“Venk! We need to get going!”
Venkat could count the number of times Teddy had visited his office, rather than vice versa, on his fingers. The director of NASA only did it when he didn’t feel like waiting anymore for something he expected an hour ago, and never mind any countervailing conditions.
“I’m almost done with this response to Congresswoman Dubois,” Venkat replied, typing as fast as he could. “Her request hit my desk while I was showing the Ares III families into the conference room for their live video chat with Hermes. I couldn’t let it sit.” And that was while ignoring two dozen other calls for his attention. He knew Teddy had more, tons more, calls on his time; how had he broken away so cleanly?
“Mrs. Dubois is one of our strongest supporters on Capitol Hill,” Teddy said. “I’m sure she would understand if it took a couple of days for you to respond.”
“Teddy,” Venkat said, “the fact that she’s one of our strongest supporters is why I can’t let her wait. I want to keep her a supporter.”
“Venk, it’ll take just over an hour to get to Bush Intercontinental this time of day,” Teddy said. “And even with expedited boarding it’ll take half an hour to get to our seats. And the plane to Beijing takes off in two hours,” Teddy paused to look at his wristwatch, “and fourteen minutes. Where’s your bags?” Teddy had one large suitcase and one small carry-on bag in his hands.
“Suit for photo ops in suit carrier behind door,” Venkat said. “Other clothes and tablet in carry-on bag underneath.”
“Good.” Teddy didn’t dance impatiently in place, nor did he pace back and forth. The man had perfected the art of looking impatient and eager to go without moving a muscle, without allowing himself to look flustered or ruffled in any way.
Venkat cut short his encomiums on NASA and on the Congresswoman’s career to date, expressed regrets that her request could not be accommodated this close to the critical Hermes flyby of Earth, and sent the email. “There,” he said. “My deputy can deal with most of the other things on my desk.”
“The cab’s waiting downstairs,” Teddy said. “Let’s go.”
Rich Purnell had his own office. It was very small, and it didn’t have a shower or personal toilet like he’d requested, but it did have a bunk and a corner painted off on the carpet and a sign reading TRASH ZONE, as he’d requested, so that sanitation services would know the difference between what Rich was done with and what was still important. It also had its own coffee maker and a supply of disposable polystyrene cups, both of which were kept resupplied. Those had been requested by his coworkers, who were tired of going to the dollar store twice a month for new coffee mugs.
The lion’s share of the Watney Prize was going to be his, if it went to anybody. Director Sanders had approved it, but the announcement had been halted by Congress, where the oversight committees had protested that Purnell was ineligible by reason of being a NASA employee. The core of the argument- whether Rich being on vacation counted as “his own time” if he spent said vacation in his cubicle- showed no signs of being settled before the elections.
Rich didn’t care. He was content.
He hadn’t done either of the trajectories that sat displayed on his computer monitor. The Sleipnir 4 and 5 launch trajectories weren’t minor, though. Sleipnir 4 would launch first, from KSC, and enter into orbit, including a long adjustment burn to put the orbital plane in line with the trajectory of Hermes’s flyby. Sleipnir 5, launching from Jiuquan, had too much potential orbital inclination for such an adjustment, so it would launch direct, without an orbital insertion, with Sleipnir 4’s Hermes injection burn timed to match Jiuquan’s launch.
Each probe had about five percent surplus delta-V for corrections or in case of minor glitches during launch. After that they would be on maneuvering thrusters only, converging on Hermes roughly twenty-four hours after Hermes’s closest approach to Earth.
The numbers and simulations checked out. Rich added his name to the peer review approval list, signing off on this final revision of launch plans for the probes. This done, he reopened his simulations of the yet-to-be-modified Ares IV MAV, tweaking variables to see what could be done with the pony thrusters if used on different parts of the ship.
While he did this with his left hand, his right hand called up the delivery-food app on his phone, selecting a restaurant at random, confirming his favorite order for that restaurant, and placing the order, all without looking.
Nobody wished him hello. Nobody broke his chain of thought to ask his opinion on something. Nobody said it was five o’clock. Nobody sang happy birthday or passed around betting sheets about whatever Houston sports team was playing this time of year. No distractions of any kind. Food came, trash went, and Rich more or less did as he pleased.
The square peg was happy in its square hole.
For the first time in months, Mindy Park wasn’t steering Martian satellites or examining pixels on Martian photos. SatCom was too busy. Every pair of eyes and pair of hands were needed. Hermes was coming in hotter than anything in history that wasn’t a rock or an iceball, and it needed a clear path through Earth local space.
For the Rich Purnell maneuver to work, Hermes had to occupy a fairly narrow trajectory slot around Earth, picking up both momentum and a hard turn in-system in order to gain more speed from solar gravity. It would be allowed to maneuver around space debris if any was going to be in its path, and nine-tenths of SatCom was busy double-checking the orbits of the 275,183 bits of space junk larger than a pencil lead that NASA was tracking as of 8 AM that morning. (That didn’t count an equal number of smaller objects floating around up there, but beyond a certain point anything, even Hermes, had to take its chances.)
Hermes was allowed to dodge space junk, which couldn’t move of its own accord. Everything else had to move the hell out of the way, the farther the better. The remaining tenth of SatCom was reviewing forty-six active orbiting satellites (out of over 2400 active machines in Earth orbit) that had more than a 0.1% possibility of intercepting Hermes should something go badly wrong with the trajectory. Remaining thruster fuel on board was a factor; so was stability of orbit, urgency of continuous function of satellite, and potential intercept with other satellites in the course of moving one or the other out of Hermes’s way.
And then, of course, any satellites that had to be moved also had to be kept clear of the quarter-million ballistic bits of electronics-shredding crap that hadn’t had the good luck or sense to fall back to Earth and burn up in atmosphere. An injudicious orbital change to duck Hermes could send the satellite into a stray washer, a broken bit of Russian solar cell, or Mike Collins’s camera from his Gemini spacewalk, creating a debris field that Hermes might plow into, creating the long-anticipated, long-feared Kessler Syndrome event and, incidentally, dooming eleven people to horrible deaths.
It was a ton of work, and if Hermes stuck to its planned course within ten kilometers all of it would be absolutely unnecessary. But NASA couldn’t rely on “probably.” Every contingency had to be addressed, and time was running out.
The media would have to do without its spy-eye shots of Mark and his friends on their spacewalks. Mindy was busy, for once, doing the job she’d applied for. So was everyone else in the department; no gossip, no cake and cookies, no long coffee breaks. Blouses and skirts, shirts and slacks, had largely been replaced with T-shirts and sweats for maximum comfort instead of professionalism.
Occasionally a phone rang or a computer beeped for email received, usually someone from the Department of Defense providing updated data on space junk. Supervisors from four different departments walked the rows of desks, conferring quietly with the satellite herders, getting information and working slowly towards decisions on the fate of forty-six satellites.
But the loudest sound was, and remained, the clicking of mouse buttons and the clacking of keyboards.
Meanwhile, Hermes drew closer.