Then I cut shit up!
I’m not a materials engineer; my design for the bedroom isn’t elegant. It’s just a six-meter perimeter and a ceiling. No, it won’t have right angles and corners (pressure vessels don’t like those). It’ll balloon out to a more round shape.
Anyway, it means I only needed to cut two big-ass strips of canvas. One for the walls and one for the ceiling.
After mangling the Hab, I pulled the remaining canvas down to the flooring and resealed it. Ever set up a camping tent? From the inside? While wearing a suit of armor? It was a pain in the ass.
I repressurized to one-twentieth of an atmosphere to see if it could hold pressure.
Ha ha ha! Of course it couldn’t! Leaks galore. Time to find them.
On Earth, tiny particles get attached to water or wear down to nothing. On Mars, they just hang around. The top layer of sand is like talcum powder. I went outside with a bag and scraped along the surface. I got some normal sand, but plenty of powder, too.
I had the Hab maintain the one-twentieth atmosphere, backfilling as air leaked out. Then I “puffed” the bag to get the smallest particles to float around. They were quickly drawn to where the leaks were. As I found each leak, I spot-sealed it with resin.
It took hours, but I finally got a good seal. I’ll tell ya, the Hab looks pretty “ghetto” now. One whole side of it is lower than the rest. I’ll have to hunch down when I’m over there.
I pressurized to a full atmosphere and waited an hour. No leaks.
It’s been a long, physically taxing day. I’m totally exhausted but I can’t sleep. Every sound scares the shit out of me. Is that the Hab popping? No? Okay…. What was that!? Oh, nothing? Okay….
It’s a terrible thing to have my life depend on my half-assed handiwork.
Time to get a sleeping pill from the medical supplies.
What the hell is in those sleeping pills!? It’s the middle of the day.
After two cups of Martian coffee, I woke up a little. I won’t be taking another one of those pills. It’s not like I have to go to work in the morning.
Anyway, as you can tell from how not dead I am, the Hab stayed sealed overnight. The seal is solid. Ugly as hell, but solid.
Today’s task was the bedroom.
Assembling the bedroom was way easier than resealing the Hab. Because this time, I didn’t have to wear an EVA suit. I made the whole thing inside the Hab. Why not? It’s just canvas. I can roll it up and take it out an airlock when I’m done.
First, I did some surgery on the remaining pop-tent. I needed to keep the rover–airlock connector and surrounding canvas. The rest of the canvas had to go. Why hack off most of the canvas only to replace it with more canvas? Seams.
NASA is good at making things. I am not. The dangerous part of this structure won’t be the canvas. It’ll be the seams. And I get less total seam length by not trying to use the existing pop-tent canvas.
After hacking away most of the remaining tent, I seal-stripped the two pop-tent floors together. Then I sealed the new canvas pieces into place.
It was so much easier without the EVA suit on. So much easier!
Then I had to test it. Again, I did it in the Hab. I brought an EVA suit into the tent with me and closed the mini-airlock door. Then I fired up the EVA suit, leaving the helmet off. I told it to bump the pressure up to 1.2 atm.
It took a little while to bring it up to par, and I had to disable some alarms on the suit. (“Hey, I’m pretty sure the helmet’s not on!”). It depleted most of the N2 tank but was finally able to bring up the pressure.
Then I sat around and waited. I breathed; the suit regulated the air. All was well. I watched the suit readouts carefully to see if it had to replace any “lost” air. After an hour with no noticeable change, I declared the first test a success.
I rolled up the whole thing (wadded up, really) and took it out to the rover.
You know, I suit up a lot these days. I bet that’s another record I hold. A typical Martian astronaut does, what, forty EVAs? I’ve done several hundred.
Once I brought the bedroom to the rover, I attached it to the airlock from the inside. Then I pulled the release to let it loose. I was still wearing my EVA suit, because I’m not an idiot.
The bedroom fired out and filled in three seconds. The open airlock hatchway led directly to it, and it appeared to be holding pressure.
Just like before, I let it sit for an hour. And just like before, it worked great. Unlike the Hab canvas resealing, I got this one right on the first try. Mostly because I didn’t have to do it with a damn EVA suit on.
Originally, I planned to let my bedroom sit overnight and check on it in the morning. But I ran into a problem: I can’t get out if I do that. The rover has only one airlock, and the bedroom was attached to it. There was no way for me to get out without detaching the bedroom, and no way to attach and pressurize the bedroom without being inside the rover.
It’s a little scary. The first time I test the thing overnight will be with me in it. But that’ll be later. I’ve done enough today.
I have to face facts. I’m done prepping the rover. I don’t “feel” like I’m done. But it’s ready to go:
Food: 1692 potatoes. Vitamin pills.
Water: 620 liters.
Shelter: Rover, trailer, bedroom.
Air: Rover and trailer combined storage: 14 liters liquid O2, 14 liters liquid N2.
Life Support: Oxygenator and atmospheric regulator. 418 hours of use-and-discard CO2 filters for emergencies.
Power: 36 kilowatt-hours of storage. Carrying capacity for 29 solar cells.
Heat: 1400-watt RTG. Homemade reservoir to heat regulator’s return air. Electric heater in rover as a backup.
Disco: Lifetime supply.
I’m leaving here on Sol 449. That gives me fifty-nine sols to test everything and fix whatever isn’t working right. Then decide what’s coming with me and what’s staying behind. And plot a route to Schiaparelli using a grainy satellite map. And rack my brains trying to think of anything important I forgot.
Since Sol 6 all I’ve wanted to do was get the hell out of here. Now the prospect of leaving the Hab behind scares the shit out of me. I need some encouragement. I need to ask myself, “What would an Apollo astronaut do?”
He’d drink three whiskey sours, drive his Corvette to the launchpad, then fly to the moon in a command module smaller than my Rover. Man those guys were cool.
CHAPTER 21
I’m working out how to pack. It’s harder than it sounds.
I have two pressure vessels: the rover and the trailer. They’re connected by hoses, but they’re also not stupid. If one loses pressure, the other will instantly seal off the shared lines.
There’s a grim logic to this: If the rover breaches, I’m dead. No point in planning around that. But if the trailer breaches, I’ll be fine. That means I should put everything important in the rover.
Everything that goes in the trailer has to be comfortable in near-vacuum and freezing temperatures. Not that I anticipate that, but you know. Plan for the worst.
The saddlebags I made for the Pathfinder trip will come in handy for food storage. I can’t just store potatoes in the rover or trailer. They’d rot in the warm, pressurized environment. I’ll keep some in the rover for easy access, but the rest will be outside in the giant freezer that is this planet. The trailer will be packed pretty tight. It’ll have two bulky Hab batteries, the atmospheric regulator, the oxygenator, and my homemade heat reservoir. It would be more convenient to have the reservoir in the rover, but it has to be near the regulator’s return air feed.