Nathan H. Green's Blog, page 3
November 22, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 7
November 22nd, 2022
So, this is odd.
After last night’s awkwardness with Mark, I figured everyone would be sleeping it off and this would be a bit of a late day - for a farmer that meant an extra 15 minutes or so.
The thing is, I didn’t hear from him. I decided to have breakfast and if Mark still hadn’t called me, I’d call him. It’s weird, when I’m not expecting a call I could have happily gone days without talking to anyone. But when it’s expected and not coming, all I can think of is why not.
Breakfast’s a chocolate bar.
I was a chubby kid growing up. And when you really think about it, that wasn’t my fault. I mean when you’re under about 13 or 14 you’re just this ball of desire without any ability to self regulate or think critically about what you’re doing. That’s what parents are for. By the time I was almost done high school I’d ballooned up and was hearing about the “freshman 15”.
So I went on a diet. I sat down and looked at everything I’d eaten in the past week and started thinking about where the easy calories to cut were, and how I could keep full. Soda, potato chips, candy, and chocolate bars all got cut. Then instead of having pasta and carbs I replaced it with cooked vegetables. Sweet potatoes, lefty greens (fun fact, choy is the Chinese word for leafy greens: bak choy, yu choy, etc.), asparagus, carrots, etc.
I don’t want to get all preachy about this, but ultimately that’s what worked for me. The only reason I’m telling you this is because it has literally been a decade since I’ve had a chocolate bar and Jesus, Joseph, Mary and the little donkey, are they sweet. Like disgustingly sweet, like all I want to do is drink-water-and-floss sweet. I seriously think people must get desensitized to sweetness over time because I’m getting hit by full blast sugar overload here.
Breakfast done, I broke down and call.
“Morning Mark.” No answer. Five seconds goes by with no answer, five minutes, a half an hour goes by.
“Artemis I to mission control - copy.” No answer.
You may recall that NASA, repeatedly, told me not to touch any of the Orion’s controls. So, careful to touch nothing, I moved over to the commander’s chair just to have a look-see at what was happening.
Now I like to think of myself as a smart guy. NASA engineer, degree in aerospace engineering, but looking at that nice, functional, multi-purpose LCD display, I didn’t have the damnedest idea what it was saying. My “pre-flight safety briefing” covered tool kits and flotation devices, not the Orion’s actual controls (which was probably all on its own a six-month training course).
For the past six days NASA’s had me doing busy work that I couldn’t possibly mess up - not pushing buttons.
Mostly the console is full of buttons I don’t know. “FCM 1”, “FCM 2”, “FCM 3”, “FCM 4”. Whatever the hell “FCM” stands for, it needs a lot of buttons. There’s also, “LVLh”, “Preddt”, and “Por”.
The buttons I do know are either useless, “Cockpit Lights”, or “Strobe 1”. More practically though they are buttons that absolutely shouldn’t be pressed, “trj clr”, or “burn auth”.
The problem is, there have to be about a hundred different readings and displays on this LCD panel and after an hour of watching them, I don’t think a single one has changed. They should change, right?
Mental math time. Battery status 92.35%. So this is day 7. Just to keep the math easy let’s say 150 hours elapsed from 100% on the battery to 92.35% on the battery. That’s 7.65% in 150 hours, or 0.05% per hour, give or take. That means that battery % should be ticking down by 0.01% every fifteen minutes or so. I watch it. After twenty minutes it hasn’t changed.
Well, this is why people invented writing… Anyone have a pen?
Would you believe that the last page in the emergency procedures manual is actually a copyright page? Anyways, it’s scrap paper now. I record every number on the LCD panel, set a watch, and an hour later they are all, still, exactly the same.
That’s odd. Bad odd.
NASA’s also still not answering the radio. I check to make sure I’m not in the moon’s shadow - I look out the window and spot earth (that was easy). So why isn’t NASA answering the radio? Why isn’t the command console’s LCD display changing?
I expand my search. There are exactly thirteen LCD displays in the Orion that are tied to the main computer and I record every reading on everyone. I wait two hours, then circle back and check. Every number, on every display, is the same.
I think the computer's frozen.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and
I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
So, this is odd.
After last night’s awkwardness with Mark, I figured everyone would be sleeping it off and this would be a bit of a late day - for a farmer that meant an extra 15 minutes or so.
The thing is, I didn’t hear from him. I decided to have breakfast and if Mark still hadn’t called me, I’d call him. It’s weird, when I’m not expecting a call I could have happily gone days without talking to anyone. But when it’s expected and not coming, all I can think of is why not.
Breakfast’s a chocolate bar.
I was a chubby kid growing up. And when you really think about it, that wasn’t my fault. I mean when you’re under about 13 or 14 you’re just this ball of desire without any ability to self regulate or think critically about what you’re doing. That’s what parents are for. By the time I was almost done high school I’d ballooned up and was hearing about the “freshman 15”.
So I went on a diet. I sat down and looked at everything I’d eaten in the past week and started thinking about where the easy calories to cut were, and how I could keep full. Soda, potato chips, candy, and chocolate bars all got cut. Then instead of having pasta and carbs I replaced it with cooked vegetables. Sweet potatoes, lefty greens (fun fact, choy is the Chinese word for leafy greens: bak choy, yu choy, etc.), asparagus, carrots, etc.
I don’t want to get all preachy about this, but ultimately that’s what worked for me. The only reason I’m telling you this is because it has literally been a decade since I’ve had a chocolate bar and Jesus, Joseph, Mary and the little donkey, are they sweet. Like disgustingly sweet, like all I want to do is drink-water-and-floss sweet. I seriously think people must get desensitized to sweetness over time because I’m getting hit by full blast sugar overload here.
Breakfast done, I broke down and call.
“Morning Mark.” No answer. Five seconds goes by with no answer, five minutes, a half an hour goes by.
“Artemis I to mission control - copy.” No answer.
You may recall that NASA, repeatedly, told me not to touch any of the Orion’s controls. So, careful to touch nothing, I moved over to the commander’s chair just to have a look-see at what was happening.
Now I like to think of myself as a smart guy. NASA engineer, degree in aerospace engineering, but looking at that nice, functional, multi-purpose LCD display, I didn’t have the damnedest idea what it was saying. My “pre-flight safety briefing” covered tool kits and flotation devices, not the Orion’s actual controls (which was probably all on its own a six-month training course).
For the past six days NASA’s had me doing busy work that I couldn’t possibly mess up - not pushing buttons.
Mostly the console is full of buttons I don’t know. “FCM 1”, “FCM 2”, “FCM 3”, “FCM 4”. Whatever the hell “FCM” stands for, it needs a lot of buttons. There’s also, “LVLh”, “Preddt”, and “Por”.
The buttons I do know are either useless, “Cockpit Lights”, or “Strobe 1”. More practically though they are buttons that absolutely shouldn’t be pressed, “trj clr”, or “burn auth”.
The problem is, there have to be about a hundred different readings and displays on this LCD panel and after an hour of watching them, I don’t think a single one has changed. They should change, right?
Mental math time. Battery status 92.35%. So this is day 7. Just to keep the math easy let’s say 150 hours elapsed from 100% on the battery to 92.35% on the battery. That’s 7.65% in 150 hours, or 0.05% per hour, give or take. That means that battery % should be ticking down by 0.01% every fifteen minutes or so. I watch it. After twenty minutes it hasn’t changed.
Well, this is why people invented writing… Anyone have a pen?
Would you believe that the last page in the emergency procedures manual is actually a copyright page? Anyways, it’s scrap paper now. I record every number on the LCD panel, set a watch, and an hour later they are all, still, exactly the same.
That’s odd. Bad odd.
NASA’s also still not answering the radio. I check to make sure I’m not in the moon’s shadow - I look out the window and spot earth (that was easy). So why isn’t NASA answering the radio? Why isn’t the command console’s LCD display changing?
I expand my search. There are exactly thirteen LCD displays in the Orion that are tied to the main computer and I record every reading on everyone. I wait two hours, then circle back and check. Every number, on every display, is the same.
I think the computer's frozen.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and
I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
November 21, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 6
November 21, 2022
I’ve got a theory I don’t like.
What if there’s a very real chance that the powered flyby we’re doing today could have something go wrong with it. Alarms sounding, the ship burning too slow and falling ever closer to the lunar surface, or burning too hard or too long and flinging Orion, and just as importantly me, on a course out towards deep space.
What if NASA did yesterday’s training just on the off chance they needed to get me a little used to alarms going off, and following Mark’s instructions?
That’s a big part of my thinking as I make my final preparations before the burn. The moon’s getting really big, really quickly, enough so that there’s actually the impression of “falling” towards it - which is super cool.
The most dramatic part or the burn ends up being the view. I’m only 80 nautical miles away at the closest and it’s literally right there. After seeing the moon as a thumb sized ball your whole life when you’re this close it really looks like you could just jump down.
I’m going to lose radio contact with NASA as I pass into the lunar shadow and can hear the smile in Mark’s voice when he wishes me a safe 2 hours 36 minutes of radio silence. He had a joke in mind but decided not to say it.
It’s a long time to just sit and feel like you’re alone. I’d never really thought of space as “lonely” but there it is. Basically, since day 2 of this mission I’ve been further away from any other human being than anyone has ever been. On the far side of the moon, radio to Earth blocked, it is like being lost at sea.
The view keeps me occupied for about a half hour. I take a look for Webb, not that I expect to see it. The James Webb space telescope is, on any pen and paper diagram of the earth and moon, just a few inches further off beyond the moon from earth. In practice that’s more thousands of miles than I can see. But still, it’s “right there”.
I eat a Skor bar, using my precious - only get one set in my adult life - teeth to grind caramel and sugar into small enough chunks for me to swallow. And then I read a book. It only half helps. Starship Troopers is an interesting read though - especially when contrasted with the movie. Should people have to demonstrate a willingness to put the collective good ahead of their individual benefits in order to vote? Or are we all on this ship of state together and so it’s important for everyone to get a say in its operations?
2 hours 35 minutes later and the master alarm hasn’t gone off, and I’ve got radio back. NASA’s crunching the numbers to see how it went, but they seem happy with heir first set of readings.
“We’ve got a good insertion Alex!” Mark’s got a gentle drawl, like his tongue is in no real hurry to get the words out.
“You watching the video upload from radio shadow? The moon looks amazing. I half expected to spot Webb.” I leave out the intentional self-distraction.
I can hear the engineers buzzing in the background of the radio. It sounds like each and every single one of them just got a promotion, a bonus, and a text from a crush telling them that they loved them.
“Hell Alex, between you and me, right this second, I’m jealous as hell of you,” Mark said.
Ouch, that hurt.
I honestly thought I deserved this. It was all I’d ever wanted since I was a little damn kid. I’d spent my summers at high school at science camps and dreaming about space, I’d gotten a damn degree in aerospace engineering with damn honors, I’d given NASA three years of my life working for them instead of founding a tech start-up (btw. It would have been called Clarity. An online science repository where studies are organized and cross posted and tracked by topic. Say coffee. You open the entry, and the first thing is the most compelling meta analysis of coffee’s overall health effects, then sub articles about its most significant individual effects. Someone writes a new study about coffee increasing the risk of colorectal disease? It has to “beat” the other studies already up about that in order to get posted. The idea is, you want the state of the art on coffee and you’ve got the top articles right there, and you can zoom in with greater and greater detail revealing more, and more, niche studies, but all of them the leading ones. Science “news” can happen when something in that top line changes.)
Anyways… I hadn’t done that. Instead, I’d tried for this. And I got a form letter saying that unfortunately, due to the “keen interest in the astronaut program, many well-qualified applicants such as myself,” didn’t get in. But Moonikin did? An empty seat on the one trip I ever wanted to take.
I did, honestly, think I deserved it. Now all I can think about is how Mark must feel exactly the same way, except he got even closer. Yet here I am, and there he is. I cheated and got what he wanted. Everyone at NASA must feel like that.
I’m such an asshole.
I give things a few hours back at NASA to calm down. They’d be having champagne and enjoying the win. Mission control might not even be too crowded.
“Mark?”
“Yeah, how’s it go’in up there buddy?” He didn’t sound like he’d been drinking. Probably on shift. I couldn’t hear much in the background anymore.
“Can you do me a favor? I’m going to need a lawyer for when I get back. Think you could find me someone?”
There’s a long pause at that.
“NASA wants to keep you being up there kind of close to the chest for the time being. This is kind of their moment in the sun, and they’d rather not have clouds right now.”
“Yeah… No problem.” If NASA were asking for a favor, I definitely owed them a few billion.
“Hey, look on the bright side. So far the mission’s been going off without a hitch. You’re due a mission glitch, and maybe it saves you the worry of a trial.”
The funny thing about the radio, if you say something, then cringe at having said it, the person on the other line will have a hard time knowing. I very much heard Mark cringe. He must have had a couple of glasses of champagne after all.
But hey, I don’t believe in bad luck or jinxes. You hear that God? I dare you to do something to me! Smite me!
See? Still alive and unsmitten. Smitted. Whatever, I’m an engineer not a linguist. Still… I’d kind of deserve it.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
I’ve got a theory I don’t like.
What if there’s a very real chance that the powered flyby we’re doing today could have something go wrong with it. Alarms sounding, the ship burning too slow and falling ever closer to the lunar surface, or burning too hard or too long and flinging Orion, and just as importantly me, on a course out towards deep space.
What if NASA did yesterday’s training just on the off chance they needed to get me a little used to alarms going off, and following Mark’s instructions?
That’s a big part of my thinking as I make my final preparations before the burn. The moon’s getting really big, really quickly, enough so that there’s actually the impression of “falling” towards it - which is super cool.
The most dramatic part or the burn ends up being the view. I’m only 80 nautical miles away at the closest and it’s literally right there. After seeing the moon as a thumb sized ball your whole life when you’re this close it really looks like you could just jump down.
I’m going to lose radio contact with NASA as I pass into the lunar shadow and can hear the smile in Mark’s voice when he wishes me a safe 2 hours 36 minutes of radio silence. He had a joke in mind but decided not to say it.
It’s a long time to just sit and feel like you’re alone. I’d never really thought of space as “lonely” but there it is. Basically, since day 2 of this mission I’ve been further away from any other human being than anyone has ever been. On the far side of the moon, radio to Earth blocked, it is like being lost at sea.
The view keeps me occupied for about a half hour. I take a look for Webb, not that I expect to see it. The James Webb space telescope is, on any pen and paper diagram of the earth and moon, just a few inches further off beyond the moon from earth. In practice that’s more thousands of miles than I can see. But still, it’s “right there”.
I eat a Skor bar, using my precious - only get one set in my adult life - teeth to grind caramel and sugar into small enough chunks for me to swallow. And then I read a book. It only half helps. Starship Troopers is an interesting read though - especially when contrasted with the movie. Should people have to demonstrate a willingness to put the collective good ahead of their individual benefits in order to vote? Or are we all on this ship of state together and so it’s important for everyone to get a say in its operations?
2 hours 35 minutes later and the master alarm hasn’t gone off, and I’ve got radio back. NASA’s crunching the numbers to see how it went, but they seem happy with heir first set of readings.
“We’ve got a good insertion Alex!” Mark’s got a gentle drawl, like his tongue is in no real hurry to get the words out.
“You watching the video upload from radio shadow? The moon looks amazing. I half expected to spot Webb.” I leave out the intentional self-distraction.
I can hear the engineers buzzing in the background of the radio. It sounds like each and every single one of them just got a promotion, a bonus, and a text from a crush telling them that they loved them.
“Hell Alex, between you and me, right this second, I’m jealous as hell of you,” Mark said.
Ouch, that hurt.
I honestly thought I deserved this. It was all I’d ever wanted since I was a little damn kid. I’d spent my summers at high school at science camps and dreaming about space, I’d gotten a damn degree in aerospace engineering with damn honors, I’d given NASA three years of my life working for them instead of founding a tech start-up (btw. It would have been called Clarity. An online science repository where studies are organized and cross posted and tracked by topic. Say coffee. You open the entry, and the first thing is the most compelling meta analysis of coffee’s overall health effects, then sub articles about its most significant individual effects. Someone writes a new study about coffee increasing the risk of colorectal disease? It has to “beat” the other studies already up about that in order to get posted. The idea is, you want the state of the art on coffee and you’ve got the top articles right there, and you can zoom in with greater and greater detail revealing more, and more, niche studies, but all of them the leading ones. Science “news” can happen when something in that top line changes.)
Anyways… I hadn’t done that. Instead, I’d tried for this. And I got a form letter saying that unfortunately, due to the “keen interest in the astronaut program, many well-qualified applicants such as myself,” didn’t get in. But Moonikin did? An empty seat on the one trip I ever wanted to take.
I did, honestly, think I deserved it. Now all I can think about is how Mark must feel exactly the same way, except he got even closer. Yet here I am, and there he is. I cheated and got what he wanted. Everyone at NASA must feel like that.
I’m such an asshole.
I give things a few hours back at NASA to calm down. They’d be having champagne and enjoying the win. Mission control might not even be too crowded.
“Mark?”
“Yeah, how’s it go’in up there buddy?” He didn’t sound like he’d been drinking. Probably on shift. I couldn’t hear much in the background anymore.
“Can you do me a favor? I’m going to need a lawyer for when I get back. Think you could find me someone?”
There’s a long pause at that.
“NASA wants to keep you being up there kind of close to the chest for the time being. This is kind of their moment in the sun, and they’d rather not have clouds right now.”
“Yeah… No problem.” If NASA were asking for a favor, I definitely owed them a few billion.
“Hey, look on the bright side. So far the mission’s been going off without a hitch. You’re due a mission glitch, and maybe it saves you the worry of a trial.”
The funny thing about the radio, if you say something, then cringe at having said it, the person on the other line will have a hard time knowing. I very much heard Mark cringe. He must have had a couple of glasses of champagne after all.
But hey, I don’t believe in bad luck or jinxes. You hear that God? I dare you to do something to me! Smite me!
See? Still alive and unsmitten. Smitted. Whatever, I’m an engineer not a linguist. Still… I’d kind of deserve it.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
November 20, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 5
Would anyone object if I just start with shit going wrong?
So, there I am, minding my own business, Artemis I was happily cruising towards lunar insertion, and I’d woken up a half hour earlier than NASA wanted me to. Thirty minutes away from the NASA farmer-accountants tabulating every second of my time: heaven. I’d just started on one of the science-fiction books I had very much expected to be half way through at this point, and an alarm went off.
In retrospect this might be why they train astronauts so much. Desensitize them to an alarm so they can get right to the business of dealing with it. In the movies the crews always look so instantly professional, all evaluation, no fear. Like a bank manager scrutinizing a letter of credit.
In contrast, my reaction to the master alarm going off for the first time in my life was more… instinctual.
“No, no, no, no, no, god no, no, no, no, no, please, no, no, please, please, no…” would be the verbatim quote as I literally bumped into every bulkhead on Orion making my way from cot to console.
All I’m saying is that if this were my second, or third, or fiftieth alarm, I’d have been a lot cooler. I think for the proper astronauts who’ve done thousands of these in training that alarm is probably the sound of them being given an opportunity to show what manly men, and womanly women, they are by how calmly, and efficiently, they can deal with it.
I was just scared for my life.
“There’s an alarm! What do I do?” In retrospect it was a surprisingly efficient radio message back to NASA. Help me farmer-accountants, you’re my only hope.
The command console’s LCD display was flashing red and, this is embarrassing, it took me a minute to read through the different flashing bits to find what the actual emergency was. The whole console’s pretty scary when you get right down to it, especially when it’s flashing red. “Warning: cabin pressure loss.”
“Alex,” Mark’s voice came back over the radio a few seconds later, the guy was as cool as ice cream. “We need you to get your flight suit on. Expedite.”
I stashed the flight suit I’d pilfered off Moonikin in a storage hatch designed just for them. I’m sure there would be a proper, by the book, way to have folded up all the components and tucked them away. I’d packed it like a teenager going to college.
As soon as I start pulling stuff out, bits of the suit start drifting away. Zero gravity is horrific for making a mess. Everything is moving. I’m moving away from the compartment and cartwheeling slowly. The pumpkin colored flight suit’s outer layer is wobbling around and spinning like it had a ghost inside it. Bits of the rubber pressure underlayer are spinning and coasting away in random directions through Orion. The alarm is still blaring, and the only bit of good news is I got the first piece of the flight suit I need to put on - a pair of what really do look like rubber underwear.
Trying to pull them on in zero-G is a whole world of fun. I’m pretty sure my thighs have swelled a little in space, because while they fit - barely - on Earth, I’m having a hell of a time forcing my thighs through the leg holes. This is mandatory. The orange outer layer of the flight suit doesn’t hold pressure. This inner layer, a multi-piece rubber pressure bladder is what’s going to save my life - if I can get it on.
My thighs are stuck in the rubber legs of the underwear and it really, really, doesn’t want to slide up as much as I need it to. This thing was made to fit Moonikin - who I stole it from - and while I luckily ended up having a similar upper body physique, I’ve got big legs. Back on Earth I’d left the suit’s rubber thighs, calves, and booties behind. There was no way for me to get my legs and feet into the things.
Now I’m going to die in space because I have swollen thighs. The weirdest part though, maybe the worst part, my brain really likes to make connections, and this feels a lot like the horror of pulling on pants you need and discovering you’ve put on weight, and they won’t fasten. It’s like, 60% that, and 40% I’m going to die.
I’ve got this terrible image in my head: Orion’s internal cameras capturing me floating around, wildly trying to pull up my underwear as I asphyxiate. For the rest of human history that video would get shown in safety briefings as why you fit your gear correctly. Everyone will be laughing, at me dying, forever. I can’t even blame them, I know I look like an idiot.
I do get them on, thank god.
And I move on to the belly piece. It’s managed to spin and bounce and wobble itself all the way to the other side of Orion and I have to go diving through the ship to get it. Then I put it on, but upside down. This is horrific. The safety training video just keeps being recorded.
I get a flashback of some of Jess’s clothes where it wasn’t always obvious how she was supposed to wear them. She just always seemed to know - and as soon as they were on, they looked spectacular.
I get the belly piece on with my second attempt and the chest piece is firmly stuck over my head, my arms pointing straight “up” as my body rotates around Orion, when the alarm stops.
“Alright Alex. That’s enough,” Mark’s voice comes back over the radio.
I manage to lever the rubber chest piece down. It’s bunched up in my armpits, but at least my head and arms are free, and get to the radio. “Did you guys fix the problem on your end?” I ask. The console’s back to a non-imminent death mode and I realize my heart is absolutely racing and I’m coated in sweat.
“Just a drill. We’re going to need to work on dawning the OCSS though. Getting proficient at putting it on could well save your life up there.”
They’re actually pretty good sports about it. They don’t bother me at all for the next fifteen minutes while I drift back and forth in Orion swearing to myself. Initial feelings aside, I eventually have to admit that this is exactly what I signed up for, and what I’d wanted. Surprise drills are actually full-on NASA astronaut stuff. How many times you think Neil Armstrong died in simulations? More than me so far.
I really could have just died. If there had actually been a leak in Orion and I’d had to get that flight suit on in time to save my life, that would have been it for me. I imagined myself blown up on launch or dying on re-entry. Things I had no control over. I never imagined dying because I was too incompetent to save my own life. What if I die up here because I’m an idiot?
“What are you thinking Mark? Step 1 is us going through how I should be stowing the flight suit? Or you guys want to do a few more practice runs of just putting it on?”
We spent the next two hours - two hours - going through how the OCSS should have been stowed. You know, so that all it’s pieces don’t go exploding out of its locker when you try and take something out. Then four hours about how to put it on.
“Mark…” I say into the radio, “the video of me from the drill…”
“Don’t worry about that buddy, I took care of it already.”
So, there I am, minding my own business, Artemis I was happily cruising towards lunar insertion, and I’d woken up a half hour earlier than NASA wanted me to. Thirty minutes away from the NASA farmer-accountants tabulating every second of my time: heaven. I’d just started on one of the science-fiction books I had very much expected to be half way through at this point, and an alarm went off.
In retrospect this might be why they train astronauts so much. Desensitize them to an alarm so they can get right to the business of dealing with it. In the movies the crews always look so instantly professional, all evaluation, no fear. Like a bank manager scrutinizing a letter of credit.
In contrast, my reaction to the master alarm going off for the first time in my life was more… instinctual.
“No, no, no, no, no, god no, no, no, no, no, please, no, no, please, please, no…” would be the verbatim quote as I literally bumped into every bulkhead on Orion making my way from cot to console.
All I’m saying is that if this were my second, or third, or fiftieth alarm, I’d have been a lot cooler. I think for the proper astronauts who’ve done thousands of these in training that alarm is probably the sound of them being given an opportunity to show what manly men, and womanly women, they are by how calmly, and efficiently, they can deal with it.
I was just scared for my life.
“There’s an alarm! What do I do?” In retrospect it was a surprisingly efficient radio message back to NASA. Help me farmer-accountants, you’re my only hope.
The command console’s LCD display was flashing red and, this is embarrassing, it took me a minute to read through the different flashing bits to find what the actual emergency was. The whole console’s pretty scary when you get right down to it, especially when it’s flashing red. “Warning: cabin pressure loss.”
“Alex,” Mark’s voice came back over the radio a few seconds later, the guy was as cool as ice cream. “We need you to get your flight suit on. Expedite.”
I stashed the flight suit I’d pilfered off Moonikin in a storage hatch designed just for them. I’m sure there would be a proper, by the book, way to have folded up all the components and tucked them away. I’d packed it like a teenager going to college.
As soon as I start pulling stuff out, bits of the suit start drifting away. Zero gravity is horrific for making a mess. Everything is moving. I’m moving away from the compartment and cartwheeling slowly. The pumpkin colored flight suit’s outer layer is wobbling around and spinning like it had a ghost inside it. Bits of the rubber pressure underlayer are spinning and coasting away in random directions through Orion. The alarm is still blaring, and the only bit of good news is I got the first piece of the flight suit I need to put on - a pair of what really do look like rubber underwear.
Trying to pull them on in zero-G is a whole world of fun. I’m pretty sure my thighs have swelled a little in space, because while they fit - barely - on Earth, I’m having a hell of a time forcing my thighs through the leg holes. This is mandatory. The orange outer layer of the flight suit doesn’t hold pressure. This inner layer, a multi-piece rubber pressure bladder is what’s going to save my life - if I can get it on.
My thighs are stuck in the rubber legs of the underwear and it really, really, doesn’t want to slide up as much as I need it to. This thing was made to fit Moonikin - who I stole it from - and while I luckily ended up having a similar upper body physique, I’ve got big legs. Back on Earth I’d left the suit’s rubber thighs, calves, and booties behind. There was no way for me to get my legs and feet into the things.
Now I’m going to die in space because I have swollen thighs. The weirdest part though, maybe the worst part, my brain really likes to make connections, and this feels a lot like the horror of pulling on pants you need and discovering you’ve put on weight, and they won’t fasten. It’s like, 60% that, and 40% I’m going to die.
I’ve got this terrible image in my head: Orion’s internal cameras capturing me floating around, wildly trying to pull up my underwear as I asphyxiate. For the rest of human history that video would get shown in safety briefings as why you fit your gear correctly. Everyone will be laughing, at me dying, forever. I can’t even blame them, I know I look like an idiot.
I do get them on, thank god.
And I move on to the belly piece. It’s managed to spin and bounce and wobble itself all the way to the other side of Orion and I have to go diving through the ship to get it. Then I put it on, but upside down. This is horrific. The safety training video just keeps being recorded.
I get a flashback of some of Jess’s clothes where it wasn’t always obvious how she was supposed to wear them. She just always seemed to know - and as soon as they were on, they looked spectacular.
I get the belly piece on with my second attempt and the chest piece is firmly stuck over my head, my arms pointing straight “up” as my body rotates around Orion, when the alarm stops.
“Alright Alex. That’s enough,” Mark’s voice comes back over the radio.
I manage to lever the rubber chest piece down. It’s bunched up in my armpits, but at least my head and arms are free, and get to the radio. “Did you guys fix the problem on your end?” I ask. The console’s back to a non-imminent death mode and I realize my heart is absolutely racing and I’m coated in sweat.
“Just a drill. We’re going to need to work on dawning the OCSS though. Getting proficient at putting it on could well save your life up there.”
They’re actually pretty good sports about it. They don’t bother me at all for the next fifteen minutes while I drift back and forth in Orion swearing to myself. Initial feelings aside, I eventually have to admit that this is exactly what I signed up for, and what I’d wanted. Surprise drills are actually full-on NASA astronaut stuff. How many times you think Neil Armstrong died in simulations? More than me so far.
I really could have just died. If there had actually been a leak in Orion and I’d had to get that flight suit on in time to save my life, that would have been it for me. I imagined myself blown up on launch or dying on re-entry. Things I had no control over. I never imagined dying because I was too incompetent to save my own life. What if I die up here because I’m an idiot?
“What are you thinking Mark? Step 1 is us going through how I should be stowing the flight suit? Or you guys want to do a few more practice runs of just putting it on?”
We spent the next two hours - two hours - going through how the OCSS should have been stowed. You know, so that all it’s pieces don’t go exploding out of its locker when you try and take something out. Then four hours about how to put it on.
“Mark…” I say into the radio, “the video of me from the drill…”
“Don’t worry about that buddy, I took care of it already.”
November 19, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 4
November 19th, 2022
I probably should have been telling you about the moon.
Ever buy one of those “gardening for idiots” kits where you just take it home, add the exact amount of water shown on an included plastic measuring cup, then watch in amazement as a little green shoot get bigger every time you look away? That’s kind of like what it was like watching the moon get bigger. And bigger. And bigger.
There are four really big days on the mission calendar. The first was launch. The last is “landing”, or as I like to call it, ‘finding out just how smart those folks in heat shield design really are’. But between those two you’ve also got entry into lunar orbit and exit from lunar orbit. Entry is coming up.
Now look, you don’t stow away on a spaceship and spend the rest of your life in jail (actually saying that phrase aloud kind of puts a cold lump in my stomach. I am probably going to have to ask Mark to get me a lawyer and give me an estimate on the damages for all this). Anyways… You don’t do that without absolutely, annoyingly, “Alex, you’ve got to stop talking about space!”, loving this stuff.
And lunar insertion is really, really, cool. Imagine that NASA is some kind of famous sharpshooter. To pick one famous example at random: the hunter Orion. And Orion takes an arrow from his belt, points up at the moon, and fires.
For five days that arrow flies straight up towards the moon, or more accurately, where the moon is going to be, but Orion’s not trying to actually hit the moon. No, that would be too easy. Orion’s real target is just off to the moon’s side, so that the arrow passes into the exact right window for a powered flyby and entry burn.
An accountant would appreciate the game NASA’s playing. Artemis I only has so much fuel onboard and it’s all about the best lunar orbit to require the smallest change in energy to enter, and exit, it. Changing velocity to enter, or exit, an orbit kind of sucks from a fuel use perspective. But what would really, really, “uh we don’t have enough fuel to do this and are going to die in space” suck, would be missing our marks and having to change position as well.
How close did Orion have to be to hit its marks in space six days away from him? If you imagine a regular arrow range, and you imagine that Orion had an arrow the width of a human hair, and he was aiming for a bullseye the size of a grain of sand, that would be about fifty times easier a shot to make than this one.
In fairness to Orion in this competition - NASA cheated and used a few correction burns along the way. In fairness to NASA, they haven’t been very big correction burns.
So, what happens when that “powered flyby burn” hits the day after tomorrow? I’ll strap into my seat to get ready for the nine-g acceleration. Just kidding. You’ve seen Neil Armstrong bouncing around on the moon, right? That’s the moon’s gravity on the surface, those are the kinds of forces we’re working with. You try for a hair-on-fire flyby and the slingshot’s rope breaks and you fly off into space.
People always over-estimate how much force is required to do things in space. A half an hour of nice slow, sub 1-g acceleration has a bigger impact than a minute of blackout inducing, 9-g madness.
NASA’s doing their best to keep me busy, but I can only check so many readouts before this little voice in the back of my mind starts yammering away. I wonder if I could ask Mark to find out what Jess thinks about this whole thing. I mean look, I can guess what she thinks. Her ex has gone off and done exactly the kind of thing she thought was dumb, only this time he’s gotten himself into a world of trouble. But it is a little impressive right? She probably wouldn’t admit that to Mark though.
Maybe I could give her a call or write a letter. I think I need a distraction. Dinner time.
I’m starting to regret not just packing butter. I hate everything about chocolate bars. They’re too sweet, they make my teeth ache, and they’re just calories that do nothing for you.
Look, I get it, no one wants a lecture on their diet. I swear this isn’t some hippie mumbo jumbo about kombucha or whatever the hell. I’m an aerospace engineer and I think like one. So what’s the engineering approach to food?
First you identify your objectives, 1. All the calories and nutrients you need. 2. The alleviation of hunger. 3. Taste. Now you impose your constraints on those requirements: A. Money. B. preparation time. C. limiting calories to daily requirement.
My problem, on Earth anyways, with chips, and chocolate, and soda, was that they are way too calorie expensive. I’ve got a 2K daily budget to work with and I could easily consume 500 calories a day of liquids that would do nothing to alleviate hunger. Yeah, they taste nice, but there are three factors, and “junk” food gets 25% on the test.
Leafy green vegetables get 66%, you can probably guess where they lose points. But when you start playing with some veggie recipes - for example chop up cauliflower, add some olive oil, salt, and pepper, and bake at 350 for 19 minutes on parchment paper. That’s reasonably tasty actually. Overall score 85%
Sweet potatoes as well, same cooking instructions but this time cooked for 32 minutes, and damn… 93%.
Anyways I attacked my diet as an optimization problem. I figured out every food with an 80% or higher score, then priced them all out in terms of cash and calories, and bing bang boom, I had me a diet.
Jess never got into the spirit of that system.
For this mission I’d picked Skor bars (7%) because of their caloric density per gram. But they are doing nothing to make me feel full. At least I’m not weak from hunger.
I wonder what Jess is having for dinner.
*****
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
I probably should have been telling you about the moon.
Ever buy one of those “gardening for idiots” kits where you just take it home, add the exact amount of water shown on an included plastic measuring cup, then watch in amazement as a little green shoot get bigger every time you look away? That’s kind of like what it was like watching the moon get bigger. And bigger. And bigger.
There are four really big days on the mission calendar. The first was launch. The last is “landing”, or as I like to call it, ‘finding out just how smart those folks in heat shield design really are’. But between those two you’ve also got entry into lunar orbit and exit from lunar orbit. Entry is coming up.
Now look, you don’t stow away on a spaceship and spend the rest of your life in jail (actually saying that phrase aloud kind of puts a cold lump in my stomach. I am probably going to have to ask Mark to get me a lawyer and give me an estimate on the damages for all this). Anyways… You don’t do that without absolutely, annoyingly, “Alex, you’ve got to stop talking about space!”, loving this stuff.
And lunar insertion is really, really, cool. Imagine that NASA is some kind of famous sharpshooter. To pick one famous example at random: the hunter Orion. And Orion takes an arrow from his belt, points up at the moon, and fires.
For five days that arrow flies straight up towards the moon, or more accurately, where the moon is going to be, but Orion’s not trying to actually hit the moon. No, that would be too easy. Orion’s real target is just off to the moon’s side, so that the arrow passes into the exact right window for a powered flyby and entry burn.
An accountant would appreciate the game NASA’s playing. Artemis I only has so much fuel onboard and it’s all about the best lunar orbit to require the smallest change in energy to enter, and exit, it. Changing velocity to enter, or exit, an orbit kind of sucks from a fuel use perspective. But what would really, really, “uh we don’t have enough fuel to do this and are going to die in space” suck, would be missing our marks and having to change position as well.
How close did Orion have to be to hit its marks in space six days away from him? If you imagine a regular arrow range, and you imagine that Orion had an arrow the width of a human hair, and he was aiming for a bullseye the size of a grain of sand, that would be about fifty times easier a shot to make than this one.
In fairness to Orion in this competition - NASA cheated and used a few correction burns along the way. In fairness to NASA, they haven’t been very big correction burns.
So, what happens when that “powered flyby burn” hits the day after tomorrow? I’ll strap into my seat to get ready for the nine-g acceleration. Just kidding. You’ve seen Neil Armstrong bouncing around on the moon, right? That’s the moon’s gravity on the surface, those are the kinds of forces we’re working with. You try for a hair-on-fire flyby and the slingshot’s rope breaks and you fly off into space.
People always over-estimate how much force is required to do things in space. A half an hour of nice slow, sub 1-g acceleration has a bigger impact than a minute of blackout inducing, 9-g madness.
NASA’s doing their best to keep me busy, but I can only check so many readouts before this little voice in the back of my mind starts yammering away. I wonder if I could ask Mark to find out what Jess thinks about this whole thing. I mean look, I can guess what she thinks. Her ex has gone off and done exactly the kind of thing she thought was dumb, only this time he’s gotten himself into a world of trouble. But it is a little impressive right? She probably wouldn’t admit that to Mark though.
Maybe I could give her a call or write a letter. I think I need a distraction. Dinner time.
I’m starting to regret not just packing butter. I hate everything about chocolate bars. They’re too sweet, they make my teeth ache, and they’re just calories that do nothing for you.
Look, I get it, no one wants a lecture on their diet. I swear this isn’t some hippie mumbo jumbo about kombucha or whatever the hell. I’m an aerospace engineer and I think like one. So what’s the engineering approach to food?
First you identify your objectives, 1. All the calories and nutrients you need. 2. The alleviation of hunger. 3. Taste. Now you impose your constraints on those requirements: A. Money. B. preparation time. C. limiting calories to daily requirement.
My problem, on Earth anyways, with chips, and chocolate, and soda, was that they are way too calorie expensive. I’ve got a 2K daily budget to work with and I could easily consume 500 calories a day of liquids that would do nothing to alleviate hunger. Yeah, they taste nice, but there are three factors, and “junk” food gets 25% on the test.
Leafy green vegetables get 66%, you can probably guess where they lose points. But when you start playing with some veggie recipes - for example chop up cauliflower, add some olive oil, salt, and pepper, and bake at 350 for 19 minutes on parchment paper. That’s reasonably tasty actually. Overall score 85%
Sweet potatoes as well, same cooking instructions but this time cooked for 32 minutes, and damn… 93%.
Anyways I attacked my diet as an optimization problem. I figured out every food with an 80% or higher score, then priced them all out in terms of cash and calories, and bing bang boom, I had me a diet.
Jess never got into the spirit of that system.
For this mission I’d picked Skor bars (7%) because of their caloric density per gram. But they are doing nothing to make me feel full. At least I’m not weak from hunger.
I wonder what Jess is having for dinner.
*****
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission. You can follow along through my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
November 18, 2022
Onboard Artemis I - Day 3 of a daily mission log
You ever meet a farmer? They’re like surgeons, or pilots, or athletes in that they have a unique outlook on the world. For farmers there’s no such thing as being “done”. Every second of the day has something productive that it could be turned to and, if the day were a hundred hours long, a farmer’s dearest wish would be that it was a hundred and one hours long.
NASA’s management team must have come from farming folk.
The first item on the day’s agenda was a toilet debriefing. When they’d heard I hadn’t read the toilet’s instructions in advance, and had to figure it out… under pressure… they immediately scheduled a two hour, start of the day, radio debriefing with their head of digestive by-product disposal.
Dr. Natalie Summers. She sounded cute, like really cute, but that was probably because of how excited she was. I’ve now had three conversations with women about my penis, each with a completely different tone. The first was when I was 16, in the back of my car with this girl Jackie, and it was the first time in my life I was showing a girl my penis.
“Why does it look like that?” she’d asked. Apparently it was also Jackie’s first time seeing an uncircumcised penis.
If Satan had chosen that moment to pop into existence beside me, thrown open the gates of hell, and shouted, “quick! In here lad!” I’d have leapt in.
By the way. Sex education. I don’t know specifically which knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, nothing-better-to-do-than-sit-on-a-school-board, bastard was responsible for Jackie’s sex ed curriculum, but he deserves a smack upside the head with an uncircumcised dildo.
The second conversation was with Jess. That one was a lot nicer. Tender. As in, if an angel came down from heaven and said, “you can come on up this way now, if you’d like.” I’d have said that I was totally good where I was.
This was the third conversation, and yeah, enthusiastic. Dr. Summers eventually clued in that I was feeling awkward and explained it to me in a way I could understand: we were working to design something that humanity would use for the rest of its space faring future. I was going to help shape the daily life and comfort of every person in space.
I kind of got into the spirit of things from there. What man wouldn’t like the thought of writing his name in the history books… with his penis.
Really makes you appreciate the simple brilliance of the toilet when you start thinking about a total, zero gravity, redesign. I didn’t say it, but all I could wonder by the end of our call was whether Dr. Summers was hoping that one day, in the far distant future, everyone would say they needed to “use the summers”.
Next, NASA introduced me to my Crew Management Specialist, Mark Whitney. Fun guy, good sense of humour, came prepared with the airplane pre-flight safety briefing.
Mark started off the call with a simple explanation, “Alex, my job down here is to keep you alive, and your job up there is to help us save you.” The more he talked, the more I believed him.
Over the next three hours I learned a lot about Mark. He was actually an astronaut, he had my dad’s taste in music, he had a teenaged daughter, and I’ll let you guess how he sees the world based on some of his gold star quotes during the safety briefing.
“This one can be tricky, you’ve got to make sure you release the connection before you open the valve and write that down because it could well save your life up there.”
“Don’t touch anything on the control panel.”
“Now this could save your life one day Alex: you need to be on the lookout for signs of hypoxia: laughing, confusion, clumsiness.”
“Never push any buttons on the control panel.”
“Always ask yourself: is this rated to be used this way? That questions going to save you.”
“Whatever you do, leave the control panel alone.”
“Now this could save your life up there: never guess when it’s something you can’t undo.”
Before you get the impression that Mark gave me a basic overview of the ship: he didn’t. He showed me the emergency floatation devices that could well save my life, the pencil case sized toolbox that could well save my life, the double phonebook thick emergency procedures manual that could well save my life, and eventually we got to the emergency atmosphere controls which could well save my life.
Those were hidden behind a piece of paneling on the Orion’s wall. Sorry, bulkhead. Why do they call spaceships ships? Why not spaceplanes? Or spaceboats?
Planes fly through air generating lift? But boats float on water using buoyancy. Are trains any less defined by their tracks than boats are by water?
Anyways, not important, that ship has sailed.
That panel had a finger thin yellow and black hazard decal around its edge and a black stencil “EMRG - ATM CNTRL” in its center. A single latch swung it open along a long hinge and the interior was actually much more manageable than I’d imagined if you got under the Orion’s skin. There were four braided bundles of cabling at the hatch’s back, but mostly the space was filled up by a single tank the size of my thigh and a half a dozen steel woven hoses that ran from a box about the size of two fists. A red lever on one side of the box was labeled “MANL EMRG REPRS”.
By the way, you’ve probably heard the jokes about engineers and their writing skills. Well, this is what happens if you put us in charge of grammar and spelling. “Manual emergency repressurization”, gets cut down from thirty-one perfectly readable and clear letters into thirteen letters that make, almost, no sense.
“Emergency Air,” is thirteen letters as well. But noooooo, “air” isn’t sciency enough for them.
Mark walked me through the process. The tank had enough ‘air’ in it to repressurize Orion. Pull the handle, and about five seconds later Orion will be full… and cold. PV=nrT. However, interestingly, that tank uses the same valving as the flight suit.
He also re-emphasized several times that I was not, under any circumstances, to touch any of the ship’s controls.
I had a Skor bar for lunch, and then there were about 700 valves and gauges that NASA wanted me to manually check for them. Somewhere around the five hundredth valve reading, I made the mistake of mentioning to Mark that I was looking forward to reading that night. Mark, literally without missing a beat, said “plenty of time to read in jail.” Like I said, funny guy.
Oh, Ender’s Game. Fast read. I liked it. But I’ve got a question. The book is about how important it is to understand others, and even an alien that’s completely different from us is worthy of understanding, empathy, respect. There’s also several references to checking out guy’s butts, a boy-boy naked shower fight scene where the key to victory is lathering up in slippery, hot, soap, and I’m supposed to believe the book isn’t an allegory for being accepting of homosexuality? I know Orson Scott Card is infamous for his opinions on this topic, and probably never consciously intended that… But come on, is there another way to read it?
Anyways, I’ve got to say, this entire thing is going really smoothly. The food sucks, and I really regret not bringing a tooth brush, but other than that everything’s coming up Alex.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission.
You can follow along through my Instagram (@authornathanhgreen), my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen), sign up on my website to be part of my daily mailing list (www.authornathanhgreen.com).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
NASA’s management team must have come from farming folk.
The first item on the day’s agenda was a toilet debriefing. When they’d heard I hadn’t read the toilet’s instructions in advance, and had to figure it out… under pressure… they immediately scheduled a two hour, start of the day, radio debriefing with their head of digestive by-product disposal.
Dr. Natalie Summers. She sounded cute, like really cute, but that was probably because of how excited she was. I’ve now had three conversations with women about my penis, each with a completely different tone. The first was when I was 16, in the back of my car with this girl Jackie, and it was the first time in my life I was showing a girl my penis.
“Why does it look like that?” she’d asked. Apparently it was also Jackie’s first time seeing an uncircumcised penis.
If Satan had chosen that moment to pop into existence beside me, thrown open the gates of hell, and shouted, “quick! In here lad!” I’d have leapt in.
By the way. Sex education. I don’t know specifically which knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, nothing-better-to-do-than-sit-on-a-school-board, bastard was responsible for Jackie’s sex ed curriculum, but he deserves a smack upside the head with an uncircumcised dildo.
The second conversation was with Jess. That one was a lot nicer. Tender. As in, if an angel came down from heaven and said, “you can come on up this way now, if you’d like.” I’d have said that I was totally good where I was.
This was the third conversation, and yeah, enthusiastic. Dr. Summers eventually clued in that I was feeling awkward and explained it to me in a way I could understand: we were working to design something that humanity would use for the rest of its space faring future. I was going to help shape the daily life and comfort of every person in space.
I kind of got into the spirit of things from there. What man wouldn’t like the thought of writing his name in the history books… with his penis.
Really makes you appreciate the simple brilliance of the toilet when you start thinking about a total, zero gravity, redesign. I didn’t say it, but all I could wonder by the end of our call was whether Dr. Summers was hoping that one day, in the far distant future, everyone would say they needed to “use the summers”.
Next, NASA introduced me to my Crew Management Specialist, Mark Whitney. Fun guy, good sense of humour, came prepared with the airplane pre-flight safety briefing.
Mark started off the call with a simple explanation, “Alex, my job down here is to keep you alive, and your job up there is to help us save you.” The more he talked, the more I believed him.
Over the next three hours I learned a lot about Mark. He was actually an astronaut, he had my dad’s taste in music, he had a teenaged daughter, and I’ll let you guess how he sees the world based on some of his gold star quotes during the safety briefing.
“This one can be tricky, you’ve got to make sure you release the connection before you open the valve and write that down because it could well save your life up there.”
“Don’t touch anything on the control panel.”
“Now this could save your life one day Alex: you need to be on the lookout for signs of hypoxia: laughing, confusion, clumsiness.”
“Never push any buttons on the control panel.”
“Always ask yourself: is this rated to be used this way? That questions going to save you.”
“Whatever you do, leave the control panel alone.”
“Now this could save your life up there: never guess when it’s something you can’t undo.”
Before you get the impression that Mark gave me a basic overview of the ship: he didn’t. He showed me the emergency floatation devices that could well save my life, the pencil case sized toolbox that could well save my life, the double phonebook thick emergency procedures manual that could well save my life, and eventually we got to the emergency atmosphere controls which could well save my life.
Those were hidden behind a piece of paneling on the Orion’s wall. Sorry, bulkhead. Why do they call spaceships ships? Why not spaceplanes? Or spaceboats?
Planes fly through air generating lift? But boats float on water using buoyancy. Are trains any less defined by their tracks than boats are by water?
Anyways, not important, that ship has sailed.
That panel had a finger thin yellow and black hazard decal around its edge and a black stencil “EMRG - ATM CNTRL” in its center. A single latch swung it open along a long hinge and the interior was actually much more manageable than I’d imagined if you got under the Orion’s skin. There were four braided bundles of cabling at the hatch’s back, but mostly the space was filled up by a single tank the size of my thigh and a half a dozen steel woven hoses that ran from a box about the size of two fists. A red lever on one side of the box was labeled “MANL EMRG REPRS”.
By the way, you’ve probably heard the jokes about engineers and their writing skills. Well, this is what happens if you put us in charge of grammar and spelling. “Manual emergency repressurization”, gets cut down from thirty-one perfectly readable and clear letters into thirteen letters that make, almost, no sense.
“Emergency Air,” is thirteen letters as well. But noooooo, “air” isn’t sciency enough for them.
Mark walked me through the process. The tank had enough ‘air’ in it to repressurize Orion. Pull the handle, and about five seconds later Orion will be full… and cold. PV=nrT. However, interestingly, that tank uses the same valving as the flight suit.
He also re-emphasized several times that I was not, under any circumstances, to touch any of the ship’s controls.
I had a Skor bar for lunch, and then there were about 700 valves and gauges that NASA wanted me to manually check for them. Somewhere around the five hundredth valve reading, I made the mistake of mentioning to Mark that I was looking forward to reading that night. Mark, literally without missing a beat, said “plenty of time to read in jail.” Like I said, funny guy.
Oh, Ender’s Game. Fast read. I liked it. But I’ve got a question. The book is about how important it is to understand others, and even an alien that’s completely different from us is worthy of understanding, empathy, respect. There’s also several references to checking out guy’s butts, a boy-boy naked shower fight scene where the key to victory is lathering up in slippery, hot, soap, and I’m supposed to believe the book isn’t an allegory for being accepting of homosexuality? I know Orson Scott Card is infamous for his opinions on this topic, and probably never consciously intended that… But come on, is there another way to read it?
Anyways, I’ve got to say, this entire thing is going really smoothly. The food sucks, and I really regret not bringing a tooth brush, but other than that everything’s coming up Alex.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission.
You can follow along through my Instagram (@authornathanhgreen), my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen), sign up on my website to be part of my daily mailing list (www.authornathanhgreen.com).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
November 17, 2022
NASA "Furious" with Artemis I Engineer - Day 2
So NASAs pissed.
When I’d imagined their response, I pictured them having meetings about how exactly to communicate with me while in space. I imagined them treating me like they would an inexperienced astronaut: friendly, helpful, needing guidance. Hell, I kind of figured they’d quickly see the bright side and put me to work on whatever work they could think up. Of course, that would change the second I splashed down, but up in space it would be all ‘gosh-darn-it what’s done is done, so let’s work together.’
It kind of started out that way. They had a lot of questions to make sure I hadn’t done anything to mess up the mission or break something aboard. Yes, I weighed Moonikin and made sure I wasn’t so much as an ounce over-weight. No, I hadn’t touched anything aboard the ship. No, I wasn’t on here by accident, this wasn’t some terrible case of ground crew catching a nap at the wrong moment (something they probably thought was several orders of magnitude more likely than what’s actually happening).
That lasted about an hour. But once the engineers had asked every question they could think to ask, the yelling started.
Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the flight director, and my boss’s, boss’s, boss, didn’t exactly yell. You know when you’re having a fight with your girlfriend and she’s not yelling, but she’s annunciating each word like an ice pick being thrust at you? Charlie was doing that.
She also fired me. Technically I’m supposed to get a warning letter which invites me to a performance review meeting, where I’m “coached” to bring my performance up, and when that doesn’t work, I get a final warning and meeting with my supervisor to talk over the issues, then they can fire me.
Charlie made an exception for me. I’m exceptional.
It was actually a lot like getting yelled at by your mother. She was angry, but the focus wasn’t on her emotion, it was on how much I’d let everyone down. Thrown away a great career, bright future, you probably don’t need me to conjure up memories of what a disappointed mother sounds like.
The deputy director of NASA did yell. He is working himself up to an aneurysm. I didn’t want to say anything at the time, but he needs a yoga retreat, or to switch to decaf, or something. I’d describe him as nearly incoherent with rage. I guess the higher you get up the ladder the less you have to hold yourself back.
Then the director of NASA began his call with, “son, you better be praying you make it back alive so we can throw you in jail.” So, yay!
The real surprise though was that I got a call from the Vice-President of the United States of America. She yelled at me. Vice-President Harris seems like such a nice person on television, but wow, when she gets going…
“I guess that means you don’t want another donation from me for your next campaign?” Honestly, I was trying to be funny. It seemed like a good thing to say at the time. She did not take it well. Apparently, the entire apparatus of the US government was going to be turned to the question of how they could screw me over once I was back, and screw me over they would.
Still, I’d like to focus on the positives: I got a call from the Vice-President of the United States of America. Maybe one day I’d do something bad enough to get a call from the President!
Was it worth it? I’m the first human being to leave Earth’s orbit solo. I’m the first human to stow away on a spaceship. I’m the first human to fly in an Orion capsule, or atop the SLS rocket system. I’m the first felon in space. I’ll be the first person to both be in space, and in prison (though I’ve been beaten to jail - darn).
Being an astronaut is the first thing I remember wanting - if you exclude a Nintendo. I spent four years getting a degree in aerospace engineering, and three years working at NASA trying to get into the astronaut program. If I’d been selected, I would have gone through another three or four years of training before being selected for a mission, and then another year or two of specialized training for that. Total investment: 12 years. I’m sure, with good behavior, I’ll be out of prison in 12 years. I mean, I don’t know every single little law I might have broken. But I’m a first time offender and this was a non-violent crime, how long could it really be?
Besides, if you’re willing to risk being blown to hell on a rocket just to get into space, doesn’t it stand to reason you’d gladly accept some prison time if you make it back safely?
I’d really rather not be thinking about being stuck in a tiny cell for years. So instead, I decide to focus on the tiny room I’m stuck in for the next month.
This is one of those good news, bad news, scenarios.
The good news is that I do have all of the necessities. There is a toilet (though honestly it looks more like a sleep apnea machine built into the wall), and I’d made the mistake of waiting until I needed to use it before trying to figure out how to use it.
Even though this was supposed to be a test mission, the ship has oxygen and water like it would for a real mission. So again, that’s good news.
Bad news time. On a manned mission there would have been a couple of hundred pounds of vacuum sealed meals in the galley. Pre-launch I hadn’t been able to figure out whether they were actually stocking it for the test, and when I opened the hatches for food storage all I found were large plastic cubes labeled “ballast test weight: 1 kg”.
That’s ok. I had crammed as many Skor bars into my flight suit as I had weight allotment for. It works out to 500 calories a day, and if I’m just floating around taking things easy that should be about a 500 calorie a day deficit which works out to 6 pounds of lost fat over the mission. Some people pay good money for that kind of diet.
And yes, butter is a more calorie dense food. But when I closed my eyes and imagined eating scoop after scoop of butter for weeks on end (and it starting to go off by the end of the mission), I’d rather have the chocolate bars and lose a little weight.
I spend some time floating around Orion, exploring. In the compartment where there were supposed to be space suits there was just a note “I owe you 1 spacesuit - NASA”. Kidding. There was a test weight. No spacesuit though.
I’ve got to say, floating there, looking at that stupid test weight where a space suit should have been, I started to wonder what other important stuff Orion was missing.
Looking around was a lot like exploring an empty hotel room. Empty drawer after empty drawer. I was really starting to expect to find a bible at some point. And then I did. The Emergency Procedures Manual. The thing is as thick as two phone books with just as many pages. I flipped it open, pretty much gibberish as far as I could tell, and stowed it. Here’s hoping I don’t need it.
Aside from that, I’d loaded up a thumb drive with two hundred science fiction books. Speaking of which, I think it’s finally time I give Ender’s Game a chance.
What are the odds the entire government’s going to be after me when I get back?
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission.
You can follow along through my instagram (@authornathanhgreen), my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen), sign up on my website to be part of my daily mailing list (www.authornathanhgreen.com).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
When I’d imagined their response, I pictured them having meetings about how exactly to communicate with me while in space. I imagined them treating me like they would an inexperienced astronaut: friendly, helpful, needing guidance. Hell, I kind of figured they’d quickly see the bright side and put me to work on whatever work they could think up. Of course, that would change the second I splashed down, but up in space it would be all ‘gosh-darn-it what’s done is done, so let’s work together.’
It kind of started out that way. They had a lot of questions to make sure I hadn’t done anything to mess up the mission or break something aboard. Yes, I weighed Moonikin and made sure I wasn’t so much as an ounce over-weight. No, I hadn’t touched anything aboard the ship. No, I wasn’t on here by accident, this wasn’t some terrible case of ground crew catching a nap at the wrong moment (something they probably thought was several orders of magnitude more likely than what’s actually happening).
That lasted about an hour. But once the engineers had asked every question they could think to ask, the yelling started.
Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the flight director, and my boss’s, boss’s, boss, didn’t exactly yell. You know when you’re having a fight with your girlfriend and she’s not yelling, but she’s annunciating each word like an ice pick being thrust at you? Charlie was doing that.
She also fired me. Technically I’m supposed to get a warning letter which invites me to a performance review meeting, where I’m “coached” to bring my performance up, and when that doesn’t work, I get a final warning and meeting with my supervisor to talk over the issues, then they can fire me.
Charlie made an exception for me. I’m exceptional.
It was actually a lot like getting yelled at by your mother. She was angry, but the focus wasn’t on her emotion, it was on how much I’d let everyone down. Thrown away a great career, bright future, you probably don’t need me to conjure up memories of what a disappointed mother sounds like.
The deputy director of NASA did yell. He is working himself up to an aneurysm. I didn’t want to say anything at the time, but he needs a yoga retreat, or to switch to decaf, or something. I’d describe him as nearly incoherent with rage. I guess the higher you get up the ladder the less you have to hold yourself back.
Then the director of NASA began his call with, “son, you better be praying you make it back alive so we can throw you in jail.” So, yay!
The real surprise though was that I got a call from the Vice-President of the United States of America. She yelled at me. Vice-President Harris seems like such a nice person on television, but wow, when she gets going…
“I guess that means you don’t want another donation from me for your next campaign?” Honestly, I was trying to be funny. It seemed like a good thing to say at the time. She did not take it well. Apparently, the entire apparatus of the US government was going to be turned to the question of how they could screw me over once I was back, and screw me over they would.
Still, I’d like to focus on the positives: I got a call from the Vice-President of the United States of America. Maybe one day I’d do something bad enough to get a call from the President!
Was it worth it? I’m the first human being to leave Earth’s orbit solo. I’m the first human to stow away on a spaceship. I’m the first human to fly in an Orion capsule, or atop the SLS rocket system. I’m the first felon in space. I’ll be the first person to both be in space, and in prison (though I’ve been beaten to jail - darn).
Being an astronaut is the first thing I remember wanting - if you exclude a Nintendo. I spent four years getting a degree in aerospace engineering, and three years working at NASA trying to get into the astronaut program. If I’d been selected, I would have gone through another three or four years of training before being selected for a mission, and then another year or two of specialized training for that. Total investment: 12 years. I’m sure, with good behavior, I’ll be out of prison in 12 years. I mean, I don’t know every single little law I might have broken. But I’m a first time offender and this was a non-violent crime, how long could it really be?
Besides, if you’re willing to risk being blown to hell on a rocket just to get into space, doesn’t it stand to reason you’d gladly accept some prison time if you make it back safely?
I’d really rather not be thinking about being stuck in a tiny cell for years. So instead, I decide to focus on the tiny room I’m stuck in for the next month.
This is one of those good news, bad news, scenarios.
The good news is that I do have all of the necessities. There is a toilet (though honestly it looks more like a sleep apnea machine built into the wall), and I’d made the mistake of waiting until I needed to use it before trying to figure out how to use it.
Even though this was supposed to be a test mission, the ship has oxygen and water like it would for a real mission. So again, that’s good news.
Bad news time. On a manned mission there would have been a couple of hundred pounds of vacuum sealed meals in the galley. Pre-launch I hadn’t been able to figure out whether they were actually stocking it for the test, and when I opened the hatches for food storage all I found were large plastic cubes labeled “ballast test weight: 1 kg”.
That’s ok. I had crammed as many Skor bars into my flight suit as I had weight allotment for. It works out to 500 calories a day, and if I’m just floating around taking things easy that should be about a 500 calorie a day deficit which works out to 6 pounds of lost fat over the mission. Some people pay good money for that kind of diet.
And yes, butter is a more calorie dense food. But when I closed my eyes and imagined eating scoop after scoop of butter for weeks on end (and it starting to go off by the end of the mission), I’d rather have the chocolate bars and lose a little weight.
I spend some time floating around Orion, exploring. In the compartment where there were supposed to be space suits there was just a note “I owe you 1 spacesuit - NASA”. Kidding. There was a test weight. No spacesuit though.
I’ve got to say, floating there, looking at that stupid test weight where a space suit should have been, I started to wonder what other important stuff Orion was missing.
Looking around was a lot like exploring an empty hotel room. Empty drawer after empty drawer. I was really starting to expect to find a bible at some point. And then I did. The Emergency Procedures Manual. The thing is as thick as two phone books with just as many pages. I flipped it open, pretty much gibberish as far as I could tell, and stowed it. Here’s hoping I don’t need it.
Aside from that, I’d loaded up a thumb drive with two hundred science fiction books. Speaking of which, I think it’s finally time I give Ender’s Game a chance.
What are the odds the entire government’s going to be after me when I get back?
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission.
You can follow along through my instagram (@authornathanhgreen), my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen), sign up on my website to be part of my daily mailing list (www.authornathanhgreen.com).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Nathan H. Green
November 16, 2022
Artemis I Has A Stowaway - Day 1
People would kill for a seat on an Artemis mission, I only had to play dead.
You’d think it would be almost impossible to remove the NASA approved test dummy aboard Artemis I, who NASA actually named Moonikin, slap on some makeup and a plastic face mask, fake the sensor feeds Moonikin was supposed to be recording, and put myself into its place. It turns out it’s way easier to do that than getting accepted into astronaut training. I should know, I’ve tried both and only succeeded at one.
The plastic mask I was wearing to mimic Moonikin’s face didn’t have eye holes, so before launch I was blind as a bat. The helmet muffled most of the sounds. So, all I could really hear was the short, professional, mumbles of the ground crew working through final items on their checklists, and their bootie clad footsteps on Orion’s deck. Well, that and the sound of air blowing into my suit. There’s an intake valve on my flight suit’s thigh that feeds all the way up to the helmet.
I don’t know whether to call that valve being active NASA’s big mistake, a massive waste to the US taxpayer, or my evil inspiration.
See me and David, one of my buddies working on the Moonikin sensor package, were slaughtering digital zombies after work back in July and chatting. I had been correctly pointing out that Sisko had a Starfleet education on theory of combat and tactics, and David had been incorrectly pointing out that Holden had proven adaptability in commanding classes of ships he wasn’t trained on, so would have an edge if put in command of a Star Destroyer.
I was racking up a double-digit headshot shooting streak when talk turned to work and David started complaining about how the turbulent airflow into Moonikin’s flight suit was reducing the sensitivity of the sensors he was designing. I asked why they were even bothering with that, it wasn’t like a dummy needed to breath, and David said, and I’m quoting him here, “NASA’s acting like Moonikin is alive.”
While my digital brain was getting devoured by a zombie, it felt like the normal world full of complexity, disappointments, and bad luck had just been turned sideways and there was suddenly this narrow, but clear, path ahead: I could stow away on Artemis I.
We all get evil ideas sometimes. Part of being civilized means not giving in to those temptations, or just having a laugh about them when they’re really clever. Just because the idea of stowing away seemed like it could work didn’t mean I’d really do it.
But then came the mission delays. Every time they pushed back the launch I thought about it, I planned a little more. A part of me wanted to do this, and week, after week, after week of delays it kept poking at me.
Eventually I had a plan to sneak on, but not off, and that little voice in the back of my head asked, “what if we roll the dice? If you sneak on, and it launches, then it was meant to be. If you sneak on and they delay again, then you shot your shot.”
Yeah, not great logic, but that was what convinced me.
The blast-off was pretty cool. It was smoother, and shorter than you’d think, but that probably had something to do with the adrenaline. You know your endocrine system’s going a bit wonky when you’re riding a rocket into space and jonesing to do some pushups.
I wish I could tell you about how spectacular it was seeing the curvature of the earth, or night turning into an even darker night, or the stark intensity of the stars, but I kept my Moonikin mask on the whole time. I was worried that if NASA found out while they could still abort the mission, they would. Technically once they ignited the engines any kind of abort would have a multi-billion dollar price tag affixed to it, but NASA makes weird choices sometimes.
I might be the only astronaut (am I an astronaut? Is it a title which must be bestowed, or a descriptor of those who have done?), anyways I might be the only person whose heart rate actually slowed down during blast-off. I was just so crazy relieved that I’d actually pulled this off, that I wasn’t thinking right.
In retrospect that’s probably when NASA officially realized something was wrong. Moonikin (the manakin I bumped from this mission) was rigged up with seventy five different sensors including vibration and acceleration. I’d recorded a few hours of “normal” readings from those sensors - sorry David - and was feeding that back into the system. When the launch kicked off, David and the rest of his team would have been asking why Moonikin thought nothing was happening.
Do I feel guilty about that? More than you’d think. A few years ago, I accidentally ran a red light, and I’d put fifty bucks on Leclerc to win the World Drivers Championship through a European sports betting website, but prior to hitching a ride on a multi-billion dollar spaceship I had no business being on, that was the extent of my criminal activities. And I agonized about the legality of that bet. Jess had said I needed to be less uptight about that kind of stuff though.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, I’ve read that book too, and unfortunately I’m not a space pirate. I didn’t commandeer command of Artemis I: this mission is fully automated/remote controlled and I’m more cargo than commander. Further I wasn’t in international waters when I snuck on board, so maritime law does not apply. In fact, what I am is a felon, though I am the first felon to travel into space. Space felon.
But I’ve got a lot of great excuses for my felonious conduct! First of all, I’m not hurting anyone. No offense to David, but Moonikin’s value really isn’t that big, and I can tell them anything that Moonikin could.
Next is the pure, unadulterated, waste of this “unmanned” mission. 4.2 Billion dollars. That’s what this launch is costing - just for the launch. The development costs of the Orion are an order of magnitude above that. Artemis I is a fully functional spaceship. It has every bell and whistle that the manned missions are going to have.
I feel badly about throwing away the junk they give out at conferences. NASA wanted to throw away a stack of hundred dollar bills six miles high.
The only reason Artemis I wasn’t supposed to be manned was because when NASA sat down and did the math on the risks of all this, and they started adding up a brand new - giant - rocket (the SLS rocket), a brand new (with a ton of design and construction issues) spaceship, a long mission too far away from Earth to abort or send help, the numbers just came up a bit too scary for them to risk lives.
There’s also the heat shield. When I get back to Earth the heat shield is what’s going to get me back down through the atmosphere safely, you’ve seen the movies. Anyways Artemis I has the biggest heat shield ever made, and NASA’s nervous about it. Biggest risk of the whole mission.
I happen to know the folks on the heat shield’s design team. They’re smart cookies. Smart enough for NASA to bet the lives of trained astronauts on? No. Just smart enough for me to bet my life on them.
A lot of people think the rocket blast-off is the coolest part of space travel. Not even close. It’s all about the heatshield. Back in the 50’s when they were trying to figure out how to get nuclear warheads back into the atmosphere from space, there was a lot of debate about making them pointy and aerodynamic so they could “fly” back down like a plane.
They eventually figured out that, like most physics, it’s all about conservation of energy. That giant rocket that launches things into space? All that fuel is getting converted into the kinetic and potential energy of the spaceship (and a bunch of waste heat, sound, and light, but let’s ignore that for a moment). When you want to get back to the ground, that rocket’s worth of energy has to be shed, and the heat shield converts kinetic and potential energy into heat allowing a nice, soft, touchdown.
If you imagine the SLS rocket’s plume of fire being blasted onto the heat shield, you’re in the ballpark of the kinds of energy that shield needs to deal with. It’s crazy cool stuff.
Long story short, NASA doesn’t trust the heat shield, they don’t trust Orion, they don’t trust their 4.2 billion dollar SLS rocket, so they made a fully functional test mission where the only missing ingredient was someone brave (pronounced “dumb”) enough to risk their life aboard, and I’m the dummy taking over for Moonikin.
After the launch there’s about fifteen minutes of total euphoria. Again, the adrenaline. It worked: I’m in space! I spend about ten minutes just playing with a floating, zero-g Skor bar. You want a fascinating time in zero-g, try spinning something along its longitudinal axis and watch instabilities quickly transform the rotation into one about its normal axis. For the non-engineers. If you start it spinning around its length it will change to spinning end over end.
If you want to see something weird, watch adults trying to learn new basic skills they never picked up in childhood, they act just like babies. There’s giggling (when do adults giggle?), there’s clumsy, handsy, grabbing. There’s wide eyed wonder at the basic operation of the world. Jess didn’t know how to use a broom when we met, grow up living the good life and you’ve got maids for that. When I handed her a broom for the first time, she held it out, at arms length, perpendicular to the ground, with both hands a foot apart on the shaft, and then basically pivoted at the hips and tried to ‘sweep’ that way. Most damn adorable thing you’ve ever seen. Anyways, I can feel my face smiling as I play with the Skor bar.
But after that I start feeling bad for the Moonikin team. They’re not thinking that some space felon has come along and is feeding them fake data. They’re down on the ground thinking they screwed up, or something broke, and a ton of work they put into this project has been a very public, very embarrassing, failure.
If there’s a victim here, it’s them. The good news is I don’t have to keep them waiting long. An hour and a half after launch and Artemis I kicks again with the trans-lunar injection burn. 18 minutes of gentle thrust and I’m on my way… Committed. Artemis I no longer has enough fuel to turn around and come home. We’re going to the moon and there’s not a thing NASA can do about it!
It was time to fess up. If I was a real astronaut, they would have given me a headset tied into the ship’s computer. As is, I use a handheld backup from the commander’s console.
Click. “Mission Control, this is Alex Whelm aboard Artemis I. Over.” Click.
When they put me on trial for this, I hope I get to see the video of the control room right now.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission.
You can follow along through my instagram (@authornathanhgreen), my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen), sign up on my website to be part of my daily mailing list (www.authornathanhgreen.com).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
You’d think it would be almost impossible to remove the NASA approved test dummy aboard Artemis I, who NASA actually named Moonikin, slap on some makeup and a plastic face mask, fake the sensor feeds Moonikin was supposed to be recording, and put myself into its place. It turns out it’s way easier to do that than getting accepted into astronaut training. I should know, I’ve tried both and only succeeded at one.
The plastic mask I was wearing to mimic Moonikin’s face didn’t have eye holes, so before launch I was blind as a bat. The helmet muffled most of the sounds. So, all I could really hear was the short, professional, mumbles of the ground crew working through final items on their checklists, and their bootie clad footsteps on Orion’s deck. Well, that and the sound of air blowing into my suit. There’s an intake valve on my flight suit’s thigh that feeds all the way up to the helmet.
I don’t know whether to call that valve being active NASA’s big mistake, a massive waste to the US taxpayer, or my evil inspiration.
See me and David, one of my buddies working on the Moonikin sensor package, were slaughtering digital zombies after work back in July and chatting. I had been correctly pointing out that Sisko had a Starfleet education on theory of combat and tactics, and David had been incorrectly pointing out that Holden had proven adaptability in commanding classes of ships he wasn’t trained on, so would have an edge if put in command of a Star Destroyer.
I was racking up a double-digit headshot shooting streak when talk turned to work and David started complaining about how the turbulent airflow into Moonikin’s flight suit was reducing the sensitivity of the sensors he was designing. I asked why they were even bothering with that, it wasn’t like a dummy needed to breath, and David said, and I’m quoting him here, “NASA’s acting like Moonikin is alive.”
While my digital brain was getting devoured by a zombie, it felt like the normal world full of complexity, disappointments, and bad luck had just been turned sideways and there was suddenly this narrow, but clear, path ahead: I could stow away on Artemis I.
We all get evil ideas sometimes. Part of being civilized means not giving in to those temptations, or just having a laugh about them when they’re really clever. Just because the idea of stowing away seemed like it could work didn’t mean I’d really do it.
But then came the mission delays. Every time they pushed back the launch I thought about it, I planned a little more. A part of me wanted to do this, and week, after week, after week of delays it kept poking at me.
Eventually I had a plan to sneak on, but not off, and that little voice in the back of my head asked, “what if we roll the dice? If you sneak on, and it launches, then it was meant to be. If you sneak on and they delay again, then you shot your shot.”
Yeah, not great logic, but that was what convinced me.
The blast-off was pretty cool. It was smoother, and shorter than you’d think, but that probably had something to do with the adrenaline. You know your endocrine system’s going a bit wonky when you’re riding a rocket into space and jonesing to do some pushups.
I wish I could tell you about how spectacular it was seeing the curvature of the earth, or night turning into an even darker night, or the stark intensity of the stars, but I kept my Moonikin mask on the whole time. I was worried that if NASA found out while they could still abort the mission, they would. Technically once they ignited the engines any kind of abort would have a multi-billion dollar price tag affixed to it, but NASA makes weird choices sometimes.
I might be the only astronaut (am I an astronaut? Is it a title which must be bestowed, or a descriptor of those who have done?), anyways I might be the only person whose heart rate actually slowed down during blast-off. I was just so crazy relieved that I’d actually pulled this off, that I wasn’t thinking right.
In retrospect that’s probably when NASA officially realized something was wrong. Moonikin (the manakin I bumped from this mission) was rigged up with seventy five different sensors including vibration and acceleration. I’d recorded a few hours of “normal” readings from those sensors - sorry David - and was feeding that back into the system. When the launch kicked off, David and the rest of his team would have been asking why Moonikin thought nothing was happening.
Do I feel guilty about that? More than you’d think. A few years ago, I accidentally ran a red light, and I’d put fifty bucks on Leclerc to win the World Drivers Championship through a European sports betting website, but prior to hitching a ride on a multi-billion dollar spaceship I had no business being on, that was the extent of my criminal activities. And I agonized about the legality of that bet. Jess had said I needed to be less uptight about that kind of stuff though.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, I’ve read that book too, and unfortunately I’m not a space pirate. I didn’t commandeer command of Artemis I: this mission is fully automated/remote controlled and I’m more cargo than commander. Further I wasn’t in international waters when I snuck on board, so maritime law does not apply. In fact, what I am is a felon, though I am the first felon to travel into space. Space felon.
But I’ve got a lot of great excuses for my felonious conduct! First of all, I’m not hurting anyone. No offense to David, but Moonikin’s value really isn’t that big, and I can tell them anything that Moonikin could.
Next is the pure, unadulterated, waste of this “unmanned” mission. 4.2 Billion dollars. That’s what this launch is costing - just for the launch. The development costs of the Orion are an order of magnitude above that. Artemis I is a fully functional spaceship. It has every bell and whistle that the manned missions are going to have.
I feel badly about throwing away the junk they give out at conferences. NASA wanted to throw away a stack of hundred dollar bills six miles high.
The only reason Artemis I wasn’t supposed to be manned was because when NASA sat down and did the math on the risks of all this, and they started adding up a brand new - giant - rocket (the SLS rocket), a brand new (with a ton of design and construction issues) spaceship, a long mission too far away from Earth to abort or send help, the numbers just came up a bit too scary for them to risk lives.
There’s also the heat shield. When I get back to Earth the heat shield is what’s going to get me back down through the atmosphere safely, you’ve seen the movies. Anyways Artemis I has the biggest heat shield ever made, and NASA’s nervous about it. Biggest risk of the whole mission.
I happen to know the folks on the heat shield’s design team. They’re smart cookies. Smart enough for NASA to bet the lives of trained astronauts on? No. Just smart enough for me to bet my life on them.
A lot of people think the rocket blast-off is the coolest part of space travel. Not even close. It’s all about the heatshield. Back in the 50’s when they were trying to figure out how to get nuclear warheads back into the atmosphere from space, there was a lot of debate about making them pointy and aerodynamic so they could “fly” back down like a plane.
They eventually figured out that, like most physics, it’s all about conservation of energy. That giant rocket that launches things into space? All that fuel is getting converted into the kinetic and potential energy of the spaceship (and a bunch of waste heat, sound, and light, but let’s ignore that for a moment). When you want to get back to the ground, that rocket’s worth of energy has to be shed, and the heat shield converts kinetic and potential energy into heat allowing a nice, soft, touchdown.
If you imagine the SLS rocket’s plume of fire being blasted onto the heat shield, you’re in the ballpark of the kinds of energy that shield needs to deal with. It’s crazy cool stuff.
Long story short, NASA doesn’t trust the heat shield, they don’t trust Orion, they don’t trust their 4.2 billion dollar SLS rocket, so they made a fully functional test mission where the only missing ingredient was someone brave (pronounced “dumb”) enough to risk their life aboard, and I’m the dummy taking over for Moonikin.
After the launch there’s about fifteen minutes of total euphoria. Again, the adrenaline. It worked: I’m in space! I spend about ten minutes just playing with a floating, zero-g Skor bar. You want a fascinating time in zero-g, try spinning something along its longitudinal axis and watch instabilities quickly transform the rotation into one about its normal axis. For the non-engineers. If you start it spinning around its length it will change to spinning end over end.
If you want to see something weird, watch adults trying to learn new basic skills they never picked up in childhood, they act just like babies. There’s giggling (when do adults giggle?), there’s clumsy, handsy, grabbing. There’s wide eyed wonder at the basic operation of the world. Jess didn’t know how to use a broom when we met, grow up living the good life and you’ve got maids for that. When I handed her a broom for the first time, she held it out, at arms length, perpendicular to the ground, with both hands a foot apart on the shaft, and then basically pivoted at the hips and tried to ‘sweep’ that way. Most damn adorable thing you’ve ever seen. Anyways, I can feel my face smiling as I play with the Skor bar.
But after that I start feeling bad for the Moonikin team. They’re not thinking that some space felon has come along and is feeding them fake data. They’re down on the ground thinking they screwed up, or something broke, and a ton of work they put into this project has been a very public, very embarrassing, failure.
If there’s a victim here, it’s them. The good news is I don’t have to keep them waiting long. An hour and a half after launch and Artemis I kicks again with the trans-lunar injection burn. 18 minutes of gentle thrust and I’m on my way… Committed. Artemis I no longer has enough fuel to turn around and come home. We’re going to the moon and there’s not a thing NASA can do about it!
It was time to fess up. If I was a real astronaut, they would have given me a headset tied into the ship’s computer. As is, I use a handheld backup from the commander’s console.
Click. “Mission Control, this is Alex Whelm aboard Artemis I. Over.” Click.
When they put me on trial for this, I hope I get to see the video of the control room right now.
***
I’m Nathan H. Green, a science-fiction writer with a degree in aerospace engineering, and I’m going to be doing daily semi-fictional stories tracking the Artemis I mission.
You can follow along through my instagram (@authornathanhgreen), my reddit (u/authornathanhgreen), sign up on my website to be part of my daily mailing list (www.authornathanhgreen.com).
Artemis I Has A Stowaway is a work of semi-fiction. All incidents, events, dialogue and sentiments (which are not part of the mission’s official history), are entirely fictional. Where real historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, sentiments, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events, personality, disposition, or attitudes of the real person, nor to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Save the above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
October 6, 2022
Nerding Out with Nathan: Spaceplane? Spaceboat?
I've got a degree in aerospace engineering with a space focus, and one question they never answered in school was why a spaceship is a ship? Why not a spaceplane, spaceboat, spacetrain, spacemobile?
Trains travel on tracks and there are no tracks in space, but ships float on water via buoyancy and that doesn't happen in space.
Spaceplane seems like the best alternative title contender. Why did spaceship win out?
I would point to the social systems around planes vs. ships. People want to understand the hierarchy of a situation quickly. A workplace has a boss, a sports team has a star player. Etc.
The Pilot of a plane is also its captain. She is in command of the plane and those aboard however primarily the pilot can operate the plane themselves with other members of the crew tasked with dealing with passengers or taking over when the pilot needs a break.
The captain of a ship however doesn't necessarily directly operate the controls and is a much more managerial position making sure different departments are operating in the manner that they should. A ship's captain could spend almost no time on the bridge.
A spaceship would follow the second model much more closely, and certainly will as we make bigger and bigger spaceships. So for the social animals in us the hierarchical structure we are stepping into is more like a ship than a plane.
Woe to the Victor
Trains travel on tracks and there are no tracks in space, but ships float on water via buoyancy and that doesn't happen in space.
Spaceplane seems like the best alternative title contender. Why did spaceship win out?
I would point to the social systems around planes vs. ships. People want to understand the hierarchy of a situation quickly. A workplace has a boss, a sports team has a star player. Etc.
The Pilot of a plane is also its captain. She is in command of the plane and those aboard however primarily the pilot can operate the plane themselves with other members of the crew tasked with dealing with passengers or taking over when the pilot needs a break.
The captain of a ship however doesn't necessarily directly operate the controls and is a much more managerial position making sure different departments are operating in the manner that they should. A ship's captain could spend almost no time on the bridge.
A spaceship would follow the second model much more closely, and certainly will as we make bigger and bigger spaceships. So for the social animals in us the hierarchical structure we are stepping into is more like a ship than a plane.
Woe to the Victor
October 3, 2022
Winston Churchill 20 Quote Test
Below are 10 quotes from Winston Churchill the man, and 10 quotes from Winston Churchill the fictional ghost in My Late Life. Can you tell them apart? Answers at end.
1. By unspoken covenant with God, I had agreed to feel the proper amount of shame for my sins, and God had agreed to make only such protests as were necessary for propriety’s sake.
2. Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
3. Vengeance is the most costly and dissipating of luxuries.
4. I know drunks and reprobates who would have been warriors of song and praise had they not had the misfortune to be born into the wrong century.
5. My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best.
6. Perhaps the real trouble with company is not so much their presence as their opinions.
7. Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak, it’s also what it takes to sit down and listen.
8. One always measures friendships by how they show up in bad weather.
9. I do attempt not to judge by vice; those scales would be too loaded if turned in my direction.
10. Evils can be created much quicker than they can be cured.
11. all his public failings persisted in private, and he had yet more private failings that he had managed to keep from public and Parliament.
12. I saved the world, and my critics have the audacity to blame me for not saving it quite well enough!
13. The hour hand of his life had progressed into the afternoon, and he was displeased that morning was now over.
14. Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
15. I had learned from the wars was that General Chance is often a more fascinating commander than General Reason.
16. This is the problem with greatness: it is a summit from which all paths lead downwards, and one cannot stay atop it forever
17. There is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.
18. There are certain facts that men spend a great deal of time clothing and positioning so as not to cause too great a distress to the listener.
19. The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.
20. Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.
Answers:
1. Ghost
2. Man
3. Man
4. Ghost
5. Man
6. Ghost
7. Man
8. Man
9. Ghost
10. Man
11. Ghost
12. Ghost
13. Ghost
14. Man
15. Ghost
16. Ghost
17. Man
18. Ghost
19. Man
20. Man
My Late LifeNathan H. Green
1. By unspoken covenant with God, I had agreed to feel the proper amount of shame for my sins, and God had agreed to make only such protests as were necessary for propriety’s sake.
2. Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
3. Vengeance is the most costly and dissipating of luxuries.
4. I know drunks and reprobates who would have been warriors of song and praise had they not had the misfortune to be born into the wrong century.
5. My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best.
6. Perhaps the real trouble with company is not so much their presence as their opinions.
7. Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak, it’s also what it takes to sit down and listen.
8. One always measures friendships by how they show up in bad weather.
9. I do attempt not to judge by vice; those scales would be too loaded if turned in my direction.
10. Evils can be created much quicker than they can be cured.
11. all his public failings persisted in private, and he had yet more private failings that he had managed to keep from public and Parliament.
12. I saved the world, and my critics have the audacity to blame me for not saving it quite well enough!
13. The hour hand of his life had progressed into the afternoon, and he was displeased that morning was now over.
14. Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
15. I had learned from the wars was that General Chance is often a more fascinating commander than General Reason.
16. This is the problem with greatness: it is a summit from which all paths lead downwards, and one cannot stay atop it forever
17. There is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.
18. There are certain facts that men spend a great deal of time clothing and positioning so as not to cause too great a distress to the listener.
19. The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.
20. Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.
Answers:
1. Ghost
2. Man
3. Man
4. Ghost
5. Man
6. Ghost
7. Man
8. Man
9. Ghost
10. Man
11. Ghost
12. Ghost
13. Ghost
14. Man
15. Ghost
16. Ghost
17. Man
18. Ghost
19. Man
20. Man
My Late LifeNathan H. Green
