Voyage. Stephen Baxter
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Название: Voyage
Автор: Stephen Baxter
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Научная фантастика
isbn: 9780007445400
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To survey landing sites for the eventual manned mission a new series of Mariner unmanned photographic orbiters will be sent to Mars. These flights will replace the previously proposed Viking science platforms, which are now canceled, and so will take place within the envelope of current funding levels.
The decision by the President is a historic step in the nation’s space program. It will transform man’s reach in space. In another decade the nation will have the means to transfer men and equipment across interplanetary space; shortly thereafter we expect such missions to be mounted as routinely as we now have sent men to the Moon and returned them safely to Earth. Not just Mars, but our sister planet Venus, the resources of the asteroid belt, and the moons of Jupiter and the outer planets will come within our compass. This will be done within the framework of a useful total space program of science, exploration, and applications at approximately the present overall level of the space budget.
Thank you …
Frederick W. Michaels Chronological File, 1972, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington DC
Wednesday, January 5, 1972 NASA Headquarters, Washington DC
Gregory Dana had spent the day at a meeting on rendezvous techniques for the upcoming Skylab missions. He came across a number of Houston people gathered in the hallway, before a notice board.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Don’t you know? We’re going to Mars. Nixon has confirmed it at last. Look at this.’ They made way for him at the board. At first Dana could see nothing of interest to him on the board: an offer of tickets for the Cowboys vs Dolphins Superbowl, classes in TM and acupuncture (posted here, in NASA HQ!), and a bright orange sticker saying simply JESUS HEALS. But there, crowded out by the trivia, was a closely-printed piece of headed paper. It was a statement from Nixon, and a subsidiary statement from Michaels, the new NASA Administrator. Some supporting press briefing material was pinned up too: a ‘Mars mission digest,’ with simple question-and-answer chunks of information about the mission, and a few spectacular artist’s impressions of the mission’s various phases. There were even a few outlines of the modes which had been evaluated and discarded.
There was no mention of Dana’s Venus swingby mode.
Since that apocalyptic Phase A meeting in Huntsville back in July, Dana had heard almost nothing of the development of the Mars options. And this was the first he’d learned of the final decision – along with the Headquarters cleaning staff, and the rest of the nation. It was clear, now, that he’d been excluded from the decision-making process since July.
What could he do about it? Write another letter to Fred Michaels?
He felt the injustice, the stupidity of it, burn a hole in his stomach.
Well, it was nothing to do with him any more. Maybe, at least, Jim would be able to realize some of his own dreams, in the slow unwinding of this decision.
Dana tucked his briefcase under his arm and walked away.
Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 003/09:23:02
York floated in her sleeping bag. She was dog tired, but sleep just wouldn’t come. Her lower back was sore, and she had a stuffy headache, as if she was developing a cold. Her heart was suddenly too strong; blood seemed to boom through her ears. She missed the pressure of a pillow under her head, the security of a blanket tucked in close around her. The bag was too big, for one thing; she found herself bouncing around inside it. And every time she moved, the layer of warm air which she’d built up around her body, and which stuck there in microgravity, tended to squirt away, out of the bag, leaving her chilled.
When she managed to relax, she had a feeling of falling. Once she almost drifted off, but then her arms came floating up, and a hand touched her face …
She let her eyes slide open.
She was inside her sleep locker, at the base of the Mission Module. The locker was little bigger than a cupboard, with a foldaround screen drawn across it. On the surface above her head was her overhead light, and a little comms station, and a fan. There were little drawers for personal things, like underwear; when she opened them the drawers had blue plastic nets stretched over them, to stop everything from floating away.
A lot of light and noise leaked around the foldaround screen. She could hear the hum and whir of the Mission Module’s equipment, and the occasional automatic burn of the attitude clusters as they kept Ares pointing sunwards. With the bright, antiseptic light of the wardroom beyond her screen, and the new smell of metal and plastic, it was like trying to sleep inside an immense refrigerator.
Apparently there had been plans to provide solid doors on the sleep lockers. She even remembered seeing a memo which talked about the need to provide privacy for astronauts ‘significantly relating,’ in the typically obscure, euphemistic doubletalk NASA employed when talking about the functions of the warm bodies they were shipping into space at such expense. But the doors had been skipped, for reasons of saving weight. So much for significantly relating.
And now – on top of everything else – she needed a pee.
She tried to ignore it, but the pressure on her bladder built up steadily. Christ. Well, it was her own fault; the relief tube – the Mission Module’s toilet, the Waste Management Station – was so uncomfortable she’d put off using it. Besides, she seemed to be peeing more than usual, since coming up into microgravity.
She succumbed to the inevitable. She squirmed her way out of the bag, turned on her overhead light, and folded back the screen. When she moved, her back hurt like hell.
After the TOI burn, the Ares modules had undergone the first of the cumbersome waltzes the crew would have to endure before the mission was done. Under the command of Stone, Apollo, containing the crew, had separated from the nose of the stack, turned around and docked nose-to-nose with the Mission Module.
When she’d first been talked through the mission profile, waiting until after the TOI burn to do this separation and docking had seemed bizarre to York. Why wait until you were already on your way to Mars to cut loose of your main ship? But it made a kind of sense, in the convoluted, abort-options-conscious way the mission planners figured these things. If the MS-II had blown up during the TOI burn, the crew, in Apollo, could have got out and done an abort burn to get home. And if the injection burn was successful but the docking hadn’t been, the crew could use the Service Module’s big engine to blast back toward Earth.
Anyway, after the successful docking, the crew had been able to crawl through a docking tunnel and started moving into the Mission Module, their interplanetary home-from-home.
As long as she didn’t think about the wisdom of taking apart the spacecraft in deep interplanetary space, it didn’t trouble York.
York let herself drift across the wardroom. She was light as a feather, and invulnerable; it was like СКАЧАТЬ