With that, Stetson finished making the last suit connection and walked over to the airlock’s inner door. It was barely large enough for him to enter fully encumbered, but he managed. Once inside, he closed the inner door and began preparations for opening the outer door—into the vacuum of space that was the Moon’s natural environment.
“Alright,” Stetson said as the door opened. “Tony, I’m on my way. While I’m gone, go ahead and start piling up the stuff we’re throwing overboard. Just don’t put any in the airlock yet. We may need to get our guests into the lander quickly, and I don’t want any crap in the way. After we cycle them in, we can off-load. We’ll assess their conditions, and then we’ll do the mods to the skin of the ship.”
“Sure thing. Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
With that, Stetson stepped out of the airlock. He had been totally ready for the outer door to open, but when it had, he reacted with a startle reflex. He carefully walked over to the door and peered out. But stepping out, on the other hand, was a whole different thing. As eager as was to step on the Moon, he felt a sense of hesitation, like looking down at a swimming pool below from the high dive and swallowing the butterflies in order to just dive in.
“Damn. What were those stupid-ass engineers at NASA thinking when they put the crew compartment on top of this monster?” Stetson said, forgetting that the live microphone was recording his words for posterity.
He was reminded by the voice of mission control. “Bill, is there a problem?”
Realizing what he’d just said into an open microphone, including the “damn” part, he replied, “No, there’s no problem. Sorry about the chatter. I’m just looking out the door and down at the ground—the view surprised me is all.”
But that was not what Bill Stetson was thinking. He was standing on the exit platform in front of the airlock and looking twenty feet straight down to the ground. I told those jackasses that putting the crew compartment on top was a stupid idea, and they wouldn’t listen. Falling twenty feet to the ground on Earth could kill you instantly. Falling twenty feet to the ground on the Moon in one-sixth of Earth’s gravity would break bones, and, since you’re three days from a hospital, it could still kill you. Dead would be dead. Stupid jackasses.
Stetson moved across the platform to the elevator that would take him down to the surface. To call it an elevator was actually an undeserved flattery. It was more of a moving cage that would take astronauts from the crew compartment to the ground and back again. Though there was a ladder, the lander designers had realized the risks of a clumsy astronaut wearing a spacesuit attempting to use one on the Moon.
Stetson entered the elevator, closed the gate, and pushed the down button. With a clank, the elevator began to move slowly downward. After a painfully slow few minutes, which to Stetson seemed like an hour, he reached the surface.
A few minutes later, Bill Stetson became the first American to walk on the Moon since Gene Cernan. He tried not to think about the external cameras on the Altair recording his every move. He didn’t make any pithy comments for posterity, nor did he think he needed to say anything. He was focused on his rescue mission.
He headed toward the boulders and, hopefully, the crew of the Harmony.
The boulders were farther away than they appeared. Without the usual reference points of houses, trees, or even clouds, it was very difficult to determine how far away an object on the Moon really was. The fact that it was nighttime further complicated gauging the distance.
Now acutely aware that he was potentially speaking to about six billion people listening back on Earth, he said, “It’s not as dark as I thought it would be. The sun is not visible, and the Earth is only about one-tenth visible on the horizon here at the limb. But the reflected light from the Earth is more than enough for me to see. It’s sort of like taking a midnight walk under a full Moon. It’s tranquil. It’s serene. It…it’s beautiful.”
Stetson had been walking for ten minutes, and he couldn’t discern that he was any closer to the boulders than when he first left the Altair. He trudged on, alternating skipping and walking, depending upon how the mood struck him. Skipping along wearing a two-hundred-pound backpack was relatively easy on the Moon, where it weighed only thirty-three pounds. He managed to cover more ground that way to boot.
Approximately thirty minutes after leaving the lander, Stetson reached the outcropping of rocks on its left side. Now walking much more slowly due to the increased number of loose rocks near the base of the outcropping, Stetson moved around the boulders. As he made his way around, he saw the Harmony.
Clearly a copy of the Altair design, the lander was also, clearly, severely damaged. Instead of sitting proudly on the lunar surface as was the Altair, this lander looked like a silver wounded animal trying to get back on its feet while dragging a broken leg behind it. The front leg of the Harmony was crumpled; the remaining three legs were bent at impossible angles. What was once a hopeful symbol of China’s emergence as a world power was instead a mangled mess on the lunar plain. Stetson was humbled, momentarily imagining that it was he and his crew similarly trapped so far from home.
“Tony, I see the lander. It is totally dark, and there is no external sign of life. I’m going forward. They’re bound to be in the crew compartment. Camera working okay?”
Stetson tapped his helmet near where the camera was installed. The camera was broadcasting and recording everything he saw.
“Camera working fine. What a mess. Be careful.” Chow kept his reply brief.
Stetson began walking toward the lander, and, as he got closer, he could see where the Chinese had run a hose from the ascent engine’s propellant tanks to what appeared to be a small rocket test stand, complete with an improvised rocket engine, pointing straight toward the lower left wall of the crew compartment. The connections to the fuel tanks were crude and, from all appearances, leaky. Whoever had made the connection had found a way to puncture the tanks and insert what looked like aluminum air hoses into the openings. The hoses looked to be in pretty good shape as they snaked across the ground and connected to the bent metal of the improvised “engine.” He couldn’t tell from what the engine was made, but since it was so obviously charred, it couldn’t have been aluminum. Aluminum would have melted during the resulting combustion.
The scorched sides of the compartment’s outer wall were clearly visible just in front of the improvised engine’s exhaust nozzle. Stetson immediately realized what they had done.
“Brilliant,” he said. “Tony, do you see this?”
“Bill, I see something, but I can’t tell what it is.”
“It’s a Bunsen burner. They built themselves a furnace to keep warm. A furnace! If their ship is like ours, and it clearly is, then they may not have had power, but they sure had fuel. The fuel they would have used to get back into space. Do you get it?”
“Um, no. I don’t.”
“Doctors,” Bill muttered under his breath.
Not wasting any time, Stetson explained as he continued to navigate around the crashed lander, trying to find a way to get inside. “Like us, they used hypergolic fuel in their ascent stage because it has to be simple. Cryogenic fuel has to be kept cold, and it still boils off. They kept their system simple, and, from the looks of it, they used the same thing we do—N2O4. Mix it with hydrazine and, poof, it lights. Simple. Only instead of using the fuel to get off the Moon, they kludged it to make a Bunsen burner to keep warm. The flame was aimed at one wall of the crew compartment, and I bet I’ll find them all huddled around that one wall. The flame is out now. And I can’t tell from looking at it for how long. If it had been us, the flame might have burned right through the thin skin of the lander.”