Star of Fire 火星 Mars Space People

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Chapter 16. Gemini

Shanghai, 1986

Colonel Zhou looked over his new troops, twenty young girls wearing masks and sun goggles and covered head to toe in body gloves. Fate had determined that they would hide their appearance from human eyes. They all had simple nametags, displaying their choice of their Chinese family name or the Christian or western first names Zhou had given them. The girls had been raised in a commune and were four to eight years old. Were these girls the next human race or would they be feared, hunted, and killed by Homo sapiens? Zhou thought that his rivals had dumped the girls on him to scuttle any chance that he had for advancement in the military hierarchy. There had been talk about the mysterious Dragon Lady arranging for his assignment. Zhou didn’t resent the hand that Fate had dealt him. He trained his troops, especially the girls, to be military leaders, his secret weapon. The girls had been bred from a set of identical Chinese twin girls who had been subject to medical experiments by the Japanese to develop immunity to Asian diseases. Miraculously the twins had survived the intense radiation of the American nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and were repatriated by the Americans to Nanking. Further breeding to eliminate deleterious genes, and enhancing intelligence and endurance resulted in golden skin and hair and reptilian-like eyes. Zhou didn’t know if DNA from the radiation-resistant microbes of American nuclear power plants had been inserted into their genome, nor did he care. All of the attempts at creating male embryos failed.
Mong was the leader of the group. By Zhou’s design, she had trained two replacements for herself. Charon, one of the youngest girls became a team leader in Mong’s small group of five. Charon had shown a flair for system design and organization. She touched and felt mechanical things like boys do. General Zhou thought of the two young women as two beautiful beans from a single sweet coffee cherry. Sadly, squads of workers would never pamper them into sweet mellow Kona coffee. The Chinese astronauts, the taikonauts, were the traditional green tea. Zhou trusted common people – the taikonauts were a bunch of preppies - well-connected elitist bookworms. The colonists on Mars couldn’t initially support a privileged class. Zhou was old school and attached no stigma to the term girl, even though he was aware of the term’s political incorrectness in the not so mysterious West. Zhou’s people were down in the Chinese space pecking order, but he had more astronauts (people who had flown above the 100-kilometer von Kármán delineation for space), more rocket launches and more landings. Let the taikonauts fly in their air-conditioned simulators.
Adding to his problems was defending the politically unreliable engineers and scientists he had gotten temporarily released from prisons. Women drifted into his command starting rumors that he was running a private harem or even worse, a whorehouse. Many of the older villagers in the surrounding area believed the young girls were extraterrestrials or demons looking for souls to snag. To Zhou they were where it all began.

Beijing, 1995

The young Chinese medical student in labor, Liang, was a surrogate mother; she had been told that she was bearing a child for the wife of a high-ranking official who was unable to retain a child through gestation. Her compensation was payment of her remaining boarding fees and tuition at the Beijing Ching Wai Medical School.
The delivery was routine with only a local anesthetic, with a sudden silence interrupted by swearing from the attending obstetrician. The crying baby was bundled and carried away, the nurses indifferent to the request from the surrogate mother to see her child. Liang was only told that the baby was a perfectly healthy girl. The atmosphere in the delivery room was chilling, words of congratulations delivered by rote. Liang’s return to classes after a 4-month leave for a crisis in her family didn’t relieve her unease as she threw herself back into her studies. Was her daughter well and would her new parents treat her kindly?

Names and Gender

The Earth is female, a mother to all of mankind and life as we know it. Mars is masculine, aloof and to be feared more than loved – some would say like a father, especially if life on Earth had gotten a jump-start from microbes drifting in from Mars on meteors or alien tourists. Mysterious and smoldering Venus is most definitely a woman, perhaps of the type that young men pursue because their mothers have warned them about such women.
Pluto’s companion, Charon, discovered by James Christy up the hill from the Lowell Observatory at the Naval Observatory, is a faithful female companion, vulnerable and loyal. General Zhou gave the little girl who always stood distant from the others, observing everything, the western name of Charon. Charon soon orbited Mong and the binary planets stabilized. Stable as a rock, no nonsense Mong. Zhou wasn’t sure if Pluto had captured Charon or Charon had adopted Pluto. [The discovery of two additional though small satellites of Pluto suggests a creation of the moons by a collision mechanism similar to that, which created our own moon.]
The potato-shaped moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, Fear and Panic, were the hellions, Janice and Jane. Individually they would have tied up any parents; together, well, they were a handful. Janice and Jane were his prime suspects of being the perp(etrator)s in the incident when he had been hit by water balloons during his formal inspection of an elevator shaft in the dormitory. Payback is a bitch and he would pay the two back after they had suffered the fear of retribution and thought that they had escaped, even if they weren’t guilty. Such an act of revenge would please the girls. Phobos and Deimos also happened to be the best students of martial arts in the group; should this surprise him?
Zhou made the four oldest girls squad leaders. The squad leaders had red nametags; the remaining girls had been divided into two layers of skill levels by screening and had yellow and green tags. Zhou wanted the girls to gravitate to a natural order where a yellow-tagged girl would pair up with a green-tagged girl to form a team. A squad leader would acquire two pairs of girls. The organization was hierarchical, fluid and military. He had reserved the base swimming pool the whole evening for his private use during his initial face-to-face meeting with the girls. Security at the pool was increased and the girls replaced their uniforms and goggles with bathing suits.

Water is life

Zhou had a belief that water and the ocean was the mother of life and mankind. A whole person was at peace with water and did not fear even its dangerous nature; man could not breath its oxygen and its mass could crush man’s frail body. Rightly or wrongly, he believed that scuba diving was a good screening test for astronauts planning to go into the hostile environment of space. Water is a prerequisite for life.
The children milled around quietly and Zhou could sense their apprehension of him. They were wearing one-piece bathing suits, as varied in color as his supply people could acquire. Zhou entered the hall wearing a Hawaiian robe over his bathing suit. Five women, who were also wearing robes and bathing suits, accompanied him. Susan Quian Mong, the oldest girl, called the girls to attention. Zhou walked through the girls, looking everywhere, left and right, at the fronts and backs of the girls. Fresh meat, he thought, cannon fodder. He walked to the edge of the pool and faced the girls. “At ease,” he commanded and he watched the girls relaxing and fixing their attention on what he would be saying.
The general smiled and dove backwards into the pool. He was smiling as his face broke through the surface. He stood up and the water barely came to his chest. He gestured with both hands to the girls to come into the water. The women quietly slipped into the water, followed by a few of the braver girls. The rest of the girls followed more cautiously. Zhou walked around with his five women, pulling the girls who were floundering to their feet. He ended up holding one girl for a few minutes who had swallowed some water. Soon he was facing twenty alert pairs of alien eyes.
Zhou dropped forward and floated face down for a few minutes until he felt a gentle hand under his chin. He saw that it was the girl he had named Mong, looking at his face with concern. Little Charon Li Shioohua, stood guard to Mong’s right and rear, by heredity or temperament a wingman, protecting her point man. Zhou returned to his feet and motioned to Mong to approach him. Zhou suspended Mong on the surface of the water in a horizontal position, slowly walking around while gliding her through the water. Then he set her on her feet and glancing into her golden eyes, took a deep breath and dropped beneath the water. Mong took a deep breath and Zhou saw her gazing back at him under water. She broke through the surface slightly after Zhou. Zhou walked over to Charon and repeated the procedure. Then he told Mong to repeat his procedure with one of the girls. Mong lead one of the girls through the ritual and soon the girls were giggling and playing in the water.
Zhou made the girls exit the pool without using the stairs, using only their arms to get up to floor level. Then he had them jump back into the water with life preservers. Zhou didn’t want to pressure the girls too much during their first swimming lesson – that would come later. Little Charon discovered the technique of squirting water from her mouth at the other girls, and this knowledge traveled like wildfire. Things were going good. Nobody seemed to have a natural fear of the water. It was like flying or surfing – fear could be seen immediately by anyone who was observant. Zhou could see that there wouldn’t be any attrition from this test/lesson. A commotion erupted when Janice sat on Jane as Jane attempted to swim between her legs.
The girls all had full Chinese names but would never learn who their surrogate mothers were. Zhou now had twenty more daughters to add to his natural daughter, Alicia. His new daughters would live harder and see more than Alicia. He would have to harden his heart with these girls, as any commander must with his boots. These girls sure would make beautiful surfers.

Jiaotong Quadrangle

The girls studied biology, mathematics, automotive mechanics, machine shop, physics, and computer science. A considerable amount of the girls’ time was expended in performing chores, growing vegetables, and caring for food and experimental animals. English, the Chinese classics and art, geography, and music rounded out their curriculum. Sports were part of their military training and each girl could also pursue individual interests.
Zhou’s group was a solution without a problem. They gravitated towards biological and chemical warfare; they would become the first responders during a terrorist biochemical attack. Zhou’s duties were extended to forming a biological chemical incident response team. Environmental systems became second nature to the girls as did polluted water environments. Zhou tried to develop a no-tomorrow attitude with the girls because he believed that would be their fate – an untimely and probably meaningless death. The safety of his people was paramount in Zhou’s mind as the mission morphed to extreme environments. That doesn’t mean that rogue pilots would be allowed – the pilots and equipment were too valuable. Four balls or no balls – was he training personal initiative out of his girls? It is folk wisdom that the United States Air Force with its Safe Flying philosophy and standoff rocket-launching platforms were hammered by the Soviet MiGs with their bomber-busting cannons in Korea. Now as the space vehicles became a greater part of his responsibilities he realized the advantage his girls had in a radiation-intense space environment. The greatest peril for interplanetary travelers is radiation. Cancer and cataracts pale in the minds of mission planners alongside the danger of a solar flare, which could incapacitate the astronauts. The mission (whatever it may be) would be compromised. Cold but necessary calculations.
Funding was always problematic, especially in China’s hard financial times. The young girls trained with ATVs, and powered parachutes and ultra lights, much to the amusement of the PLA Air Force personnel in other units. Zhou obtained some light 2-seated aerobatic aircraft and two American Hueys (utility helicopters) abandoned by the U.S. Army in Viet Nam. With great difficulty and continuous spending of political capital he obtained some obsolete jet trainer aircraft and fuel. Fortunately Zhou’s superiors required the military mechanics of the jets to accompany their aircraft and they were drafted into becoming trainers. Paul Allen donated two XCOR EZ-Rocket planes to Zhou’s rocket units when the aircraft became obsolete after being replaced by Velocities with larger rocket engines. Zhou’s air cadets had to maintain and repair their own vehicles and aircraft. All of his pilots were aircraft mechanics, certified in airframe, power plant, and avionics repair. Zhou’s pilots were not the equivalent of military pilots but they acquired private, instrument, flight instructor and commercial ratings for light and rotary aircraft. He thought that he should have morale problems but he couldn’t see it when he interacted with his people. Had he got too old and lost touch with his people?
The children were expected to know the constellations of the Chinese and European zodiacs by now, as well as the stories associated with them. Tonight they were studying the features of a half moon from the flat roof of the dormitory. Charon had read a story about a queen who lived on the moon and wanted to produce a play based on the story.
Charon asked Mong, “Do you think people will ever go to the stars?”
“The Americans went to the moon,” answered Mong. “And that was forty years ago.”
Charon and Mong alternated positions, sharing time at the telescope and holding the lunar chart. Looking upwards, Charon asked Mong, “How high is the sky?”
Mong answered, without removing her attention from the eyepiece of the telescope, “It’s as high as you want it to be.”
Bioprotection uniforms were turned into space suits and biological decontamination vehicles into space rovers through the cleverness of his supply and maintenance people. He replaced one of the engines in a jet trainer with a rocket engine and began space pilot training. A hostile environment was basically a systems problem – if you can’t keep your systems running, you die. Besides, the problems of space were more amenable than Man’s problems on Earth and Chinese politics.

The Robin

General Ken Zhou Xim contemplated the red ball setting over the Huang Shan Mountains. His ultimate challenge was to fly and land an unmanned spacecraft on Mars with a full complement of flight instrumentation and flight controls, loaded with six tons of hydrogen and several nuclear devices. Obviously the Russian heavy lift vehicle wasn’t man-rated. [NASA has also proposed using carbon monoxide and oxygen as fuels that wouldn’t require hydrogen as a reactant.] How would Admiral Cheng Ho, the ancient Chinese supporter of exploration and trade during the Ming Empire, handle this ridiculous conundrum?
The first vehicle would be unmanned and two thirds of the autonomous vehicles to Mars had been lost. The American plan was to use the hydrogen feedstock as a reactant to generate methane and oxygen for the vehicle’s return trip. The alternate scenario of using a spacecraft carrying cryogenic fuel for the return trip required larger tanks and a bigger booster – the equivalent of landing a bomb gently on the Martian surface. The paradox is that a manned spacecraft is more adaptive but humans need heavy life-support systems and power. Unfortunately, most men want two-way tickets, BUT, three of his favorite science fiction writers had described separate missions going and returning, Congress willing, with the astronauts returning to Earth on a later mission.
General Zhou had negotiated a success-oriented payment strategy with the Americans. The Russians would be paid for their part of the launch as soon as the interplanetary insertion to Mars was accomplished and the MAV was on its way. China had received about half of its money for the MAV as Zhou’s group made construction and integration objectives. The landing on Mars and generation of fuel were milestones that would trigger further progress payments and get the program, as far as the Chinese were concerned, out of the red (no pun intended). There were too many unknowns and contingencies that could not be anticipated or tested. He would have to hedge his bet. The choice would have to be Mong and Charon, his favorite and best team. The Russians had achieved a propaganda victory by sending Valentina Tereshkonov, a female civilian parachutist with no flying experience, into space. His women were trained for space, but not to the level of the astronauts, cosmonauts or taikonauts. He felt that they were trained better than either Gagarin or Tereshkonov had been, when they made their historic flights. He got command authority, but as expected, he would be on his own. Deniability and lack of responsibility from above reigned.
American pressure on Zhou’s production partners for launch readiness was intensified by a rumor of a pending Government Accounting Office investigation of four “areas of noncompliance with NASA safety requirements.” The noise level of the equipment in space had never satisfied OSHA requirements.
Physical training for Mong and Charon was intensified; exercise seemed to be the only available solution to the deleterious effects of weightlessness. The loss of bone mass in micro gravity is thought to be linear – one half of Earth’s gravity would produce one half of the one percent annual bone loss experienced in zero gravity. Experience with weightlessness on the Russian Mir and the International Space Station allowed the dismissal of dangerous or expensive artificial gravity schemes. The first humans to return from Mars might be American but the first footprints on Mars would be Chinese.
There of course, wasn’t any extant life on Mars. Microbes had reduced the primeval carbon dioxide atmosphere on the ancient Earth to oxygen, using photosynthesis. Life decreases entropy; the Martian atmosphere was in a state of maximum-entropy equilibrium. Most of Mars’ water was frozen in the permafrost and polar caps. There were no carbonate residuals of life on Mars such as the White Cliffs of Dover visible from the sensors of orbiting spacecrafts. The metallic core of Mars had solidified eons ago terminating the polar magnetic field and removing any protection that the field had given the atmosphere and surface from solar flares and cosmic particles. Any microbes living on Mars or dropped in from space would be sterilized by the intense ultraviolet radiation on the surface as soon as they tried to leave dormancy and reproduce. Venus and Mars have carbon dioxide atmospheres – ergo, no life.
Zhou therefore concluded that since Mars had never evolved to an environment amenable to oxygen-breathing organisms and since there was no surface vegetation, life had not evolved normally on Mars. And anyway, if life had evolved it would be too different to interact with life from the Earth. After all the precautions and the quarantining of the Apollo astronauts, there had been no lunar germs. Repeating the obvious: there is no extant life on Mars.

Chapter 17. Mars or Bust

Mong and Charon hid in the biologically sealed MAV as it was shipped by rail to Kazakhstan and mated to the Energia. Integration, testing, and preparation for the launch took more than a month. Mong and Charon could only exercise at night when the Russians were not working. Two standalone CO₂ scrubbers were expended when the air became stale. The women put up with the isolation and darkness, waiting for the freedom of space after the launch.

Launch

Commander Al Hollis led the American astronauts to the VIP bleachers at Kalkonur Cosmodome. Hollis was the primary commander for the Mars mission, which should follow the Robin Mars ascent vehicle (MAV) at the next launch opportunity in 26 months. Shuttle pilots Aggi Worthley, Bill Leavitt, and Tim Perry sat with Hollis and several senators from west coast states. Russian cosmonaut Alexia Kogbadov sat with taikonaut Chen Long. General Zhou and his wife were among the Chinese dignitaries. Surprisingly to General Zhou, his wife seemed to be as interested in the launch of the Robin as in schmoozing.
The air was brisk but calm – perfect launching weather. The first launch date of the Robin had been missed because of communications problems with the MAV. The problem had more to do with the Russian transceivers; communications with the American ground and deep space communication links shouldn’t be a problem. The Energia heavy lift launch vehicle spit flames and smoke and slowly rose off the launch pad, a controlled mini-Krakatau (usually misspelled Krakatoa). A shock wave and wall of noise hit the bleachers seconds later; Major Perry felt that tingle in his balls that gazing into a deep chasm elicits. Aggi felt like she was in the MAV with the Energia pushing her butt all the way into orbit. Don’t stop. Keep going. That’s right, Baby. Up and away. She drove the ship upward with the power of her will.
The rocket became a flame in the air, then a point of light heading southeast. Some of the Russian dignitaries stood up as the Energia shed its first stage. Mong kept the Robin’s viewports closed until the Robin was well on its way to orbit. The second stage fired and the MAV settled into orbit. Charon started to feel nauseated and reached to open her faceplate. She vomited into her helmet and needed to have Mong help her open the faceplate. Mong removed Charon’s helmet and Charon grabbed the helmet and used it as a sink. Mong removed her helmet and continued the chain reaction that Charon had started. Space welcomed and initiated the Chinese women into the brotherhood of spacefarers.

Trans-Mars Injection (TMI)

The TMI Centaur stage propelled the Robin from low-earth orbit (LEO) to a transmartian trajectory. A hydrogen/oxygen Centaur was used because of delays in the development of the nuclear thermal propulsion system. The best use of the nuclear propulsion units would be to refuel and park them in space rather than using them as expendables. A giant thud shook the Robin as the noise of the insertion burn ceased; the warning lights indicated an explosive decompression in the garage and the floor by the data storage unit collapsed aft. Mong and Charon connected their environmental carry-ons and put on their helmets. The floor seemed to be stable but Mong pointed Charon towards the capsule port. They entered the capsule, connecting their umbilical cords to the capsule’s internal systems. Mong isolated the capsule from the Robin’s main systems and the two women waited for disaster. They floated quietly in free fall with nothing else happening. Their real space suits were in the laboratory as was most of the food and nearly everything else. The pressure remained stable in the laboratory. Charon disconnected herself from the capsule’s system and connected her umbilical connector into the carry-on life support system. She opened the port and pushed her upper body into the laboratory. Then she entered the laboratory and flew to the buckled floor. The garage temperature and pressure were stabilizing to that of space. Charon scanned the external monitors but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary on the outside of the spacecraft. The monitor by the rover showed that the floor had collapsed onto the rover – the laboratory floor was now the pressure vessel wall between the laboratory and the unpressurized garage. She shut down the systems in the garage and focused on the laboratory systems. The damage wasn’t fatal.

Houston

The Robin had been struck by a meteor or, more likely, space-debris, with loss of the integrity of the garage. The coldness of space would cause the equipment in the garage to take themselves offline (shut themselves down). The environmental control equipment was designed to be heated or cooled by ambient air – a workaround using only the internal heaters and cooling tubes would have to be developed. One of the two hydrogen tanks had vented into space. The loss of the hydrogen would chop the amount of fuel available for exploration and the return to Martian orbit in half. An ERV with half of its hydrogen gone would not be able to return to Earth orbit. Not an auspicious beginning.

Space Repair

Charon attached a tether to her environmental backpack. First she pushed her upper body into space and turned her head outward to adjust to the feeling of being isolated in space. She didn’t experience the sensation of falling, fear, or disorientation that some astronauts have experienced. She took some video of the external surface of the Robin, just to accomplish a real space task. The surface appeared unblemished. Charon didn’t feel that she needed a rest, so Mong agreed that she could examine the bow of the spacecraft. There were more handholds near the capsule and the forward port was near the capsule. The Robin was no shuttle; it had no Canadian Remote Manipulator (arm) System or Manned Maneuvering Unit. The rapid exhaustion of astronauts engaged in EVAs outside of the shuttle bay or without the use of the RMS was well known. Charon had the advantage over previous space walkers of spending hours in a pressure suit, maneuvering inside the Robin. Mong turned on the nose camera and turned it to face towards the edge of the spacecraft, where Charon could be expected to approach the camera. Charon continued her first external space walk, gazing over the edge, trying to see the camera. The camera was embedded in fixtures but Mong could see Charon coming over the edge. Charon circled the camera, maneuvering around the edge. Charon pulled her body onto the bulbous part of the capsule and slowly moved around the circumference examining the external surface of the spacecraft. She could see a piece of sheet metal, space junk, penetrating the hull. Mong could see the offending fairing through Charon’s head camera – the hole must be large, considering how fast the penetration had caused the explosive decompression. The object would have to be removed and the pressure hull repaired before entry into the Martian atmosphere. Charon repositioned her tether anchor and completed navigating the circumference of the capsule, as Mong followed her progress with the nose camera. She returned to the portal and shut the port. Charon’s first EVA had been routine.
Charon’s entry to the garage the next day revealed that the damage was behind the bioreactor – removal of the fairing and repair of the pressure vessel would be a convoluted operation. Zhou told the women to slow down and for Mong to become proficient at EVAs and for Charon to learn the Capcom or lifeline skills. After all, they had eight months to fix the breach before they got to Mars, and the MAV would have to last for years after they got to Mars. In fact, the removal of the equipment took Mong and Charon several weeks before the offending debris was loosened and finally pushed away from the spacecraft using an oxygen bottle for propulsion. The fairing drifted slowly away from the Robin over a period of days.

Southern Sky

Just about everything that a person can see with the naked eye from the surface of the Earth is in our galaxy, the Milky Way, with a few obvious exceptions, such as the Magellan Clouds in the southern hemisphere and the Andromeda Nebula (Galaxy) in Andromeda. The women were no longer limited to seeing only the constellations of the northern hemisphere. They quickly learned the southern constellations, which they had only seen with planetarium software and through presentations at the Shanghai Planetarium. The Magellan Clouds and Southern Cross caught their attention at first, followed by Alpha and Beta Centauri and the Cruz Australis (Southern Cross) constellation.

Mars Orbit Insertion

Some fuel was used for course corrections and orbital insertion but most of the deceleration would be accomplished by atmospheric braking in the thin Martian atmosphere. Mong overrode one burst command when the spacecraft’s attitude differed from the flight computer’s computed attitude. Examination of the code by the chief programmer, “Mace” Gellately, revealed that a case statement was missing break punctuation. The code was patched, Houston recycled the navigation computer and the next burst fired flawlessly. Mace couldn’t figure out the cause of the glitch so he went to confession the next night, lighting two candles. There aren’t any atheists in space.
Mace would have nightmares and flashbacks of this incident for the rest of his life.

Deorbiting and Landing

Some of the precious rocket fuel was used to slow down the Robin MAV, dropping the MAV into the denser atmosphere. The aero brakes, triple parachutes, and rocket engines would decelerate the MAV to a soft landing. The sensors in orbit had predicted that the landing site would be as smooth as a baby’s bottom. That was true in the large scale, but the MAV was heading for a peninsula of rock outcroppings in the smooth area. Mong jettisoned the parachutes and made a rocket-only landing in a small clearing. The terrain was much rougher than the Mars exploration robotic landers had experienced.

Houston

The Robin had prematurely jettisoned its parachutes and the flight computer had taken a long time recomputing its engine commands. The spacecraft must have experienced some extreme wind shear, as the flight computer path had been irregular and not smooth. Telemetry indicated a touchdown – the continued reception of telemetry was a good sign by itself. Finally the dual video cameras came alive by their own program, returning a scene of jagged rocks. Capcom Bill Leavitt released his breath and uncrossed his fingers. He didn’t have anybody to talk to on this mission. Looking at the video returns, he wondered if they had landed in Arizona.

Shanghai

Confirmation to Shanghai that the women had made a safe landing was encoded into the less significant bits of the interior flight deck temperatures. Video would have been better, but the Chinese accomplishment couldn’t be acknowledged for now. The cheering in Shanghai was sincere but subdued, as the camera selected by the NASA channel panned some large nearby peaks and the distant horizon from the landing site.

Chapter 18. Exploring Mars

After a few days, Mong and Charon got over the lethargy and weakness that they had felt when they first touched down on Mars. No sedimentary rocks could be found – basaltic rocks covered the volcanic sand or regolith. The simple tests for life on the local Martian regolith out gassed oxygen but didn’t detect any organic compounds; no microbes could be detected on the ultraviolet ray drenched regolith with the limited equipment on the Robin.

Spider

The Spider rover functioned semi-autonomously. Its sole function was to deploy the nuclear reactor a safe distance from the Robin. The ramp deployed so that one corner was on a rock. The viewers of the still pictures from the frame grabbers for the stereoscopic video cameras were oblivious to the perilous descent from the garage and commanded the Spider rover to a position beyond the ramp. The Spider’s right wheels went off the ramp when the ramp tilted and the tractor was stuck. All attempts during the remainder of the sol to move the tractor failed so the control group regrouped to discuss the suggested procedures coming in from around the world to dislodge the rover. That night Mong and Charon wrestled the tractor with the nuclear generator off the ramp. The next sol Houston observed that the rover’s autonomous routines had miraculously managed to move the rover off the ramp.

Mars Observer Laser Altimeter (MOLA)

The Apollo astronauts had extensive maps of the lunar landing sites. Their maps had been prepared with the aid of NASA observers at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The first spacefarers to Mars had even better digital maps, thanks to the MOLA maps generated by the laser altimeter on the Mars Global Surveyor, which were being enhanced by the updates from the Mars Reconnaissance Observer telescope. Mong and Charon explored the local area on the simulator and would fill in local details with a laser scanner as they systematically surveyed the terrain beyond the landing site. The surveying data, which was forwarded to Shanghai, would only become really useful when it could be integrated into the international maps of Mars. Mong and Charon explored more of Mars in their first week of ambulatory exploration than both of the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, had during their highly successful lifetimes.

Cold Soak

Fuel generation was in progress, so simple survival became the priority. The stored food was plentiful if boring. They explored the local area on foot – nothing exciting to report home. A four-kilometer round trip was as far as they dared to walk in the pressure suits.
Mong and Charon transferred liquid methane and oxygen to the pressurized rover. The pressurized rover had the same standard six-wheeled undercarriage as the Spider, which would allow the Spider to be cannibalized for spare parts. The moon’s surface is igneous rock pulverized [gardened] by meteors. Mars has the effects of erosion imposed with sedimentary rock deposited by the flow of water or wind. They drove to a hill about five kilometers from the landing site and collected a few rock samples and soil. The peaks were basaltic, obviously dikes that had been exposed by erosion. Their surveying matrix slowly expanded around the landing site. The fractured rock samples collected from the mountain were volcanic, not sedimentary as they had hoped. The Martian surface was not alive like the Earth’s; Mars was seismically as dead as the moon. Staying on the open plain they drove a radius varying five to eight kilometers from the base camp, returning to the backside of the landing site. They found and recovered the parachutes; waste not, want not. They would explore the local area until they were more confident of the rover and their equipment. The women slowly got used to the rugged beauty of the rusty terrain.
The rover wouldn’t start by itself when its internal temperature was allowed to go below minus thirty degrees Centigrade. The umbilical would have to remain connected to the vehicle to pre-condition the vehicle before any travel was possible. It would be too much trouble putting the rover in the garage every night and too expensive in terms of energy to keep the garage at a higher temperature. As far as Houston knew, the integrity of the garage had been compromised and the Americans would figure out sooner or later that they had been too lucky. The normal procedure was to allow the Martian sun to warm the rover, aided by power from the Road Runner’s solar panel.
Mong and Charon had planned to test the communications and navigation system of the rover. Charon was sitting in the rover in her pressure suit. Communications would be through the intercom, which used wires in the rover’s umbilical cord to the MAV. The rover’s computer communicated with the MAV’s master cluster of computers. The engine start had been uneventful and the storage batteries were fully charged. Charon pressurized the rover to four psi, feeling the increased pressure in the rover as a relaxation in the stiffness of her pressure suit. Mong told Charon to increase the pressure to eight psi to test the pressurization system. As the pressure stabilized at double the normal operating pressure, the rear side window popped out and flew about five meters from the rover, resulting in a mild explosive decompression. The workmanship was Chinese, but the design and prescribed gaskets were American. Not a very good sign at the start of exploration further away from their home base.
The popped window was glued in with superglue and both rear windows were covered with one half-inch Plexiglas and caulked in. At first, the women wore their space suits on all of the excursions and rarely even removed their helmets. Later, as their confidence in the integrity of the rover increased, they drove without wearing their helmets and gloves.

The Caverns

The women drove up the ancient water shed to the cliffs where the water in the ancient arroyo should have come from. Free water could not be found but there were some minerals that contained bound water; water could be extracted thermally and chemically from the sulfate-rich Martian soil and rocks.
A recent paper had speculated that dry flowing of material could cause the observed gullies. Some planetologists had speculated that the mudslides of rain-saturated gravel in Southern California could be analogous to the melting of water or carbon dioxide permafrost on Mars. The debris at the bottom of the cliffs indicated that a sheet of rock had collapsed off the wall and then had been eroded by running water. The debris was a confusing mixture of smooth and jagged slabs of rock. All the speculation about these terrain features would have to be done by experts based on the samples they were collecting and videotapes of the terrain. They looked up at the dozens of holes or caves in the cliff. These caves were about ninety kilometers from Mars Site 1.
Rubble in the center of the cliff had accumulated up to one of the openings. The women climbed up the boulders to a cave, which was accessible from the rubble pile. After switching on their shoulder lamps, they entered the darkness of the cave from the outside brilliance. The gas chromatograph detected minute traces of methane, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. They walked slowly into the cave, letting their eyes adapt to the darkness. Several hundred meters into the cave, the beams from their shoulder lamps started to scatter off a foggy haze. The dead stalagmites showed that the cave had been alive in ancient times. The cave opened to a frozen waterfall of ice. Lacking the proper equipment for a climb, they only got about twenty feet above the bottom or floor level of the cave. Collecting and preserving samples for biological evaluation is especially difficult since bugs are sensitive to small variations in temperature. Earth air and light would most likely be lethal to most Martian microbes. Antarctic ice had long been considered to be sterile until scientists started to handle their specimens more carefully. They retrieved two five-kilogram samples and sealed them and a few rock samples in their sample case. They had found some unbound water. WATER. Man could survive on Dune. The chemically bound hydrogen was a bonus.

God’s First Domain

Back in the Robin, Mong removed a small portion of the ice sample and placed it in a beaker. Long filaments could be seen in the melted ice under the microscope. Mong wondered, Could these structures be microbial life? The density of the organisms was about 50,000 per cm³ or milliliter (ml). The second sample had a population of 45,000 per ml. Next Mong filtered the large particles from the water and separated the remainder into five fractions, which would separate the possible microbes by size. The carbon-based chemistry of Martian life could be compared to Earth microbes – perhaps cross-contamination had occurred between Mars and the Earth in the past. Maybe the microbes on Mars would be found to fit into the lower part of the earthly Tree of Life, the Dark Life archaea, part of the third domain of life like the bugs from Lechuguilla Caverns. The other two domains of life, also predominately microbial, are eucaryotes and bacteria. Nanobacteria, by definition bacteria smaller than a micron are found almost anywhere in the Earth’s biosphere that microbiologists look. Dark Life, nanobacteria found in extreme environments devoid of sunlight or oxygen would be the primary focus. The fractions were lysed and amplified by PCR. Each fraction had numerous peaks on the chromatograph and high performance capillary electrophoresis. The ssrRNA results from these microbial communities would have to be analyzed in Beijing. Viable but nonculturable (VNC) – alive until we got hold of them, was the expected classification of the bugs but, hopefully, time and persistence would change that. The data and low-resolution photographs were transmitted to the Earth. They would send the high-resolution images to Shanghai over the coming weeks.
The microorganisms had a symbiotic relationship which didn’t allow the cultivation of a single species into a colony. Charon’s field work with plankton prepared her for these difficulties. In any case, the growth of the colonies was excruciatingly slow compared to the bacteria that they had grown in China. The microorganisms seemed to have a symbiotic relationship which didn’t allow the cultivation of just one species into a colony. The more numerous bugs were theorized to have a genetic mechanism that limited their growth beyond a certain concentration.

Bugs

The tactical red light came on with the buzzer. The alert level shown by the alert and warning lights was only yellow – a non-critical equipment failure. Charon beat Mong to the support system console and shut off the buzzer. Mong glanced at the fuel generation gauges after reading the five warning messages listed on the flat panel display. The temperature for the CO₂ intake chamber hadn’t dropped to the outside ambient temperature – the intake filters must be clogged. Mong looked at the readings. Could dust, the bane of equipment on Mars, be the culprit? The system had worked flawlessly for four months.
Charon wanted to trouble-shoot the system so Mong told her to get into her pressure suit. Mong wheeled her chair over to the security/surveillance system monitors. The infrared and low-light intensity cameras showed that there was nothing out of the ordinary outside. She turned on the daytime video camera and switched on the burglar light near the intake port of the methane fuel generator. She saw the flutter of a swarm of small insects. The yellow lights went out. She told Charon to stop dressing. Charon put her pressure suit on a bench and pushed a chair over to the console. Mong told Charon to turn on the video recorder for the intake video camera and then she turned on the light. Nothing.
“Cancel the recording,” she said.
Mong turned off the floodlights and scanned the infrared (IR) and low-light intensity (LLI) video screens. Then she told Charon to select the camera next to the greenhouse on the video recorder. Mong turned on the video camera and the greenhouse lights. A swarm swirled around inside the greenhouse then disappeared. A cloud rose and then dissipated outside the greenhouse. They played with the cameras and lights but couldn’t see anything else. Mong decided not to go outside the MAV until daylight. That night Mong left the security light near the CO₂ intake on. The next morning they found several clumps of dead bugs in the intake filters. LIFE. Multicellular LIFE on Mars.
The bugs looked very frail and were practically just wings. Mong photographed the bugs by camera and microscope. The color of the wings under magnification was as beautiful as a peacock tail. Charon prepared RNA and DNA samples and ran the mush through the chromatograph. Let the people in Beijing compare the RNA sequences to earthly genomes to see if Martian life had a common ancestry, genes and metabolic pathways.

Tar Pits

Mong and Charon drove around a sharp protruding rock about 325 meters high and came onto a comparably open area which reminded them of the salt flats that they had seen in pictures from the American space program. The rock-strewn plain went all the way to a distant ridge and looked rather boring. They decided to go about 30 kilometers into the open area and then return home. As they were turning Charon spotted a darkened area on her side of the rover. Mong drove over to the area and stopped about 30 meters from the black 200 meter-wide pool. Charon picked up rock samples from the surrounding area as Mong chipped out a large sample of the material. Sand Dunes covered parts of the flat area. Tests back at the Robin revealed that the pool was asphalt – tar. Was this some counterpart of fossil-derived petroleum on Earth produced by nanobacteria or did it come from organic compounds formed in deep space? The tar would provide a useful raw material, which could probably be used to synthesize products needed by the colonists when they got to Mars.
The tar was brought to room temperature in the hood and while the tar softened, it was still solid. A wide spectrum of hydrocarbons and organic molecules was present. The sample turned to goo when left overnight. Microbes had cracked the large molecules to simpler, smaller molecules. Mong lacked the skills needed to culture the microbes and ended up just sending the DNA and rRNA spectra to the experts at the Beijing Ching Wai Medical School.

Veggies

Only a few plants thrived in the Martian soil of the greenhouse. The peanuts and potatoes were doing well. Mong and Charon experimented with potato dishes but craved some plain old rice. Mong acquired a taste for (microwave) baked potatoes stuffed with the plentiful frozen vegetables. Most of the leafy plants, at least, survived. They would attempt to grow some tomatoes and beans for a second time.

Aquifer

The ground penetrating radar signal detected water beneath the road at a depth of about 220 meters. The women mapped the underground stream where it crossed their trail to the caverns. The water was much nearer to the surface than the consensus opinion of planetary scientists on Earth thought possible because of the postulated thick permafrost layer. The aquifer was about two kilometers wide at this point.

Leisure Class

Zhou seemed to make fewer and fewer demands on Mong and Charon; in truth, his people thought that isolated people became depressed and despondent if too many demands were made on them. Whatever the reason, the women now had free time for the first time in their life. Mong started maintaining a journal and Charon started reading travel books. Charon liked a writer named Michener who had written about the surfers of Hawaii. Zhou’s ancestors had practically been slaves when they arrived in Hawaii but had worked themselves up to a status just under the rich Haoles whose ancestors had come to Hawaii as missionaries and traders. And Europe had hot water baths, saturated with healing minerals. Abruptly, the demands from Shanghai for surveying and exploration of the caverns became strident. Minerals and ores were extensively searched for; an excellent landing site was found near the caverns. Water was the essential differentiator at the caverns site. They were to set up small explosive charges in one of the smaller caves and evaluate the result. The results of the explosions and their evaluations were sent back to Shanghai. Silence followed.
Six weeks later the simple, explicit orders came – set all the remaining charges in the ice falls of one of the large caves and set them off at 5:31, Mars Local Solar Time. The Chinese authorities had decided that they wanted to entice the Americans into sending the ERV to the caverns. The Americans had indicated that they were starting to think that a common landing site was safer than multiple, distributed sites. A release of water vapor as the Caidin Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flew over might tempt the Americans; at least that was the plan. The astronomers advising Zhou thought that the prescribed time was their best guess for the water venting to be seen during the day with a proper shadow by the Caidin orbiter.
Mong and Charon packed the equipment and survival gear in the rover. They decided to go to the caves early, place the charges, and then explore the surrounding network of caves. They would be getting home after dark. They used the easiest direct route to the caves to guarantee that they wouldn’t get lost and have to spend the night in the rover. Their improvements to the road were making the trip shorter and faster. Charon drove on the outbound leg.
Mong and Charon inspected the cave where they had set the charges two months ago. There was some sort of shiny material on the sand and rocks about thirty meters below the cave. Mong collected a sample of the material and the sand and rock it was on. Otherwise, there didn’t seem to be anything new to observe. They started unpacking and carrying their equipment up the cut bank to the main cave. They had fabricated four sections of aluminum pipe that could be connected by quick-release flanges. Wires for the electrical heaters and detonators would be attached by mating plugs. Connecting the first section to the appliance cord, they held it as horizontal as they could while it melted its length into the ice. After the initial section had penetrated about four and a half feet into the ice, they disconnected the appliance cord. The section was pointing slightly upward. Mong attached the next section by connecting the plug and then screwing the fast-connect to the next metal pipe while Charon kept it aligned. Then Charon connected the appliance cord and the insertion procedure was repeated. It had taken ninety Earth minutes to embed the two sections. The procedure was repeated for the third section and then the whole pipe was pulled out of the ice leaving a long cylindrical hole. The headpiece was removed from the first section and a fourth section with explosives was attached. Mong didn’t like the fact at all that even this section had to be heated with explosives in it. The pipes slowly slide into the hole and Mong turned off the heaters with a silent sigh of relief. Mong disconnected the appliance cord and they left the cave. At least with no more explosives, they wouldn’t be required to do that procedure again.
They were relieved to move the rover away from the cliff; a large eruption of water might collapse the cliff onto the rover, stranding them away from home. They drove to the hills ten miles from the caverns and found a beautiful location for a monastery or possibly an observation or laser relay post facing in the direction of Mars Site 1.
The rover video camera was set to show a wide area of the cliffs and timed to begin recording 15 minutes before the detonation of the explosives. Mong left the rover about 500 meters from the cliffs and walked over carrying the timing electronics for igniting the explosives. The pipe was firmly frozen in the ice but the explosives were still at the desired room temperature. Setting the timer was completed and the women left the darkness of the main cave. They worked their way about 100 meters to the left of the main cave and sat down on some rocks to watch the show. The explosion seemed to be disproportionately large. A volume of water gushed out of the cave and a section sheared off of the cliff and fell/flowed. The water flew into the atmosphere and snowy ice crystals fell and danced in the atmospheric currents. The cliff started to collapse in their direction so they started to retreat ahead of the falling rocks. Charon got caught in a slurry of mud from the cliff and slide with the mess to the plain below. Mong could see her lying in the rubble ten meters below. She got to her friend as fast as she could and saw that Charon’s pressure suit had a leak. She packed mud on the suit and it froze in place. Mong gave little thought to the danger of frostbitten fingers that her wet gloves presented.
Charon was stunned from the fall and not sitting up by herself. Mong ran to the rover and drove it next to Charon. Mong replaced Charon’s nearly depleted oxygen tank. Placing Charon in the rover, she pressurized the interior, and removed Charon’s helmet. The pressure vessel had better hold, was Mong’s only thought. She turned off the video cameras. The interior of the rover heated up to operating temperature and Charon was asking for water, a good sign. Mong took off Charon’s gloves and helmet and rubbed her face. Charon’s eyes opened and Mong’s face slowly came into focus.
“I dreamt that I was surfing with a large fish in Hawaii,” she said. “The fish looked at me with warm eyes. The fish looked like a strange eel.”
You missed your chance, not having a surfboard, thought Mong. What would Zhou’s relatives in Hawaii make of Charon’s vision?
“You always did like the water,” said Mong. And don’t ever scare me like that again, she thought. Mong drove the rover slowly home, turning the video equipment back on as the sun was setting. Zhou always liked sunsets.
The sun set and the Earth rose, although the Earth initially was too low to be seen in the dusty atmosphere of Mars. Charon was sleeping gently. Twenty kilometers from Mars Site I, Mong saw a glow on one of the hills. She stopped the rover and turned off the headlights. Mong videoed the hills with the low light intensity camera, but doubted if the luminescent effect would be visible in the recording. She let Charon sleep.
Xuen Haiming at the Jet Propulsion Lab examined the Caidin MRO images from the area around the caverns for the venting that he had been told to look for, but could only see slight smudges to indicate that a cloud of ice crystals had escaped from the surface. The evidence that he had been told to look for wasn’t good enough for a paper but he soon had others looking at the images. Only rumors about the evidence for water escaped to the public but NASA studied the terrain around the cliffs with new interest (of course, only Zhou and the people privy to his information knew about the caves). Some analysts thought they saw evidence of a collapsed cliff that had exposed an aquifer. The second vehicle of the 2007 opposition, an ERV, would go to this nearby site, now called Yellowstone.

One sol at a time

The relative time of a martial day or sol depends on where you are on the Earth and what Martian times zone you are monitoring. It is preferable that the support people on Earth adapt to a Martian schedule, but, of course, the Marsnauts had to keep track of what time zone the people that they had to communicate with were in.

Waiting for the Tide to come in

As the first year on Mars passed, Mong and Charon’s thoughts started to drift to events on Earth and to wonder about which people would arrive after the next opposition. As the blue gem grew in brilliance, Mong started thinking of the Earth as a woman being impregnated by Mars, with people arriving on Mars after gestation. The reports from Zhou suggested that an unmanned American habitat would land at Mars Site 1. An ERV, per schedule, would be coming with their friends, landing at the caverns, instead of being parked in orbit. Charon started talking about fresh air and perhaps a trip to Zhou’s family farm in Hawaii. Mong wondered if Charon had forgotten who they were, lost souls on Earth, as free as it gets on Mars. They had only been free of their hoods and goggles for two years. Charon commented to Mong that she missed the din of the dormitory in Shanghai.
The Americans launched the unmanned habitat direct from The Cape. Without a second ERV in Martian orbit, the only available vehicle for the return trip to Earth for the American astronauts would be the anticipated ERV, which would land 90 miles away from Plymouth at Yellowstone. The American-launched habitat would land at Plymouth.

Yo Ken

Charon had been reading Apollo astronaut Al Bean’s Apollo (a book of Bean’s paintings depicting the astronauts on the moon). Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, had thought of writing a message to his daughter Tracy in the moon dust on a large moon rock, after he had left the moon. Alan Bean had painted this imagined rock, Tracy’s Boulder, which had a message to Tracy written in the lunar sand. Charon wasn’t on the moon, but almost as good, she was on Mars. She would send such a photograph to Tracy as soon as their existence on Mars was disclosed.
Several months later Charon found “General Zhou’s Rock.” Mong vetoed the message “Yo Ken.” The message written on the Martian sand, clearly legible, said “Yo Zhou.” The photograph rippled across China’s space community like a residual tsunami from a Japanese earthquake hitting Honolulu. General Zhou was pleased.
Precious Chinese resources were diverted to space research and development. The Martian dust storm season started.

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