Today Chow would be an observer. With a doctorate in biophysics and a medical degree, there wasn’t really much for him to do on a test flight with no humans aboard. Engineers would be monitoring the detailed information from the systems and subsystems of the Altair—power, propulsion, communications, and navigation. Unless there were questions about human health or relating to the planned crew health experiments that they were to undertake during their upcoming manned flight, Chow would have the pleasure of watching history from the inside with nothing to do.
He stood there and psychologically fed on the energy of the people in the room. Given that level of energy and sense of purpose, one would think that this modest conference room holding almost four dozen people, was actually mission control rather that simply a room down the hall from it.
“Tony! Come here a minute, would ya?”
Chow recognized the voice as that of Helen Menendez, the other mission specialist who would be going to the Moon with him as part of Commander Stetson’s crew. He respected Helen and trusted her implicitly, but he couldn’t say he really “liked” her. At times she could be downright antisocial. But she was good, very good, at what she did. Not only was she near the top of her field, geology, but she was cross-trained in all things mechanical. If a moving part was on the Altair, you could bet Helen knew where it was and all about how it worked.
Chow rose from his not-yet-warm seat and moved down the table to lean over Menendez’s shoulder as she stared intently at the computer monitor in front of her.
“Tony, are you as excited as I am? What’s it going to be like? Leaving the Orion and all of us going to the surface in the Altair? We’ve been training for years, but seeing it happen on the screen in front of me with no crew seems kind of creepy.”
“Hmm.” Chow thought about it for a moment and rubbed his fingers through his hair. “Helen, I honestly don’t know. It doesn’t strike me as creepy. It just seems, well, wrong. Empty. People are meant to be there. What’s the point if it doesn’t happen with people?”
She said, “Wrong. Yeah, that’s it. Wrong.”
“Uh-huh.” He hesitated. “Is that all you wanted?” Having all-work-and-no-play Helen Menendez call him over for what amounted to idle chitchat at a moment like this was simply not normal.
“No, not really. I’m just excited. That’s all.” That and the fact that her blunt approach to just about everything at work and outside of it had alienated a sizable fraction of the people in the room. “I just thought you, of all people, might be able to understand. Never mind.”
With that, Menendez reverted back to the business at hand. And that no longer included off-topic conversation with Anthony Chow. He immediately regretted his reaction to her overture.
Chow returned to his seat and reviewed the mission-summary reports from the previous thirty-six hours. With only a few minor exceptions, all had gone according to plan and all systems were working nearly flawlessly. Only a few hours previously, the Altair lander had used its engines to accomplish the Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) burn, slowing the vehicle down so that it could be captured into orbit around the Moon. Depleting about forty percent of the fuel in its tanks, the Altair was now poised to burn the remainder in its descent to the surface.
Having separated from the Orion a few hours previously, the Altair was about to perform a totally automated descent and landing on the surface of the Moon. The more Chow thought about it, the more he regretted his response to Menendez.
Chow looked up at the monitors in the front of the room. The one on the right showed various camera views from the Altair. One was toward deep space, with what appeared to be the Orion as a point of light in the distance, barely resolvable as more than a point in the sky. The one to the left showed the interior of the lander. Finally, the bottom portion of the screen showed the gray and brown landscape of the surface of the Moon moving rapidly beneath it.
It was this view that caused Chow to relive the most vivid portions of his recurring nightmare. He lost touch with what was happening around him in the crowded conference room and remembered how it played out in his dream.…
It was always the same. He was not with his crewmates and colleagues on the surface of the Moon. Instead, he was alone. He was standing in the crew cabin of the Altair, looking across the desolate lunar surface and feeling afraid. Afraid because he’d just learned that the ascent engine that was supposed to loft the top portion of the Altair, called the Lunar Ascent Vehicle, was not functioning. The ascent vehicle was supposed to carry the crew back into space for a rendezvous with the Orion and the trip home. But, at least in his dream, the engines did not light. He was trapped. Alone.
In the dream he could hear the voice of his wife telling him that she loved him and would miss him. He recalled hearing the voices of his friends and family tell him similar things as he frantically sought a way out of being trapped on the lunar surface to die. And the people who spoke to him on the radio included his now-dead parents, both of whom told him how much they loved him and what a hero he would be. In the dream he wept, and, in many cases, he awoke from the recurring dream with tears running down his face.
Alone. Trapped. Facing death. No way out.
No way out. Nowhere to run except out the airlock and across the barren and very dead lunar surface.
It was a nightmare he didn’t dare to tell anybody other than his wife. And he didn’t tell her about most of them. There was no need to give a shrink any reason to ground him from the mission.
He was sure he was having just a private moment of inward reflection, but when he snapped out of his stupor for a moment he was positive that everyone in the room had noticed his lapse. As he looked around, however, he discovered that no one was paying him any particular attention. They were either focused on their individual data streams or engaged in conversation with others nearby.
“Whew,” he sighed. Relieved, he resumed scanning the status reports. To himself, he asked,
Thirty minutes later, the command was given and the Altair’s four liquid-hydrogen and oxygen engines fired for the second time, slowing the twenty-two-ton lander and causing it to move closer to the lunar surface. The onboard radar and extensive lunar-terrain maps were correlated and cross-checked as the lander began its descent.
