Launched: Annika

I didn't sleep, of course, after such an experience during launch. But I tapped out some messages to friends and supporters, hit 'Send', and shut my eyes for a while. Then before I knew it I was on watch. I called up the vital readouts onto my screen and watched them closely for a few minutes. I did my maintenance on the comms rack, checking for loose boards or bolts, checking for FOD. I went over my suit with a magnifying glass. No pinholes that I could find, no rips, just some dirt in the folds of the cuffs and ankles and boots. It was hard to bend right over and reach my feet while wearing the suit. I was thinking what a relief it would be when we can take these things off after boarding the MTV.

Mars Transfer Vehicle. Makes it sound like a bus. Those Americans with their acronyms.

I spent a large part of my time looking out of the windows at the Earth. Also I could see the Moon from the other side for a while, then later it was the bright starfield I remember seeing from the Bigelow last year. It's astounding, the richness of the universe. How can anyone think that this all happened by chance? There just has to be a Life Force in it somehow. Perhaps the goal of science is to reach towards that Force and understand it. I don't know.

So I was enjoying the view and looking back at my screen as I drifted around, when I heard Asya's sharp intake of breath and she barked my name: "Annika! Come here!"

That startled not only me but the guys too. They were jolted fully awake, thinking there was an emergency. "No, we're fine," Asya muttered to their questions. "It's our Public Relations Manager here. Take a look."

So on her screen was a Twitter storm and a few major news sites. We were headlining. Mars Rocket Close To Falling Apart trumpeted one, and another claimed that SSI had pushed for the launch to go ahead despite the astronauts' protests. People were shooting off heated messages on social media and some were venting their ignorance and hysteria. This wasn't even the UFO people or the flat-Earthers or the far-right-wing so-called Christians.

Asya scrutinised me. "What did you do?" she asked quietly. When I didn't answer right away, trying to piece together how I came into this, she shrugged. "Not that I really care. Those people can make a conspiracy out of a sneeze. And they can't catch us now. But I see from our logs that you sent some email."

The light clicked on for me. I explained that I'd written some brief blog-type pieces for my supporters and close friends. I wanted them to feel it like I had felt it, so the children could ride with me in their imaginations. It's what I planned to do as long as I could still lift a finger to a keyboard or speak into a microphone. I told Asya this. "Somebody intercepted it and blew it out of shape," I protested. "Sure, I mentioned the launch hold and the g-forces and the vibration, but that's what really happened. I didn't overdo it. Look!" I showed them the text of the email but only Asya wanted to read it. She scanned through it, shaking her head a little.

She looked up with a blank face. I think this is when she is controlling her feelings. Her mission face. "Just be more careful the words you use," she said. "All of you. We tell them the good things, and not so much the bad things. We need SSI to do well and be famous. You know? Be careful!" We all nodded obediently. We're all like her children. It's funny, really, although Don looks like the sour-faced teenager of the family. Marco smirked behind her left shoulder. I smothered a grin, and Asya's eyes flicked to the side at that. She's a sharp mom.

We settled down again. I spoke with the SSI Media Relations lady, Ranya, and she assured me that there was plenty of positive coverage of the launch too. In fact one space industry personality called SSI 'a revolutionary force to be reckoned with'. Another said that 'history was written in the sky today'. I could breathe easily after that.

Time seemed to accelerate and rush away until Don was tapping my shoulder at the end of his watch, and it was time to prepare for rendezvous. All four of us had no time to relax for the next couple of hours. I was interrogating Naqsh's systems telemetry. I had to make sure the partial pressures of oxygen, nitrogen and argon were about right, as well as the temperature, humidity and the carbon dioxide level. All of Naqsh's systems looked good, except for a slightly lower battery power than I had expected. Control had warned us before our launch that this was a possibility – they had noticed a small drop in voltage from the craft's solar arrays after a few orbits. But it was good enough to start with.

The docking probe didn't deploy automatically.

Don announced this calmly to us and to Control, and I heard Asya's frustrated breath and recovery to a state of calm. "Did you allow thirty seconds for the self-diagnostics?"

"Yup."

"OK. So let's work out the problem. Marco, please confirm Don on the probe not deploying. Annika, watch our drift. I take us to manual."

I was getting slightly concerned. We all knew that without the docking probe deployed, we couldn't link up to Naqsh, which lay only three hundred metres away from us now. I imagined us going EVA just to get in, but we had to get docked for the rest of the mission to work. Naqsh was the MTV and the refuelling tanks for the TMI burn. We sat in the lander, or Command Capsule to be correct, with its Service Module and the propulsion unit that we had needed to adjust our orbit to match that of Naqsh.

Marco agreed with Don. Something was stopping the probe from deploying from the front of Jamal and repeating the commands had no effect. On our screens we could see 'Dock Probe – Stowed'. Stubborn. I could hear the aggravation in Asya's voice being amplified in Don's. Then they would both take a breath and the tone would subside.

I asked if we'd need to do an EVA. Asya said nothing for a whole five seconds: busy. Then, "Nyet, that's no use here. Problem is inside." She gestured over our heads to the hatch, where the probe was mounted, and through which we would enter the MTV. "And we have no EVA suit here." I had forgotten that. Our suits were only pressure suits, for survival if the cabin was punctured or we lost our air somehow.

Asya and Marco talked to the ground. The engineers said they were working on it. I knew they would give it their absolute all.

Ten minutes passed, fifteen, then Asya suddenly muttered to herself in Russian, slapped herself on the forehead, and got busy on her keyboard. More Russian followed, sounding as if she were criticizing a friend's taste in clothes, then: "We are fixed. Probe deployed."

Marco was confused. "No… it's still there, stowed. Are you sure?"

"Switch monitor to Input 2 or 3."

We all did this. The ship actually had three computer systems, running the same calculations simultaneously. It's all about safety, and having a back-up. I could see the probe was deployed, viewing through the second and third systems. "How did you do that?" I asked her, glad and not too surprised that she had solved the riddle.

"Not me. It worked automatically, first time. Stupid cheap computer lied to us." The quality of the hardware was one unending grouch of hers ever since Nowal recruited her onto the team. At least Asya had overcome her habit in training of thumping the console and swearing in a torrent if a hardware fault showed up.

"Oh, I get it," said Marco. "The code translation tables are different in the Master system. It's all the way down to the processor and the backside bus. I always said we should have gone with Intel."

Don and I stared at him. "Backside translation table yourself," I said. "You're talking about the docking lock as a peripheral, right? The protocol it uses? You mean one system has a bug in it, and we were using it the whole time until just now?"

"Yeah, but the other two systems show what's really happening to the probe. It deployed automatically."

We spent a while hashing out the fine details and conferring with Control, who brought their best minds onto the case. They were going to put together a patch and upload it to us. Meanwhile Asya was keen to dock.

I looked hard at her. "How did you know?"

She stared back at me with a Mona Lisa smile. "A good astronaut always knows."

I rolled my eyes. "Yes, but how did you know?"

She turned to her command console and began summoning the docking protocol program. Without looking up, she finally said, "I met an old cosmonaut once, Misha Borisovich Kornienko. It happened the same to him, once." I nodded, and began to turn away. "Exactly the same," she said, slowly.

I wasn't sure what to make of that.

The docking went smoothly. Soon Jamal and Naqsh were joined. It took another couple of hours to verify the docking seal – standard safety procedure – and half an hour to unfasten Jamal's hatch in the ceiling of the cabin. It was jammed somehow, and Don couldn't find any purchase for his feet while trying to turn the latch handle. Everyone had a try, even Asya, and we tried various combinations of people braced against each other. It was becoming embarrassing while Control waited for us, and none of us was cheerful. I had a very strong hunch that they – and especially Nowal – were down there looking at the video feed of us hanging and swinging like frantic monkeys, and were laughing themselves into hysterics. I know I would have, in their place.  Meanwhile, outside, the darkness gave way to another brilliant sunrise and light flooded through two of the ports.

Image credit: NASA

That reminded me that I had a schedule to stick to. Compared to the mission profiles of most astronaut crews before us, we had it easy. We were in for the long haul, and there would be plenty of time for science experiments and maintenance on our gruelling interplanetary trek. But I had set myself the goal of transmitting at least one update to my people every day, for the rest of the foreseeable future. This time I could settle myself, think through what I would say, and make sure there were no slip-ups.

As I composed my message at my couch the stresses of launch began to evaporate. There was no fear of leaving people behind. This way, through daily blogs, I could take them with me. I hoped to change the world much more from up here than I ever could as one person in the mayhem and confusion of Earth. On Mars I could become a voice of sanity, a voice for peace and hope. At least… I hoped so. It would assume that I could stay sane myself.

The engineers on the ground were looking into all the possible angles to help us with the hatch, and finally one of them said that the extreme cold of Naqsh's exterior could have caused a contraction in Jamal's steel locking mechanism, so it was too tight.

"What do we have for heating up this handle?" asked Marco, looking around the cabin and starting to open the few lockers we had. I was pretty sure there would be nothing.

"No!" snapped Asya. "We have all the heat we need." She pulled herself over to her seat and began tapping keys in rapid sequence. "Who can first tell me what I am doing – and why – can be first aboard Naqsh and have first pick of the bunk rooms." She glanced up at us. "I suggest you take a handhold."

The cabin started to turn very slowly around us, as I heard faint puffs of gas thrust from the RCS. Asya was rotating the whole assembly of the two spacecraft.

That was very New Space, too, taking direct control without hours of consultation with the ground. Where we were going, we would need to make many of our own decisions on the spot, without waiting half an hour while the messages zipped back and forth. So it was already agreed that Asya was a real-time commander. It was an authority she relished.

Marco guessed: "We turn. We spin. So we put a little stress on the joint and force it free?" That was a mechanic's answer. It didn't sound convincing to me. Asya said nothing. I knew we had to warm up the mechanism somehow, but how?

Don spoke up from where he was holding the latch handle. "The mechanism is cold because all heat was radiated into space. It was in the shade. You are turning the ship so that the sunlight will fall on the docking joint and warm it up." He glanced at Asya, who gave a fractional nod. "Neat, but it might take too long and we'll be back in the night side," he finished. Then he and Marco started discussing if the mylar insulation reached all the way along the docking ports. If not, that could be a design problem to be fixed.

Thirty minutes later, after I had transmitted my day's video blog and not long before we would approach the dark side of the Earth, Don was the first to pull himself through the opened hatch and into the MTV. The protocols called for another hour of leak checks on the seals between the two ships, but Asya OK'd it after we all closely examined the pressure readings. There was a small atrium for equipment storage, then the area opened up into the combined medical lab and exercise room. Looking over his shoulder, it looked like a huge volume of wonderful empty air to me.

Asya watched his feet disappear through the hatch. "Just don't get big ideas that you're now a great astronaut," she called after him. Was it possible that her tone held a degree of humour?

"I would never dream of it," came the muffled reply.

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Onwards to Launched: Don

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