“Can you use your return capsule?”
“No.”
The Mirusha had an ancient Soyuz module attached. The Soyuz spacecraft was, according to the design specifications, the lifeboat that the crew was to use to return to Earth in the event of a failure. But the Soyuz had been designed for only one year in orbit.
“We have been using it for junk storage,” the Russian said. “We have been removing out the junk and try to power up the systems. No is working.” Long pause. “Is designed for one year in orbit. Is now twelfth year. Nothing works. Is junk.”
“Better than suffocating.”
“No,” the Russian replied. The signal was beginning to acquire static. “Cannot undock, my friend. Is welded to Mirusha. Not even big hammer can work to undock.”
“Signal’s breaking up, buddies,” Ryan said. “I’d better sign off. Hang in there, buddies.”
“Da,” the Russian replied. “We will hang here. Where else we hang, no?”
And then there was nothing but static.
“Passed over the horizon,” Ryan said. “If we had a joint data-relay agreement, I could relay communications, but as it is, that’s it for today.”
Radkowski hadn’t realized how bad the Russian’s situation was. But there was nothing they could do about it, he knew. The Russians would have to solve their own problems. “You talk to them every day?” he asked. It was an odd hobby, talking to the other space station over what was, essentially, an amateur radio link, but there were no regulations against it.
“When there’s a line-of-sight window,” Ryan said. “I like Russians. They’re the friendliest people in the world. And their space station may be small and cramped and low-budget, but it’s still a space station, and it’s great that they’ve managed to keep it going, with a budget of old paperclips and broken rubber bands.”
He paused for a moment, and then added, “If nobody else is going to do it, I will.”
“You will what?” Radkowski asked “Why, I’ll save them.”
Radkowski chuckled. “Right,” he said. “You do that.”
Garbage is a big deal on a space station.
Garbage accumulates. Food containers and byproducts, used and reused pieces of paper, human waste, broken equipment, worn-out underwear, used chemicals, filled barf-bags, shaving bags, and vacuum-cleaner bags, sanitary napkins, used-up sponges, biological sample containers, dead petri dish cultures, used personal hygiene supplies, wastewater too contaminated to recycle—garbage accumulates. With every docking of a logistics transfer vehicle, more material is brought up to the space station, and all of it, eventually, becomes garbage.
Some of it can be returned to Earth with the shuttles. But more refuse and wastewater is generated on the space station than can be returned to Earth in the empty space in a personnel transfer module.
Garbage can’t be just thrown overboard; garbage tossed out a hatch would accumulate in the same orbit as the station, turning into lethal debris at the orbital velocity of 17,000 miles per hour. Not even the wastewater can be vented; one of the benefits of the station is to use the high-vacuum environment of space, and a wastewater dump would contaminate the environment near the station, destroying its usefulness.
Instead, garbage is lowered on a string.
The principle is simple. A month’s load of garbage is placed into a plastic disposal bag, which is attached to one end of a spool of thin super-fiber. The garbage load is dropped out the nadir hatch and nudged infinitesimally backward in orbit. A satellite in its own right, but tethered to the spacecraft by the superfiber cable, the garbage-satellite drops into a lower, and hence faster orbit. It moves ahead of the station and unwinds the superfiber behind it. A brake on the superfiber reel pulls back on the garbage, and the more the garbage is pulled backward, the lower the orbit it drops into. At its full extension of twenty kilometers, the garbage satellite hangs directly below the space station. Now the superfiber cable is pulling straight outward on the garbage. And then the cable is cut.
When the cable is cut, the garbage satellite drops into an orbit lower yet. The orbit, in fact, has a perigee which is lower than the space station’s orbit by exactly seven times the length of the tether. Left to itself, the garbage would diverge from the space station by a hundred and forty kilometers. But an orbit a hundred and forty kilometers below the space station skims through the Earth’s atmosphere. Anything in such an orbit will burn up.
And so, in the form of a briefly flaring meteor, the garbage is returned to the Earth it came from. It was a far more efficient way to deorbit garbage than using a rocket; no fuel is needed, and the superfiber tether was a low-technology system no more complicated than a fishing reel.
John Radkowski was in command of the station and had just finished running a garbage dump. It was one of the more interesting duties, actually; if performed incorrectly, the superfiber cable could snag or could go into an oscillation such as the “skip-rope” mode or, in the worst-case scenario, the brakes could fail and the tether deploy too quickly, rubber-band itself back into the station, and hit any of a million possible damage points with a two-ton wrecking ball of garbage.
When he had completed the garbage dump and returned to the lounge area, he found Ryan Martin and several others already there, engaged in an animated discussion.
“Hi, Ryan,” he said.
“Radkowski,” Ryan said. He was wearing a T-shirt that read: HIGH ENERGY PHYSICISTS HAVE A STRANGE CHARM. He floated with the tip of one foot hooked under a loop to keep him from drifting away. He was oriented sideways to Radkowski’s local vertical; it didn’t seem to bother him, although Radkowski still had trouble adapting to it. “What do you think?”
“About what?”
“The rescue, of course.”
Radkowski blinked. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The Russians, man,” Ryan said. “The cosmonauts. We’re going to rescue them.”
Radkowski shrugged. “No, of course not,” he said.
Ryan Martin shook his head. His body rotated in counterpoint, and the foot he had hooked under a restraint loop popped loose. He started drifting. “If we don’t rescue them, it’s damn certain that nobody else will,” he said. “They’re leaking. They’ve got five, maybe six days. Who’s going to rescue them that fast? Not the Russians—that last blast tore the hell out of their pad; it will take them six months to get back operational. Not the U.S.—we have only four shuttles; two of them are up here with us, and we can’t get them down and then back up again that fast. The other two are in for refurbishment; they’re going nowhere. Not the Brazilians—they can’t hit that orbit from their launch site. So, if we don’t save them, then who will?”
“Don’t be ignorant,” Radkowski said. “Can’t get there from here. They’re in a completely different orbital plane.”
Ryan smiled. “The crew return vehicle can do it.”
Radkowski shook his head so vigorously that he had to hold on to a loop to keep from moving. “Not enough delta-vee for a plane change. Not by half.”
Ryan Martin nodded. “Nope. So we have to be clever. We have to be very, very clever.”
Ryan Martin, as it turned out, was clever.
The crew return vehicle was a tiny, four-person lifting body. It had been designed to be an ambulance, an emergency way to land an injured astronaut fast. It had a rocket engine for the deorbit, but not enough fuel to make the plane change needed to get into the Russian orbit. Plane change maneuvers need a tremendous amount of fuel; even if every drop of rocket fuel in the space station could be used, it would not be enough to get the little vehicle into the right orbital plane.