Энди Вейр - The Martian

“You’re sending him to space under a tarp.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Like a hastily loaded pick up truck.”

“Yeah. Can I go on?”

“Sure, can’t wait.”

“We’ll also have him remove the back panel of the pressure vessel. It’s the only other panel he can remove with the tools on-hand. Also, we’re getting rid of the auxiliary fuel pump. Sad to see it go, but it weighs too much for its usefulness. And we’re nixing a Stage One engine.”

“An engine?”

“Yeah. The Stage One booster works fine if one engine goes out. It’ll save us a huge amount of weight. Only during the Stage One ascent, but still. Pretty good fuel savings.”

Bruce fell silent.

“That it?” Venkat asked.

“Yeah.”

Venkat sighed. “You’ve removed most of the safety backups. What’s this do to the estimated odds of failure?”

“It’s about 4%.”

“Jesus Christ.” Venkat said. “Normally we’d never even consider something that risky.”

“It’s all we’ve got, Venk,” Bruce said. “We’ve tested it all out and run simulations galore. We should be ok if everything works the way its supposed to.”

“Yeah. Great.” Venkat said.

[08:41]MAV: You fucking kidding me?

[09:55]HOUSTON: Admittedly, they are very invasive modifications, but they have to be done. The procedure doc we sent has instructions for each of these steps with tools you have on hand. Also, you’ll need to start electrolyzing water to get the hydrogen for the fuel plant. We’ll send you procedures for that shortly.

[09:09]MAV: You’re sending me into space in a convertible.

[09:24]HOUSTON: There will be Hab canvas covering the holes. It will provide enough aerodynamics in Mars’s atmosphere.

[09:38]MAV: So it’s a ragtop. Much better.

On the way here, in my copious free time, I designed a “workshop.” I figured I’d need space to work on stuff without having to wear an EVA suit. I devised a brilliant plan whereby the current bedroom would become the new home of the Regulator and Oxygenator, and the now-empty trailer would become my workshop.

It’s a stupid idea and I’m not doing it.

All I need is a pressurized area that I can work in. I somehow convinced myself that the bedroom wasn’t an option because it’s a hassle to get stuff into it. But it won’t be that bad.

It attaches to the rover airlock, so the only way to get stuff in is annoying. Bring the stuff into the rover, attach the bedroom to the airlock from the inside, inflate it, bring the stuff in to the bedroom. I’ll also have to empty the bedroom of all tools and equipment to fold it up any time I need to do an EVA.

So yeah, it’ll be annoying, but all it costs me is time. And I’m actually doing well on that front. I have 43 more sols before Hermes flies by. And looking at the procedure NASA has in mind for the modifications, I can take advantage of the MAV itself as a workspace.

The lunatics at NASA have me doing all kinds of rape to the MAV, but I don’t have to open the hull till the end. So the first thing I’ll do is clear out a bunch of clutter, like chairs and control panels and the like. Once they’re out, I’ll have a lot of room in there to work.

But I didn’t do anything to the soon-to-be-mutilated MAV today. Today was all about system checks. Now that I’m back in contact with NASA, I have to go back to being all “safety first.” Strangely, NASA doesn’t have total faith in my kludged-together rover or my method of piling everything into the trailer. They had me do a full systems check on every single component.

Everything’s still working fine, though it’s wearing down. The Regulator and Oxygenator are less than peak efficiency (to say the least) and the trailer leaks some air every day. Not enough to cause problems, but it’s not a perfect seal. NASA’s pretty uncomfortable with it, but we don’t have any other options.

Then, they had me run a full diagnostic on the MAV. That’s in much better shape. Everything’s sleek and pristine and perfectly functional. I’d almost forgotten what new hardware even looks like.

Pity I’m going to tear it apart.

“You killed Watney,” Lewis said.

“Yeah,” Martinez said, scowling at his monitor. The words “Collision with Terrain” blinked accusingly.

“I pulled a nasty trick on him,” Johanssen said. “I gave him a malfunctioning altitude readout and made engine 3 cut out too early. It’s a deadly combination.”

“Shouldn’t have been a mission failure,” Martinez said. “I should have noticed the readout was wrong. It was way off.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Lewis said. “That’s why we drill. You’ve still got three weeks to get it right.”

“Will do,” Martinez said.

“We only got a week of remote launch training,” Johanssen said. “It was only supposed to happen if we scrubbed before landing. We’d launch the MAV to have it act as a satellite. It was a cut-your-losses scenario.”

“It’s mission-critical now,” Lewis said. “So get it right.”

“Aye, Commander.” Martinez said.

“Resetting the Sim,” Johanssen said. “Anything specific you want to try?”

“Surprise me,” Martinez said.

Leaving the control room, Lewis made her way to the reactor. Climbing “up” the ladder toward the center of the ship, the centripetal force on her diminished to nearly zero as she reached the core. Vogel looked up from a computer console. “Commander?”

“How are the engines?” She asked, grabbing a wall-mounted handle to stay attached to the slowly turning room.

“All working within tolerance,” Vogel said. “I am now doing a diagnostic on the reactor. I am thinking that Johanssen is busy with the launching training. So perhaps I do this diagnostic for her.”

“Good idea,” Lewis said. “And how’s our course?”

“All is well,” Vogel said. “No adjustments necessary. We are still on track to planned trajectory within 4 meters.”

“Keep me posted if anything changes.”

“Ja, Commander.”

Floating to the other side of the core, Lewis took the other ladder out, again gaining gravity as she went “down”. She made her way to the Airlock 2 ready room.

Beck held a coil of metal wire in one hand and a pair of work gloves in the other. “Heya, Commander. What’s up?”

“I’d like to know your plan for recovering Mark.”

“Easy enough if the intercept is good,” Beck said. “I just finished attaching all the tethers we have into one long line. It’s 214 meters long. I’ll have the MMU pack on, so moving around will be easy. I can get going up to around 10 meters per second safely. Any more and I risk breaking the tether if I can’t stop in time.”

“How fast a relative velocity can you handle, you think?”

“You mean once I get to Mark? I can grab the MAV easily at 5 meters per second. 10 meters per second is kind of like jumping on to a moving train. Anything more than that and I might miss.”

“So, including the MMU safe speed, we need to get within 20 meters per second of his velocity.”

“And the intercept has to be within 214 meters,” Beck said. “Pretty narrow margin of error.”

“We’ve got a lot of leeway,” Lewis said. “The launch will be 52 minutes before the intercept and it takes 12 minutes. As soon as Mark’s S2 engine cuts out we’ll know our intercept point and velocity. If we don’t like it, we’ll have 40 minutes to correct. Our engine’s 2 millimeters per second may not seem like much, but in 40 minutes it can move us up to 5.7 kilometers.”

“Good,” Beck said. “And 214 meters isn’t a hard limit, per se.”

“Yes it is,” Lewis corrected.