She can finally stop work for a few minutes. The flight
computer is ready for the rendezvous and the trans-Mars injection burn. That
second one is probably the most finely-tuned calculation and will need to be
updated beforehand. The journalists describe TMI as trying to shoot at a penny
from a thousand miles away. But it's not so dramatic, with course corrections
included.
The SSI mission plan calls for a free-return trajectory. She
pictures the long arc originating in low Earth orbit, their MTV shooting out
from the planet, gradually slowing, but keeping enough speed that it will meet
Mars after about eight months – catch up with it, actually, as the Red Planet
swings around in its own slower orbit. Then if they do nothing more, they would
swing past Mars and begin a long, tedious descent back towards Earth that would
drag out to eighteen months. Instead, they will take the lander and leave the
MTV to continue its lonely way back home.
She knows it's the best mission plan for this, only the
second crewed voyage to Mars, once you allow for the timeline and the limited
budget that SSI could come up with. Space is hard, so travelling through it is
expensive. More money – and more time to spend it in – would mean more delta-V,
a shorter trip, less radiation exposure, more reliable hardware. She toys with
the idea of remaining onboard, letting the other three do the landing and the
base-building, while she heads home and returns to Moscow to a hero's welcome.
It's not going to happen, for many reasons, but for a moment it's a pleasant
fantasy.
Would she actually have anything to go home for? She thinks
of her aged sister, in her comfortable apartment in Pushkino, outside of
central Moscow. That's the only surviving family she has, and Tanya doesn't
need much looking after and doesn't value Asya's company so much. Any attempt
at a second career would undoubtedly end in disappointment and boredom. SSI,
meanwhile, holds out the possibility of further flights, ferrying settlers to
Mars, maybe later visiting NEOs. If their Amlaq craft ever gets further
than a machine shop prototype, she muses, that would be an interesting ship to
command, with all that delta-V at her disposal. The attempt at artificial
gravity by tethered rotation would help a great deal too. Perhaps she can clock
up an unassailable record in spaceflight endurance and make it into the history
books.
But first, she tells herself, you have to survive this
stupid trip. These three crew members may yet be the death of me. Marco
especially – he's just bright enough to find a solution to a problem, but too
excitable to make right decisions. That last-minute call to change the ignition
sequence – the manual activation – any sane astronaut or Flight Controller
would have immediately have called for an abort. Amateurs! They were all crazy.
And she's not immune to insanity, either. What am I doing up here? she asks herself, not for the first time.
In the dim cabin lights, as they swing around Earth's night
side towards the dawn, the cabin for a moment seems like an underwater cave,
the three tethered floating shapes like some undiscovered species of sea
cucumber. Asya draws her legs up into a lotus position and almost allows herself to relax, always shooting glances at the partial pressure gauges and
electrical board.
When she comes to the end of her watch, she leans over and
touches Annika on the shoulder.
- + - + - + -
Onwards to Launched: Annika
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