“Roger that.” Actually, walking horizontally with a minimum of ups and downs came naturally to Okita. It was one of the first lessons he had to internalize in his judo class.
Many a time at the beginning, failure to do so caused him to be thrown down on his back.
As they made their way toward the two unmanned ships, Eriksen started planting automatically-piercing metallic sticks, about one and a half meters long, into the moon’s crust at an interval of several meters. Like the harpoons for anchoring the ship, once the sharp point reached a certain depth, the stick would release an anchorlike hook that would open underground. But he had to be careful when he gave the stick an initial shove downward so as not to propel himself into a trajectory. Okita, following his captain, ran a wire through a loop on each pole. Those who would follow the path to the supply ships in the future could run a hand around the wire and avoid the embarrassment of pushing themselves into a flight path.
An inspection of the inside of the ships showed that the shipments had arrived intact and that the habitat, after minor rearrangements, would provide a living space for several occupants.
“Good, now we can stay on Phobos without worrying much about consumables. When we send the shuttle down to the surface, we may even be able to bring back some ice from near the polar regions,” said Eriksen, sounding optimistic.
The shiny dark patch was another few hundred meters away. Upon arriving there, Okita got down on his stomach without being told to do so and cautiously crawled onto the shiny material. Somewhat to his disappointment, the shiny surface was not ice; it would have been too good to be true, anyway. The shiny surface was a glassy material and was smooth and slippery. He was glad that he had taken the precaution; he might otherwise have skidded off, if not into a low orbit around the moon, at least to the other side of this shiny patch some fifty meters away. At the far side, he could see an overhang of rocks—
just beyond where the glassy material ended. Whatever was below the overhang was totally shaded from the sunlight.
“This stuff is glassy—maybe it’s molten rock. Too bad it’s not an ice patch. I want to take a look at what’s underneath that protruding rock over there.” Okita informed Eriksen.
“Okay, go ahead. Watch your step. I’ll hang around here and check things out on this side.”
Okita decided to walk around the slippery patch rather than crawl across it. When he reached the spot, he saw that the overhang concealed a cavelike structure underneath.
The ceiling was high enough so that he could walk into it. It was total darkness inside as there were no air molecules to scatter the sunlight from outside. One moment he was stepping into the cave and the next moment he skidded and ended up on his back.
Thankfully, in the low gravity of Phobos, the fall was slow and gentle. He felt foolish for not having turned on his portable flashlight before stepping in. When he corrected his mistake and turned on the light, he was instantly alert. For instead of finding more of the glassy staff, what he saw definitely looked like an ice deposit.
Eriksen joined him promptly, as fast as the low gravity permitted him to move. After ascertaining to his satisfaction that the stuff was indeed ice, Eriksen brought out instruments and started measuring the dimensions of the ice lake inside the cave. The surface area was easy enough to estimate. It was the thickness of the ice that presented a problem in determining the volume of the ice deposit, as the thickness could vary from place to place. He solved the problem by measuring the depth at several randomly selected sites. The average depth seemed to be no less than ten meters. As the surface area was about twenty by thirty meters, this represented several thousand tons of water, which could sustain the crew for a long time. Of course, once they established a base on the Martian surface, there would be a virtually inexhaustible supply of water in the form of polar ice, even without counting on the possible underground deposits of ice in some places.
While Eriksen was measuring the size of the ice deposit, Okita looked around his surroundings for anything unusual. During the long voyage out, Jacques Boutillier had shared with Okita his secret suspicion that Mars might not have been an entirely dead planet. The mysterious catastrophe that befell Expedition I several years earlier had probably been a natural disaster, but it could also have been caused by something else—or, should he say, something artificial?
Mars Expedition I, the first manned mission by an international consortium—consisting of the U.S. (NASA), European Union (ESA), the Russian Federation and Japan—to Mars seven years earlier, ended up in a mysterious disaster. The exact cause of the failure was still under investigation and remained unclear.
The crew of Mars Expedition I, the first expedition to the fourth planet, had no leeway in picking the time to land. They had to land when they arrived and where they were supposed to, no matter what the planetary conditions were. Mars Expedition I lost contact with Earth when it was behind the planet—just as it was preparing to land.
Those back on Earth had never learned what had happened during the communications blackout as no message had since been received.
The orbital probes that were sent later to the Red Planet could find no trace of the spacecraft anywhere on the ground. Since the doomed ship’s orbit was inclined to the equator, the ship might have plunged into the dry ice in the polar cap and disappeared underneath. The total surface area of the Red Planet was comparable to that of the entire land area of Earth. Finding the ship, if it had indeed crashed somewhere, would be more difficult than finding from space a Boeing 707 that had crashed somewhere on the Eurasian continent, even if the terrain were completely bare of any plants, animals, or artifacts.
The direct landing on the fourth planet was in part necessitated by the slowness of the journey using the Hohmann trajectory, in which the ship accelerated only at the beginning, then coasted along in free fall, and decelerated at the end of the journey to match Mars’ orbital velocity. It took so long getting there that the ship did not have sufficient reserve of consumables, which would have afforded the luxury of looking over the planet from an orbital altitude before landing. The ship needed to land without delay so that the crew could get at the provisions that had been dispatched to the landing site several months in advance.
One way to avoid the necessity of directly landing on Mars from Earth orbit was to shorten the travel time so that the ship would have ample provisions first to go into orbit around Mars and make certain that the landing would be safe. But it was all but impossible to do so with the conventional chemically powered rocket engines, which took so long in getting the crew to the destination. The ship could carry barely enough to keep the crew going for the nine months that it took to get there.
To shorten the travel time, it would be necessary to accelerate continuously for an extended period beyond the insertion to trans-Martian orbit. One way to do that was to use a nuclear powered rocket engine. It had turned out that the U.S. Air Force Space Command had been successful in developing an experimental nuclear fusion engine. Its early version had been proposed in the 1980s by Bussard at the time of the strategic defense initiative program; in its original form, the engine used protons, boron-11, lithium-6, deuterium, and helium-3 in appropriate cycles. This cycle did not emit neutrons, which made it safe for the human crew using this type of nuclear fusion engine. It had not been funded for development at the time but had later been picked up by the Space Command under the obscure budget heading of High-Efficiency Space Propulsion System. The label was not deceptive, as the nuclear fusion engine would be easily several times more efficient than chemical rockets in terms of the fuel mass involved. With a nuclear fusion engine of this type, it was possible to make it from Earth orbit to Mars orbit in just two months.
Just as importantly—perhaps even more significantly—placing the interplanetary ship on tiny Phobos first and sending a much smaller shuttle to the planetary surface meant that they would not have to expend a great deal of fuel to land the entire mass of the huge ship and lift it again from Mars for the return trip home. Instead, they would be landing and lifting the considerably smaller mass of the shuttle.
However, the phobia over using nuclear power was strong among the political parties in control of the leading countries in Europe that made up the ESA, as had sometimes been the case in the United States.
After the failure of the first manned mission to Mars, recognizing the immense advantages of using a fusion engine, the U.S. had broken away from the Consortium.
The U.S. manned mission to Mars had become a joint venture between the Air Force Space Command and NASA.
To show unity with the European Union, Russia had decided to stick with the
Consortium although historically Russia had had much fewer scruples about the use of nuclear power in space or elsewhere. Anchoring Mother Russia firmly to Western Europe was the sine qua non priority on their political agenda.
