Back to the Moon-ARC

Stetson walked to the ladder and looked down as taikonaut number four approached. The Chinese astronaut looked briefly upward and began to climb the ladder toward Stetson.

A few minutes later, Bill Stetson and Chinese Political Officer Zhi Feng cycled through the airlock and into the Altair.

Chapter 25

Everybody except the injured pilot seemed to have strong vitals. Bill rummaged through some of the last- minute supplies that had been stored aboard the Orion and then transferred into the Altair after launch. The key supplies were replacement power packs for the Chinese spacesuits. Bill pulled them from a storage bin Velcroed to the rear wall and started to examine how to install them. The Chinese engineer, the only conscious member of the Harmony crew at the moment, saw what Bill had and moved carefully around his limp crewmates strewn about to get a closer look.

“I can do this.” He looked at Bill and held out a hand to take the power cells. “Do you have a regular screwdriver?”

“I have two.” Bill handed the man half of the cargo and reached in a sleeve pocket for a screwdriver. Both of the men had removed their helmets and gloves but were still in their suits.

“Why do we need these? There is air in here.” The Chinese taikonaut seemed confused and a bit more than concerned to Bill. But Stetson was going to cut the man some slack since he had been practically left for dead for several days now.

“We’re all too heavy. This ship’s engines are a precursor to the ones that Altair will eventually have. This one just wasn’t ready for a big, bulky sample-return mission. We’re gonna have to go outside and remove some exterior panels in order to be light enough to get us all up to lunar orbit.” Bill pointed at two of the panels that would have to go. The two panels alone were three hundred kilograms.

“I see. China was not the only country with technical constraints.”

“More like political.” Bill shrugged. “The on-again, off-again, on-again nature of politics and the American space program left Altair as the last vehicle to be finished, and at a third of the originally planned budget.”

“Ha, the American might is not so great after all.” Bill didn’t know how to respond to the man, so he didn’t.

“We’ve got to get these suits back up and running.” He nodded to the suits and started to work. Stetson wasn’t sure that he liked the man’s attitude and wasn’t all that happy about talking with him at the moment.

“Mission control, we’re all suited up and ready to begin the exterior skin modifications.” Tony scanned the interior of the ship and made certain that all of the passengers had their suits sealed off. Three were still unconscious, so he had to check them each himself. Bill had recruited the coherent engineer fellow to go outside and do the work on the spacecraft. Tony wasn’t sure if Bill didn’t like leaving the Chinese inside all by themselves with them locked outside or if he just thought that the doctor in the bunch should stay inside with his patients.

“Roger that, Mercy I. Pipe Bill through, and we’ll walk him through the mods.”

“The line is open, Houston.”

“Roger that, Mercy I. Begin decompressing the cabin.”

Tony stood with his back against the wall, leaning a bit to take the weight off as he cycled the interior-pressure vents. He was tired. It had taken him and Bill and Zhi nearly two hours to cycle all of their superfluous supplies and whatnot out to the lunar surface. Now there was deconstruction work to be done. Sure, all six of them could stand inside the vehicle, very closely. Very. Closely. But they were still too heavy to get off the surface. The mission had been planned to take four American astronauts to the lunar surface and back on a shoestring budget and a very compressed schedule. This version of the Altair was only a limited prototype and not the final design of the vehicle that would fly on future flights, if there were any. The politics of the Constellation program to send Americans back to the Moon had been quite a battle. The program had used a majority of NASA’s budget since 2011.

The Apollo-era program had about the same amount of money, sixteen or so billion dollars per year, between the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Extrapolating the Apollo budget to modern-day dollars, taking into account inflation, would be about one hundred and two billion dollars per year. So, it was clear that the NASA budget was about six to seven times underfunded. It was ridiculous how low the funding for the American space program had become while any number of entitlement programs were running at hundreds of billions of dollars per year with no public debate on shutting them down. And, to top all that off, the robotic-probe planetary scientists had a powerful lobby on Capitol Hill literally able to force NASA to use up about a quarter of its budget for unmanned probes to the outer planets, comets, asteroids, and other places like Pluto. The science return on those missions versus the science return on manned missions was often the subject of heated debate.

Needless to say, the Altair, being the last of the vehicles to be constructed in the project, was built on a fraction of the planned budget. It was slimmed down, and every corner that could have been cut on its design and construction was cut. The engine was smaller, the frame bulkier, than it should have been, and the fuel tanks were smaller. There was very little margin left for extra weight with four occupants. With six, they were way overweight, and even throwing everything overboard was a couple hundred kilograms short, with no margin for error. The engineers back at NASA had figured out a work-around, but that meant some major modifications to the vehicle’s exterior structure.

Tony could faintly hear some whirring, more like buzzing noises, vibrating through the structure of the ship and into his helmet that was propped against the wall. His guess was that it was from the cordless power tools being used outside. It took another hour for the engineers at Johnson Space Center to talk Bill and Zhi through which bolts to remove. Where to pry at a panel. When and where to hit something with a hammer. And then all of a sudden a large screwdriver blade poked through the wall from the outside. Tony listened, only half paying attention, and nearly dozed off at one point, but the vibration of a saw blade cutting through a metal panel fastener startled him to attention. Then all of a sudden he heard Bill.

“There, Zhi. Hold it there.” Then there was a pause. “Step out of the way and hold on to something.”

“Okay, Tony,” the engineer at Houston said. “Very carefully, hold on to the pilot-station panel and kick the skin panel with the bottom of your boot.”

“Uh, roger that, Houston.” Tony carefully found himself a handhold. He didn’t want to bounce out with the panel and go flying onto the surface some twenty or more feet below. Once he assured himself he was secure, he prepared to kick. “Kicking in three, two, one.” Clank. The vibration of the kick resounded through the structure of the cabin.