Zack laughed out loud. “I don’t believe it! They harpooned it!” Seeing that none of his crew understood, he said, “They fired an anchor from that tube. It wasn’t a missile launcher, it was a tool to keep them from bouncing the way we did.”
“You mean, they winched themselves in?” Tea said, clearly stunned. Of the four of them, she was the only one with sailing experience.
“Bingo,” Zack said. “Just like a sailing ship.”
“Well,” said Pogo, turning to Zack. “I guess you’re not the only Horn-blower reader around here.”
The crew of spacecraft Brahma prepares for its historic exploration of Near-Earth Object Keanu. Data continue to be received via Deep Space Network at Byalalu near Bangalore.
It may be recalled that the Brahma spacecraft was launched from European Space Agency’s Kourou Space Centre on 18 August 2019.
INDIAN SPACE RESEARCH ORGANIZATION PRESS RELEASE, 22 AUGUST 2019
“Yes, I’m standing by.”
Lucas Munaretto was growing tired of using that phrase. In the four days since Brahma had launched from Kourou, it was almost the only thing he had been able to say on the air-to-ground link.
The problem was Bangalore mission control, where even the simplest question triggered a series of lengthy consultations. Lucas had noticed this hesitancy during the months of mission simulations but had written it off as the learning process (Bangalore had never controlled a mission this complex). Besides, Taj’s international crew had frequently been too slow to act.
But now, as Lucas struggled with a pressure regulator on Natalia Yorkina’s EVA suit, he realized that no one on the ground team, not even lead flight director Vikram Nayar, seemed willing to exercise any authority. With the eyes of the world on them, with a crew of four newly landed on Keanu, they were like actors who froze the moment the lights went up.
From his tour on the International Space Station, Lucas knew that NASA did not operate that way. Its communicators were either astronauts or training team members who worked in tandem with shift flight directors. Routine decisions got made instantly. Emergencies obviously required some consultation, but even then the voice on the line would be brisk, professional, informed.
But that reflected the difference in approach: Bangalore had based its style on the Russian method, in which cosmonauts’ actions were strictly controlled from the ground. NASA was more flexible, operating on the attitude that a properly trained astronaut was capable of responding to any situation.
Bangalore apparently had little faith in its crew. A shame, since it included the World’s Greatest Astronaut.
Lucas Munaretto loved the title, which had descended on him several years ago, during his one and only space mission, the first by a Brazilian astronaut to the International Space Station.
During an EVA, Lucas’s partner, a Japanese astronaut, had briefly become disconnected from the station exterior. EVA astronauts were tethered by at least two different lines, but one of those perfect storms struck, where a latch failed at the same time the Japanese engineer was relocating his backup line to a new position on the S6 truss and failing to catch it on first try. That simple motion—normally damped by connection to the massive station—caused the man to keep turning and begin floating away from the truss.
Without apparent concern, and in full view of TV viewers on Earth, Lucas had simply launched himself at his comrade, who had almost floated out of reach, grabbing the errant spacewalker’s feet and slowly but steadily pulling him back to safety.
The emergency lasted only a few seconds. Indeed, later analysis discounted the real threat, noting that there were no “rates”—no tumbling or even much motion—on the disconnected astronaut, who was also reachable by the station’s remote manipulator arm.
Nevertheless, the legend had already taken flight, unhindered by Lucas’s dark-haired good looks, smile, and fluency in four languages, or by his reputation as a daring rescue helicopter pilot, or by his sister Isobel, a former Victoria’s Secret model.
The notoriety had obviously helped Lucas win a coveted spot on the Brahma crew. Brazil’s financial contributions to Coalition space efforts theoretically earned it the right to have a representative on the first big mission, but the Agencia Espacial Brasileira had no astronaut corps, only a pair of pilots who had been hired over the past decade and sent through the training programs in Houston, Moscow, Cologne, and Tsukuba. By 2017, Lucas Munaretto was the only one still qualified, and he faced competition from members of the Russian cosmonaut team and India’s vyomanauts, not to mention qualified applicants from the European Space Agency and Japan, and even a disgruntled former NASA astronaut.
He had made the cut, of course, and entered training with a vyomanaut commander and two Russians with wildly varying degrees of experience. Dennis Chertok was fifty and had flown in space five times, all to the International Space Station, one of them as a mission specialist in America’s long-gone space shuttle. He knew everything about hardware, operations, and especially EVAs, having logged eighty hours in space walks. Even Taj, notoriously sensitive to slights and perks, had deferred to Dennis for much of the training, right up to the time when his obsessive-compulsiveness became overwhelming.
Natalia Yorkina had never flown a mission of any kind. She had been selected, Lucas suspected, to have a woman on the crew. Dark-eyed, often nervous and giggly, Natalia had not impressed him at first, either. But she turned out to be ferociously competent, eager to learn, and relentlessly hardworking, like an automaton.
Then there was Taj himself, the most stolid, phlegmatic human Lucas had ever met, more like a retired accountant or grim-faced Swiss banker than a test pilot. His greatest virtue was patience . . . which was turning out to be a good thing, given Bangalore’s slowness.
The only time Taj lit up with anything like emotion was when learning of some American outrage. Then a smile would begin to form, an eyebrow would rise, and he would rub his hands together in anticipation.
Lucas was grateful to know that his vyomanaut commander had feelings, but as for him, he hated the amped-up rivalry between the Coalition and the United States. True, the U.S. relationship with Russia had blown hot and cold for the past twenty years, and, yes, the Americans had bullied India on a number of issues.
But Brazil’s disputes with the Big Brother to the north were largely limited to energy matters. Even those tended to consist of public huffing and puffing.
All of this—the lack of response from Bangalore, the petty gamesmanship, and the fact that the very capable American crew was already headed to the surface—made Lucas want to scream with rage and impatience:
Let’s go! Glory awaits!
Big Dumb Object : n., from science fiction, a term originated by critic Roz Kaveney, writing in Foundation , the British journal (1981), to describe large, extraterrestrial planetoids, spacecraft, or structures. See Ringworld, Dyson sphere, etc.
SCIFIPEDIA , ACCESSED AUGUST 2019
With Brahma safely down, Zack actually felt impatient, eager to go outside. Within an hour, he and Yvonne were suited, on oxygen, and waiting for the pressure in the Venture airlock to bleed down to zero. Although he was linked to Yvonne, to Pogo and Tea, and to Houston and the world beyond, Zack felt cocooned. It was to be expected, of course, since the suit, which weighed almost a hundred kilograms on earth—more than a naked Zack—was like a man-sized spacecraft.