This one is definitely fiction, maybe. ****** Crew of Five By Greg Utrecht January 24, 2002 Copyright c 2002 Don and Judy Jones were on the freight run from Earth to the asteroid Perseus. They had been doing it for eight years, ever since Judy had gotten in trouble with the Terplan undercover cops in that bar on Farside. Judy had been hanging out with the artists and pottery wheelers on Farside back in the teens when Farside was new, and when Earth people realized it was the farthest you could get from Earth. On Farside you can never see the Earth. Being involved in that crowd got Judy into some trouble since many of the artists and writers were busy trying to import Martian stones and crystals for sale on Earth. Back then the rockets coming back to Earth from Mars stopped in Earth orbit, and many of the smugglers brought their crystals down to Farside Base for later smuggling them off to Earth. That's when the Terplan people set their eyes on Judy and used her to infiltrate the smuggler's ring. But Judy was smart and she figured out what was going on, too late for the Terplan investigator, who she caught breaking the Terplan surveillance and interdiction laws, as well as the entrapment laws restricting the use of police secret agents and spies. Judy was smart and she used the evidence she gathered to make a safe escape while protecting the people she knew from being prosecuted. Judy and Don ended up on the freight run to Perseus. After a couple of years of being in space 9 months out of 12, Judy and Don got married. The Terplan spy presumably got transferred back to Earth, probably somewhere like Africa, and was never heard from again. Judy and Don lived on their ship nine months out of twelve. Behind the small cockpit and command module was a living quarters with a kitchen and a small room with a bed. Three four hour shifts on and three four hours off all day every day with two six hour shifts so they each could sleep. Life was pretty dull out of port but it was just the two of them and they were happy. The command module had room for two to sit quietly and there wasn't much to do, monitor the life support, check the starnav system, compute the fuel efficiencies and check the auxiliary systems. Once a day they got out their sextant and shot the stars, but mostly for fun because the starnav had never failed. The run from Earth to Perseus was slow, Perseus being naturally in the same orbit with Earth but behind, on the quadrature. Getting to Perseus meant looping out toward Mars to slow down, and getting back to Earth meant speeding up using an orbit that brought their ship temporarily on an orbit toward Venus. To Venus, Judy laughed about that, "Who in the hell goes to Venus?" and they got about 5 percent of the way before kicking back uphill. Perseus was not a required layover, and a lot of people didn't like it there, but there was sunshine and green plants and people to hang out with. You could get a shower, a real room with gravity, hot food and company. They also had supplies, emergency kits, temporary sails, flairs, running lights of all colors and audio equipment, as well as cowboy hats and boots on sale. But sooner or later you wanted to get off it and the first thing to do was sign up for the freighter catapult. When a ship like yours was ready to head up to Mars, then they got shot from the catapult uphill and you got shot on the catapult downhill back to Earth. This double shot evened out the impact on the orbit of the dredger and also moved Perseus half a meter per second closer to Earth.. The dredger operation was pulling nickel and bauxite and silicon out of the soil and then processing the oxgen out of what was left. The soil went into hydroponics with some nitrogen. Half of the metal went into building the Jupiter ship, still unnamed, that was destined for orbit around Ganymede. Of the rest, bauxite and silicon and nickel and oxygen, half went to Mars on the outbond catapult, and half went to Earth-moon for use in Earth orbit colony ships. It was simply cheaper to take the metals from the asteroid than lift them from the moon or the Earth. The Jupiter ship being built was going to be a sphere about a mile in diameter, although right now not even one full corridor went through all 360 degrees of the circle. The plan showed five more years of construction on the shell and then the launch. Finishing the construction of the rest of the corridors, living spaces and bio areas would continue during the ten year orbital lob out to Jupiter. There was plenty of time to finish her off, and once at Ganymede any further metals could be got from Ganymede or Io. The biggest problem was having enough people for a small community, and teaching the young people how to maintain the ship. "That is their life." Judy thought looking at the still unpressurized arcs rotating slowly in space about 5 miles starside of Perseus. After seven years it was still hard to detect much change in the Jupiter ship, even between runs of their seven month round trip to Earth. But that was their life, and she and Don were glad to get into Earth orbit at least once a year, and five years earlier they had vacationed in San Francisco, which the Jupiter people would never be able to do. When their turn came up Don and Judy brought their ship to the dredger, lined it up on the electromagnetic rail, and filled their hulls with the silicon, oxygen and aluminum and nickel ore for the trip back to Earth orbit. When it was full, and when the 'twin' ship for the Mars run was full, then the great superconducting inductors were slowly charged for the ride down the rail. After a day of charging the pulse was ready and when it fired their ship was propelled steadily along the 3 kilometer rail at a force equal to 1 times the force of Earth gravity. Compared to the 10 gravity mass drivers on the south pole of the moon, this 1G force was suitable for electronic equipment, people, and environmental systems that otherwise never would experience any significant G force. Those moon catapults just threw rocks around - 500 tons at a time. Judy and Don secured their equipment, stabilized their systems, and shut down their auxiliary equipment. When the mass driver fired they were pushed into their seats with a force rarely experienced by people in space, a force never exceeded except by the 6G nominal forces experienced on reentry into Earth atmosphere. The rail rapidly moved them so that the 3 kilometer trip down the rail was accomplished in 24 seconds. Except for their two weeks on Earth five years earlier, this was the only time Don and Judy ever experienced their true Earth weight. It was an unusual feeling. The rail had pushed them rapidly to a speed 240 meters per second, or about 500 miles per hour relative to the station on Perseus. And only sixty nine and a half million miles to go. Judy and Don began checking their systems and set up their comm equipment with Earth traffic control. They set their beacons, checked their rotation, calibrated their starnav system and pressure hull monitors before checking on cooling, carbon dioxide, waste purging and oxygen scrubbing equipment. When these all checked out Don got into his suit and tested the jet pack thrusters and control gyros. Every minute wasted now could mean as much as another hour in transit, and who knew how the price of 30 tons of aluminum might change during the wasted hour of flight. This was not the time for sitting still and looking at the stars. Don went through the lock and with Judy monitoring and advising on every move he began to unstow the first solar sail. Early solar sails for cargo ships had depended on mere photons for accelerating the ships and were capable of one hundredth of a g. This extra speed was useful if the effort to deploy the sail was not too expensive: and their certainly was lot of free time on some of those early cargo hauling ships. 50 years ago ships like the Boston had started using their solar sails as furnaces, and injecting a stream of cesium ions into them. The furnaces acted like a rocket, ejecting the ions at 5 kilometers a second, and some ships experienced up to two hundredth of a G from their sails. They tried nuclear engines trying to accelerate the cesium particles faster but the engines added a lot of weight, and 2000 pounds of thrust cost 100 grams of cesium fuel per second - 800 pounds an hour. Then the lightweight Wassala induction engine was developed. It could turn raw heat into electrical energy with about 50% conversion ratio. Electric induction motors were used to generate 8 million volts and propel cesium ions at 400 kilometers per second cutting fuel costs down to 80 pounds an hour. Boston was equipped with 3 sails each driving a twin pair of wassala cathodes that consumed 10 grams per second and generated 2000 pounds of thrust. Total thrust for the ship was 12,000 pounds so that for every hour of flight with the engines on, she went ten miles an hour faster. By the time she was halfway to Earth she should be doing 15,000 miles an hour, and time to start slowing down. From that perspective she was basically standing still after being launched from the dredger. That is why it mattered to get the sails up fast, to get back to Earth and sell their cargo before prices had changed. At the end of the first shift Don had rigged out the first sail and the engine had nearly reached operating temperature. He was now unstowing the second sail and rigging its nylon lines. When the second sail was heating up Don flew the 6 kilometers to sail one and ignited the wassala with a thousand volt surge from a capacitor. Playing out the nylon cables and testing the gyro controls in place, the twin thrusters were soon generating 2000 pounds each, running ahead and to the side of Boston and towing her along. Rigging the cables for the second sail now caused a problem - a cable rubbed against the side of the engine and Don let loose his gripper to pull the cable off it. Don hurried to free it and his gripper sheared off a sliver of aluminum from a handhold, the sliver being about 2 millimeters long and half a millimeter wide. "How much damage could that do?" Don asked Judy, hanging out in space five kilometers from the Boston and 6 kilometers from the working engines on the number one sail. "Hang on, wait one" she said and punched up the schematics and the procedures manual for loose conductors near space engines, sub paragraph two - engines running. "Did you see which way it went?" Judy asked. Don said no it was spinning and the cable was running out so that I lost sight of it. "Wait one." Judy computed that the running engines on sail 1 were 6 kilometers away - therefore the sliver of aluminum was somewhere inside a sphere defined by him and the sail one - a sphere with a surface area of 113 square kilometers. Once the sliver got outside that sphere they would be safe. But if the aluminum sliver should happen to touch the cathode or the anode of either of the twin engines on sail 1 it could short it out. That meant that if the sliver hit any of 4 areas, each one about ten square centimeters, they could have a runaway engine. It was the Poisson pin problem. With 113 million possible square millimeters, there were 4000 bad ones. Judy's computer said there was one chance in 28,000 that they would not make it to market on schedule, but Judy knew there were worse things that could happen. Don sat out there waiting, for the computer to cough up a checklist, for Judy to compute the odds, or for the number one engine to arc out and start wildly spraying deadly cesium atoms in his direction. He didn't know. Later folks said that the static field generated by the hot anode made the odds a lot lower than one in 28,000 - that if the sliver trajectory was even in the same 5 degrees of the sky, then it would likely be drawn into the positively charged anode. Around one chance in 5 thousand would take the sliver that way. No matter what the odds were, when the sliver hit the anode, it shorted it out against the grounding cable. The circuit seemed broken, or at least now electrons were spraying all across the sky - most of them missing the anode - and the cesium stopped flowing from the cathode. The result was that one of the twin rockets on sail one stopped working. The microprocessor on the wassala was designed to handle this - one jet failing - but all of the test cases assumed that power was also lost when the ion rocket failed. No one had tested for the condition that the rocket was fouled and that the cathode remained in a circuit but with an erratic anode field. These were exactly the conditions caused by the sliver of aluminum stuck hard up against the side of the anode. It was a hardware problem, and the software should have shut the engine down, but the software was incapable of accurately recognizing the problem. To the microprocessor it looked like a gyro problem, and Don was 6 kilometers away watching wide eyed, and lowering his darkest helmet shield against what would soon become a space field full of rapidly moving cesium molecules. As far as the microprocessor was concerned the rocket failure was approximately the same as an erratic gyro. Both involve engines that are out of control. In this case the microprocessor decided it could run Kalman filters against the bad data from the gyro, check the prediction against the starnav system on Boston, and control the engine. The microprocessor thought it could stabilize the engine and it tried to do so. The engine was not shut down. The microprocessor had no data that one of the twin rockets on the engine was fouled. The natural tendency of failed engine was to spin in three dimensions, first spinning flat, then spinning end over end, and then rolling over sideways. The microprocessor filtered what it thought was bad gyro data and started stabilizing the yaw and roll axes right away. But the pitch gyro was 35 years old and had shown a small stutter under field tests on Perseus. In addition to the rocket failure, the pitch gyro on sail 1 really was erratic. Don had planned to replace it when they got back to Earth orbit. The Kalman filter could predict and control all the engine motions except the pitch, because of the erratic lag caused by the occasional stutter in the pitch gyro. It should be obvious that the rocket porpoised up and down, with a period of about every thirty seconds, and started porpoising again at random every time the gyro stuttered. This porpoise motion filled the aft sky with 10 grams of 400 km/sec cesium exhaust per second, and yanked the cables on the sail. Boston was pulled up and down, slowly at first, but with rising speed, because the period of oscillation for the 1000 ton Boston was more like 5 minutes, and not 30 seconds like the errant engine. Don waited, but there was no checklist for this, and Judy was staring out the viewport, just like Don was staring out the heavy facemask on his suit from 6 kilometers away. "We better cut the sails, Judy" "If we cut loose we may sail right through it." "Judy thats why they give us chemical rockets for emergencies. This is one for the next edition of the book." "I'm coming in." With that Don cut sail 2 and abandonded the unfurling sail. Hitting his rockets, he steered back to Boston while hoping to avoid the cesium stream snaking behind sail 1 on the far side of Boston and below him. Tuning into the beacon on Boston, his suit nav system then computed an intercept course, and brought him safely to the ship. Ten minutes after the sliver of aluminum disappeared from his view into the blackness of space he entered the lock back to go back into the ship. The fuel feed for the failed engine had now ruptured from excessive porpoising motions. There was a cloud of low speed cesium atoms forming behind sail one. Atoms from the fouled rocket were floating around and the exhaust from the working rocket was snaking through the cloud, bouncing cesium atoms all over the place, heating them up and causing them to glow bright blue in the sky. Boston was starting to accelerate. She had already moved a dozen meters ahead of the cloud and was being pulled by the unbalanced solar sail and its one good rocket. The nav computer told Judy that the nearest thing ahead of them was the star Deneb. Although they were still running almost parallel to Perseus Station, their elliptical orbit was taking them "downhill" towards the sun so that they could speed up and catch the Earth in four months. The Mars ship they had launched against was also running parallel but running "uphill" to Mars and was now 10,000 kilometers away. Perseus was 2500 kilometers behind them. While Don struggled out of his suit Judy started the emergency checklist for chemical rocket burn - straight ahead - hopefully far enough ahead that if the rocket on sail 1 broke loose it would miss them when it went by. Don got into his seat, and Judy punched the button - six minutes of chemical burn - all she's got - which is what it says to do in the manual. They sat back for their burn and were soon going 18,000 MPH faster. After the burn there was nothing to do. Judy picked up the comm link, and said "Houston, we have a problem" which is what shipwrecked sailors had been saying in emergencies for over a hundred years. Houston came back about 6 hours later with a plan. Boston was going to miss Earth orbit: the emergency burn sent them so fast that there was no way to stop this side of Mars. But there was not enough food for the 13 month trip to Mars unless they accelerated all the way. And if they did that they would be going way too fast to stop at Mars. Houston said that was the plan. The plan was to set the last sail and head for Mars, and when they got to Mars another ship would salvage their cargo and take it along on its way to Jupiter. On the way to Mars they could work out a way to get Don and Judy off their wrecked ship. 13 months to Mars, 4 years to Jupiter. "all because my gripper pulled some aluminum off a bolt on a handhold" Don thought. "Houston what about me and Judy?" "Hang on Don, we are doing background checks now." "Background checks?, Houston?" "Don we can't get you off at Mars. You will be going too fast. You can transfer to the salvage ship at Mars. But you'll shoot past Jupiter too I'm afraid. I hope you didn't have any big plans for the next four years Don. The good news is there's a ship being built out past Jupiter. Designed for a crew of five. It might be ready for you when you get out that way. We could tell you more about it, but we'd have to swear you to secrecy. We are running your background checks now." *** And that's the story how two truck drivers came to command the first starship to Epsilon Eridani. They almost didn't make it. The cargo salvaged from their ship was barely enough to help them build a habitat large enough to survive the first three years. After that they built ships that could get down to the planet and back. Earth sent four more starships - one every ten years, and due to light speed compression the first one arrived in Epsilon Eridani a year after Don and Judy's crew. It's been a seventy five years since Epsilon Eridani was colonized, and for Don and Judy it was a ten year trip - they left Earth eighty-five years ago. On Earth 175 years have passed - with no news from us. Not until we can build a return ship that can make it 100 light years - with a crew of five. End *** I always imagined Kevin Costner playing the greedy frustrated capitalist.