Mission simulations came next, bringing all four crew together in the habitat-cockpit mock-up. Here they practiced everything that could go wrong and the few things that could go right—endlessly.
For starters, nobody had ever built a combo habitat and cockpit. The two functions had diametrically opposed demands. Habitats should be comfy and convey largeness; cockpits should be rugged and tight. They had to fly the bulky hab and land it on Mars, but return would be in the ERV, already in place.
The habitat-lander was a big aluminum and steel tuna can with a central cylinder that served to reach the air lock at its base. The top level was living quarters, the bottom held their Mars exploration equipment and the cockpit. There were no side windows, nothing looking straight ahead, where the craft would slam into the Martian atmosphere at speeds of several kilometers per second. Viktor would have to fly using TV screens alone. Fair enough; aerobraking required senses of flow speeds, spiking temperatures, and pressures, not eye-balling.
Four months before nominal launch date, joint integrated simulations began in earnest. To this grueling party everybody got invited: operation control, flight director, habitat monitors, techs—eighty-six people in all.
In a way, a whole-systems exercise was a game. The crew wanted to make no errors, while the flight director tried to make them die in dozens of different ways.
Their flight director, the ever-smiling Brad Fowler, had left NASA three years before for private consulting and many more bucks. Axelrod had topped whatever he was getting and then some, by all accounts. Brad was happy to be back running a real program of exploration, though he tried hard not to show that too much.
“Must admit,” Viktor said, “systems personnel are best money can buy.”
Julia countered, “Best, period. Half these guys quit NASA to come here.”
The others were from private corporations that were essentially NASA feeder outfits. It was an open secret that NASA’s stand-down from Mars had sent the whole organization into a tailspin from which morale might never recover. If not Mars, what was the point of having a space agency? That had simplified Axelrod’s problems immensely. People would sign on just to have a hand in getting to Mars, even for jobs that were below their capability ratings.
So here they all were, one happy gang all wanting to go to Mars, and a dozen times a day dying in the simulators. Brad Fowler smiled at them every day, obeying a standard NASA commandment: Thou shalt smile, but not grin. Confidence, not arrogance. His teeth shone like a white flag against skin as weathered as beef jerky, from decades in the Houston heat. He gave them the same opening mantra, “Morning, all. The tougher we are on you here, the easier it’ll be on Mars.”
Each time Julia thought to herself, Yeah, right, you sadist. Even though she knew what he said was true.
The rules of the simulation game were, no Challenger-level disasters. Nothing beyond their control, when the only response possible was to say your prayers. Sure, those events could happen, but there was no point in simulating them.
Instead, they got what Julia thought of as instant obstacles.
Failure of a subsection of the electronics board. Fuel pump shutdown. Cryo malf. Leak in the vector-keeping system lines. Big-time pressure drop.
Miss the first sign and that wedged you against the clock, trying to restart a procedure while fluids spurted out into space or pumps locked up nice and tight. One of these—or all three—come at you while the habitat is scooping deep on its first gulp of the Martian upper atmosphere.
In a typical “exercise,” Viktor was trying to fly an avionics structure that more nearly resembled a refrigerator than an airplane. Raoul was performing mechanical CPR on the fuel feeds that had just redlined. Julia and Marc were running backup, taking over problems that the others had discarded as nonessential.
That didn’t mean they couldn’t kill you, only that they wouldn’t do so right now.
Like, say, a pesky waffle in their aerodynamic trim. Sure, there was plenty of theoretical backup on this, books full of Navier-Stokes three-dimensional flow-field solutions for their aeroshell shape. They also inherited thick studies of how the reacting flows of appropriate CO2 chemistry worked out with the preliminary thermal protection system (TPS, in NASAspeak). No problem there.
But when Viktor handed off the problem to Julia as he struggled with the Mach window, she couldn’t find the right operating regime for their vector-control jets. Viktor had to take it over and fly the bird by hand, not even looking at the overshoot trajectory plots that an anxious ship computer kept flashing up on his right-hand screen.
No matter that they had bought from NASA a “robust 3-D Conceptual Fluid Dynamic code capable of radiating, turbulent, and dusty flow simulations.” Viktor had fifty-eight tons at his back and no wings to lift them out of trouble. He had to skate on the filmy upper blanket of CO2 by feel more than by numbers.
So when the vector problem grew to fatal levels, he snatched it back from her and tried to correct the sliding yaw the whole craft was developing. The simulation was good. It yanked them around, buffeted them like a bad roller coaster, meanwhile yowling in their ears like a drumroll from hell. Not a great aid to abstract thinking.
Running out of luck got to be a habit. Engines went out at just the worst moment, when they were pulling maximum g’s. Headwinds maxed up to kill their lifting speed. Boards went dead, running lights and all, just before a critical command had to pass through them.
Nothing in nature said that only one thing had to go wrong at once, after all.
Brad reminded them of that far more often than he needed to. Maybe there was a bit of the smiling sadist in him.
Maybe NASA had selected him for that. Or Axelrod had.
Every time they failed to recover from a malf, they looked at each other, knowing that the feed camera was showing their dismay to the whole goddamn team outside. Everybody was thinking the same thing: if this were Mars, they’d be dead. Little chunks of red stuff spattered across the already red planet.
They needed their coffee breaks.
A few months of this and maybe the magic point would come. NASA termed it “crystallization”—when a crew thought as one, knowing when and how to do the right things at just the right times. So that they didn’t get in one other’s way, blundering through the complex, interacting systems commanded from the tight little cockpit.
Crystallize too early and a crew got cocky, bored. Too late and they couldn’t fly at all, because they weren’t seasoned.
Hitting the right point as the launch window started to open was why Brad Fowler’s job was more like an artist’s than an engineer’s.
Or a psychotherapist’s.
Viktor had started his career during the slow revival of the Russian space program, post-Mir. His father had worked on keeping Mir aloft, laboring in the mission control center that was a brooding mausoleum hulking beside a pothole avenue. Though his father had been a flight controller, to make ends meet he had to drive a taxi in his off hours.
After Mir, Russian cosmonauts had lawyers and contracts and agents, in a parody of neocapitalism. They got bonuses for doing EVAs and running orbital experiments. Viktor was already used to doing telecasts from orbit endorsing snack foods and sweaters. Russian institutions had a long habit of covering over embarrassing lapses and outright failures, so the Consortium’s up-front attitude—if it doesn’t work, let’s hear pronto, then fix it—had been delightful.
At night he lay in bed with Julia and could talk about things like this, things that to another, ordinary woman would have been petrifyingly dull. But to Julia it was the world she lived in, his experience in it different and strange and movingly sad. What she thought of it did not matter. What did was that she heard and felt through his halting, awkward English the pain of a life lived in tougher places, harder times.
Hearing it helped him. And her.
But all the wonderful, warm communication only served to offset the complexity and strain of their working days, which now stretched to fill all but sleep. And sometimes it invaded sleep itself. She would awaken to find Viktor pacing, moody and unable to speak. Sometimes she felt that way herself, for reasons she could not name.
But they helped each other through those times and emerged in the morning whole and sometimes even rested. Able to smile for the cameras that sometimes got through security and dogged their footsteps as they fetched the morning Houston Times.
The tragedy of Mir and the International Space Station alike was that they did not confront the deep problem of living in space.
Instead, they camped in space. They used disposables, taking in food and air and dumping their waste, never closing the loop.
Only when it became embarrassingly obvious that the ISS had nothing much to do did NASA’s attention turn to the obvious next goal: systems for true exploration, Mars. Recycling water and air, separation of solid waste, air chemistry—these had gotten worked out in orbit with painful slowness.
