not by a little. What Dragon’s crew needs is some kind of magnetic grapple. The human arm is basically the shittiest intercept device for spaceships you can imagine. If your closing speeds are much over a half-meter per second, or your distance from a handhold is much over a half-meter, there’s literally no way to hold on. For context orbital speed is 7,660 m/s, and the circumference of the ISS’s orbit is 42,650,000 meters. So we need to be 99.99% the same speed, and 99.999999% the same position, or the intercept is pooched.
Imagine someone being such a jerk that on a four million dollar purchase they rejected it because you were short a penny. That’s space. Biggest jerk in the world.
I’m also deliberately antagonizing NASA. They deserve it though, and I need something to churn in the back of my mind instead of anxiety. So, situation: I have now been a stow-away aboard Artemis I for 21 days. In that time I have not had a shower, nor have I shaved, brushed my teeth, used deodorant, or applied cologne.
If I pull this off, then in two days I’ll be meeting one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. Excuse me, I should rephrase that. In two days stow-away, turned space-pirate, turned heroic space-hero, Alex Whelm will heroically swoop in to save the life of a spectacularly beautiful, accomplished, woman (and her crew). Did I mention: hero?
I do this and even if we hate each other, they’re going to be making romance novels with the two of us on the covers for decades. If I could get just a tad closer to looking like the cover art on one of those books, or at least smelling like it, I’d very much appreciate it.
So, how can I clean up a bit? Well there are no razors aboard Artemis I as there wasn’t supposed to be a crew. There is however a knife in the survival pack of my flight suit. I’ve proposed that I sharpen that bad boy up to a razor’s edge: by holding it bare-handed and scraping the blade repeatedly against a piece of ceramic piping I found in the galley, sending microscopic bits of stone and steel into the air as I do. And then straight razor shave my face and throat without the benefit of a mirror, shaving cream, or ever having straight-razor shaved before.
NASA is, obviously, dead set against every aspect of my plan from the motivations to the execution.
“You’re the ones who had Captain Covington flirt with me,” I keep pointing out to them. It’s not a real argument, like I said, I’m just trying to annoy them a bit. I also re-raised the question of how it wasn’t workplace sexual harassment. Mark was quick to point out that I don’t actually work for NASA anymore.
To which I was quick to reply, “well then you’re not the boss of me and I can shave!”
That observation led to its own fun, and I’m happy to report that I am, again, officially a NASA employee. I even got a raise. A small one. Astronauts get paid shit, even the space-hero ones.
Anyways, upon being rehired, NASA issued me my first order as an employee: no shaving. They thought they won this round. What they forgot is that my one big failing was being unemployed. Now I’m the employed space-pirate turned heroic space-hero gallantly swooping in to save Captain Covington. So I’ll have a beard, Leonidas had a beard.
“In your mind, you look like Gerard Butler?” Mark asked.
Space-spoilsport.
*******
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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