The Next Continent (22 page)

May 1, 2029, 5:30:45 pm. Following insertion into lunar orbit after a flight of sixty hours, Serpent—Sixth Continent's two-ton probe—was approaching the lunar south pole. The control room was responsible for spacecraft tracking and control as well as data acquisition. Twenty-eight control positions faced the bank of monitors, arranged in four rows, including Flight Dynamics; Guidance, Navigation and Control; Propulsion; Instrumentation and Communications, or INCO; Collection and Recovery; and Data Processing. The controllers stared tensely at their monitors. In the last row, TGT flight director Hideto Hibiki stared at the backs of their heads with a dour expression.

The tension was even greater than usual, and for good reason. Many aspects of this mission were extremely difficult or involved some unprecedented element. The launch of TGT's new rocket, Eve I. Sending a probe to the moon. Placing the probe into polar, rather than equatorial, orbit. A soft landing at the pole. Collection of ice samples. Return of the samples to Earth. All carried out by private enterprise. A test mission would not have been unusual for any of these elements, but none had been conducted. It was hardly surprising that TGT's staff was under tremendous pressure.

Still, nearly half of the previously untested hurdles were behind them. Eve I, the first launch vehicle equipped with a transforming scram rocket engine, carried the probe into Earth orbit. The second stage, equipped with a conventional LE-9S engine, executed a perfect translunar injection burn. The insertion into polar orbit was also successful. Now Serpent was a hundred kilometers above the surface, waiting for the command to initiate descent.

Sohya and the others entered the observation booth at the rear of the control room. The glassed-in booth looking out over the controllers was crowded with journalists. Among them was a figure that seemed out of place: a tall man in a worn lab coat.

The man waved to Sohya. “Hey, Aomine. I hear the multidozers passed the final test. Congratulations.”

“We wrapped the shakedown sequence less than an hour ago. How'd you know?”

“Everyone knows. Sixth Continent's portal went live in April.” Shinji waved his wearcom.

Sohya smiled. “The news is up already. Gotenba is really on the ball.”

“No point in having a site if you don't update it constantly, and not just for the public. The project partners are on the VPN all the time, swapping information.”

Shinji smiled at Tae, who was standing behind Sohya. She was the website designer and ELE's head of PR. It was her idea to have each participant in the Sixth Continent project input updates directly to the site rather than running everything through her. Shinji was right: to keep the attention of the public over the project's decade-long timeline, regular updates were essential. Tae's decentralized approach spared ELE's PR team a lot of work. The project participants liked it as well. It gave them a chance to describe their hard-won success in their own words and made for effective communication. In addition to Gotoba, ELE, and TGT, there were over two hundred Sixth Continent partner companies—aerospace, airlines, engineering, construction, electronics, machinery, physical and life sciences, tourism, and advertising firms. The VPN was indispensable for efficiently sharing information across so many entities.

Sohya brought chairs for Tae and Sennosuke and sat down next to them with Shinji.

“If you're up to speed I don't need to explain,” said Sohya. “My group's work is finished for the moment. I can spend the rest of the day here. When's touchdown?”

“Another half hour or so.”

“In thirty minutes our fingertips will touch the moon.”

“Yep. We've been reaching for four years. We're just brushing the surface this time.”

“Has it seemed like a long time to you?” asked Sohya.

“No. I'm having so much fun I don't notice the time passing. Don't tell me it's any different for you.”

The two men looked at each other and burst out laughing. Perhaps because they were so close in age—the childlike materials scientist would be thirty soon—Shinji and Sohya had become fast friends.

“Another half hour.” Sohya folded his arms and watched the displays through the booth's bay window. The blue line representing Serpent's orbit slowly extended itself across the map of the lunar surface. In a corner of the display was a six-figure number indicating the Earth–moon distance in kilometers: 389,121.

Now everything was up to the probe, a machine about the size of a compact car, thirty Earth diameters away from Flight Control.
Not much to inspire confidence
, thought Sohya.

Suddenly the control room began to buzz. GNC began calling out updates.

“Losing telemetry. Readout interrupted.”

“Unable to access attitude control.”

INCO called, “Switching high gain to omni…No response. Unable to reestablish link with orbiter.”

Flight's response followed instantly. “Switch to CORE 3.”

“Roger, handing over from CORE 1 to CORE 3…We have contact!”

“Telemetry recovered.”

“Reacquired attitude control. Orbiter is responding to commands.” The controllers sounded relieved. Hibiki didn't relax.

“Confirm telemetry and go back to high gain. Support Room Two, troubleshoot CORE 1.”

The commotion died down, and tense silence reigned again. Sohya and the others exchanged glances—they had watched the short burst of activity with bated breath but did not fully understand what had just taken place.

“What's CORE 1?” asked Tae.

“It sounded like the communication link was broken. Shinji?”

“CORE 1 is a geostationary satellite that links the probe and Flight Control. There are three communications satellites giving full coverage of the moon. I guess there was a problem with one of them. Say, why don't we go in and ask?”

“Are you sure?” said Sohya. “That room's pretty crowded.”

“Why not? We're with the VIPs.”

Shinji looked over at Tae and Sennosuke, who blinked uncomprehendingly, then glanced at each other shyly.

“Grandfather, we should have ringside seats.”

“All right, as long as we're not in the way.”

With Shinji in the lead, the group headed toward the door leading to the control room. They showed their IDs to security and passed through. The journalists watching them go fumed with envy.

Shinji approached Hibiki, who was sitting in the last row of control positions. “Can we ask you a question?”

“Hold it.” Hibiki held up a hand as he spoke into his headset. “Go ahead, Support…What do you mean, someone blanked our frequency? Cut the crap. Who'd be jamming us? Rerun the diagnostics!” he shouted into his headset, then glared at Shinji. “If I had the budget, I'd hire a public affairs officer,” he muttered. “What is it?”

“Is there a problem with CORE?”

“We don't know whether it's a malfunction yet. But the probe is fine. Don't worry.” Nicknamed “the Japanese Gene Kranz,” Hibiki had worked on the H-IIC rocket and was one of TGT's most seasoned flight directors.

“Serpent's telemetry was interrupted, so we switched to a different frequency. That didn't help, so we tried a different comm sat and recovered the link. There are always two CORE satellites available at any time. Even if we lost all three, we have a ground link. There's nothing to worry about.”

“Okay, thanks.” As Shinji spoke, one of the controllers put a hand on Hibiki's shoulder and pointed at the console.

“Um-hm…what? Goddard Space Flight Center? The Americans?” Hibiki stiffened. The console phone was buzzing. Baffled, he picked up the receiver. Apparently it was an outside call. The conversation was short, with no visual. The call ended, and Hibiki slammed the receiver into its cradle. “Those bastards! Who do they think they are?”

“What happened?” asked Shinji in surprise. The other controllers swiveled in their chairs and looked questioningly at Hibiki. He ignored them and roared into his headset.

“Support Two! Cancel CORE 1 troubleshoot. Resume normal operation…What? I don't know. Maybe aliens are messing with the probe!” Hibiki lowered his voice. “Keep this quiet for now,” he said to Shinji. “We've just been treated to a NASA prank. That was Goddard Space Flight Center.”

Shinji stared at him, mouth agape. Hibiki seemed ready to bite the mic off his headset. “They used a satellite in CORE 1's line of sight to jam our signal.”

“Can they do that?” asked Shinji.

“It's not hard if they pump out enough power on a frequency close to ours. Ever listen to the radio next to a freeway? You get a lot of interference from CB traffic. It's the same thing. All they have to do is point a high-gain antenna on one of their ATDRS comm sats at CORE. To change the satellite's attitude, they just use their gyros. No need to waste propellant.”

“Yes, but…can they
do
that?” Normally mild-mannered Shinji's expression was uncharacteristically severe. “Serpent is entering its most critical phase. Messing with our communications now could blow the mission!”

“No. The interference only lasted a few seconds. And they just hinted at the solution. Of course, they knew we'd have it fixed by now. But just in case we couldn't recover the signal, they wanted to make sure we knew how—without admitting anything, of course.”

“But why?”

“I told you. It was a prank.” Hibiki frowned and muttered, “Probably a test of our emergency-response capability. They've been guiding spacecraft a couple of generations longer than we have, so they gave us a poke just to see how we took it. That's bad enough, but what really burns me is how soft the poke was. They must think we're amateurs!”

Shinji and Sohya exchanged glances. Tae was confused. “Does this kind of thing happen often? Interfering with another nation's space missions? If they pushed it too far, a huge amount of work could be wasted. It seems like a terrible thing to do.”

“Don't forget—America's space program started out as a missile program.” Hibiki looked weary. “All the major space powers' rocketry started with the military. The Soviets even put a heavy machine gun on one of their manned spacecraft. If they wanted to, these guys could attack us.”

“Isn't that something that went out with the Cold War?” said Shinji.

“We're in a cold war right now with our competitors. The prize is the moon's water.” Hibiki's words pointed to another problematic aspect of the mission. Building a moon base was not something that everyone everywhere would necessarily welcome. Certain parties with vested interests were already uncomfortable, if not in open opposition. There was even some opposition to TGT's engine technology, since many nations were eagerly working to develop new, cheaper launch vehicles using TROPHY.

“Don't forget, we're going after a gold mine here…Okay, we're getting close. Take a seat in the corner over there.”

Hibiki broke off the conversation and turned to his console. Sohya sighed. “A gold mine. I guess he's right. The only reason we're going through the trouble of sending a probe is to find water. It's ironic. NASA just showed how important that is.”

“If Serpent brings back samples, I bet they offer us a million dollars for them.”

“No way. Ten kilos is all Serpent can carry. And we're paying for it.”

“I'm paying for it, actually,” said Sennosuke with an innocent air. He laughed quietly and turned back to the mission screens.

Serpent was scheduled to bring back no more than ten kilograms of lunar material—a stark testament to the difficulty posed by a round-trip to the moon.

Eve I was forty-one meters long and weighed 148 tons fully loaded. It was capable of carrying fifty tons of payload into low earth orbit, ten times as much as other vehicles of similar size. For lunar orbit, its payload was ten tons. But since this was Eve's first launch, the payload was limited to 20 percent of maximum: two tons. That determined Serpent's total weight and the payload it could ferry back to Earth.

Half the probe's weight was accounted for by the orbital module. This was the heart of the probe, containing the satellite bus—power supply, communications gear, and attitude controls—as well as the engine, propellant for insertion into lunar orbit, a small relay subsatellite christened Figu, and a remote-sensing system for surveying the lunar surface. Using the capabilities of this module, Serpent made several passes over the south pole, using lasers and a spectrometer to pinpoint promising locations for water ice.

The remaining ton of mass was accounted for by the landing module. After the landing area was selected, this module would separate from the orbital module, maintain communication with Earth via Figu, and land on the moon.

Half of the landing module's mass was propellant: nitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine. This would allow the module to hover over the surface and carry out a more detailed search for the best landing area. Once the area was selected, the module would fire its engine, lower itself to the surface, and collect samples.

The mission's goal was to explore the nature of the ice-bearing material. It was virtually certain ice would be found, but its form was unknown. Water molecules deposited over hundreds of millions of years might be distributed like snow or as frozen lakes with an overblanket of regolith. It might be buried deep beneath the surface or mixed with particles of regolith in a kind of permafrost. It might even lie in scattered basins separated by tens of kilometers free of ice. Scientists had proposed a variety of such scenarios. Before the water could be utilized, Serpent had to determine which if any of these models was correct.

Great care had been taken to configure the landing module so it could return with samples regardless of the nature of the ice deposits. First, Serpent had to touch down on an ice deposit. To ensure this, it was equipped with active sensors in everything from microwave to infrared frequencies, and it was equipped with drills that would allow it to access ice on, as well as below, the surface. To prevent the torque of drilling from rotating the lander in the weak gravity, the drills would operate simultaneously. If one of them were to break, a sample could still be obtained. Even if drilling proved impossible, a contingency sampler—a collection bucket fired onto the surface with a small explosive charge and then reeled back with a wire—could recover a sample by scraping the surface.