Launch: Marco, continued

Wheeeeoooooh!

They tried to simulate this with a rig that would shake us while squashing us under a heavy cushion representing the multiplied weight of our own bodies. But that was totally tame. This is a lion gripping me in its jaws and shaking me like a rag, crushing me into one of those Indian pancakes. I wonder if it's meant to be this rough. Surely it's shaking itself to bits. But we clear the pad and the tower.

Image credit: Indian Space Research Organisation

This frantic sense of acceleration, grabbing for the sky with a tail of fire, it's what I had almost forgotten from last time. I could get hooked on this speed!

It's time to pitch and roll. We're heading out over the ocean. It must be quite a sight from down there. The shaking lessens enough for me to read my screens. Wow! Engine performance is right on the button, as my British friend Jerry would say. I hear Asya talking to Control in a voice only slightly strained by the g-force, while Don and Annika are quiet. It's hard to breathe with two or three people sitting on our chests. We've all been through at least one launch before, but this is the first time anyone has launched in a Jamal rocket. It's a determined beast. We're carrying 37 tons of payload, including ourselves, which is not much on the next-generation heavy-lift rockets, but pretty big for SSI. Twenty-four Saqr engines are burning down below. We break the sound barrier not long after the sixty-second mark and head upwards towards Max Q. When the rocket accelerates to its maximum loading of drag and thrust, it's an edgy moment of truth. The flight program throttles the motors back slightly to lessen the load, and as the atmosphere thins out, the load drops off, and we'll be fine.

But it's not fine. The cabin is rattling even worse than at launch. My head is hammering inside the helmet. The cabin's a blur. The noise is unbelievable. I grit my teeth. There's a software routine to sense the load and throttle back a little more. I feel that happening. But still, it's… disturbing. Is this it? The rocket could be shattered, and we would be flung through the stratosphere like rag dolls.

Through it. We survived. I breathe. Asya mentions the vibrations to Control, in a tone I'd use at a restaurant for telling the waiter that my fork was slightly dirty. 

Copy that, Jamal.

What can they do about it now?

We're still catching our breath after Max Q when we get first stage MECO. The rocket motors have done their job, and the first stage just has enough fuel for its boostback burn and powered landing. The powerful forward thrust suddenly cuts.

I'm thrown against my straps, but immediately the second stage lights up and we're flung back again, not so cruelly this time. Annika whoops, Don remembers to check all the ECLSS readings again, and Asya is confirming second stage ignition with Control. Me? I'm monitoring the six Saqr engines and feeling pleased with them. We have a burn of over five minutes, then finally a long, quiet coast to look forward to until Naqsh comes within our reach and we dock.

I think we all are overwhelmed with relief that we've made it this far. We chatter a little, and I can hear it in their voices. In my voice. Even Asya cracks a little joke about how we must have boarded a food blender instead of a rocket. But we still have to speak up to be heard over the roar and vibration of the second stage. It's not over yet.

Hey, spaceboy, glad to be on your crew, says Don. Quick thinking back there with the ignition cable.

Annika says, You da man!

Just doin' my jaawb, I reply, doing a kind of dry Texan drawl. Asya adds nothing to that. I know she's the commander and could almost be flying this whole mission on her own, but still… yeah, I did my job alright.

Hey guys, look! Stars! Annika is our nature-lover-in-chief. She loves seeing the view. Right now there's not much I can see through the small port, and I have to watch the rockets. But we're right up there now, and the drag noise has faded to almost nothing. There's about twenty or forty kilometres of air below us, and none above us to speak of. We're leaving the planet. A gripe of zero-g nausea rolls around my stomach for a while, then it passes.

Finally with a jolt it's second-stage MECO, and we're suddenly floating in our straps and it's so quiet again. Asya issues commands to us, without much force behind them, as if she's distracted. And I see that she is. She's already preparing the flight computer for TMI.

We can unstrap and take our helmets off! As soon as I do, the whirring of the fans and the chugging of pumps erases the silence. But the sense of freedom is a beautiful thing after what we've just been through. Don, Annika and I look round at each other and grin. Someone remarks on the background noises, and Asya glances over at us. "Get used to it," she snaps. She has a point.

First, though, we have a job to do. Half of a planet is waiting to hear us speak. We do a video interview with the SSI Media Relations people. It's not deep: everyone just wants to see us smile and say that everything's going well. All four of us have a turn. Annika shows them around our tiny cabin. Asya explains what comes next. Then it's over. I'm left feeling squeezed dry but excited that so many people are following the mission.

Then the three of us crowd at the port which gives us the best view of Earth.

How to describe it? I could say blue and green and brown, but I would need a thousand or more other colours to describe the glaring beauty. It’s shining in the sunlight, almost too bright to look at. We launched towards the east, running from the night. The clouds are like thrown silks, caught in circling winds or shredded across the continents. The oceans glitter with a range of blues from darkest navy to pearly aquamarine. And it's on the move, turning beneath us, or rather we're shooting across its face, barely skimming the cloud tops it seems. There's a thunderstorm, there's a desert on the horizon, there's a string of islands in a scooped-out bay. We're passing over southern Asia and I don't know my way around here too well. I know we won't be passing over Brazil.

I don't know how long we have been watching. Don quickly retreats back into the little world of our cabin. I can't stop looking. It isn't my first time, but this never gets old. Annika murmurs a remark about China and its cities, but I am speechless. It isn't a mere emotional reaction to beauty, as profound as that can be. All I know about astronomy, physical science, geopolitics and ecology comes together in a shock of recognition: this is what it's all about. Up there is the rest of the universe, so large that we can't comprehend, apparently without purpose or feeling, oblivious to us, and here is this jewel, the perfect cradle for human life, priceless, but already catastrophically damaged by our own stupidity. I see what Annika is pointing out: the smogs of China. It goes deep down into me, much more than when I was on my first spaceflight. This is your only chance, humans!  it whispers to me. This is priceless! Don't waste it!

But our mission plan takes us in the opposite direction, outwards, to a world that's very different. For a brief moment I wonder what we're doing, turning our backs on such a gem of a planet.

Annika sighs and turns aside. She's pretty, floating there within arm's reach, and I forget, she must be somewhere about my own age. But I corral my thoughts. "You can see why some astronauts go back changed," she says. "The Overlook Effect, they call it. If anyone needed convincing that there's some sort of a God, this must be one of the strongest pointers, eh?"

I nod, knowing that she's not particularly religious, but spiritually-minded. I think about that for a moment. "It's like some kind of signpost, but not written in any language we can understand," I say. "It's changed the whole way the human race thinks of itself. Those Apollo photos, too, of the Earth rising above the moon. And then Voyager picked out our planet, from way out. Tiny, a mote caught in a sunbeam, but priceless."

I go about my duties checking over the RCS and the TMI engine, wondering what it all really means. I wonder if what we're doing means that much after all, after drinking in all that awesomeness. I wonder again what I'm doing here.

Asya must have overheard us. "When he came up here, the People's hero Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin remarked on the obvious absence of God. I don't see that anything has changed." She's busy with her screens, doesn't look up.

I think about that. "Well, yeah, but an actor in a play might just as well expect to see the playwright walk on to the stage," I reply. I don't know why I want to contradict her – I don't believe anymore, do I?

Annika tips her head to one side. "Neat. But isn't everything that we see a kind of miracle? I feel that God is in everything."

Don looks around. "By definition, a creator deity would not be physically part of its own creation, would it."

"It?" questions Annika. The corner of a smile appears on her lips. "Don't you mean she?"

"As you like," he says. "I'm not saying such a being exists, just pointing out the logical necessities."

I watch their short exchange and it occurs to me that I don't disbelieve everything, actually, not after gazing down into the face of beauty. A play must have an author, mustn't it? As much as I find the theory of evolution convincing, when it comes to my own life, I can't believe I'm an accident. I turn to Don. "A logical piece of software must spring from another greater program, or from a logical mind, don't you think? What's the ultimate source of logic and thought?"

He creases his brow, probably thinking how not to offend me. "That sounds too Platonic. Our thought patterns developed over huge stretches of time. I don't see the need for a source. If logic is something that we discovered outside of ourselves, it must be just an intrinsic property of the universe, not a mind or a being. At least, that's how I see it."

He must be right, and I nod. But what if there was such a thing, a source of logic, or an author? Wouldn't that Mind have the greatest vantage point? How would the human race think of itself if we looked down from way up there?

But that's just a rockpile of idle thoughts. Cogito ergo sum is all very well, but conjuring an invisible, undetectable God from logical thought was always doomed to failure. OK, grudgingly I concede to myself that I could be just an accident after all, an accident with pretensions of grandeur. I'm less than a speck in an endless ocean of vacuum. Is that all? Is that the human race in a nutshell?

"OK, my mutinous crew," says Asya, "I command you to get some food and some rest. We have over four hours to the intersection of Naqsh's orbit. We'll dim lights. Take watches. I take first watch. Forty-five minute watches."

None of us feel like mutinying over that order. The food is quick and business-like, pastes from tubes, things that won't crumble. We won't take off our suits, so rest won't come easy, but in zero g I find some kind of dozing state eventually, loosely clipped on to my couch, wondering what colour the Martian sunrises will be, and if we'll ever see a rainbow again.

- + - + - + -

Onwards to Launched: Asya

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