David Golemon - Legacy

At 9:10 in the morning California time, the press room was full of reporters, not because of the excitement of America’s robotic return to the Moon, but simply because it was a very slow news day. As everyone watched the rovers on four different high-definition monitors arrayed around the large press room, they saw one view go askew. The press on hand had no idea that Ringo was in the midst of what Pasadena called “a hissy fit.” Inside the mission control room, a hundred men and women who had worked on the Peregrine mission for the past ten years watched as a problem they didn’t need with the press on hand started happening right before their eyes.

“Ooh, we have Ringo going off mission here,” said one of the men watching the telemetry board in front of him instead of the video being broadcast. “Jesus, according to my telemetry he’s… oh, there he goes.”

Stan Nathan, the director of the mission, switched his view to that being broadcast by George, the closest beetle to Ringo. As he watched, he saw the 450-pound rover slowly start sliding off the edge of the crater.

“Becky, stop that damn thing,” Nathan said, trying to be as calm as he could. “If it gets down inside of there, we’ll never be able to get its telemetry. Those crater walls will stop any signal from getting to it. Hurry up, because Houston’s going to start screaming in just about one minute.”

Dr. Becky Gilickson, remote operator and programming technician in charge of Ringo, turned to her six-person team and frowned. There was nothing she could do. She tried sending out a command to reverse its track and override its program, but with the one-and-a-half-minute delay in communication, all she could do was watch as Ringo started a head-first run down the steep incline inside Shackleton Crater. Instead of typing in the remote command, she turned toward Nathan, who was standing in the middle of the darkened room.

“Flight, our command just hit Ringo, but it’s too late, he’s starting to slide. We recommend we run with it. If he tries to reverse track now at that speed he may roll over.”

Nathan hurriedly turned to the live shot of Ringo as it traversed the slope of the crater. For the moment it was running straight; its large six-limbed arms with the tri-rubber tracks seemed to be handling the rough terrain with ease.

“I concur. Let him go. I want a command sent now that once it hits the bottom of the crater I want it to turn-”

“Stan, Hugh Evans is on the line from Houston,” his assistant said as he looked up from the large phone console.

“Put him on speaker.”

“Stan, Hugh here,” said the senior flight director calling from his personal console at the Johnson Space Center. “Look, this could be very embarrassing. Let Ringo run and do not, I repeat, do not order it out of the crater. It’ll be down there, so let the press know that we decided to explore the base of Shackleton. Tell them it was my decision to send Ringo off mission, clear?”

Nathan was relieved that the flight director for the Peregrine mission had taken control. With the press watching this, it was a potential public relations disaster in the making. If they couldn’t control their robots, how the hell could they keep men alive out there?

“Clear. Ringo ’s running free. It looks like he’s going to make the half mile journey pretty quickly.”

“Okay, get your press people out there and explain that we intentionally sent Ringo off on its own to explore the inside of the crater, nothing more. That ought to keep the dogs away until we can figure out how to recover the rover.”

The phone line went dead as Nathan turned his attention back to George ’s video. The descending rover just went past its line of sight as it slipped and slid down the steep slope.

“Switch main viewer to Ringo so we can see what it sees.” Nathan turned to his left at the last telemetry station in the long row. “REMCOM, start getting a communications relay established between George, John, and Paul. We have to align them so we can continue to receive telemetry from the little guy once it hits bottom, because it’ll never be able to broadcast out of the damn hole.”

The remote control communications station began sending out signals interrupting the programming of the three remaining rovers. The scientists would introduce a “burp” in their existing program and send another order to span that gap. They would arrange the rovers around the edge of the crater to receive the telemetry signals from Ringo and then relay that signal to earth. It had never been done before, but that was the business they were in.

“Estimate thirty-five feet, plus or minus a foot, until Ringo hits bottom,” Communications called out. “Signal strength on telemetry is weak. Okay, signal lost at 0922 local time.”

“Come on people. Let’s get the rest of the Beatles in on this,” Nathan called out as he closed his eyes, hoping that Ringo didn’t go belly-up in the last thirty feet of its unscheduled walkabout.

“We have a patch through from Paul,” Communications said. “Okay, we now have video from Ringo… it stopped. It looks like-”

“The damn thing’s sideways-it’s hung up on something,” Nathan said angrily. He was trying his best not to take it out on his people.

On the monitor, the video streaming from Ringo showed the side of the crater. As they relayed a signal down into Shackleton from Paul, they ordered the camera to rotate 60 degrees. They wanted to see what they were hung up on before trying to extricate Ringo from its current 10 degree tilt position.

“Okay, at least we know it’s on the bottom and in one piece,” Nathan said as he stepped toward the large monitor, watching the area around the rover as it panned its view to accommodate its orders from Earth. “Goddamn big crater,” he mumbled as he looked at the darker than normal picture surrounding Ringo. “We must be in the lee of the crater’s northern wall.”

As the camera completed its 180-degree sweep, it stopped. Its lens was automatically trying to focus on something that would be oriented to its left side. It was obviously the obstacle that had arrested Ringo ’s run down the slope.

“Okay, there it is,” Nathan said, as he tried to get a clear picture. “Is that all we have on focus?” he asked.

“Without the external lighting, that’s it,” REMCOM said as he turned in his seat and looked at the flight director.

“Well, the batteries be damned,” he said, looking at the remote communications specialist. “We have to get Ringo into the sunlight anyway to charge the damn thing. Turn on external lighting and see what we’re snagged on,” Nathan said in frustration, because he knew battery life was real life when you’re on the Moon.

“Relaying the order,” REMCOM called out.

As they waited for the delay in communications, Nathan sat on the edge of one of the consoles and rubbed his face. He hoped this would be the only glitch of the mission, but he knew when you were dealing with robots and remote technology, anything could go wrong, so he figured this whole endeavor could take years off his life.

As everyone in mission control in both Pasadena and Houston watched, and with the press yawning, displaying their boredom in both press rooms, Ringo turned on the powerful floodlights rigged to the top of its camera tower. The lens refocused and the picture suddenly turned to red and blue.

“Color? What in the hell is color doing on the Moon?” one of the technicians said as she stood up to get a better view.

Of all the photos from the Apollo program and countless views from the Moon, with the exception of anything man-made or views of the Earth, there was never anything of color to be broadcast from the lunar surface, just the white, grays, and blacks of its geology. But here was Ringo, the little remote designed for the search and testing of water deposits, sending out a full color image of something that had reached out and grabbed it on its way into the crater.