Back to the Moon-ARC Read online

  Back to the Moon-ARC

  Travis S. Taylor

  Les Johnson

  BACK TO THE MOON-ARC

  Advanced Reader Copy

  Travis S. Taylor

  &

  Les Johnson

  Baen Books by Travis S. Taylor

  One Day on Mars

  The Tau Ceti Agenda

  One Good Soldier

  Warp Speed

  The Quantum Connection

  The Science Behind the Secret (nonfiction)

  with John Ringo:

  Vorpal Blade

  Manxome Foe

  Claws That Catch

  BACK TO THE MOON

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Travis S. Taylor & Les Johnson

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1188

  Wake Forest, NC 27588

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4391-3405-4

  Cover art by David Mattingly

  First printing, December 2010

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: t/k

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Prologue

  Mare Serenitatis, the Moon

  December 14, 1972

  Standing on an airless, desolate plain flanked by boulders the size of houses and by mountains taller than eight Eiffel Towers stacked atop one another had a way of leaving a man humbled and feeling just how fragile a human so far from home truly was. Gene squinted in the bright sunlight, pondering what to do next. He and his two colleagues were near the end of a decade-long journey; the three days of travel from the Earth to the Moon followed by three amazing days on the lunar surface were only the most recent portions. The journey of Apollo 17 was the culmination of the most technologically advanced endeavor mankind had ever attempted. With the majestic, stark, and absolutely unforgiving Moon soon to be only a memory, a fleeting moment from his glory days, Gene reached behind his spacesuit as best he could to point the camera toward the vehicle that would soon take him from this place and put him on a journey back home. Gene realized that it would be a while before humanity felt the spark to return. Humanity’s candle had burned exceedingly bright for a decade, but it just couldn’t maintain such a vast level of effort. Going to the Moon was a major endeavor that took the full focus of an entire nation driven by the desire to defeat another great nation. Americans had won the race, and Gene, along with the rest of Apollo 17, was the final flicker of that bright-burning candle.

  At a distance of about one mile, the camera would capture his moment of liftoff and transmit the video back to Earth. Or, if something were to go terribly wrong, the video might be useful in reconstructing how he and his partner might have met their untimely demise on the distant lunar surface. The camera, mounted on the lunar rover that had served them so well during their all-too-brief visit, provided a needed connection to mission control back on Earth. Gene didn’t want to leave so soon, but at the same time, he was anxious to go home.

  After making final adjustments to the camera, he again paused. Then, ever so slowly and with the appearance of great clumsiness due to the limited movement granted by the inflated spacesuit, he kneeled down to the surface of the Moon and scratched three letters into the lunar dust. Satisfied with his work, he stood up, brushed off some of the dust from the lower half of his suit, and began Moon-bouncing back toward the Lunar Module.

  It was a short walk, but Gene was nonetheless huffing and puffing by the time he arrived. Working against the inflated suit required strength, aerobic conditioning, and endurance all at the same time. Despite the technological prowess required to send him to the Moon, the bulky, awkward, and oh-so-heavy spacesuit required considerable effort to use—even in one sixth of Earth’s gravity.

  Gene stood by the Lunar Module knowing it was his time to make a historical last statement for the bold and ever-decreasingly budgeted American space program. He uttered what were to be the last words spoken from the surface of the Moon for over a half century.

  “Bob, this is Gene, and I’m on the surface; and, as I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come—but we believe not too long into the future—I’d like to just say what I believe history will record. That America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.”

  With that, Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan climbed the ladder to join his crewmate and friend, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, in the Lunar Excursion Module. They would then let their training take over and begin all the prelaunch preparations required to get them off the surface of the Moon and on their way back to the only place in the universe known to contain life—Earth.

  The next day, with the camera recording nearly every detail, the LEM named Challenger lifted into the blackness of space, carrying two brave men back toward home, leaving the Moon lifeless once again.

  Humanity had left its mark on the Moon six times, impressions of twelve feet, and two of those feet had been Gene’s. But he had left more, a more personal mark. Etched into the lunar dust, probably to remain undisturbed for several human lifetimes, or more, were the letters TDC—the initials of Cernan’s daughter.

  “Shh, Mommy! They’re leaving the Moon for good!” Bill gave his mother a stern shush as the precocious five-year-old kept his eyes glued to the small black-and-white television in the family room. He leaned in and squinted at the screen as if that would help him see more details of the spaceship and the Moon. All it really did was accentuate the large phosphorus pixels of the old black-and-white picture-tube technology.

  “Don’t sit too close to the TV, honey—it will hurt your eyes,” his mother said.

  “Oh, mom.”

  “So, you think the spacemen are neat?” Bill’s father smiled proudly at his son.

  “Yeah, I like the Moon. I’m gonna go there someday.” To Bill, the statement was simply the fact of the matter. He was going to go to the Moon someday.

  Chapter 1

  As famously depicted in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movements of objects in space did appear to be choreographed like those of dancers. With grace, precision, and painfully slow forward motion, the two-hundred-eighty-two-thousand-pound Earth Departure Stage, or EDS, and the four-person Orion capsule moved closer and closer to each other. From the Orion capsule’s point of view, it was moving toward the EDS, with its attitude-control thrusters firing in quick “bang bang” succession. As the distance between the two spacecraft decreased from kilometers to mere hundreds of meters, the glorious blue and white Earth moved quickly beneath them only a hundred or so miles away.

  The latest test flights of the vehicles that would hopefully carry people back to the Moon for the first time in over fifty years moved toward completion. The present tests were an important step even though no people were onboard either of the vehicles.

  The vehicles were on autopilot, testing the “new and improved” automated docking and rendezvous system that NASA had been working on since the space-shuttle days. Gone was the day of the astronaut “rocket jockey” controlling every spacecraft movement with a throttle and stick. Of course, the “rocket jockeys” themselves didn’t agree with the move, and the general public typically liked the notion of the superh
eroic space-pilot astronauts. However, the guys with the software had won the technical arguments and determined that having the pilot “out of the loop” was by far a safer approach. Or so their calculations indicated.

  The massive aluminum-and-composite EDS had been launched just hours previously by the mighty Ares V rocket. Measuring over ninety feet long and containing enough fuel to carry four people, a lunar lander, and all the supplies needed for a week’s stay on the Moon, the EDS appeared to be dead, floating effortlessly two hundred and ten kilometers above the Earth. The over-one-hundred-forty-ton behemoth moved around the Earth at nearly seventeen thousand miles per hour. The Orion was closing in on it, moving with about the same speed, adding only enough velocity to catch up with the EDS in order for the two spacecraft to dock.

  And the distance was closing—rapidly. Too rapidly. The first warning bell sounded in mission control at 2:58 p.m., local time. Nobody was particularly alarmed by the bell.

  “Bill, we’ve got an anomaly with the Orion’s close rate on the EDS,” Marianne Thomas said calmly from her console near the back right corner of Constellation Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The anomaly had been simulated in training, but she hadn’t expected it to happen during the test. But that was why they trained. “Orion’s laser ranging indicates they’re closing faster than programmed and faster than the onboard computer says it’s going.” There was only objectivity in her voice and not a trace of the anxiety that she was starting to experience in her gut.

  “Roger that,” Mission Commander and Blue Team’s Flight Controller Bill Stetson responded automatically—again, thanks to the training. “Do we have confirmation of the closure rate from GPS?”

  The onboard differential GPS system was supposed to be able to resolve the relative positions of the two spacecraft and calculate relative motion based on successive position measurements. Stetson was set to command the next flight—the one that would actually carry people to the Moon—and was in charge of this portion of the final flight test. Up to this point, everything had gone fairly smoothly, and this was just fine with Bill Stetson.

  “Bill…” Thomas hesitated, a pause that was noticed by all in the room, including Stetson. “Looks like we have no data from GPS.” Her eyes were scanning the display in front of her, desperately trying to find out why there was no data and simultaneously not believing that she would be the one with the flight anomaly. She pursed her lips and repeated her last words for clarity. “We have no data from GPS. I’m trying to find out why.”

  Throughout mission control, those on console were verifying and reverifying the data scrolling across their screens, hoping to have some bit of information to provide that would help all in the room understand the situation. Only a minute had passed since Thomas’ announcement, but to those responsible for the success of the test flight, it seemed like an eternity. Finally, the technician monitoring the Orion’s propulsion system saw something and spoke up.

  “Orion propellant is showing lower than predicted,” the console tech said. He then hesitated a moment before continuing. “It’s not enough to trigger an alert, but it is lower than it should be.” The technician, known to his comrades and friends as “Stubborn Stu” due to his alleged inflexibility in virtually all things, might also have been called “Meticulous Stu” for his attention to detail. Whatever the nickname might have been, when he spoke, his colleagues always listened.

  “Roger that, Stu.” Bill thought about the data briefly. He knew that less propellant in the tank could mean that more propellant was being used than predicted. And that could account for the Orion moving too fast. If the engines were burning for even a fraction of a second too long, then they would consume more propellant. And if they were consuming too much propellant, then the spacecraft was accelerating faster than expected. That wouldn’t be good.

  Of course, there could also be other explanations. In this case, the specific reason why the propellant was low was not of immediate concern. But Bill was certain that the fact the propellant level was too low was all the confirmation he needed to conclude what his next step ought to be.

  “Marianne, what rate does laser tell us we’re dealing with here?”

  “Hold on.” Thomas tapped some keys on her console without hesitation and then replied. “According to laser, we now have a delta-vee excess of slightly over five meters per second and accelerating. No confirmation from GPS.”

  “Sheesh,” Bill muttered to himself. Five meters per second was just a little more than fifteen feet per second. All in the room understood the implications. The Orion and EDS were designed to soft dock with one another. In other words, their rate of closure would gradually decrease to only a fraction of a meter per second when they finally made contact. If they were to collide moving tens of feet per second, not only would the docking maneuver fail but it might result in a crash, with the loss of both the Orion and the EDS being a real possibility. And that was simply not acceptable to NASA, mission control, or Bill Stetson.

  “Abort options?” Stetson hated to ask the question, but mission procedures gave him no option. A safe abort and potential retry in a few orbits was simply the right course of action to consider. Lives were not at stake, but billions of dollars and months, perhaps years, of schedule were. And Bill Stetson didn’t want a test-flight failure to set back the date for his flight to the Moon. Who knew how the press would handle another NASA failure? The evening news report of a disaster in space might be enough to halt the Moon mission altogether.

  The technician who reported the excess propellant usage had on his screen an algorithm that constantly told him what propellant would be required to perform an abort and an estimate of the trajectory and time required to recover from the abort so that another attempt could be made. Bill knew that the console tech was ready for his question.

  “Well, Bill,” Stubborn Stu started, “if laser ranging data is correct and we have to perform a burn to take out that velocity and then fly around a few orbits to try again, we will be at the minimum propellant margin for the rendezvous. But it still won’t meet mission-success criteria. The EDS will have been on-station too long. Propellant boil-off will exceed TLI commit.”

  Though never actually uttered, virtually everyone in the room heard the expletive that Stetson thought to himself. Bill pulled his headset free for a second and adjusted his thinning hair while making a motorboat sound with his lips. Not being able to do a TLI, or Trans-Lunar Injection, burn of the rocket engines would mean not going to the Moon. The longer the EDS had to wait, the more propellant would evaporate—reducing the total burn-time possible for the engine. They had to fire before too much had boiled off.

  The EDS was powered by one of the most energetic rocket fuels known—liquid hydrogen. When combined with an oxidizer, in this case the ultimate oxidizer, liquid oxygen, the combustion produced the rocket thrust that would propel the EDS toward the Moon. It was these same propellants that powered the three main engines of the old space shuttle, producing much of the cloud of steam that was the hallmark of a successful launch.

  Unfortunately, to keep hydrogen liquid, it had to be kept cold. In fact, the temperature had to be kept to about minus four hundred twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. To do this, the huge hydrogen tanks in the EDS were kept wrapped in the best thermal insulators known and placed in the vehicle so as to minimize the heat they might receive from the sun and that reflecting back into space from the Earth. It was, in effect, a large thermos bottle in orbit. It was also an imperfect thermos bottle; some heat inevitably would always get through to warm up the hydrogen. As the volatile gas warmed, it boiled and evaporated and then vented into space. Hence the phrase “boil-off.”

  Engineers designed the EDS tanks and propulsion system to have enough liquid-hydrogen propellant remaining—after boil-off—to complete the mission even if the craft had to remain in orbit for a few days before beginning its trip to the Moon. If its time in orbit exceeded the design limit, then there would sim
ply not be enough fuel remaining to complete the mission. Since there had been some minor glitches before this one, the allowable time in Earth orbit was close to being over, and a further delay would mean that the burn to send the Orion to the Moon would not happen—at least not on this test flight.

  “Oh, well,” Bill Stetson responded with an audible sigh as he readjusted his headset. He then straightened himself in the seat and barked, “Release the automatic docking system to manual control. Give me real-time data from the laser ranger and don’t give me any more data from the damned GPS!” This, too, they’d practiced in training. A manual docking was something the astronaut corps had insisted upon since the Shuttle-Mir program of the 1990s. This was what the pilot and mission commander lived for. In an instant, Stetson decided to assume control of the Orion instead of asking his pilot, Charles Leonard, to do so. It was his call and he made it. Leonard heard the call and, though disappointed, accepted the decision and made himself ready to step in should he have to do so.

  Switching views on the monitor in front of him and seeing the requested data feeds appear on the secondary monitor to his right, Stetson prepared to take manual control of the Orion. Forgetting about the paperwork that would be required should he be successful, and the probable reprimand should he fail, Stetson gave the order to release the vehicle to manual control.

  “Alright, give her to me,” he said.

  To a detached observer, it would have appeared that Bill Stetson was beginning to play a video game. With a controller that looked like the technological cousin of a PlayStation game controller and an LCD screen with a simulated 3-D rendering of both the Orion and the EDS, he assumed manual control.