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o/~ "Fly me to the moon . . ." o/~
SEP-010, Chapter 6.
"How's our azimuth?" Mission Commander Brian Adkinson asked. Pilot Jamie Cunningham looked at her display and nodded.
"Thirty four degrees to gimbal lock, Brian. If this attitude holds, we'll be able to talk to ground all the way up to LOS," She said.
"Good," Adkinson said softly. Constitution was falling precipitously towards the moon in a head's-up, tail-first attitude, and so far the crew inside had only had visual contact with the Earth. It was now a small, circular blue spot in the sky, and if the trajectory calculations were correct, it would be somewhere in the sky 'behind' and 'above' them.
"Sienna," He said.
"Yes, Captain Smith," She replied, and he shook his head again. That had been the honorific she'd given him, and he noted with a mixture of frustration and admiration that his new nickname had refused to go away.
"You wanna take up position with a camera at the back windows, please? I imagine we'll be sighting the moon in a few minutes."
"On it, Captain Smith," She replied cheerfully.
"Time?" Adkinson prompted.
"Twenty two hours, thirty five minutes coordinated," Jamie replied. "MET's at three days, two hours, eleven minutes and thirty-eight seconds."
"Alright, then," Adkinson said.
* * *
"What are you doing?"
Mission Specialist One, Sienna Morrison floated up to the window with a video camera in her hand, and she smiled at Anthony Downs. He hadn't moved from his spot near his sleeping quarters in several hours, and she didn't blame him. Despite several trips to the toilet and the maximum recommended dosages of anti-emetics, he still looked like he was going to die at any moment.
"We're coming up on lunar orbit. You want to take a look?" She said.
"God. That means I have to move?" He muttered.
"I'm afraid it does if you want to look," She crooned. "Besides, you'll have to be strapped in for the burn, anyway."
"Right, right. I'm coming. Just give me a minute. I'm having trouble keeping this thing going in a straight line."
Sienna snickered softly as she looked out the window.
"I heard that," Downs muttered, which only made her smile wider.
Looking out into the cargo bay, Sienna saw the fuel tanks stacked up next to the aft bulkhead, the blue-tinted auxiliary radiator panels clipped to the cargo bay doors, and the red-orange auxiliary solar panels in front of them. She looked at the bulkhead, the engine access panels barely visible behind the fuel tanks, and she waited.
She didn't have to wait long. Between the primary cooling radiators and the hull of the ship, a grey mass peered out, and she raised her camera to her eye out of reflex. Her preparation was immediately rewarded as the grey mass coagulated into the Moon.
She saw dark grey marae beneath her, punctuated by brilliant white crater ejecta on her left, and stunning grey-white fields of lunar mountainous terrain on her right side spalling the tranquil uniformity of the sparse, almost spartanly-decorated fields on her left.
"God, will you look at this," She breathed jubiliantly.
* * *
"Houston, Constitution MS-2."
"Go ahead, Sienna."
"Houston, we've got some video I'm broadcasting for you . . . it doesn't show up very well on our monitor, but I think we've got a clean signal going out for you."
"Yeah, Sienna, we've got a good signal down here; I've got to tell you this is the quietest the control room's been all day. Everything's looking good."
"Go ahead; I've got this," Brian Adkinson prompted as Jamie Cunningham impulsively reached for a handrail and stopped herself. "Not much going to happen for a few minutes, anyway."
She gave him a huge, appreciating smile, and vaulted herself across the cockpit.
"Constitution CDR, Houston," He heard. "As a reminder, LOI burn is projected one-zero minutes, three-one seconds; duration is five-eight point nine seconds."
"Roger that, Houston, and our data agrees and is locked into the computer. One zero minutes plus three one from last transmission; duration at five-eight point nine," He replied.
"And that's a good readback, Brian. We expect loss of signal in two-five seconds . . . mark. We'll expect re-acquisition of signal in approximately thirty-three minutes."
"Roger that, Houston. This is Constitution. We'll see you on the other side."
* * *
"Flight, G.C.," Flight Director Matthew Payton heard. His attention was riveted to the viewscreen in front of him as the moon swelled in size.
"Go ahead, G.C."
"Flight, both WIND and STEREO have pinged a CME."
Payton froze. A coronal mass ejection was certainly nothing to ignore. The equivalent of the sun vomiting its own particulate matter quite violently into space, it also tended to be accompanied by a plethora of radiation artifacts that could constitute a Bad Event.
"Copy," He croaked. "Is there any word yet on the vector and velocity?"
"Affirmative, flight," He heard the voice reply unhappily. "The bowshock is an eighty-percent probability of hitting us directly."
* * *
Brian Adkinson watched the numbers tick on his display. He was three hundred thousand feet in altitude above a moon that he was only beginning to stare in awe at. There'd be plenty of time for that during the next few days, of course. He just . . . found it hard to quell the excitement he was feeling as a palpable being rippling through the ship.
He was the only one in the cockpit, and his eyes tracked upwards to look at the sun shining brilliantly upon Constitution as it rose above the moon.
"Damn, that sun is bright," He said to himself as he drew a polarizing shield over the nearest cockpit window.
"Hey."
Adkinson turned, and smiled at Jamie Cunningham as she floated into the cockpit.
"Where are we at?" She asked.
"Above the moon," He replied, and she gave him a dry look.
"I mean, what's our position?"
"I'm sitting. You're floating." Evading another dirty glance, he checked his monitor. "We're about over Mare Crisium, and we'll be coming over the Sea of Tranquility in a few more. You want to look?"
"Constitution, Houston. S-Band radio check, over."
Jamie nodded as she swam toward her station. Pulling a microphone off of its velcro patch on the panel, she clicked her mic as she peered through the window.
"Uhh, Houston, Constitution. Radio check satisfactory, over."
"Great to hear, Jamie. We're reading your telemetry; it showed up on the TDRS right on time. It looks like you've had no problems with the orbital insertion."
"That's affirmative, Houston. We're about to come over Mare Tranquilitatis, and I have a personal request at this time."
Brian Adkinson craned his neck to look at Jamie curiously, and she gave him a warm smile.
"Go ahead, Jamie."
"Houston, we'd like to flip ourselves head's down as we pass over the Sea of Tranquility for a few minutes. I'd like to get Sienna and I to get some video as we pass near Tranquility Base, and we'll probably be for all intents and purposes off the air while that's going on. I promise we'll downlink our video when we're done. Will that be satisfactory?"
"How much time do you plan to take off-air?"
"Less than five minutes, Houston."
There was silence on the radio as Mission Control considered this. The idea of going out of communications wasn't a terribly welcome one, but there were limits to Constitution's construction. She was primarily built for orbital operations, but she had the obvious capability to make circumlunar trips. The problem was that all of her radio antennas were built into the skin of the ship in specific locations, and that meant they all comprised a 'cone' of coverage around the top of the ship -- but not the bottom. Inverting the ship relative to the moon's surface meant they'd pull that coverage away from Earth . . . but it didn't mean they'd necessarily be completely out of communication.
In an emergency, they all knew that there was the possibility of cranking the broadcast power on the Ku-band and S-band antennas to send a directional transmission to the moon's surface. If the geometry was right, the idea was to 'bounce' the signal off the regolith so that it would propagate back to Earth. Jamie knew that amateur radio operators practiced that technique frequently on Earth to make long-distance contacts.
"Constitution, Houston. I have a personal waiver from the flight director. You are go for one observation pass of Tranquility Base, and then we want you to maintain constant communication when possible for the duration of your stay up there."
"Thank you, Houston!" Jamie smiled brightly as Adkinson nodded to her with a smile of his own. She propelled herself away from her seat, chirping a "woohoo!" in the process. Reaching the mid-deck, she stopped herself, and sticking her head down the tunnel, she cleared her throat.
"Hey Sienna!" She called out.
* * *
". . . a coronal mass ejection could have serious implications for the safety of the crew. We're talking about plasma and radiation. I know we've built the snot out of this thing up there, but I don't know if it'll take a full assault like that and survive. It's too risky."
"FIDO, what's the possibility of actually landing her on the moon?" Flight Director Matthew Payton said pensively, and the room silenced.
"We've got the fuel to do it, and make it back, Matt . . . I just don't know about the hover engines," Flight Dynamics Officer, Michael Parks said. "We've only tested them in a real gas environment; we don't know yet how they'll operate for sure in a vacuum."
"They'll work," Payton said firmly. "They may be a different type of liquid-fed rocket, but we've tested the snot out of them like everything else on that ship. They'll work. The other problem is, where are we going to put them?"
He crossed the short distance from the front of the room to a large map of the moon projected onto the wall. The map was shaded to show light-side and dark-side.
"They're about here," He pointed to Mare Tranquilitatis, "taking pictures of Apollo 11's old site. We should have radio contact with them in a few minutes after they're done sightseeing, and in a quarter hour we'll have radio blackout as they cross into the far side. Where do we put them?"
"Their ground track is going to put them right over the Sea of Tranquility every time. That's right on the edge of daylight," Parks offered.
"Put them down near Tranquility Base?" Payton said. "Probably not a good idea; they're in line of sight with us, but still in line of sight from anything the sun will throw at us. What about Crisium?"
"That'd require a planar correction," Parks admitted. "It could be done, but Crisium's only really been explored on the surface by a pair of Russian probes. It's supposd to be nice and flat, though I don't know if we can get them their course correction in time. I think we've got another option if the survey's correct. Mare Smythii."
Payton looked at the map. Smythii was a large target, and it was an area of geologic interest because of the rather unusual gravity draw at the core of the mare. He also noted that the region was going to be a formal landing site anyway, at least as early as twelve years ago.
"Smythii is right along the equator," Payton observed. "If my textbooks are right, we should do well sending them there. Alright. Let's give them Smythii to land on."
* * *
Jamie Cunningham pressed her forehead against the overhead window.
The lunar landscape dazzled her, with the eerie variety of grey 'above' her, and her forehead against the glass of the window and the pitfall-like sensation in her stomach reminded herself once more that she wasn't dreaming. Stunningly bright light-greys of lunar crater ejecta. Deep black shadows. The greyish-grey of basalt rock. She was three hundred thousand feet above the surface, and yet she felt like she could reach her hand out and grab a rock or two.
"Okay, it looks like we're coming up on the north edge of Tranquility Base . . ." She heard Sienna say slowly. Her accent -- a sophisticated London City accent -- seemed especially pronounced just now, and Jamie stole a second to look at her.
Sienna Morrison swept the landscape with her brown eyes, and Jamie noted how serious and unmoving she was. Her eyes were trained, they had been tested, and they were now at work studying every feature of every rock flow they floated over.
"Jamie, if you look over the right side of the ship, I think you might see something worth looking at," Sienna said. Jamie swam her way over to her seat and looked out the window. Out of an expanse of dark grey, she saw a light source flicker at her. She stared at it. It wasn't just flickering -- it seemed as if it was reflecting light.
"That's Armstrong . . . that's Collins . . ." Sienna said softly, and Jamie twitched as a finger made its way to the window. She traced the finger back to its owner, and she noted a video camera being shoved her way.
"You take some video of that," Sienna prompted.
Jamie held the camera's viewfinder to her eye and zoomed in. The motion was smooth, free of the 'jerkiness' one would expect when shooting from a moving vehicle, and she sighted the light source. Zooming in further, she gasped.
"It's mechanical," She said as a sudden shot of adrenaline flooded her veins. "Looks like the descent stage!"
She held the camera on her target for a few more seconds. Her brain was complete mush as she took the sight in. A silver, gold-spalled mechanical construction looking like a spider with its head chopped off, sticking obtrusively out of the grey of the lunar regolith. Several small devices tossed around it. The many small pinprick-like shadows of what could only be footsteps.
"Houston, we've sighted Tranquility Base," She finally remembered to say.
"They can't hear you," Adkinson reminded her.
"I know," Jamie replied. She held her gaze at the base and sighed pensively.
"Boy, I'll have a thing or two to say to some of those bozos back home," She said under her breath.
* * *
SEP-010, Chapter 6.
"How's our azimuth?" Mission Commander Brian Adkinson asked. Pilot Jamie Cunningham looked at her display and nodded.
"Thirty four degrees to gimbal lock, Brian. If this attitude holds, we'll be able to talk to ground all the way up to LOS," She said.
"Good," Adkinson said softly. Constitution was falling precipitously towards the moon in a head's-up, tail-first attitude, and so far the crew inside had only had visual contact with the Earth. It was now a small, circular blue spot in the sky, and if the trajectory calculations were correct, it would be somewhere in the sky 'behind' and 'above' them.
"Sienna," He said.
"Yes, Captain Smith," She replied, and he shook his head again. That had been the honorific she'd given him, and he noted with a mixture of frustration and admiration that his new nickname had refused to go away.
"You wanna take up position with a camera at the back windows, please? I imagine we'll be sighting the moon in a few minutes."
"On it, Captain Smith," She replied cheerfully.
"Time?" Adkinson prompted.
"Twenty two hours, thirty five minutes coordinated," Jamie replied. "MET's at three days, two hours, eleven minutes and thirty-eight seconds."
"Alright, then," Adkinson said.
* * *
"What are you doing?"
Mission Specialist One, Sienna Morrison floated up to the window with a video camera in her hand, and she smiled at Anthony Downs. He hadn't moved from his spot near his sleeping quarters in several hours, and she didn't blame him. Despite several trips to the toilet and the maximum recommended dosages of anti-emetics, he still looked like he was going to die at any moment.
"We're coming up on lunar orbit. You want to take a look?" She said.
"God. That means I have to move?" He muttered.
"I'm afraid it does if you want to look," She crooned. "Besides, you'll have to be strapped in for the burn, anyway."
"Right, right. I'm coming. Just give me a minute. I'm having trouble keeping this thing going in a straight line."
Sienna snickered softly as she looked out the window.
"I heard that," Downs muttered, which only made her smile wider.
Looking out into the cargo bay, Sienna saw the fuel tanks stacked up next to the aft bulkhead, the blue-tinted auxiliary radiator panels clipped to the cargo bay doors, and the red-orange auxiliary solar panels in front of them. She looked at the bulkhead, the engine access panels barely visible behind the fuel tanks, and she waited.
She didn't have to wait long. Between the primary cooling radiators and the hull of the ship, a grey mass peered out, and she raised her camera to her eye out of reflex. Her preparation was immediately rewarded as the grey mass coagulated into the Moon.
She saw dark grey marae beneath her, punctuated by brilliant white crater ejecta on her left, and stunning grey-white fields of lunar mountainous terrain on her right side spalling the tranquil uniformity of the sparse, almost spartanly-decorated fields on her left.
"God, will you look at this," She breathed jubiliantly.
* * *
"Houston, Constitution MS-2."
"Go ahead, Sienna."
"Houston, we've got some video I'm broadcasting for you . . . it doesn't show up very well on our monitor, but I think we've got a clean signal going out for you."
"Yeah, Sienna, we've got a good signal down here; I've got to tell you this is the quietest the control room's been all day. Everything's looking good."
"Go ahead; I've got this," Brian Adkinson prompted as Jamie Cunningham impulsively reached for a handrail and stopped herself. "Not much going to happen for a few minutes, anyway."
She gave him a huge, appreciating smile, and vaulted herself across the cockpit.
"Constitution CDR, Houston," He heard. "As a reminder, LOI burn is projected one-zero minutes, three-one seconds; duration is five-eight point nine seconds."
"Roger that, Houston, and our data agrees and is locked into the computer. One zero minutes plus three one from last transmission; duration at five-eight point nine," He replied.
"And that's a good readback, Brian. We expect loss of signal in two-five seconds . . . mark. We'll expect re-acquisition of signal in approximately thirty-three minutes."
"Roger that, Houston. This is Constitution. We'll see you on the other side."
* * *
"Flight, G.C.," Flight Director Matthew Payton heard. His attention was riveted to the viewscreen in front of him as the moon swelled in size.
"Go ahead, G.C."
"Flight, both WIND and STEREO have pinged a CME."
Payton froze. A coronal mass ejection was certainly nothing to ignore. The equivalent of the sun vomiting its own particulate matter quite violently into space, it also tended to be accompanied by a plethora of radiation artifacts that could constitute a Bad Event.
"Copy," He croaked. "Is there any word yet on the vector and velocity?"
"Affirmative, flight," He heard the voice reply unhappily. "The bowshock is an eighty-percent probability of hitting us directly."
* * *
Brian Adkinson watched the numbers tick on his display. He was three hundred thousand feet in altitude above a moon that he was only beginning to stare in awe at. There'd be plenty of time for that during the next few days, of course. He just . . . found it hard to quell the excitement he was feeling as a palpable being rippling through the ship.
He was the only one in the cockpit, and his eyes tracked upwards to look at the sun shining brilliantly upon Constitution as it rose above the moon.
"Damn, that sun is bright," He said to himself as he drew a polarizing shield over the nearest cockpit window.
"Hey."
Adkinson turned, and smiled at Jamie Cunningham as she floated into the cockpit.
"Where are we at?" She asked.
"Above the moon," He replied, and she gave him a dry look.
"I mean, what's our position?"
"I'm sitting. You're floating." Evading another dirty glance, he checked his monitor. "We're about over Mare Crisium, and we'll be coming over the Sea of Tranquility in a few more. You want to look?"
"Constitution, Houston. S-Band radio check, over."
Jamie nodded as she swam toward her station. Pulling a microphone off of its velcro patch on the panel, she clicked her mic as she peered through the window.
"Uhh, Houston, Constitution. Radio check satisfactory, over."
"Great to hear, Jamie. We're reading your telemetry; it showed up on the TDRS right on time. It looks like you've had no problems with the orbital insertion."
"That's affirmative, Houston. We're about to come over Mare Tranquilitatis, and I have a personal request at this time."
Brian Adkinson craned his neck to look at Jamie curiously, and she gave him a warm smile.
"Go ahead, Jamie."
"Houston, we'd like to flip ourselves head's down as we pass over the Sea of Tranquility for a few minutes. I'd like to get Sienna and I to get some video as we pass near Tranquility Base, and we'll probably be for all intents and purposes off the air while that's going on. I promise we'll downlink our video when we're done. Will that be satisfactory?"
"How much time do you plan to take off-air?"
"Less than five minutes, Houston."
There was silence on the radio as Mission Control considered this. The idea of going out of communications wasn't a terribly welcome one, but there were limits to Constitution's construction. She was primarily built for orbital operations, but she had the obvious capability to make circumlunar trips. The problem was that all of her radio antennas were built into the skin of the ship in specific locations, and that meant they all comprised a 'cone' of coverage around the top of the ship -- but not the bottom. Inverting the ship relative to the moon's surface meant they'd pull that coverage away from Earth . . . but it didn't mean they'd necessarily be completely out of communication.
In an emergency, they all knew that there was the possibility of cranking the broadcast power on the Ku-band and S-band antennas to send a directional transmission to the moon's surface. If the geometry was right, the idea was to 'bounce' the signal off the regolith so that it would propagate back to Earth. Jamie knew that amateur radio operators practiced that technique frequently on Earth to make long-distance contacts.
"Constitution, Houston. I have a personal waiver from the flight director. You are go for one observation pass of Tranquility Base, and then we want you to maintain constant communication when possible for the duration of your stay up there."
"Thank you, Houston!" Jamie smiled brightly as Adkinson nodded to her with a smile of his own. She propelled herself away from her seat, chirping a "woohoo!" in the process. Reaching the mid-deck, she stopped herself, and sticking her head down the tunnel, she cleared her throat.
"Hey Sienna!" She called out.
* * *
". . . a coronal mass ejection could have serious implications for the safety of the crew. We're talking about plasma and radiation. I know we've built the snot out of this thing up there, but I don't know if it'll take a full assault like that and survive. It's too risky."
"FIDO, what's the possibility of actually landing her on the moon?" Flight Director Matthew Payton said pensively, and the room silenced.
"We've got the fuel to do it, and make it back, Matt . . . I just don't know about the hover engines," Flight Dynamics Officer, Michael Parks said. "We've only tested them in a real gas environment; we don't know yet how they'll operate for sure in a vacuum."
"They'll work," Payton said firmly. "They may be a different type of liquid-fed rocket, but we've tested the snot out of them like everything else on that ship. They'll work. The other problem is, where are we going to put them?"
He crossed the short distance from the front of the room to a large map of the moon projected onto the wall. The map was shaded to show light-side and dark-side.
"They're about here," He pointed to Mare Tranquilitatis, "taking pictures of Apollo 11's old site. We should have radio contact with them in a few minutes after they're done sightseeing, and in a quarter hour we'll have radio blackout as they cross into the far side. Where do we put them?"
"Their ground track is going to put them right over the Sea of Tranquility every time. That's right on the edge of daylight," Parks offered.
"Put them down near Tranquility Base?" Payton said. "Probably not a good idea; they're in line of sight with us, but still in line of sight from anything the sun will throw at us. What about Crisium?"
"That'd require a planar correction," Parks admitted. "It could be done, but Crisium's only really been explored on the surface by a pair of Russian probes. It's supposd to be nice and flat, though I don't know if we can get them their course correction in time. I think we've got another option if the survey's correct. Mare Smythii."
Payton looked at the map. Smythii was a large target, and it was an area of geologic interest because of the rather unusual gravity draw at the core of the mare. He also noted that the region was going to be a formal landing site anyway, at least as early as twelve years ago.
"Smythii is right along the equator," Payton observed. "If my textbooks are right, we should do well sending them there. Alright. Let's give them Smythii to land on."
* * *
Jamie Cunningham pressed her forehead against the overhead window.
The lunar landscape dazzled her, with the eerie variety of grey 'above' her, and her forehead against the glass of the window and the pitfall-like sensation in her stomach reminded herself once more that she wasn't dreaming. Stunningly bright light-greys of lunar crater ejecta. Deep black shadows. The greyish-grey of basalt rock. She was three hundred thousand feet above the surface, and yet she felt like she could reach her hand out and grab a rock or two.
"Okay, it looks like we're coming up on the north edge of Tranquility Base . . ." She heard Sienna say slowly. Her accent -- a sophisticated London City accent -- seemed especially pronounced just now, and Jamie stole a second to look at her.
Sienna Morrison swept the landscape with her brown eyes, and Jamie noted how serious and unmoving she was. Her eyes were trained, they had been tested, and they were now at work studying every feature of every rock flow they floated over.
"Jamie, if you look over the right side of the ship, I think you might see something worth looking at," Sienna said. Jamie swam her way over to her seat and looked out the window. Out of an expanse of dark grey, she saw a light source flicker at her. She stared at it. It wasn't just flickering -- it seemed as if it was reflecting light.
"That's Armstrong . . . that's Collins . . ." Sienna said softly, and Jamie twitched as a finger made its way to the window. She traced the finger back to its owner, and she noted a video camera being shoved her way.
"You take some video of that," Sienna prompted.
Jamie held the camera's viewfinder to her eye and zoomed in. The motion was smooth, free of the 'jerkiness' one would expect when shooting from a moving vehicle, and she sighted the light source. Zooming in further, she gasped.
"It's mechanical," She said as a sudden shot of adrenaline flooded her veins. "Looks like the descent stage!"
She held the camera on her target for a few more seconds. Her brain was complete mush as she took the sight in. A silver, gold-spalled mechanical construction looking like a spider with its head chopped off, sticking obtrusively out of the grey of the lunar regolith. Several small devices tossed around it. The many small pinprick-like shadows of what could only be footsteps.
"Houston, we've sighted Tranquility Base," She finally remembered to say.
"They can't hear you," Adkinson reminded her.
"I know," Jamie replied. She held her gaze at the base and sighed pensively.
"Boy, I'll have a thing or two to say to some of those bozos back home," She said under her breath.
* * *
