Sol 214
HERMES – ARES III MISSION DAY 343
Vogel floated in the small exercise cabin, looking out the little window at the tiny splotch of white and blue in the distance. The half-full Earth looked smaller than a half-moon would on Earth, a tiny blue dot (as Carl Sagan put it) in the vast, hostile reaches of space.
Normally Hermes would be shutting down its main engines about now for a leisurely three-day cruise into Earth’s gravity well, passing by the Moon to shed momentum, then slinging around through its upper atmosphere for the first of three aerobraking passes that would, over the course of a week, reduce its speed enough to drop it into an intercept orbit with the space station.
Now the Moon was well off to one side and out of the way, and come this time tomorrow Earth would not be ahead but beside them, as Hermes slung around its dark side for its gravity and trajectory assist maneuver. And two days from now the half-Earth would be even smaller in Hermes’ aft-facing windows than it was in the forward-facing ones.
Two days before the crew had scoured the ship, securing absolutely everything loose- exercise equipment, kitchen utensils, lab equipment, experiments, all of it. Hermes normally rotated on its long axis to produce artificial Martian-level gravity, but the ship couldn’t both rotate and maneuver on its thrusters. The big ship now had to thread a needle through thousands of satellites and possibly millions of tiny bits of space debris tomorrow and then dock with two resupply ships the next day. That meant the gravity had to go away, and after firing certain thrusters, it did.
But, as they’d learned before, no matter how careful you were, you never did get everything secure, so Lewis had sent the others around the ship to double-check for anything floating free. Beck was checking the vehicle docking bay, docking ports, and spacesuit storage. Martinez was checking the reactor room and labs. Johannsen was checking the living quarters, which left Vogel the recreation area, exercise area, and galley.
He’d done his looking, and he’d found nothing out of place. But with that task done, he had a few minutes to look at Earth, at his home, and to think about many things.
First, that he had agreed, along with the others, to pass by, postponing their homecoming for over a year and a half. Another year and a half without his wife and the monkeys- how much of their lives would he have missed, between training and the mission? Another year and a half with a comparatively fragile metal box his only protection against almost instant death. Another year and a half of muscular and skeletal atrophy. Another year of the only green being in photographs and Watney’s botanical experiments, the only animal sounds being the soft squeaking of the newborn third generation of ship’s lab rats.
But on the other hand, consider the superlatives. The Hermes crew would fly closer to the Sun than any astronauts had ever dared before, testing Hermes’s magnetic field, anti-radiation insulation, and cooling systems to their limits. At perigee during their Earth fly-by they would become the fastest humans in recorded history; they would then set an even higher speed record at perihelion. Their flight would be the longest single space duration ever, the first rescue of someone stranded on Mars, the first time individuals returned to Mars’s sphere of influence for a second visit.
First, fastest, most, best. Vogel wouldn’t be human if he didn’t like the thought.
But there was a dark side to the scenario. If the mission suffered a catastrophic failure, it would likely be a century, if ever, before anyone returned to Mars. Hermes would not, could not be built a second time. The conditions that had made it possible at all, much less in the short timeframe between the program’s beginning and Ares I’s landing, no longer existed.
And if any number of lesser mishaps occurred, Hermes might survive the trip (with or without its crew), but it would end up in the wrong place or at the wrong speed or with insufficient resources to rescue Watney and his aliens. Or, possibly, Watney would dock with Hermes functional but its crew dead, dead of solar heat, dead of micrometeorite impact, dead of failure of the reactor shielding or the magnetic field system…
The risk, when one thought about it for any length of time, sobered a man up and made him put away thoughts of first, fastest, and most.
It wasn’t likely, of course. Hermes had been designed to withstand coronal mass ejections, a threat which would have slain Apollo astronauts without warning had any occurred during that program. It had been built for a thirty-year lifespan, and it was just past its tenth year of operation now. The ship was strong and healthy, and it had a crew to match. The only danger was that the resupply missions might fail, and even then it would require that both missions failed to equal disaster. One failed resupply would merely be very bad, but not absolute doom.
Not likely… but still possible. Thus Alexander Vogel, chemist, astrogation expert, backup EVA technician, stared at the tiny fingernail clipping which was Earth and thought about the other choice.
But not for too long. The duty shift wasn’t over, and there were other preparations to make for the fly-by.
He bumped into Beck on his way down the ladder into Hermes’s central hull. “Pardon me,” he said. “Are the airlocks secure?”
“Huh?” Beck stared at him a moment, probably stunned by the bump. “Oh, yeah, the airlocks. They’re all good. I was just checking my bunk.”
“Was that not Johannsen’s task?” Vogel asked.
“Yeah, well, it’s our bunks, our personal items, you know?” Beck said. “We ought to all be responsible for our own stuff. And my bunk’s also our sickbay, so I’ve got more stuff than the rest of you to watch over.”
“This is true,” Vogel said. “I think I also shall check my bunk. Thank you for reminding me.”
“Sure thing,” Beck said, pushing off the walls in the direction of the bridge.
Vogel floated down through the ladderway to the living quarters. He had to pause and flatten himself against the side of the compartment to let Johannsen pass. She said nothing, but she seldom did, so Vogel thought nothing of it.
As expected, everything in Vogel’s cabin was in its proper place, properly secured, even the little photographs of his wife and children. Again he paused, looking, thinking.
But then his eyes flicked over another photo, taken at a children's party place and pizzeria in Pasadena. (That is, Pasadena the suburb of Houston, and not Pasadena the suburb of Los Angeles. Vogel had once made a snarky remark about how Americans were short of names for large cities, and Martinez had mentioned Frankfurt-am-Main and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. Vogel had argued that the example was irrelevant, but he'd failed to persuade the others.)
He remembered the day the photo had been taken. The pizza was bad even by American standards. The games had been simple, juvenile, little challenge. Rolling a ball up a ramp and dropping it into the center hoop held few difficulties for a man who’d bowled candlepins as a child in an outdoor alley as God intended. And hitting plastic alligators with a padded hammer had much less entertainment value after one had encountered a real live alligator fresh from Mud Lake sunning itself just outside Building 34.
But he’d had fun. They’d all had fun. And the most childish of their group, the one who’d had the most fun, was also the one who’d made sure that everyone else had fun.
And there he was, in front of Martinez and next to Commander Lewis, making the goofiest face he could for the camera. That was the reason his wife and children would have to wait. They could wait, but Mark Watney couldn’t.
Watney had promised to take them all to a Chicago place for some “real pizza” after landing and quarantine.
Vogel, for one, planned to hold him to his promise.
And as he looked at the photos on his bunk wall, Hermes drew closer to Earth.
Stats
Page generated in 0.043 seconds
Total duration
910 users online
525,992 hits today, 2,561,572 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
It's official. They're all going to die.
JSC also has a shit-ton of deer just chilling out behind the fence.
Source: Used to drive by there every morning on the way to high school.
Even if not in Texas, I'd have thought the astronauts would be on the lookout for gators around Cape Canaveral.
This was a nice chapter, giving us some insight into the Hermes crew without taking us away from the action for too long (which is weird, as they're the ones doing all the dangerous flying, but it's kind of like they're passengers in the story rather than driving the events). And that's a worrying doomsday scenario about modern technology and coronal mass ejections
NASA says 360, you say ~213, I think Weir said 229. The differences are interesting.
When all is said and done I hope we actually get a chapter wherein Mark takes his Mars friends to eat "real pizza" I think it would be amusing!
8897615
Beat me to it. I would add that just a couple years ago, Earth missed a Carrington-class CME impact by less than a week.
8897419
Maybe just as a nod, have NASA ask Mark and the American members of the Hermes crew if they wants to submit an absentee vote...
8897613
Or, at least, the tropes are stacked so hard against them that it’s either a red herring or just blatant.
My prediction? Disaster strikes the Hermes, and dead time gets taken up with them saving themselves. And they ALL get rescued by the equestrians and the Sparkle Drive.
Heh... all I can think about at this point is how the IRS is handling these guys' and gals' taxes... you think POTUS granted the American astronauts an extension on the basis of them being "most decidedly out of the Country"?
"We pray for one last landing on the globe that gave us birth. Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies and the cool green hills of Earth."
8897746
Better question is how to create Social Security cards for the Equestrians
8897743
I'm not confident about making a prediction, but I seriously doubt that it's a red herring. It wouldn't be very consistent with the rest of the story.
8897781
Yes, LEGIT and official
Frankfurt/Rhein-Main is a large metro area, not two cities. I think you meant Frankfurt an der Oder, which is in a different federal state.
Refs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Rhine-Main
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_(Oder)
8897774
8897781
Nah, the Equestrians won't need Social Security cards. I find it more likely that they'll be considered diplomats
8897884 Yes, thank you.
The link in your commentary to the gator in Cleveland makes Vogels original point all the more emphatically...
8897746
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but that has happened before. Even aside from the various astronauts on long-duration spaceflights that keep them in orbit between January 1 and April 15, Jack Swigert famously forgot to file his taxes in the commotion resulting from his last-minute switch to prime crew on Apollo 13, which lasted from April 11 to April 17, and was intended to last even longer. Nixon did grant him an extension, as on April 15, he was literally the furthest away from the United States that any human has ever been.
8897965 Well, yes, except Cleveland in Texas only has about 7,000 people. Incidentally, Texas is particularly famous (or infamous) for nicking names from elsewhere. There is a London, TX (and also a New London, hundreds of miles away); Paris, TX; Buda, TX (but no Pest that I know of); Athens; I live about forty-five miles from the village of Moscow, TX; there is a Berlin (a ghost town) and a New Berlin (still a thing); and there are communities called Stockholm and Warsaw. For duplicate names of major US cities and/or state capitals: Portland, Albany, Providence, Trenton, Pittsburg, Lexington, Montgomery, Atlanta, (West) Columbia, Raleigh, Memphis, Jefferson, Los Angeles and San Diego.
And that's not getting into the stranger names, like Cut 'N' Shoot, Gun Barrel City, the legendary Bug Tussle; the unpronouncables (Gruene "green", Kountze "kuntz", Waxahachie "Wawksahatchie"; and tons more.
All things considered, I don't think the people who settled Texas had all that much in the way of imagination.
8898006 That's where the phrase "most decidedly out of the country" came from.
So, did they have a special chair for each rat?
Presence of rats actually rises an interesting question: how's are they supposed to be taken care of for month while whole crew is on Martian surface? It's certainly possible to build a special machine for this purpose, but it would probably be a considerable additional weight.
8898009
It's also (at least around Austin) the only place I've ever seen where you can't throw a rock without hitting a kolache shop.
8898006
That... was exactly what I was referring to. It's no joke; they would've jumped him
EDIT: So I just got done checking with the genealogist in the family, and apparently Nixon is my cousin... the more you know, I guess
I doubt that. Even with total mission failure, another ship would be built and launched, as long as a single Equstrian artifact survives, there's means to study magic. And if they leave a suit behind, that's a means of talking to extra-terrestrial life.
Most stories have a plot line that, for the most part, slowly rises to a climax, like a roller coaster, then falls after the conflict resolves and the story concludes. Small dips and rises throughout. This story seems to have a lot more rises and falls, and we're definitely not at the climax yet, at least not the climax of the original novel and film (Mark needing to get from the MAV to the Hermes using a hole in his glove). I can't even begin to speculate what the new climax will be.
8897613
To be honest, I think that recurring line is just there to build tension.
8898009
As soon as I saw those, my impression was "germanic immigrants, germanic immigrants, and Spanish transcription of a native word". (eg. "Quinoa" is a Spanish transcription of "Keenwa")
8897649
I'd like to see that, especially if they can manage to pull a real version of that fanart of the Last Supper.
That would be some spectacular stuff to plaster on the internet right next to the fanmade image.
8898256
Have the pizza place some sort of Roman style joint. Make the centurion a waiter.
8897615
True, I was gonna point out that is would take a truly massive CME to damage high-voltage lines, let alone microelectronics. They're not even 100% sure you could pull it off with a bunch of high altitude high yield nuclear bombs.
8897766
All hands, stand by, Free Falling.
Prediction: One of the Angel probes is going to pop up in or around Hermes, and therefore cause issues.
Spoken like someone who's never been to New Jersey. Joke all you like, we have darn good pizza.
Looking forward to seeing what this is all building up to.
8897766
Thankfully, Heinlein isn't writing this. Otherwise, they'd be doing all the computational work with slide rules. (Though, on the other hand, his Mars is inhabited.)
8898254 In the case of Kountze, German immigrants weren't directly involved. The town was named for a financier of the rail line that ran through it. (A lot of Texas towns originated because a water station or railroad siding along the railway needed a name. Most such have disappeared without a trace, but some were developed into towns that survived.)
8898505 Vogel has actually vacationed in Italy, where what's called pizza in America is radically different by region and bears only a passing resemblance to anything served in the United States.
8898518
Ah. Well then. Never mind.
I tweaked the dates after all- I'd forgotten to adjust for the two days Hermes lost in this story by lingering in Mars space for over a week longer than in the original book.
8897597
Exactly. It seems to be building towards something of that level of TARFU.
And the next pony probe needs to end up crashing into a machine planet and get sent to Earth after being renamed V-ger.
The probe after that gets its wires crossed and comes to Earth trying to talk to whales.
8898239
These are not mutually exclusive.
8898180
Wibbly wobbly time.
So the Hermes in your story is not the same ship as in the movie, correct? Given that it spins on the long axis to generate gravity, whereas the movie Hermes has the ship remain still while that habitation segment spins independently. I understand the choice, as your story is definitely more like the book, and Weir has said he imagined Hermes being a lot less fancy than it is in the movie, although it is still scientifically sound in the film.
8901441 Very much not the same. The single biggest problem with the movie Hermes is: how would you keep two enormous bearings (necessary for spindles to spin while the central ship stays put) airtight and working without further lubrication for a full year in a normal mission? Spinning the whole ship is a much simpler engineering solution, even if it requires a lot more thruster fuel consumption for adjusting rotation.
8901606
I'd imagine mag lock lubrication, but that would make really complex design, that would be too sci-fi and there'd be problem of slow evaporation of locking liquid.
They're all going to die.
Yeah, alligators and crocodiles are on a very short list of animals that haven't really bothered with evolution beyond a passing nod and polite 'How've you been?' in the past few million years, and that's for very good reason. I'd be amazed if they couldn't bounce back from anything short of an absolute catastrophe or extinction.
So, obviously, they hang around space centers for fun.
nice
That's a lot of broken records, wow.
You can't really call them "world records" though, since they're all happening off-world
PS: Vogel isn't human! He's German! They don't know fear!
Ew... fun thoughts, there.
I think they checked out the bunks together... if you know what I mean
Coming back to reread the story now that it's finished, I noticed the bit about the alligators. JSC isn't the only NASA facility that has those. Kennedy Space Center has large areas of land that it doesn't actually do anything with, but for safety and security reasons are off-limits to everyone else. This includes a marsh around the Shuttle Landing Facility inhabited by alligators who regularly sunbathe on the runway. I once met a guy who worked as an air traffic controller there who said, not entirely jokingly, that the alligators are part of their security system (instead of digging a moat and filling it with alligators, just build in the middle of a swamp that's already full of the things). The SLF's insignia even has an alligator on it, which is painted on the hangar door. It's a shame the Shuttle landings didn't generally include camera angles that showed the hangar, because I'm sure the visitor center would sell thousands of t-shirts with that logo on them if people knew about it.