At SPAR Aerospace, Ryan Martin worked on designing tether deployment systems for space; much later, his expertise on the use of tether systems played a major part in his role in the failed Mirusha rescue attempt. He spent a year in France, to earn a degree in space studies at the International Space University in Strasbourg, and the day he came back to Canada he put in his application to join the small Canadian astronaut corps.
His application went in just in time to apply to join the first Canadian cadre selected specifically for duty to the space station. His low amount of piloting time counted against him. He had taken flying lessons and spent as much time as he could afford practicing, but he certainly had far fewer hours in the air than the RCAF pilots that applied for the same few slots. But no one had a more thorough grasp of every aspect of astronautics and microgravity science than he, and in the end that counted more than his relative lack of flight hours. He wasn’t being trained to be a pilot anyway; the Americans would never select a Canadian to fly their shuttle. For the tasks Canada wanted astronauts for, they needed expertise in all areas, and no one scored higher than Ryan.
He graduated at the top of his astronaut training class.
His appointment to the astronaut corps elicited mixed feelings for him; during those years the fate of the space station was uncertain, and whether the space station had any role at all in the future exploration of space, or if instead it was an expensive orbiting dinosaur, was quite unclear. He wondered if the real future might instead lie in commercial space, where new, small launch vehicles were beginning to make enormous profits from launching tiny, cheap satellites.
But he wanted to do more than just send up other people’s satellites.
Ryan Martin wanted to go to Mars.
Mars was his obsession. He thought about Mars, made calculations, read every book, science or science fiction, that had ever been written about Mars, published papers suggesting possible solutions to the finicky engineering details of a Mars mission. After a while he started to be invited to give lectures about Mars missions, and he found that he was good at it. He would rent an airplane and fly to some distant city and talk. Schoolchildren, Masonic temples, library groups—he loved the moment when a group of strangers suddenly warmed up, and his contagious enthusiasm spread.
He didn’t chase women—to tell the truth, he had never learned how to approach a woman—it seemed to be an arcane trick that other men learned in some class he had failed to attend—and so he treated all the women he met exactly the same way he treated the men: as coworkers or as friends. But occasionally women would ask him out, and he wasn’t against going out to a restaurant, or to a concert, or for a walk on the beaches of Lake Ontario. And afterward, if sometimes a female friend asked him back to her apartment, or his, well, he had taken no vow of chastity.
He had only two rules to his relationships, rules that he never broke. Never promise anything.
And never fall in love.
10
Riding the Slingshot
Butterfly had been designed for short hops and aerial reconnaissance, not for a two-thousand-mile flight, and it had not been designed to carry three people. Over the months that they spent at Acidalia, Ryan ripped out every part that was not critical to flight: all the redundant control systems, the scientific instrumentation. He cut off the landing gear; when she landed, the Butterfly would land on snow. And she would never take off again.
They would have no margin, but at last he had an airplane that would make it to the pole.
For the take-off, Ryan laid down two strands of the superfiber cable for three kilometers along the desert sand. At the far end he staked it down to bolts drilled into bedrock, and then went back and used the motorized winch to stretch it. The elastic energy that can be stored in superfiber is enormous: If it were to suddenly break, the release would snap the cable back at almost hypersonic velocity, setting free enough energy to vaporize much of the cable, as well as anybody who stood nearby.
Once he had it stretched, he held it stretched with a second anchor bolt. It formed a two-mile-long rubber band. Ryan would use the world’s largest slingshot to launch the airplane.
The airplane had only two seats, so Estrela and Tana both were crammed into the rear copilot’s seat of the airplane, Estrela perched on Tana’s lap. In their bulky Mars suits, they fit into the space with barely millimeters to spare.
Ryan closed and sealed the cockpit around them and took the pilot’s seat.
“Ready?” Ryan asked.
“As ready as we’re going to be,” Tana’s muffled voice said.
“Get on with it!” Estrela said.
“Armed,” Ryan said. He pulled out an arming switch on the remote control, and said, “Launch!”
The explosives fired in silence, but Ryan could see the flash behind him, severing the strap that held the stretched superfiber down. Instantly he was pressed back into his seat as the superfiber slingshot, attached to the airplane at the motor mount, grabbed the airplane and shot it forward. Behind him he heard Tana say “Yikes!” and Estrela let out a sudden grunt as the sudden weight pressed into her.
The ground rushed past them with terrifying speed. Ryan concentrated his attention on keeping the wings level; with even a slight brush of a wingtip against the sand the fragile airplane would disintegrate around them. He couldn’t spare any attention for the airspeed indicator, but he could feel the wings beginning to pull against the air. He held forward pressure on the stick to keep the nose down; they needed to reach flying airspeed as quickly as they could. He shot a glance down at the airspeed; not yet, not yet. Now.
He eased back on the stick—not too much, or the wings would be ripped off—and the ground dropped away under them. Now Butterfly was lofted like a kite being towed behind a running boy. The pressure from the slingshot eased off; they were running out of stretch. It had been only a few seconds. He concentrated on keeping his airspeed up while milking the last little bit of altitude out of the quickly relaxing slingshot.
The slingshot slackened and fell away. For a moment Butterfly was soaring. He commanded the valves on the liquid oxygen tanks open, armed the ignition switch, and watched for the green light. After a terrifying pause, it flickered on.
They were ready.
Ryan hit the ignition button, and with a shudder, the ram-rocket chuffed to life.
For the first time in weeks, Ryan felt a surge of hope. Maybe they would make it after all. They were flying. Flying!
11
Momentum Management
Other astronauts who flew up on the shuttle with him felt sick. Ryan felt exhilarated. Every part of it was exciting, the training, the launch, and now the free-fall. This was what he’d always wanted. He tried a slow flip, then a fast one. “This is great,” he said.
But he was here to work, not to play. He had the map of the space station memorized. The others went quickly to find the station physician, or at least to find vomit bags. “They’ll get over it in a day or so,” the station physician said. “How about you? You okay? Need a patch?”
“No. I’m fine.”
The doctor nodded. Ryan was fascinated to see how his body moved infinitesimally in the opposite direction as he did. “Some people aren’t affected. Guess you’re lucky.”
He went to work.
After a while, when he was alone in a module, one of the female astronauts floated over. She casually snagged a handrail next to him, and looked at him, floating upside down.