Star of Fire 火星 Mars Space People

Tranquilizers

The Americans received information that a habitat was being prepared for a launch to Mars in Kazakhstan and most likely would be manned. The information was met by skepticism by the rank-and-file workers at NASA, but not by the Road Runner astronauts. The Chinese had the ERV design and had come a long way in the last few years.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Dr. Heng and Captain Wu had organized the biological data from Mars and developed an itemized plan for pursuing the research on Mars when the Penguin got there. Dr. Heng surprised Captain Wu by asking if she could work with her at the volunteer clinic. She confessed that she had worked as a prostitute in her village before being accepted into medical school. Dr. Heng was oblivious to the fact that the shape of her hips was what is called voluptuous in the western world and would turn any male’s head when she entered the room. Compounding the problem, Dr. Heng’s body exuded an aroma that the male subconscious senses as that of a female ready for impregnation. Captain Wu considered Heng’s request for several weeks before consulting with General Zhou. Zhou thought that Captain Wu needed an assistant and that she should consider using Dr. Heng, if she wanted to. Zhou had overlooked the fact that he didn’t have a replacement for Captain Wu. The rest of his organization was a defense in depth, with everybody training his or her replacement. Zhou considered Wu irreplaceable.
Wu wondered, what had Dr. Heng heard about her in the rumor mill or from her superiors?

Delays, Holds

General Zhou woke up in a cold sweat; he was starting to get a bad feeling about the Penguin. Not only were there too many cooks in the kitchen, there were too many chefs. The integration of the Penguin hadn’t been completed and checked out in China and the Russians seemed to be rushing the testing of the Energia.
Sergei had been the first to see that the Russians would only concentrate on preparing the Penguin launch vehicle after the Blue Jay had been launched. His intelligence-gathering visit to the Pravda, the bar frequented by Anatoly’s old launch crew, highlighted the problems.
Alex, a cryogenic fuels transfer specialist, said with a wink, “I know where Anatoly is and where you’re going. My crew will check out your bird personally.”
Alex shrugged his shoulders. “The launch of the Penguin vehicle, the dodo, is another story.”
Sergei passed this information along to General Kravensky, who received the intelligence without comment. Zhou and Captain Wu stayed in Kazahkstan after the Sparrow launch to coordinate the launch preparation for the Penguin with the Russians.
The life support system in the Penguin needed to be replaced since the system had been a training unit and was showing wear and tear. The Russians revealed that the escape rocket was a refurbished unit that had been test-fired thirty times. Launchitis prevailed. Zhou communicated his concerns with Anatoly on Mars and Sergei in transit to Mars.
Zhou decided to postpone the Penguin launch until 2014, personally assuming the responsibility for the delay. His superiors in Beijing found the two-year delay and the unrecoverable deposit penalty unacceptable. Their solution was to put more people to work on preparing the Penguin and approving supplemental funding to the Russians to allow for overtime work. Zhou tried to have his crew replaced with taikonauts, but even the taikonaut leadership admitted that they weren’t ready to fly the Penguin with any degree of confidence.

Intervention from above

Anatoly immediately confirmed to General Kravenko that Zhou wasn’t a person to lose his nerve; if Zhou said NOGO, it should be a NOGO. General Kravenko ordered one of his pilots to park a trainer on the taxiway entrance of taxiway B on runway 03 East pointing west. The pilot knew the drill. As the countdown continued, the sensed winds slowly creep up to the 25-knot limitation. The pilot varied the thrust on his engine to simulate a wind shear condition. The launch commander aborted the launch due to the high winds impinging on the remote anemometer. The Chinese observers were disappointed but philosophical about the delay. The fuel requirements for a launch continued to rise until it became obvious that the Penguin habitat mission would need to be scrubbed until the next launch opportunity to Mars. Bad weather finally eliminated all hope of launching in the current window.
The lack of readiness among the taikonauts had become obvious. Zhou received reports that the taikonauts were demanding training, like the Americans received, from his people. Yao Peng told the Penguin Evaluation Committee that it was time to admit that the taikonauts were playing catch-up with the Mars mission. Yao said that he had no problem with the training he had received from his mother and would be happy to be helped by Zhou’s taikonauts. Some of Yao’s friends openly commented that they were afraid that he’d gone native, having been around Zhou’s people too long.
Zhou received additional funding and engineers; Zhou’s old friend, the cosmologist/poet, Sheng Zhi was released from house arrest. Sheng’s pitch-black hair had become a motley gray and he had changed from being an optimist to a pessimist, full of predictions of doom and gloom.
The launch crews discovered after demating the Penguin that a set of the explosive bolts for separating the Penguin from the Mars-transition stage was miswired. The miswiring was corrected but the miswiring information was not passed on to the Chinese or Americans. The Russians discarded the old solid-state strap on rockets – their fuel was too old to be reliable.

Sparrow

The Sparrow ERV arrived in Martian orbit two months after the Road Runner because of its slower, low-energy transfer orbit. Logically, the Sparrow should land wherever the Road Runner landed, providing the primary vehicle for the astronauts to return to Earth.

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