“I copy. Thank you for the information, Mr. Halvorsen. Over and out.”
I signed off with mixed feelings. My Padre taught me to “not tempt the Lord by putting yourself where only He can rescue you.” Good advice in the cold scrublands of Patagonia, and good advice here. Despite Halvorsen’s contempt for conventional political and moral authority, the concepts of forethought, at least, were not foreign to him. “Plenty of redundancies,” he’d said. I would hope.
In concept it was simple. Elegant. The ISA called it MSR, for Mars Surface Rendezvous, and dismissed it as too risky. At first, my mind boggled at a Mars surface refueling operation. But with everything tied down by Martian gravity, I realized it might actually be less tricky than a tank-module swap on Deimos. As I reviewed Halvorsen’s video, I realized the large spider legs on their supply modules placed the tanks higher than on the Amundsen and Fram, allowing a passive gravity feed. The compactness of their deceptively simple design impressed me— the same piece of mass often performed two or three functions.
Their base was not too far from where we planned to land, so a rescue contingency would not perturb our mission plan very much. There were only two of them, and they already had their own supplies down. In fact, and this was the first time I remembered thinking in these terms, while their expedition was minuscule compared to ours, they had a lot of stuff for only two people.
Halvorsen’s sign-off arrived as I was thinking it through. “Commander. What is now done is done, Mars will be a hard enough opponent, without false pride to fight as well. I tell this to Ingrid too. You should know she is in charge overall. She is the older, and has the broader education, and is a better English talker. Per is the best pilot and likes to do orbits and numbers mostly, though he can do the other too in a pinch. No matter. They do the job. If you meet my people, you will find Ingrid not so hard to work with.”
I stared at the screen speechless, not believing what I’d heard. Halvorsen’s commitment to women’s equality was well known, and it was one of the many issues over which he had pulled out of the UN project. He felt an all male expedition, especially a large and long one, could become too restive, too grumbly, too combative. But third world politics had gone against him, and he had stomped out. Now he was having his revenge by decreeing that I would have to treat this woman, whose mores and deportment I had publicly criticized, as an equal.
Not likely. It was far easier to simply ignore them, which is what we did for the next month, as we approached the Red Planet.
Mars loomed bright and full as we rose toward it from the Sun. Our nuclear reactor shadow shields did double duty as we rode out a minor solar flare. In fact, it turned out that for the entire mission, the lowest total radiation dose was in the cabins right next to the reactor shield—because it stopped half the cosmic rays as well.
We learned later that the Norwegian ships had superconducting magnetic loops that channeled the proton influx harmlessly into their heat shield, behind their propellant tanks. Another “unproven” technology, but not only did it protect the Norwegians, but they actually gained a few centimeters per second push from the interaction of the charged particle storm with their magnetic field.
Little good would that do them! Doing midcourse maneuvers with our fleet is not trivial, but I found need for another one. I was a demon: I sold it to Dr. Worthing and pushed the planning through with two sets of books—the vector I intended to use would get us there a little earlier.
Four countdowns had to go perfectly, everything forty people have spread around had to be stowed, four computers needed to agree on everything—it takes days of planning. But under my leadership it went perfectly, and it added just enough delta-V to get us back ahead of the Norwegians without creating big political problems for Mission Control.
The “race,” of course, had assumed David and Goliath proportions in the Earth media, and guess who was cast as Goliath? I was obliged to do interviews in which I decried any competition and said conciliatory things about “my colleague, Dr. Karinsdatter.”
When, as a result of our “nominal” and “planned” maneuver, we gradually pulled away from the Norwegians, the media cried foul. However, by that time, they could do nothing but throw words at us.
Not so Halvorsen. I was in my cabin ten days before our Mars orbit injection when the Norwegians threw us yet another twist. We watched it on the telescope, recorded it, and I’m still not sure I believe it: the Norwegian ships separated without despinning! The one on the approaching leg of its rotation just let go of its tether, and its rotational velocity instantly became additional velocity toward Mars! It was like a stone released from an ancient sling, headed right toward my heart.
I stared for five minutes, then played the file back again. “Give me the revised arrival times,” I finally told the computer.
It was as bad as I feared. The lead ship, the Amundsen, had gained only about thirty meters per second, which would still leave it still more than a day behind us when we got to Mars. The trouble was that they were planning to go right down if they could, and we were going to do parking orbits, surveys, transfer to landers and so on, before actually going down. If all went right with both our plans, our first landings would take place within hours of each other—theirs first.
I stared at the screen and composed my thoughts for the next call. It would not be my place to educate the ISA leaders under whose authority I commanded this expedition, but the experienced astronaut within me was saying that the Norwegians had a chance.
I needed to break the news gently.
At least, if their landing was successful, it would minimize the perturbations of our extremely complex and interrelated mission plan.
But on the other hand, our expedition would not be first, and I would not be the first man to set foot on Mars. Once more, I reviewed our mission plans, the Martian weather, where our landers were and so on. There was still a chance, if the lead Norwegian ship didn’t touch down on the first pass. That, I thought, would depend on Per Nordli’s skill and nerve.
Not exactly, as things turned out.
The simultaneous deep space restart of our nuclear rockets was ten times as complicated as the chemical midcourse maneuvers. But we did it without incident, silencing many critics. One after another, our ships turned their damping drums and their reactors went critical. A trickle of hydrogen flowed into the particle beds to cool them and run the turbines. The computers did a million cross checks. Deviations were within nominal limits.
We passed the orbit of Deimos— twenty thousand kilometers out—in good form. We would meet the moon itself, with our supply depot, after our main engine burn at periapsis put us in an elliptical transfer orbit. At Deimos, we’d do a short circularization burn with our chemical auxiliary propulsion and “land” on the tiny moon to take on propellant before sending landers to Mars. That was the plan.
Our Phobos camera sent a picture of our four ships with the volcanoes of Tharsis in the background; it was a spectacular picture. I felt a moment of triumph. Our majestic convoy, the symbol of Earth’s pioneering spirit, was headed in to mankind’s new planet!
This impressive close formation approach, however, had been another “discretionary” part of the mission plan. Originally, the ships were going to come in at one day intervals. But that would have meant another day before I reached the surface.
My moment of triumph was shortlived. Hours before, the Amundsen had made a final course correction— an expected maneuver given the chancy aerobraking ahead of it. But the trajectory report indicated that the Amundsen had actually done a major burn toward the planet! The burn had cut hours off its trajectory, but it would hit the Martian atmosphere at a slightly higher velocity, just an hour before our burn. So the Norwegians weren’t racing? I thought about negative lift and velocity-squared aerodynamic effects and could guess that something besides the race might have led them to this suicidal dive into the Martian atmosphere, but it wasn’t very convincing. No, I decided, Per Nordli was taking this risk so Halvorsen wouldn’t lose his diabolical little race.