“Once you get to Mark, how fast a relative velocity can you handle?”
“I can grab the MAV easily at five meters per second. Ten meters per second is kind of like jumping onto a moving train. Anything more than that and I might miss.”
“So, including the MMU safe speed, we need to get the ship within twenty meters per second of his velocity.”
“And the intercept has to be within two hundred and fourteen meters,” Beck said. “Pretty narrow margin of error.”
“We’ve got a lot of leeway,” Lewis said. “The launch will be fifty-two minutes before the intercept, and it takes twelve minutes. As soon as Mark’s S2 engine cuts out, we’ll know our intercept point and velocity. If we don’t like it, we’ll have forty minutes to correct. Our engine’s two millimeters per second may not seem like much, but in forty minutes it can move us up to 5.7 kilometers.”
“Good,” Beck said. “And two hundred and fourteen meters isn’t a hard limit, per se.”
“Yes it is,” Lewis said.
“Nah,” Beck said. “I know I’m not supposed to go untethered, but without my leash I could get way out there—”
“Not an option.” Lewis said.
“But we could double or even triple our safe intercept range—”
“We’re done talking about this,” Lewis said sharply.
“Aye, Commander.”
There aren’t many people who can say they’ve vandalized a three-billion-dollar spacecraft, but I’m one of them.
I’ve been pulling critical hardware out of the MAV left and right. It’s nice to know that my launch to orbit won’t have any pesky backup systems weighing me down.
First thing I did was remove the small stuff. Then came the things I could disassemble, like the crew seats, several of the backup systems, and the control panels.
I’m not improvising anything. I’m following a script sent by NASA, which was set up to make things as easy as possible. Sometimes I miss the days when I made all the decisions myself. Then I shake it off and remember I’m infinitely better off with a bunch of geniuses deciding what I do than I am making shit up as I go along.
Periodically, I suit up, crawl into the airlock with as much junk as I can fit, and dump it outside. The area around the MAV looks like the set of Sanford and Son.
I learned about Sanford and Son from Lewis’s collection. Seriously, that woman needs to see someone about her seventies problem.
I’m turning water into rocket fuel.
It’s easier than you’d think.
Separating hydrogen and oxygen only requires a couple of electrodes and some current. The problem is collecting the hydrogen. I don’t have any equipment for pulling hydrogen out of the air. The atmospheric regulator doesn’t even know how. The last time I had to get hydrogen out of the air (back when I turned the Hab into a bomb) I burned it to turn it into water. Obviously that would be counterproductive.
But NASA thought everything through and gave me a process. First, I disconnected the rover and trailer from each other. Then, while wearing my EVA suit, I depressurized the trailer and back-filled it with pure oxygen at one-fourth of an atmosphere. Then I opened a plastic box full of water and put a couple of electrodes in. That’s why I needed the atmosphere. Without it, the water would just boil immediately and I’d be hanging around in a steamy atmosphere.
The electrolysis separated the hydrogen and oxygen from each other. Now the trailer was full of even more oxygen and also hydrogen. Pretty dangerous, actually.
Then I fired up the atmospheric regulator. I know I just said it doesn’t recognize hydrogen, but it does know how to yank oxygen out of the air. I broke all the safeties and set it to pull 100 percent of the oxygen out. After it was done, all that was left in the trailer was hydrogen. That’s why I started out with an atmosphere of pure oxygen, so the regulator could separate it later.
Then I cycled the rover’s airlock with the inner door open. The airlock thought it was evacuating itself, but it was actually evacuating the whole trailer. The air was stored in the airlock’s holding tank. And there you have it, a tank of pure hydrogen.
I carried the airlock’s holding tank to the MAV and transferred the contents to the MAV’s hydrogen tanks. I’ve said this many times before, but: Hurray for standardized valve systems!
Finally, I fired up the fuel plant, and it got to work making the additional fuel I’d need.
I’ll need to go through this process several more times as the launch date approaches. I’m even going to electrolyze my urine. That’ll make for a pleasant smell in the trailer.
If I survive this, I’ll tell people I was pissing rocket fuel.
[19:22] JOHANSSEN: Hello, Mark.
[19:23] MAV: Johanssen!? Holy crap! They finally letting you talk to me directly?
[19:24] JOHANSSEN: Yes, NASA gave the OK for direct communication an hour ago. We’re only 35 light-seconds apart, so we can talk in near-real time. I just set up the system and I’m testing it out.
[19:24] MAV: What took them so long to let us talk?
[19:25] JOHANSSEN: The psych team was worried about personality conflicts.
[19:25] MAV: What? Just ’cause you guys abandoned me on a godforsaken planet with no chance of survival?
[19:26] JOHANSSEN: Funny. Don’t make that kind of joke with Lewis.
[19:27] MAV: Roger. So uh… thanks for coming back to get me.
[19:27] JOHANSSEN: It’s the least we could do. How is the MAV retrofit going?
[19:28] MAV: So far, so good. NASA put a lot of thought into the procedures. They work. That’s not to say they’re easy. I spent the last 3 days removing Hull Panel 19 and the front window. Even in Mars-g they’re heavy motherfuckers.
[19:29] JOHANSSEN: When we pick you up, I will make wild, passionate love to you. Prepare your body.
[19:29] JOHANSSEN: I didn’t type that! That was Martinez! I stepped away from the console for like 10 seconds!
[19:29] MAV: I’ve really missed you guys.
I’m… done?
I think I’m done.
I did everything on the list. The MAV is ready to fly. And in six sols, that’s just what it’ll do. I hope.
It might not launch at all. I did remove an engine, after all. I could have fucked up all sorts of things during that process. And there’s no way to test the ascent stage. Once you light it, it’s lit.
Everything else, however, will go through tests from now until launch. Some done by me, some done remotely by NASA. They’re not telling me the failure odds, but I’m guessing they’re the highest in history. Yuri Gagarin had a much more reliable and safe ship than I do.
And Soviet ships were death traps.
“ALL RIGHT,” Lewis said, “tomorrow’s the big day.”
The crew floated in the Rec. They had halted the rotation of the ship in preparation for the upcoming operation.
“I’m ready,” Martinez said. “Johanssen threw everything she could at me. I got all scenarios to orbit.”
“Everything other than catastrophic failures,” Johanssen corrected.
“Well yeah,” Martinez said. “Kind of pointless to simulate an ascent explosion. Nothing we can do.”
“Vogel,” Lewis said. “How’s our course?”