And the truth was, the three of them didn’t really get along. York never said much to anyone, Stone was too much the USAF goddamn straight-arrow commander to get involved, and Gershon himself said far too much, all the time.
But it didn’t bother Gershon. Or his crewmates, he suspected. All the psychiatric team-building stuff was so much horseshit, to Gershon. They weren’t on this mission to make friends with each other; they were there to fly to Mars. And to achieve that they would overcome a little interpersonal friction.
As long as a man got a little time to himself, it was no big deal.
He worked steadily through the gauges and dials and computer screens in front of him, and compared them with the expected readings printed out on his teletyped checklist. His headset was voice-activated; he’d fixed it so that the Mozart stopped playing when he spoke.
Gershon liked working with Apollo hardware.
The basic design was antiquated, but it was fifteen years since its last major failure, on Apollo 13. Anyway, there wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with “antiquated.” To a pilot, it was the difference between a development vehicle and an operational bird; for “antiquated” read “proven.” In Gershon’s view it would have been a crying shame to have abandoned the Apollo line back in the early 1970s and try to build a newfangled spaceplane. Nice as the shuttle would have been to fly.
The enhancements Rockwell had applied over the years had turned the basic configuration into a flexible, robust space truck. Outwardly the ship stuck nose first to the front of the Mission Module Docking Adapter looked much the same as every other Apollo which had ever flown: it was made up of the classic configuration, the cylindrical Service Module, with its big propulsion system engine bell stuck on the back, and the squat cone of the Command Module on top. But this Apollo — called a “Block V” design by the Rockwell engineers who had built her — was put together very differently from the early models, the old Block IIs, which had flown to the Moon in the 1960s, and even from the later Block III and IV Earth-orbital ferries.
The first lunar missions had been only two weeks in length. But the Ares Apollo was going to have to survive eighteen months of soak in deep space. And the temperature extremes Apollo would endure, as Ares flew across the Solar System, were much greater than on any lunar flight. So most of Apollo’s main systems had been redesigned from the floor up.
The Service Module had more reaction control gas and less main engine propellant. The old Service Modules had vented excess water, produced by the onboard batteries; the Ares model stored its water in tanks, to avoid having frozen ice particles drifting around near the cluster. The whole configuration had more batteries, and there was more stowage area and locker space in the Command Module. There was an atmosphere interchange duct in the upper docking assembly, to cycle air from the Mission Module into the Command Module. And so on.
Reliability was essential on long-duration missions. Many of Apollo’s systems had redundant backups — straightforward copies, to be substituted in case of a failure — but the old triple-redundancy design paradigm they’d used to get to the Moon wouldn’t work, it had been found, on long-duration missions. Enough redundancy to achieve an acceptably low level of risk over such a span of time would have resulted in a spacecraft of immense weight and complexity.
So the designers had gotten smarter. In addition to simple redundancy, some functions could be performed by dissimilar components, or by components from different subsystems, to reduce the chance of a single failure mode knocking out many functions altogether — as had happened in Apollo 13. And the maintenance capabilities of the crew weren’t ignored, either. The whole ship was more modular and accessible than in its first design, so that components could be reached, and repaired or replaced comparatively easily. There were also isolation valves, switches, test equipment, and fault diagnosis tools. Some of the components contained their own BITEs, microelectronic built-in self-test units.
Hauling an Apollo all the way to Mars also provided some abort options. On return to Earth the Apollo, with the Mission Module, was due to be inserted into a highly elliptical orbit around the planet: two hundred by a hundred thousand miles, a swooping curve that would take the stack halfway out to the Moon and back, an orbit accessible to Ares at a relatively low expenditure of fuel. The Command Module would be able to take them down to the surface of Earth from such a trajectory; the reentry heating would be less than a return from the Moon. And if Apollo were to fail, the crew could survive in its high orbit until rescue came, in the form of another five-man stretched Apollo.
If they couldn’t make Earth orbit at all — for instance if the J-2S, the single engine of the final MS-IVB booster stage, were to fail — they could attempt a direct entry from the interplanetary coast. The heat shield on the Command Module’s underside had been thickened and toughened up, so that it would at least give them a fighting chance of surviving a direct reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The velocity would only be around 15 percent faster than a lunar return.
And, if the Mission Module’s life support were to fail in-flight, it would even be possible for the crew to retreat to the Command Module and use it as a shelter. A lifeboat. Just then, with Gershon alone in it, the Command Module seemed pretty roomy; it wasn’t like that with three of them aboard, and things would be pretty tough if they had to spend weeks, or even months, cooped up in there.
But it was better than dying.
Every aspect of the mission had been designed with failures in mind, to give options at every point, to leave no “dead zones” where there was no abort capability. The designers had almost succeeded.
Gershon hummed along with Mozart as he worked.
This fifty-day checkup was a chore, of course, but everything on the fucking flight was a chore for Gershon. And it was the same on every long-duration spaceflight.
Gershon’s moment was going to come when he took that MEM down through the thin air of Mars itself. But he’d basically be working at peak effectiveness for, what? — forty, fifty minutes? — out of a flight that was going to last a year and a half. Not much of a payload ratio, Ralph. But that was okay. It was a bargain that Gershon was prepared to accept. Because there he was, on an odyssey to Mars.
The first time he’d come across the name “Ares” had been in a battered old book he’d picked up from a dime store in Mason. It was a collection of science-fiction stories, by someone called Stanley Weinbaum. The title story was “A Martian Odyssey,” and it featured a ship called Ares and four men exploring the surface of an exotic, mysterious Mars. Weinbaum’s magical words were alive in his memory, still, after all those years; it was as if he could feel the stiff, yellowing pages of that battered old paperback in his hands.
When he’d heard they were going to use Weinbaum’s name for the mission, Gershon had whooped.
He’d worked his way through the science-fiction canon as he grew older, and he’d ridden many other ships to Mars. Bradbury had been elusive, with his hinting descriptions of silver locusts — pulsing with fire, swarming with men — falling to the surface of a beautiful, inhabited planet. Clarke’s Ares, on the other hand, had been described in great detail. It was a dumbbell shape of two huge spheres, separated by a hundred yards of tubeway. The rear contained atomic motors — serviced by AEC robots — and the leading sphere was living quarters, with cabins and a huge dining room and an observation gallery…