Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

“Hold it. What about the Shoemakers? Henry’s unmanned sample-return probes. Two flight models and a fully functional test model, now sitting in a white room at JPL, unused, cancelled, requirements deleted.

Frank put her through another of those long silences of his. Then he said, “In fact, the Shoemaker design borrowed from some of the conceptual work we did on the manned lander. Building the structure around the tanks, for instance. But now — shit, you’re talking about using the Shoemakers to put humans on the surface?”

“Why not? Those sample-return packages must be heavy. The mass estimates are—”

“Comparable.” Frank pulled his lip thoughtfully.

“But,” Jays said, “those robot probes are designed to land themselves. What’s the pilot going to do?”

Geena took a deep breath. Here I go breaking another piece of NASA conditioning. “Jays, it doesn’t matter. Not for this mission. If this would work, if the Shoemakers would get us there, we should accept giving up control.”

“Oh, sure. And would you fly this thing?” Jays asked. “Would you risk your ass on some hacked-over piece of shit that was meant to be unmanned, ride it down in your space suit, without even piloting it, for Christ’s sake?”

Geena thought it over. Realistically, if I push this through, then this isn’t an academic question. It really could be me. With no abort options or training or — She forced a grin. “Hell, yes. Wouldn’t you?”

Jays was thoughtful. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “That’s the honest truth. I don’t know. And I’ve been there.”

“We could probably give you some control,” said Frank. “I’m not too familiar with the Shoemaker’s specs… some kind of override option during the final powered descent. Just in case you found yourself coming down on a crater wall or some such. But—” He shook his head. “I got to tell you I don’t see any way we could get those crates man-rated. Not in the timescales you’re talking about.”

“Well, I accept that,” Geena said. “Here’s another break with the culture. This isn’t going to be a safe mission.”

“That’s for sure. Just figuring out the abort options will be—”

“There may be no abort options, for long stretches of the profile,” Geena said, “But it doesn’t matter. Not this time.”

Frank eyed her. “It seems that somebody wants to go to the Moon, real bad.”

She said, “We’re all going to have to think out of the box on this. If you can make this fly, we’ll go anyhow, and accept the risk.”

Jays thumped the table. “Damn it, I’ve waited since 1961 to hear someone say that. If we’d been grown-up about the risks, accepted our casualties, we’d be orbiting fucking Jupiter by now.”

Geena saw Frank blanch. It was a common enough view, but Frank had spent a working lifetime being coached in the opposite direction. She leaned forward to cut Jays off.

“Suppose we can make the lander work. What about the rest of it?”

Frank looked warily at Jays, before turning back to Geena. “Well, we’re still in trouble. We never did build that handy Orbital Transfer Vehicle, so we got nothing to push us from Earth to Moon.”

“But we do have the PAM-Ds,” said Geena. “And the IUS.” The Payload Assist Modules and Inertial Upper Stages were small boosters carried into orbit in a Shuttle’s payload bay, to boost satellites to geosynchronous orbit, or send interplanetary probes on their way.

Jays laughed. “The ‘I’ in IUS used to stand for ‘Interim’, because it was only supposed to be operational until the OTV came along. When they found out they would be flying it in the 1990s, they figured they’d better change the name.”

Frank said, “The PAMs won’t work. Sorry. They’re spinners. That is, they depend on spinning for stabilization and thrust-vector control.”

“And we couldn’t modify them—”

“Not quickly. Besides, the performance of those solids sucks. It would make for a huge trans-lunar injection propellant load. You’d need a lot of IUSs to—”

Geena said, “What other upper stage could we use?”

Frank eyed her sceptically. “That’s the spirit. But I think we have a hole here. What we need is a Service Module like Apollo’s, or an OTV, but we don’t have either of those.”

Jays growled, “ We don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“We aren’t the only players here. I remember the security briefings we got during Apollo. I’m talking about “67 or “68. The CIA got worried the Russkies were getting close to a manned circumlunar flight, because they launched this thing called a Zond and reentered it. That was why we bumped Apollo 8 up to a lunar orbit mission; it was slated as an Earth-orbit flight.”

“Oh,” Frank was nodding now. “Oh, you’re right. The Russians were testing an upgraded lunar-mission Soyuz, complete with a new Service Module stage called a Block-D. They launched it on a Proton booster. It all fit in with their lunar landing plans, that they scrapped when their N-l booster kept blowing up on them.”

Geena smiled. “And the Block-D—”

“Is still flying. They use it as an upper stage on their commercial Proton launcher.”

“And so—”

Frank started to sound quietly excited. “And so we could use that, along with a beefed-up Soyuz, as the equivalent of the old Apollo Command-Service Module. In fact, since the Block-D is a kerosene-oxygen, it should have a better performance than Apollo did. For the old Zond missions the stage must have imparted about ten thousand feet per sec. With the added mass of our lander outbound—” He scribbled on another napkin. “You’re looking at plenty of gas for both the lunar orbit insertion and Earth-return burns.” He looked at Geena, eyes wide. “What are we missing? Suddenly this is too easy.”

Jays nodded vigorously. “Soyuz to the Moon. Has a ring to it, doesn’t it? Of course they’re still flying that baby up to Station, but it’s an Apollo-era ship. Shit, I think it predates Apollo.” He laughed. “And believe me, if you find yourself flying one of those, it will make riding down to the Moon without a cockpit look like a cakewalk.”

Geena said, “So now we just have to figure how to get that combination on the way to the Moon.”

Jays said, “The highest performance stage we’ve got is the Centaur.”

Frank shook his head. “Won’t work. Liquid hydrogen. It would take a couple of them — and we’d have to launch on Titan IVs — but anyhow the LH2 on the first one would boil away before we could launch the second. Those stages are only designed for a couple of hours on orbit.”

“How about the IUS?” Jays asked. “They can go up on Shuttles or Titans.”

Frank pulled his lip. “Their performance is poor compared to the Centaur.”

Jays grinned. “So take more. Four, maybe?”

Frank scribbled quickly. “Actually, three would do it. Hmm. I guess you could launch the first on a Shuttle, second on a Titan, and the third on another Shuttle, then use that orbiter to assemble the stages.”

Geena said, “And the Soyuz—”

Frank put down his pen. “Easy. Send it up unmanned with the Block-D on a Proton, like they did with Zond. Autodock to Station—”

“We’ll need the Progress autodock module, then.”

“Yeah. Transfer the crew from Station. Then haul over to the IUS assembly, dock — and go to the Moon…”

Geena asked, “You think the Russians would agree?”

Jays said, “You told us you could command the resources this would need. Anyhow,” he said, eyeing her, “I hear you have contacts of your own over there. Maybe that could, umm, smooth the way.”