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
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