Music crept slowly into the brain of Venkat Kapoor. He rolled over in bed and put a pillow over his head to shut it out. The pillow failed to block his wife’s elbow in his ribs. Prodded into full wakefulness by spouse and ring-tone, he reluctantly pulled himself out of bed and groped for his phone. “Hello?”
“Dr. Kapoor? This is Mindy Park.”
“Is it PM or AM?” Venkat asked drowsily.
“I don’t know. I’m living on Mars time now,” Mindy said. “It’s mid-morning there. But the latest Mars satellite pics show Watney doing something weird. You’d better come in and see.”
Had Venkat been twenty years younger, the sleepiness would have fled instantly. But middle-aged scientists and high-level bureaucrats found sleep hard enough to come by even when the job wasn’t devouring them. “I’ll… be there shortly,” he said around a yawn. “But what can you tell me?”
“He’s rearranging the solar farm,” Mindy said. “He’s made a giant letter M so far. And the aliens are gathering rocks and piling them up just north of the solar panels.”
It wasn’t coffee, but the news made a decent substitute. “Keep everything you’ve got focused on the Hab,” he said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Teddy flipped through the printed photographs, removing them from the paperclip one at a time and sliding each to the back of the stack as he looked at them. “Morse code,” he said. “Clever.” He made a face as he looked at the last panel. “Leet-speak? I thought we were done with that in the twenty-oughts. I always hated that garbage.”
“It does save on characters,” Mindy said quietly. “Um. And it takes a lot of rocks to make a message readable from space, even with maximum magnification and image enhancement.”
“’Alive Sol 32. Hit by antenna. Freak accident. Not crew’s fault. Better. Rations end Sol 307. Five aliens, food ends Sol 85, Sol 118 with Ares rations. Growing more.'” Teddy looked up from the page. “Sounds pretty bleak for the aliens.”
“Couldn’t he have told us more?” Annie asked. “We already knew all that shit except for the alien food situation.”
“It took him seven hours to lay that message out,” Venkat pointed out. “After he spent an hour moving the Hab solar cells to spell out MORSE. And he had help doing it.”
“And it took almost every rock within two hundred meters of the Hab to make,” Mindy added.
“Well, shit,” Annie snorted. “When will he make another message?”
“He probably won’t,” Venkat said. “He has no way of knowing when we see his message. He doesn’t even know we’re looking.”
“How can he not know?” Annie asked. “Of course we’re fucking looking! Who wouldn’t be fucking looking?”
“Ahem.” Teddy raised his hand. “Annie, if not for the aliens we wouldn’t have been looking. That was my decision and I own it, and I’m glad it wasn’t carried out. But Venkat’s right. Watney has no way of knowing that we’re watching him.” He tapped the paper in his hand. “But I’m most interested in the last two words. ‘Growing more.’ What do you think that means, Venk?”
Venkat shrugged. “I think it means he’s attempting to grow more food,” he said simply. “He’s a botanist. Before he applied to the astronaut corps he was doing field work in Africa reclaiming deserts.”
“It’s one of the reasons we accepted his application,” added Mitch Henderson from where he slumped in a chair.
“Do you think he can do it?” Teddy asked.
“I haven’t a clue,” Venkat said firmly, “but it doesn’t matter what I think. Watney thinks he can.”
“How would he go about doing it?” Teddy asked.
Venkat shrugged. “I can call in some experts if you like,” he said. “My guess is he’d take every container in the Hab, harvest water from the Martian permafrost, and try to build a hydroponic garden.”
“Um,” Mindy interrupted. “I don’t think that’s it. Remember all the EVAs Mark and the aliens did? We couldn’t figure out what they were doing? But they kept going to and from the airlocks. Maybe they were gathering topsoil.”
“That can’t be right,” Venkat said, shaking his head. “Martian soil is poisonous, and anyway the Hab’s not big enough for conventional agriculture.”
“Get in those experts,” Teddy said. “Have them check both scenarios. Ask them if Watney could get enough clean water for a hydroponic garden and if the Hab has enough materials to build one. Ask if Martian soil could grow crops, what Watney would need to do to make it work, and if the Hab could grow enough crops for six people.”
“Will do,” Venkat said, making a note.
Teddy turned to the speakerphone. “Bruce, how soon can we send a resupply mission to Mark?”
“Not soon,” the voice of Bruce Ng, chief of Jet Propulsion Laboratories, replied. “We’ve run rough scenarios ranging from a launch today through the next Hohmann window in twenty-one months. Right now is the worst possible time to send anything to Mars. It’d take four times the usual delta-V from Earth orbit to reach Mars, and nothing we send for the next four or five months will get there any sooner than maybe Sol 570.”
“Talk me through it,” Teddy insisted.
“Right now Earth is ahead of Mars in their orbits around the Sun,” Bruce said. “A direct flight would require cancelling Earth’s orbital momentum and offsetting solar gravity in addition to the acceleration required to reach Mars. Nothing mankind has ever built could do that. So instead whatever we launch has to go up like a mortar, way above Mars’s orbital path, to allow Mars time to catch up in its orbit. The probe would then encounter Mars on its path back down towards the Sun.”
“What are the numbers if we do that?” Teddy asked.
“Still lousy, but doable at least,” Bruce replied. “Launching today, like I said, would take four times the delta-V from orbit that our supply missions usually use. The heaviest lifter we currently have available is the Eagle Eye 3 probe’s booster. Launching today, it could land a three hundred kilogram payload on Mars.” The speakerphone went silent for a moment as Bruce paused for breath. “Note that’s not three hundred kilograms of food. That’s three hundred kilograms of food, the thing the food rides in, and the landing system that gets the food down intact and on target.
“The delta-V numbers improve with every day that passes, because we have to cancel out less and less of the Sun’s gravity on the trajectory. By the time we could actually launch- say in one hundred days- the potential payload goes up to nine hundred kilograms. Again,” Bruce’s voice warned, “that’s probe and food put together.
“But the really bad part,” Bruce finished, “is that the trajectories all end up with an arrival date somewhere between Sol 570 and Sol 610. Nothing we do with Eagle Eye will make that any faster.”
“Keep working the problem,” Teddy said. “If necessary plan for a double resupply mission. We’ll find another booster somewhere. But we need to find some way to get more food to him as soon as possible.”
“It’d help if I knew how large a resupply we were sending,” Bruce pointed out.
“That’s something that confuses me about Watney’s message,” Venkat added. “He says he has food for three hundred days. We already figured that by himself, if he rationed his food, he could last until Sol 400. But he also says that the aliens will run out of food on Sol 85, and then he says ‘Sol 118 with Ares rations.’ But the math doesn’t work. There must be some reason why the aliens only last until Sol 118 but Watney lasts until Sol 300.”
“Maybe ET has a food allergy,” Annie tossed off irritably.
“That’s a good idea,” Teddy said.
“The fuck you say!” Annie snapped. “It was a joke!”
“I’m serious,” Teddy said. “Maybe there’s only a few Earth foods the aliens can eat. Venk, have the Ares dietician go through the surface supplies for Ares III and categorize all the meals for known allergens and by general food type. You’re looking for something that makes three-quarters of the Ares meal packs unsuitable for aliens.”
Venkat made another note and kept quiet. He’d intended to do that anyway, but it never hurt to get your boss’s backing. It especially didn’t hurt when things played out so that the boss thought it was his idea.
“But getting back to the food,” Teddy continued. “The best analysis we have of orbital photos of Watney’s guests suggests that they have similar mass to humans. So assume similar food requirements. Six people, enough food to last until supplies can arrive in the next normal Mars launch window.”
“That’d be Sol 856,” Bruce said. “Let’s assume the probe arrives on Sol 556, I don’t know how. Three hundred fifty days of rations to provide a margin, for six people, at one kilogram per day, is twenty-one hundred kilograms.” The phone just barely picked up the JPL chief whistling through his teeth. “Eagle Eye 3’s Delta IX isn’t going to cut it. How soon can we get SpaceX to prep a Red Falcon first stage?”
“I’ll ask, but don’t get your hopes up,” Teddy said. “When I spoke with them last they were still backlogged on preparing for Ares IV presupply flights.” He paused, then flipped the last page in his hands and replaced the paperclip exactly as it had been when he’d received the photos, setting them down neatly on one corner of his desk blotter. “Speaking of Ares IV, there’s been a change in plans. The president has decided we’re not going to wait for Ares IV to rescue Mark Watney. The chance to make formal diplomatic contact with intelligent alien life makes the rescue mission urgent, assuming an alien rescue mission doesn't happen soon.”
“Excuse me?” Bruce Ng asked. “Does the president think we’re going to just drive there?”
“No. He expects us to take Hermes.” Teddy placed his hands on his desk and leaned forward. “Hermes will dock with the space station for refit in seven months. The next Hermes launch window is in twenty-one months. That gives us fourteen months to refit Hermes to support a crew of nine instead of six.”
“And how does he propose Watney and his friends get to Hermes?” Venkat asked. “The Ares III MAV is currently relaying satellite signals four hundred kilometers over his head.”
“Worst case scenario, he travels to Schiaparelli and uses the Ares IV MAV,” Teddy said. “Ares III-A can take a MAV to Mars to replace it, instead of an MDV. Alternately, if we can contact Watney, maybe he can use the Ares III MAV’s fuel plant to make enough fuel that a MAV can be landed at Ares III, fueled immediately, and launch.”
“I’ll try to find someone to run the numbers on that scenario,” Bruce said doubtfully.
“Don’t let it distract you from our top priority. Supplies for Watney first. Then rescue.” He turned to Mitch Henderson, who had kept unnaturally quiet for most of the meeting. “Mitch, I want you to pick a three-man flight crew for an Ares III-A mission. They won’t be landing, so we don’t need more crew. A pilot, a doctor, and a biologist. The most diplomatic astronauts we have- remember they’ll be dealing with intelligent alien life.”
“They’ll be dealing,” Mitch grunted, “with intelligent alien life that’s spent more than two years living with Mark Watney.”
“Good point,” Venkat said. “Better send a psychologist instead of a biologist.”
Everyone laughed except Teddy, who merely made a note on his blotter.
Sighing, Venkat doodled on his own notepad. “Hermes was built to last a minimum of five missions,” he said. “With regular refits it’s rated for thirty years. And its life support margins are broad enough that the only issue with nine crew would be crowding. It’s doable.”
“Why not just send the Ares-III crew back out again?” Henderson asked. “Lewis, Martinez and Beck, anyway. They have extra motivation to see Watney home safe.”
Teddy shook his head. “When they get home they’ll have been in space a year,” he said. “They need rest and recovery time, not training for a new mission as soon as they touch down. Better a fresh crew. And besides,” he added, leaning on his desk again, “every astronaut in the world already has all the motivation anyone can ask for to bring Watney home.”
Every head nodded agreement with that.
TRANSCRIPT – WATER TELEGRAPH EXCHANGE, ESA BALTIMARE and ESA SHIP AMICITAS, AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE MISSION DAY 29
AMICITAS: Amicitas calling Baltimare, over.
AMICITAS: Amicitas calling Baltimare, over.
AMICITAS: Amicitas calling Baltimare, over.
ESA: Baltimare calling Amicitas. You’re early, over.
AMICITAS: Ready for large amounts of water, over.
ESA: Detailed description of flight and landing. Include any conclusions you have formed. Over.
AMICITAS: SG - Flight normal until mid-morning day 2. System fail-safe shutdown accompanied by shattering of all main engine batteries. Only two emergency magic batteries survived. All locally magic-powered systems shut down due to lack of environmental magic. Performed controlled crash forty minutes later using magic reserves in emergency batteries and thruster batteries. Conclusion: unexpected teleport into parallel world without universal magic field. Over.
ESA: Repeat no universal magic field? Over.
AMICITAS: SG- Confirmed. Only source of magic here is life-field. Currently only life on this planet is Amicitas crew, one alien, few plants. Over.
ESA: Understood. Time check your location? Over.
AMICITAS: DF – One hour before noon local time. Planet’s day longer than normal. Over.
ESA: Copied. Prepare for long message tomorrow beginning twenty-one hours from now. Over.
AMICITAS: DF – Will empty the buckets for you. Out.
I forgot how many Sols was it till Mark remembered Pathfinder or has it already passed that due to other distractions.
Solution to the food problem:
You don't actually need THAT much food. You can make do with maybe 5-10 tons, and have a rather substantial load to buy time for the maroonees. So, yes, a BFS could make the trip in the 'off season' by running extremely light, and by flying it out to lunar orbit first, then refueling it there to minimize gravity losses before burning at ludicrous speed out with a sacrificial tanker to provide another fueling boost for preparing to cancel velocity. It sucks in terms of hardware losses, but it could get an escape option and emergency food, and a working radio, without endangering a crew in the attempt.
Due to coincidences in my Fimfiction-checking schedule, I got to read communication being established with both space programs in the same day!
This stuff continues to be great.
Also, it deeply amuses me that something extra-good happened thanks to a potentially terrible screw-up; very much a departure from what usually happened in The Martian, if I recall correctly.
Both the excellent realism and dedication I have come to expect from you. FULL credit and my deepest gratitude for the work.
8681684
To make this work, Hermes has to be the only practical large earth-mars ship. If BFS preforms as advertised then why wouldn't you send a BFS?
Something had to have gone wrong, or slower than ten years delay, on BFS, or for some reason we don't have that kind of capability.
How narrow is the angle of prismatic corner reflectors, or can they sheet up enough at enough size to be picked up by the satts, given the orbiters can rez Beagle 2 which is a metre or so accross core and three panels unfolded?
Always with the back channel though. Even if they had a penetrator delivery option, and it survived the icefield impact, it would end up 10 metres plus under the surface. And it would be a lot heavier to handle the stresses of even the full food load they calculated.
Good thing noone tried hacking a bunch of RTGs into NERVA. You know, critical size, density stuff?
8681710 When Musk announced the BFR he also said that it was going to make Falcon-9 and Falcon Heavy obsolete. I'm presuming that by 2035 both have gone the way of Saturn V.
8681722 BFR is a point-thrust rocket with no provisions for providing artificial gravity. Hermes is a constant-thrust ion vessel with rotating spines to provide gravity when not changing vector. Hermes can haul more passengers and freight and keep them healthier in half the time BFR would require for a round trip. The tradeoff, of course, is that according to the book Hermes is the single most expensive object ever built in the history of mankind.
8681739 I've seen the Beagle 2 pics. You have to know exactly what you're looking for to identify much, because all you've got is a handful of pixels, and each pixel represents a bit less than one meter. Even given fifteen years of optics advancement, Watney's going to need (and use) a lot of rocks. The solar panels are rectangular, one meter wide by two long.
8681722
Youre still going to run into the problem of orbital mechanics. Throwing a rocket behind us to reach Mars takes vastly more fuel. You are fighting initial momentum, you are fighting Sol's gravity well, and you are trying to reach a higher solar orbit all at the same time.
I'm curious how well a forward launch making a close pass at the sun to sling-shot around would work. Given that it would be unmanned, it might even be able to get so close as within Venus' orbit without serious mission hazard. The real question is time. Velocities would be higher with lower fuel expense but distance would be much greater.
8681774 Technically they still don't know it was the Sparkle Drive that did it for certain- it's the top suspect, but they don't know how. But Twilight will have that worked out very, very quickly.
8681783 The Rich Purnell maneuver would never have been approved by real-life NASA for precisely that reason- it takes Hermes inside Venus's orbit. That's probably why Martinez has to abandon his bunk during the second flight out due to cooling system malfunction.
I didn't bother testing a sun-grazing trajectory because Earth and Mars are going to be too close together for several months, and the trajectory would be too much of a bent-clothespin to work well, if at all.
Just imagined the diplomatik talks, after the rescue, including potential technology trade.
Was thinking about how happy NASA etc would be about the supply-crystals, when it hit me. Those are OP. Ignore the nice and easy supply for space crafts. that babies are more then whatever the people at NASA could hope for in regards to terraforming.
The 2 planets in out solar system potentialy worth terraforming are Mars and Venus. Problem?
Mars is missing a siutable Atmosphere (well and a magnetosphere. But that shouldn't be an immidiate problem.) IIRC Mars lost most of it's atmosphere during a time the solar wind was much stronger
Venus on the other hand has TOO MUCH atmosphere. Yes, the composition isn't nice, but changing that is a small problem compared to overabundance.
Enter magic gas-transfering crystals. Sending one on Venus, recieving on Mars and let the air flow. (now get enough to make the process feastable in a timely manner and the biggest hurdle in terraforming of both planets is heaviely reduced/eliminated)
So I guess the question now is: Who will make it to them and rescue them first? The humans or the Ponies?
Could Starlight and Twilight combine efforts to make some kind of EQ Girls portal between the two universes eventually? I'm pretty sure by the end the five Equestrian visitors won't want to permanently not see Mark and any more friends they make again. Especially Starlight. She puts lots of effort into trying to keep every friend she makes now.
Yeah, orbital mechanics is a bitch sometimes. You know, if you were just trying to work out arrival times for a resupply, you could approximate the orbits of Earth and Mars as concentric circles, work out the travel time with Kepler's laws, and get an answer accurate within a few weeks. Then again, I guess simulations are easier and more entertaining.
Glad to see more progress in communication, and now ESA is aware of the magic problem. I wonder if ESA would have any reservations about their crew being rescued by an alien civilization...
8681722
The BFS is going to happen and, sort of SpaceX getting banned from landing on Mars under normal circumstances by the Planetary Protection Office for asinine reasons (a distinct possibility, especially if life is discovered), it should run just fine. The critical parts are already developed and they start work building the damn things later this year. My guess is that some asshole in the government in this timeline banned private landings on Mars until 'sufficient analysis of the surface' could be conducted, leading to SpaceX retasking to lunar colonies in the meantime, and asteroid mining.
8681710
FH is effectively dead at this point, due to taking too long to come to fruition; superseded by the BFR/BFS. It'll fly, but Musk isn't going to bother too much with it. More importantly, by the time of the Hermes, the Falcon 9/H will be decommissioned in favor of the BFR (which can do the F9 tasks with just its second stage). However, you also have the issue that the FH isn't nearly as powerful as a BFR/S, and while it can carry a nice load into Mars orbit, it can't effectively overcome the orbital mechanics, rendering it useless and not an option in this case even if it was still flying.
8681840
Venus problem is not too much atmosphere, it's a rotation axis that is pointing to the sun and a day that lasts months (and does Jack shit for cooling since it's north pole points to the sun). A dense and hot atmosphere ate nothing close to problems you'd need to tow the whole planet to solve.
Once they get that cavern sealed they'll have an easier time, though. The ship's life support most likely can turn it habitable, and turning it into a huge farm could give them enough magical generation to use it plenty more. That is, of equestria doesn't find out how to transfer magical infused water or anything like that, a tech useless on a magic rich universe but crucial in ours.
So I’ve been thinking a bit about the water and air transfer system.
What exactly is it that prevents transporting food the same way? There has to be some kind of rule. But what kind of rule, just how restrictive is it really, and is it possible to sneak any calories through it at all? If only for a morale boost.
The first rule I thought of was “Substances transferred must be simple atoms,” i.e. transferring breaks up atomic bonds. But that doesn’t fit, water is a molecule.
The second rule I thought of was that “Connected molecules cannot be transferred,” which fits, but then, you could push pretty much anything through, it would just become a paste. This wouldn’t be that much of a nutrition problem, so that can’t be it, either.
The only remaining limitation I can think of is a limitation on molecule size.
Well, the smallest molecule I can think of that counts as food is glucose, and it’s still pretty small as far as molecules go – just 10 times higher molecular weight than water, C6H12O6. That is, the water transfer system has a decently good chance of admitting suitably diluted sugar syrup. Considering how much sugar ponies appear to consume…
One thing that would prevent this is a limitation on atomic mass, instead, but if such a limitation would not permit through carbon, it wouldn’t permit nitrogen either, and it would not be possible to deliver air.
8681897
Terraforming is too hard anyway. The planet would have to be pretty close to Earth-like in the first place for us to have any chance.
Venus has a different advantage though: The altitude where atmospheric pressure is about the same as sea level Earth is the same altitude with livable temperatures. We just need to colonise the planet with giant blimps.
8681941
It's carbon bonds the system can't handle
8681885 Assuming any are left in mothballs to be launched. I'm guessing not.
8681886 In this timeline Elon Musk's notions about the BFR being a feasible Earth-to-Mars-surface-and-back vehicle hit so many development snags that Project Ares and the Hermes passed it by on that front. But the BFR, if/when it goes online, would be about perfect for one-way supply launches, particularly of the MAV, which would be bar none the single heaviest load to be delivered intact to the Martian surface. Because right now the biggest obstacle to a Mars mission is the same one we had when von Braun was still around: getting back off the planet. It takes a lot of fuel to do that.
8681897 Venus has abundant problems. We still don't know why no surface feature is older than maybe 200 million years old max, maybe much younger. (My personal guess is that Venus's current condition is a cosmically recent event caused by a major impactor.) The atmosphere is full of sulfur compounds. And, most critically, the planet gets roughly twice the insolation per square meter as Earth, which means the place is never going to be what you'd call chilly. It's going to take a lot more work to make Venus habitable than just swapping atmospheres.
8681941 "why no food" - You mean, besides author fiat? Basically, any substance that burns to produce an exothermic reaction is going to have problems- in particular the transmission scrambles hydrocarbon bonds. Nothing more explosive than molecular hydrogen is going to pass through without making a mess of some kind. And although you can't light most food on fire without drying it out, the whole point of food is that our cells DO burn it, one molecule at a time, for energy. That's why, despite the best development efforts, attempts at passing food through the system end up as foul-smelling liquids traveling at speed... and why passing rocket fuel through the system is a good way to destroy teleportation crystals.
Besides, as Mercury astronauts could tell you, eating meals from a tube gets old really, really quick. Even if it's hot.
8681991
Just carbon bonds, but not any other kind? Kind of ridiculously arbitrary...
If the space station is big and capable enough to do refit on the Hermes, why can't it be used to assemble the payloads from two or more small boosters into some sort of one-shot cargo transfer vehicle?
YO!
I'm putting this thing on TVtropes under the Martian Fanfiction Recs.
Need help.
Ciao.
8681999 8681994
I'm happy to accept author fiat as the primary, perfectly acceptable reason for it. The story is about characters, not carbon. Science fiction all involves accepting at least a small dose of the unrealistic in order to make the rest of it flow.
But to get into the chemistry of it, the idea that it's stored energy that won't cross reliably is interesting. It suggests that you could get the chemicals across as long as they're in a completely flat, un-energetic form, then do the work of turning that into food on the receiving side. For example, the air feed can include carbon dioxide, which plants on the receiving end can use to grow. Not that Mars is short of carbon dioxide, of course - it's just an example.
This suggests there might be some more sophisticated uses of the life support feed that could help accelerate the large-scale farming effort, but that it'll take a lot of very careful experimentation and communication to establish them. Nopony wants to break them.
OK, in light of a lot of comments, let me say something very quickly.
There will be some arbitrary-looking things in this story, partly carryover from CSP, partly new. Most of it is geared towards one goal:
DON'T LET MAGIC BE THE SOLUTION TO ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING.
Magic will solve some problems. Science (or at least MacGyvering) will solve others. And it will NOT be Club Med on Mars. Resources will be limited and rescue reasonably (I don't say realistically where magic is concerned) difficult.
Everyone is going to get their chance to screw up, if not multiple such chances. Fireball's already had one. (I don't count the failed transmutation spell against Starlight, since it wasn't her idea.) Magic will have failure modes just as science occasionally failed in the original book. (Yes, I've sidestepped Watney Plays With Hydrogen, but other things will come up.) And I'm making a specific rule: for every issue the ponies bypass, I'm going to throw a new wrinkle in.
So if I listen to your suggestions on "why doesn't Starlight run a Level Three diagnostic, cross the streams, and reverse the polarity of the enchantment flow?" it will be mainly to shoot them down- if I haven't thought of them first. (And so far I'm not doing badly on that front.)
One fiat I'm giving you for free: ponies know how to convert magic into electricity or directly into mechanical power, but they don't know how to reverse the process. So far as they know it's one-way only. (Why? Because otherwise all Watney has to do is hook hab power to an electric motor, and the shaft of the motor to a mana generator, and unlimited magic.)
8682032 What kind of help?
8681795
I was talking about an emergency re-supply: something to get him through until rescue can arrive. It wouldn't be manned. It would be a balancing act between how close to the sun a cargo rocket could get against how fast they could get it there. The closer to the sun, the faster it arrives. Too close and it starts to cook on-board computers. Too far and it wouldn't get there in time. I'm not familiar with orbital calculations or solar radiation to even know if there is a window of opportunity there. Heck, given the distance, the required velocity to make it in time might put the trajectory inside the sun's corona.
8681897
Er, I think your conflating Venus and Uranus. Uranus is the one whose poles point at the sun, whereas Venus either rotates backwards (very slowly), or upside down.
8681994
I have issues with this. Many, many issues with this. I can see the BFR getting delayed 5 years. Maybe 10. But the issue is that even if the Hermes was built, that's not going to stop Musk. More importantly, the BFR getting delayed 10 years asks many other questions, because it's mostly ambitious because of how ludicrously big the damn thing is. 90% or so of the technology has already been developed for the thing, up to and including the engines. There's also the issue that Musk has made it clear that there are multiple backup plans to get the thing out the door should some aspect of the engineering not work out (such as the carbon fiber structure getting replaced by traditional construction). The engines don't work out with the full number currently specified? They're currently going to be running at about half of their potential as designed, so he can pretty quickly half the number and enlarge most of the remainder to compensate. Etc, etc. Reusability is out as a potential issue source, as he's demonstrated that he can successfully reuse all aspects of the booster, including the capsule part, for an economical amount of money. I mean, maybe I could see him only getting the reuse cost/time reduction to 30% of a brand new launch skuppering his Mars Colony Plans as currently envisioned, but that would just mean he builds a Hermes-styled cycler to fix that problem. Maybe some politician fucking commercial spaceflight over by forcing all crew flights (not just NASAs) to be certified by the current standards and then continue changing them to keep SpaceX from certifying might do it, but that's likely to get the shit slapped out of it by the supreme court for undue burden on business.
That's sort of why I proposed the 'Life on Mars gets super-protections until NASA exploratory flights successfully fully documented it' explanation for why SpaceX is in no position to help out within 120 days or less. Anything less wouldn't really stop them.
8682051
I need a secondary rec to keep it on.
8681994
If there are too many problems with the BFR, why not make it so that it already launched and is on its way to a different planet or something.
8682072 Closer to the sun isn't enough. The start and destination points also matter a lot. If they're too close together a sun-grazing shot won't save you time or delta-V, and it will give your ship a good roasting.
8682097 OK- Andy Weir used 2034-35 as the time period for his trajectory work plotting out Ares III so that, among other things, Thanksgiving would pass during its landing. Ares landings happen every other Hohmann window, or every fifty months, so Ares I, the first Mars landing, would have been roughly July 2026, with several years of ramping up beforehand. Given this, Project Ares would likely have begun around 2021 or 2022 at latest. The first BFR isn't scheduled for even a test flight until 2020 last I looked, and Falcon Heavy has been in pre-flight testing hell for five years now. So it's not much of a stretch for Musk to have been offered a buy-in on building Hermes and supplying the launches. It would only take a couple of serious issues.
(And, again remember, SpaceX was next to nothing Weir first wrote the book.)
8682123 Ah. That's not something I can help with, even if I can remember my TVTropes login. I'm grateful for your recommendation, but I don't think having the author of a piece second a nomination is good form.
8682137 For one thing, SpaceX plans for there to be a lot more than one. So I'm saying that they're backlogged on refurbishing BFRs and prepping for what would be the massive demand of daily launches for two weeks straight for Ares IV presupply.
Looking forward to the next chapter.
8682173
Yeah. It's why I asked your many fans to help.
8682179
Ah, so they aren't going to sacrifice one to mars because Ares 4 takes priority, got it.
8682087
Venus' Day is longer than its year. It circles the sun once every 225 days. It takes 243 days for it to rotate on its axis in the opposite direction of all the other planets.
There is actually a very good theory of Venus being from outside our solar system. Having been captured in our suns gravitational pull. Which is why it's weird compared to the other planets.
https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NECs=on&chk_maxMag=on&maxMag=25&chk_maxOCC=on&maxOCC=4&chk_target_list=on&target_list=mars&mission_class=oneway&mission_type=rendezvous&LD1=2019&LD2=2025&maxDT=2.0&DTunit=yrs&maxDV=7.0&min=DV&wdw_width=-1&submit=Search#a_load_results
This page may be useful.
i.imgur.com/YBdOchW.jpg
The above is a graph of launch time versus mission elapsed time for a launch.
'hotter' coloured points need more speed, and will have much less payload - going from 4km/s to 7km/s may knock over 3/4 off your payload.
The vertical axis is duration of mission.
Note on the above link, you can sort by mission arrival time too.
You have really, really limited ability to 'brute force' a trajectory.
As an example, to get to mars at opposition in 60 days takes 300km/s of speed change, not the ~7 we can just about manage.
This is easy with a sparkle drive.
From an earthly perspective, it's basically hopeless, even for a gram payload.
If you can get bits of Amicitas in orbit, things may get interesting, even if it is not much repaired.
Infinite propellant mass is fun.
8682211 No, it's that they were already behind schedule before #BringThemHome became a thing.
FYI, Blue Falcon is US military slang for "buddy fucker", someone who stabs his mates in the back. The guy who gets other people in trouble to save his own hide -- he's a Blue Falcon. It's a little bit immersion breaking for people aware of this. Maybe Black Falcon, or Blue Finch?
And this story is amazing. Keep up the outstanding work, but pace yourself.
A crossover between The Martian and MLP.
Never thought I'd see the day....
8681840
Forget about terraforming... you have a way of providing UNLIMITED propellant to a starship... instead of a VASIMIR accelerating a few atom at a time you can use the nuclear reactor to shoot out STEAM with as much as you want mass as is the feasible output of the thing...
8682256 oooookay, I'd not been aware of that before. I'll change it once I figure out to what.
8681840
Regarding terraforming, you will have to remember that the water and air are not created, they are transported. To put an atmosphere on a planet, you need to start with a planet's worth of atmosphere that nobody's going to miss. I think Equis might miss it's atmosphere if someone were to siphon it off to Mars.
8682310
He's talking about siphoning it off of venus.
8682248
So changeing the payload wouldn't affect anything/be efficient
Very cool that you actually got in touch with Andy Weir, if briefly.
As for the story, huzzah! Communication! Some of it's even two-way... though one end is effectively a leaking water main, so there's that. Still, progress is progress, and hopefully no one's going to screw it up too badly in the near future. That said, the planets are misaligned for an easy resupply and there's no way for the space agency in the same universe as the castaways to get in touch with them yet. They still have a long way to go to get home...
8682320 If the booster isn't available the payload doesn't really matter. And right now no BFRs are available.
Blue Falcon? Oh that's friggen hilarious!
8681840
I remember some of the old days where some thought of connecting big honking engines to ice-steroids to bring them into Mars orbit and land them "gently" as possible far from colonies. Much heat and water vapor would be generated over many collisions. At least the Pony version of Mars could be Equestriformed if enough ambient magic existed for, say, Luna to reach out and grab comets, even her moon could get an atmosphere, except for the lack of gravity.
Still avidly following the story! º›º