Hi all, happy Monday. Our third interlude is here, and it's a doozy. Proceed with caution, there are some elements to this week's chapter that folks may find upsetting or disturbing. I want to thank my good friend
Peter for being such a wonderful technical consultant on today's post, and posts to come over the next few weeks - this will begin a long series of events with important implications. Let's get started, shall we?
Interlude III:
Houston Space Center, Texas, United States
9:00AM Central Time
Todd Mitchell sat down at his desk at the console, ready to begin a day's work in Mission Control in Houston. He had been a flight controller, specializing in Guidance and Navigation for approximately 8 months, and was getting used to the ins and outs of shifts, helping the Olympus crews pilot their great spacecraft to and from Mars. It had been a quick learning curve, and the pace of missions had kept him busy. Olympus 8’s return had been some of his key learning moments, helping to guide the crew in, and congratulating them on their achievements. They had been a phenomenal crew to learn with, and Mitchell had attempted to keep it together when showing the crew his station after their return. In recent months, he had helped the crew of Olympus 9 start their quest to the Red Planet. Olympus 9 had been a textbook departure, with Hera burning cleanly out of the Earth-Moon system, and now moving further and further away. They were about two and a half months into their cruise now, moving closer to their goal of being the third long stay crew on the Martian surface. For the Olympus partners, cruise was always the time where flight controllers found themselves lacking in things to do. Systems were often checked, rechecked and checked again. Their shift flight director, Mackenzie Walker, greeted him as he got situated and dropped a packet on his desk - the day’s abort trajectories and optimal planning. He smiled and nodded, sipping his coffee and got comfortable. Thumbing through the pages, he made note, and prepared to transmit the abort conditions to Hera’s flight computer.
“
Hera, Houston, good morning. This is Guidance and Navigation for Blue Flight speaking, I’ll be uploading your abort parameters for today on the high band: you are still go for return in the event of an abort, no intact MTV abort options remain at this time, all modes are now Earth Return Lifeboat only.” With a few clicks, his message was cast across the vast expanse of space, and approximately 20 minutes later, was read back by the crew - with the addition of a problem for flight. A small leak they had been monitoring had moved to the point where it needed to be inspected. Small leaks were fairly common in the already aging MTVs, so a spacewalk like this was of fairly little concern. Walker would take charge, and begin to instruct the astronauts in the suit up procedure to go out and inspect it. Mitchell took no notice, he simply kept his eyes on his console, and listened passively as the crew went through the steps of heading outside. Taylor and Small, veteran spacewalkers and cryogenics experts, would take the steps outside the airlock, ready to deal with whatever problems came up. Soon, the astronauts were well on their way, and Mitchell got to work plotting the next few days of abort trajectories. He wondered what the cafeteria would be serving for lunch.
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Midday soon rolled around, and Taylor and Small were still outside, tending to the scuffed coolant pipe. A few new engineers had filed into the room, and were discussing the probable origins of the scuff, probably during the last refit. Mitchell had come back from lunch, bringing with him a small iced tea. They had served club sandwiches for lunch, and he had remembered to bring a few cookies to eat with him. As he filed back into the control room, engineers were milling about as they typically did for an EVA, watching the delayed camera footage and pouring over numbers. Surgeon was always the most anxious during any activity like this, but hey, this was their job, and they knew what they were doing. Mitchell looked over the ship’s systems, Hera was pointed in the correct attitude for the spacewalk, and was in quiescent mode. As familiar as he’d grown with his console, and the environment in which he worked, the feeling of staring at the systems of a ship on its way to Mars never got old to him, he felt like a child living out a dream he never thought possible in his lifetime. These thoughts were often hard to control, so he quickly leveled himself and got back to work. A couple of cryogenics experts from the mission planning team had come in, and were recording a few uplink instructions for the crew. Mitchell didn’t envy them, communication on EVA with this kind of light delay would be an issue, regardless of how minor a problem like this would be. The spacecraft was healthy otherwise, body rates looked good, heating was fine, and the engines had been inactive for months now. Everything was in its place.
The four hour mark on the spacewalk would come, and the crew had made it to the worksite and had begun to move the MTV’s arm into place to assist with servicing. The crew was translating nicely, but slightly behind schedule. The engineers would murmur their theories, but there wasn’t a sense of panic like there was when an Odyssey spacewalk fell behind schedule. Walker would come up to the comm, and call up to
Hera for an update, wondering if there was anything that Mission Control could advise them on or assist with. Approximately 20 minutes later, they’d receive a response from
Hera, an audio downlink. Mission Specialist 1, JAXA’s Suzu Ayase would deliver the response, only interrupted by an automated caution message from the ship: "Houston,
Hera, we've got some issues here. We’ve taken a bit of extra time to get us to the worksite. Right now we're looking at a couple strategies for remedying the prob-
CAUTION! SUIT DEPRESS, IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED. CAUTION! SUIT DEPRESS - Shit, Taylor!
CAUTION! SUIT DEPRESS, IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED. CAUTION! SUIT DEPRESS, IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED." Screaming, struggle and the suit alarm could be heard over the comm loop, and after 30 seconds of agonizing sound, the transmission ended, just as quickly as it had started. The flight team would then receive another warning, COOLANT LEAK - FLOW RATE INCREASE. Mitchell looked around, almost all of Mission Control had stood up from their consoles, looking to Walker for guidance. Her eyes immediately turned to the double doors, and the sound of cold mechanical bolts of the locks resonated throughout the room, sealing everyone in for the foreseeable future. Mitchell shrank into himself, this was the real deal. Something was seriously, horribly wrong.
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The immediate steps would be to try and raise
Hera, already difficult to do based on their distance from Earth. The comms team had to move carefully now. One message at a time would be key to establishing clear lines of communication, and understanding the nature of the problem, and message after message would prompt unreasonable delays that could potentially impede communication. The medical teams would be the first to confirm that something was wrong, showing a suit depress alarm on not one, but two suits. Two suits… an MMOD strike? The coolant leak would suggest that something might have struck the spacecraft. The tone remained consistent, and Hera’s onboard computer would soon be able to tell them the leak rate of the suits themselves as well as of her own vital fluids. The Flight Dynamics Officers were scratching their heads, there wasn’t that much out there that could pose that kind of risk, and no near Earth objects that they were tracking. Mitchell stayed at his console, waiting for something. Anything. 10 minutes… 15 minutes… 20… 25… everyone was staring at the mission elapsed timer. A tone sounded - a downlink. The voice of the MTV pilot, Max Knowles, came through the speakers in mission control: “Houston, it’s bad- massive damage, I…” he paused for a moment, and every soul sat forward to hear his next words, “It’s coming off, we’re looking at all of our options. Delon called it. Chain of command [inaudible] Fuck!” The master caution, the same master caution that could be found on Boeing flight decks around the world, was ringing in the background. The team looked around, unable to parse what exactly was happening.
Hera was still in the same orientation, power and telemetry still looked good, so a problem with the spacecraft wasn’t an immediate concern. Their confusion would soon be replaced with sheer, unimaginable dread.
A master caution warning from one of the suits, Taylor’s suit, cropped up. The Flight Surgeon, James Edwards, jumped out of his seat: “Taylor’s in cardiac arrest. He’s… He’s not breathing. Blood O2 is dropping.” The flight team sat ever closer to their consoles, chattering furiously to try and figure out the next move, the next message to send. Taylor’s heartbeat was fluctuating, his blood oxygen saturation dropping to dangerous levels. He was dying. They could see that they were trying to resuscitate him, bursts of activity indicated by jolts in heart rate induced by the defibrillator. It became the job of the medical team to diagnose the problem.
Maybe they can still make it, Mitchell thought,
maybe he had an episode during the spacewalk. They can still get to Mars… maybe? The team watched as his heart rate began to slowly stabilize, and they prepared to uplink the next message, instructions for treatment, and procedures to secure the airlock and ship. But they would not get the chance, as their hopes of the next landing on Mars were dashed before their eyes, by 5 words that would change the fate of the mission, and all of those in the control room’s lives forever. Knowles’ voice would ring through the speakers again, a short message, but the most painful one of all.
“ [inaudible]...Houston, Hera. We’re coming back… [inaudible]”
Had they called for an abort? No one knew, this wasn’t the way it was supposed to go, none of the checklists had been followed. The air in the control center was thick with sweat and worry, and curious onlookers had gathered in the glassed in viewing gallery. But the crew in the room wouldn’t notice. Soon, the phones from the joint mission control centers in Cologne and Moscow would light up, attempting to figure out what was happening. Walker would throw her headphones down, and it would be Mitchell’s station that would light up next. The MTV was moving, and fast. Faster than it was designed to, at 1.5º per second. They risked shearing instruments, the robotic arm, even the solar arrays off of the vehicle. His forehead was drenched with sweat, and he would soon find himself shouting “Flight,
Hera’s changing attitude! 1.5 degrees, they’re pulsing their RCS!” Walker sprinted to his station, and would soon start reviewing his data, before the next callout: CDA UNLOCK. The control keys, only usable by the commander and pilot, onboard
Hera had been turned, and they were preparing to light the nuclear engines. The floodgates had opened, OUT OF ATTITUDE, THERMAL WARNING and other issues would begin to pop up on nearly every console. The next, and arguably most alarming warning came in the form of HULL STRESS, an indicator that something was not sound structurally. The stream of data became a flood, and nearly every console displayed an error message. The engines, it would seem, had been lit, and the vehicle had moved from its stable attitude, no longer securely on course for the Red Planet. The crews in mission control, moving around Mitchell like ants, spoke louder and louder to get their information conveyed. He continued to remain on console, calling out data as it streamed into his monitor, fighting off the feeling of nausea.
This can’t be real, he thought,
trying to reason his way out of it, this is just a drill and we’ll hear from them, we always hear from them… Did I send them the right information? And then… silence. The data stopped flowing, all of it. No streams of information poured into mission control, and the screens flashed the most ominous message of them all: LOSS OF SIGNAL. The onboard, omnidirectional antenna, however, was emitting a tone, indicating that something had gone wrong, and the crew had seemingly made the call independently of mission control to try and come home. But whether or not the crew and ship were in one piece remained to be seen.
Hera… Her crew and the dream of the 6th Martian landing were seemingly no more. Desperately, in one final act, the communications team would try to raise her, calling into the empty void of space, only to be met with a soft crackle, a painful silence:
"Hera, Houston, UHF comm check… Hera, Houston, UHF comm check… Hera, Houston, UHF comm check… come in Hera.”
"Please."
