Martian Valkyrie

I had forgotten to say “over” and wasted six minutes. I shrugged my shoulders, and struggled for internal peace. I was not an inexperienced astronaut; I led explorations of several major lunar features and was second in command on the mission to the asteroid Eros, the trial for this mission. I’d had all the resources of the United Nations behind me. There was no reason for me to be flustered. But I sat there in front of the screen pickup open- mouthed.

“Well,” he continued, “the whole thing I will run through while you figure out what you say. Ja, ten years ago I left the ISA Mars conference. We have already discussed why. Then I talked to our prime minister who nod-ded his head to some things and shook it to others. Our space program is a matter of national pride, ja, but it has to be a not-so-expensive program.

“So, officially, I had the go-ahead to do a small Moon base. The Italians have one, the Tysker, the Nederlanders, even the Svensker!” Halvorsen scowled at this, and it was my turn to smile. If you look at the Scandinavian peninsula, you see not golden fields of Nordic brotherhood, but a line of tall mountains down its middle.

“So our little single-stage-to-orbit Norgedraken flew ten missions and twice docked four payloads to big composite disks. Then we sent them both toward the Moon. You remember?”

Very well, I remembered. It had been a fiasco. Both their seven-million-kroner base modules failed to make nominal Lunar Orbit Insertion burns and had whipped by the Moon out into interplanetary space. It had been such a loss to the minuscule Norwegian space program that observers thought that it would pretty much end the thing. But their parliamentary committee had met in closed session and voted more of their oil money for a second attempt.

The old man’s face broke into the grin I would expect to see on the face of Satan himself when he acquires Halvorsen’s soul. “Well, our real plan that was not, nei, nor did anyone notice where the so-called Moon base modules went after they picked up a couple of kilometers per second rounding the Moon.” Halvorsen raised his eyebrows and I got a sinking feeling as I remembered that the date of the Norwegian Moon base “failure” was within a month of our own Mars supply staging mission.

Halvorsen continued. “Everyone said Halvorsen screwed up. Ikke sandt? Not so? Well, we let them think that. Now I will put on the animation of our mission.” Halvorsen’s face was replaced by a cartoon of the “Moon” mission as he narrated. “The big disk was not just a docking structure, it was an aerobraking heat shield, which is how one should go to Mars. I say this to you ten years ago, but all your big rocket companies and everyone who wants to work for one someday say, ‘no, no, too risky.’ So you then buy lots of big rockets, ja? Well—”

As the trajectory lines on the animation bent past Luna toward Mars, I forgot myself. I yelled at him despite the fact he hadn’t finished talking. “Halvorsen, damn you, we only bought five ARIES heavy-lift launch vehicles!” He wouldn’t hear that until I was well into regretting I said it, of course.

“… Our ships have a mass ratio of seven and an exhaust velocity of three kilometers per second. That gets us to Mars fast, easy. We do some phasing pair burns to make sure we hit things right. Then we go right into the Martian atmosphere like the American Apollo returned to Earth, except we use negative lift to hold us down if there is not so much atmosphere where we come by. So, if air is thin, we skim the mountain tops and get at least capture, then hit our target on second pass, but if average, or more dense, we can land first pass. No matter. After we reach terminal velocity, we use rockets for the last half kilometer per second. The computers they need for this simple stuff weigh only a hundred grams now, so we take five each.

“The supply ships were the trial run for the crew ship. They left two tiny satellites in egg-shaped half-Mars- day orbit with their high points at that latitude, good for communications relay and reconnaissance. Then they left four full fuel tanks in low orbit and landed on Mars to make more fuel for our return from carbon dioxide with their solar cells. This is not very efficient, but, with two years to do it, the ground base tanks are now full. This is simple, ja? Now Ingrid and Per will go to the bottom of Chryse, as you do, ikke sandt? But they will go straight down. Now—”

My outburst about the heavy lift vehicles arrived then; I could hear my voice in the background. He frowned, then grinned. “Ja, well those big companies with the jobs, what did they build next?” He shook his head in exaggerated sympathy. “Back to Ingrid and Per. They can get themselves there and back with plenty of redundancies and no need for you to be concerned. Our ships we can park in Earth orbit and use again in two years. It is your super-complicated one-time mission about which you need be concerned. Over.”

There was too much for me to digest, and no point in discussing things until I had.

“I copy. Thank you for the information, Mr. Halvorsen. Over and out.”

I signed off with mixed feelings. My Padre taught me to “not tempt the Lord by putting yourself where only He can rescue you.” Good advice in the cold scrublands of Patagonia, and good advice here. Despite Halvorsen’s contempt for conventional political and moral authority, the concepts of forethought, at least, were not foreign to him. “Plenty of redundancies,” he’d said. I would hope.

In concept it was simple. Elegant. The ISA called it MSR, for Mars Surface Rendezvous, and dismissed it as too risky. At first, my mind boggled at a Mars surface refueling operation. But with everything tied down by Martian gravity, I realized it might actually be less tricky than a tank-module swap on Deimos. As I reviewed Halvorsen’s video, I realized the large spider legs on their supply modules placed the tanks higher than on the Amundsen and Fram, allowing a passive gravity feed. The compactness of their deceptively simple design impressed me— the same piece of mass often performed two or three functions.

Their base was not too far from where we planned to land, so a rescue contingency would not perturb our mission plan very much. There were only two of them, and they already had their own supplies down. In fact, and this was the first time I remembered thinking in these terms, while their expedition was minuscule compared to ours, they had a lot of stuff for only two people.

Halvorsen’s sign-off arrived as I was thinking it through. “Commander. What is now done is done, Mars will be a hard enough opponent, without false pride to fight as well. I tell this to Ingrid too. You should know she is in charge overall. She is the older, and has the broader education, and is a better English talker. Per is the best pilot and likes to do orbits and numbers mostly, though he can do the other too in a pinch. No matter. They do the job. If you meet my people, you will find Ingrid not so hard to work with.”

I stared at the screen speechless, not believing what I’d heard. Halvorsen’s commitment to women’s equality was well known, and it was one of the many issues over which he had pulled out of the UN project. He felt an all male expedition, especially a large and long one, could become too restive, too grumbly, too combative. But third world politics had gone against him, and he had stomped out. Now he was having his revenge by decreeing that I would have to treat this woman, whose mores and deportment I had publicly criticized, as an equal.

Not likely. It was far easier to simply ignore them, which is what we did for the next month, as we approached the Red Planet.

Mars loomed bright and full as we rose toward it from the Sun. Our nuclear reactor shadow shields did double duty as we rode out a minor solar flare. In fact, it turned out that for the entire mission, the lowest total radiation dose was in the cabins right next to the reactor shield—because it stopped half the cosmic rays as well.

We learned later that the Norwegian ships had superconducting magnetic loops that channeled the proton influx harmlessly into their heat shield, behind their propellant tanks. Another “unproven” technology, but not only did it protect the Norwegians, but they actually gained a few centimeters per second push from the interaction of the charged particle storm with their magnetic field.

Little good would that do them! Doing midcourse maneuvers with our fleet is not trivial, but I found need for another one. I was a demon: I sold it to Dr. Worthing and pushed the planning through with two sets of books—the vector I intended to use would get us there a little earlier.

Four countdowns had to go perfectly, everything forty people have spread around had to be stowed, four computers needed to agree on everything—it takes days of planning. But under my leadership it went perfectly, and it added just enough delta-V to get us back ahead of the Norwegians without creating big political problems for Mission Control.

The “race,” of course, had assumed David and Goliath proportions in the Earth media, and guess who was cast as Goliath? I was obliged to do interviews in which I decried any competition and said conciliatory things about “my colleague, Dr. Karinsdatter.”