Aeros
Five years ago today, I was strapped into a Halcyon 9 rocket in Kazakhstan, waiting for eternity. Despite streamlining the process, NASA has never been one to skimp on pre-flight checks, not that we were in any hurry. The Aeros 5 team was just one out of the past thousand or so missions the agency had under its belt, but it still had a retention rate of survival to maintain. I remember being latched in shoulder-to-shoulder with the other four, feeling the excitement and anticipation, sure, and some of that steely resolve that comes with the job, but more so I had the aching sense of regret. I didn’t have any regret for choosing this job — going to work on the moon for a two-year residency that turned into five. I regret that I didn’t take a good look around. Scanning for any remnant of human comfort, I craned my head towards the 3x 2 windows at the last glimpse of blue sky. The time started to crawl by on the dash. The last few seconds turned to hours as my eyes adjusted to the bright azure streaming in. I couldn’t get enough of it.
Then, at the 30-second mark, they handed off power to the onboard computers, leaving the fate of our mission in our hands at last. The water compression system armed, and the countdown began. I felt a rolling grumble below as the valves opened and the main engine systems pressurized. The cabin began to shiver, then shake with increasing intensity at each second. Finally, a boom and the engines lighted with a ferocious roar. Bracing my body, the G’s pressed into me like clay as we lifted off the ground, layer after layer of force warping onto my skin and into my bones. I winced at the howl of the rocket as we broke through the clouds. The pressure piled onto my chest, the cabin quaking as we soared through the sky, rapidly and rapidly, until finally, the mist of the blue surrendered to the night, and the weight released me into space.
And now I’m here.
Hamilton Base is surely one of the most robust lunar settlements NASA has established over the years. As everything in space is quite inhospitable to our fragile human bodies, the engineers that came to Mare Frigoris forty years ago had the good sense of fortifying the hell out of everything. About 1,000 people live and work in this station: a series of thirteen domes, over a baker’s dozen of connective tubes, and a byzantine-level maze of underground tunnels. Going outside isn’t particularly recommended. Thus, the main purpose of our facility as stated in the UN charter of 2037 is to mine the basalts of Mare Frigoris for thermal insulation construction, water-ice harvesting, and oxygen harvesting. The problem with oxygen harvesting, however, is that it isn’t fully sustainable, or in Congress’s eyes, economically viable. That’s where our team, Aeros 5, comes in. We’re here to shepherd in a new process that would make it more viable for oxygen extraction from lunar regolith without expending excess hydrogen and methane fuel. If that drives the cost of production down, then we can get more funding from Congress to finish this project and go home. Has it been solved? That’s a funny question.
After being here for as long as I have, the thrill of being on the moon has kind of faded into the background of my mind. Sure, a little bit of pride is still there, a little bit of anxiety, but eventually the job at hand becomes more prescient than your childlike wonders would prefer. You see the same faces every day, the same halls and corridors traced into the back of your hand, and the mounds of gray regolith in the distance greet you with the same cold comfort as you look through several inches of glass. Morning, noon, and night depend on what shift you’re scheduled for. So, today is a day like any other, but the guy at Resnik Sector’s security checkpoint never seems to remember who I am. God, every time, it never fails. I always get stopped in Resnik by this idiot. I state my identity: Naima Logan, DOB 5/29/2046, and a member of Aeros 5. I state my business: sample delivery to the Burnell lab. I state my opinion: “God, fuck you, Dennis.”
Even on the moon, you’ll find that the routines and customs and office politics of Earth remain sound. The foot traffic of life as I entered Resnik’s exchange hall brought music to my ears, with little convoys of engineers, miners, and other workers of the facility maneuvering around each other like worker bees. I’m sure the architects of the 20s would be proud. We have thirteen permanent bases settled on different regions of the moon, NASA holding seven of them, with a second commercial lunar colony finishing development in the next two years. We haven’t reached the point yet where our galaxy has been inundated with “human prosperity,” but so far, we’ve figured out how to work with this hunk of rock pretty well. Mars is nearly getting to our level of viability, and they’re already talking about a settlement on Titan, which is very generous even still.
Finally, I get to the lab. As usual, Tsarnaev is frowning at his computer; Fyodor’s gotten kind of saturnine these past few years, becoming more unkempt than the clean-faced soldier he was five years ago. Across from him fiddling with the oxygenator is Benji Satterwhite, who is another character entirely, and by that, I mean he has none of his own. Both stood to attention as my shoes squeaked against the vitrified regolith tiles, and Tsarnaev motioned me over to observe the thing he was frowning at.
“Well commander, what’s got you bunched in the face?” I chirped as I strolled up to the desk. Tsarnaev pursed his lips and pointed at the latest diagnostic feedback from our overnight test.
“Look at this.” He instructed. I scooted around to his side of the table and squinted over at his monitor. The data looked simple enough, typical feedback from the last batch of tests we’d been running that month but nearing the end of the chart my eyes froze. My neck straightened as slowly it dawned on me what was making Tsarnaev smile out of the corner of my eye.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” He asked. Quickly nodding, I pedaled back from the lab table, peering up to the balcony overhead. Sarah Minyard, a brassy, delightfully weird girl, was up on the balcony running diagnostics on our most recent batch of regolith.
“Sarah, get down here!” I exclaimed. She looked over at me, a little bemused, and rolled away from the console with a little spin. Actually, two little spins. Peering over the balcony, she returned my excitement with an inquiring grin.
“Howdy? How’s that?” She rejoined in a sing-song refrain. I smirked. Always the cheery one around here, Sarah. If it wasn’t for her golden retriever personality, I would have jumped out of the airlock on the way here, being cooped up with Satterwhite and Tsarnaev. We had a group huddle, going over the data in the usual, but trying to contain the newfound frenzy that had graced our computer screens at last.
“So, with the regolith samples we’ve returned from Protagoras crater, we’ll submerge it in molten calcium chloride, along with an inert anode and a thermocouple, and then heat the entire gas-tight cell in an electric furnace to keep the electrolyte molten,” I observed, nearing the tail end of the discussion. “The current will pass between the anode and cathode to drive the reduction of the oxide material at the cathode. . . and that’ll produce the oxygen gas we need at the anode.” Tsarnaev pointed at me with a smile.
“As usual, that keen mind of yours has pegged the situation perfectly.”
“Well finally someone noticed.”
“So, we’ll beat two dead horses with one stone then. We’ll finally have a more efficient oxygenation process and less fuel expense.” Satterwhite chimed in. Tsarnaev chuckled.
“Precisely.”
“And you think that’ll make McCauley show his hand. That this will finally drive the costs down and let us go home early.” Minyard concluded. Tsarnaev shifted in his stance, looking down at his feet for a pregnant moment, then looked up at us with a nod in acknowledgment.
“Yes, I think they’ll approve,” He spoke quietly. Sarah and I exchanged glances; absolutes were a dangerous gamble to be said aloud. I hesitated before bringing it up, but I knew it had to be probed sooner than later.
“And what if they say no?” I asked. Tsarnaev sighed and rubbed his nose. He didn’t have to answer me; I already knew he was resigned to whatever fate they had in store for us, but that didn’t mean he had to hide anything from me at this point. At last, he looked at me and shrugged, giving a half-hearted smile.
“Keep pins to your pulse, Logan,” Tsarnaev remarked, tapping at his neck.
I nodded with a grimacing little head-bob, the crest we had been riding on now sinking back into the waters of doubt. Ten years take twenty. Five years take ten. Two years take five. Such was the nature of any government-funded science project. We can’t afford to fail, as the maxim of NASA stands, but really, it’s been feeling like we haven’t been able to win. Not in a long while.
I tried not to think about it, going through the motions the rest of the day, running more sample tests, and answering emails. I tried to hide my attitude now that the team was running smoothly on testy optimism. Sarah noticed my mood during lunch, though, and tossed a French fry at my scowl. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t shake that nagging fear in the back of my mind that’s been there, almost every night (or what counts as night) while I’m trying to sleep, that somehow, after all that I’ve done, I’m still going to fail. Even though we have this little chance now, at last, I still had a feeling we would run into the same emotions as we did three years ago.
Putting it more mildly, we hadn’t even reached the point where we could call our project complete, and yet the committee for Lunar Base Activities had been subpoenaed by Congress, demanding us to provide answers. General McCauley, the “governor” of Hamilton base, had called in from Washington, and Lieutenant General Gutierrez had even bothered to arrive in person, which did nothing to dissuade our growing frustration. Our research was not as far along as we’d liked, with budget cuts further impacting the bones of our project in the last fiscal year, but it was our asses on the line if we couldn’t find a solution to the oxygenation process and drive down overhead expenses. None of this was our fault, mind you, given that mining for air on the moon is an expensive process to begin with. Needless to say, the road to hell wasn’t paved in a day.
“I don’t understand why Congress expects us to hurry up and wait on this,” I remember Tsarnaev saying, looking a lot sharper and professional back then. “Either they give us the funding now or we can’t finish. If they want to hold off on funding and expect a fully furnished processor by the end of this year, we’ll have to string it together with duct tape and safety pins. They can’t expect any kind of turnover in a matter of three months, not with the regolith being as precarious as it is.”
“Then you’ll have to stay here three more years then,” General McCauley countered from the monitor, sitting almost mockingly comfortable in his leather office chair at the Pentagon. “It seems you underestimated how long these projects usually take, as you literati usually do.” Four-star general and career mission commander, and yet he hasn’t even bothered to come back to the moon in seven years. Asshole.
“Three? Why stretch this out even longer? We could have had this project finished by the current deadline if you would’ve sent the aid we needed 4 months ago!” I had interjected. Tsarnaev shot me a glare to keep quiet, but I couldn’t help it. The fear had gotten to me.
“All we need is one more year at most,” I had assumed at the time. “We’ve been living on a pauper’s share of the budget prior to now, we just need more funding.”
“Three years is how much we’ve negotiated with Congress to spend for all of the projects involved at Hamilton,” stated Gutierrez, turning to me with a cold stare. “We luckily managed to wrap you into the package, but you’ll have to share with the rest. That’s as much as you’ll get. Any more time spent complaining and they’ll renege on the offer permanently.” She then turned over to Tsarnaev, who at this point was trying to hold back the instinct to rip the monitor off the wall and throw it at her.
“And you will be more apt this time, Commander, in updating the committee on a weekly basis, not monthly.” She said with taciturn grace. Tsarnaev scowled, boring daggers into her eyes. He finally let out a huff through his nostrils, in an attempt to expel his anger.
“Fine. We will be more prudent in letting you know when we’ve made progress.”
“And we’d be very happy to see that once you do.” Gutierrez clipped with a smile, and with the swipe of her datapad, she departed from the conference room, heels clicking in the distance. I had stood there, frozen, staring at the door she left behind, with that fear puncturing through my brain. The room had turned with a cold, black rage settling in the air. Three more years.
I barely remember storming to my cabin, sprawling onto the floor and screaming. Just screaming. Screaming into a pillow so no one could hear. That was all I could do; I couldn’t just say that I quit and pack up and leave right there. The residential contract didn’t allow for any escape clauses. You couldn’t really, not with the cold vacuum of space happy to greet you outside. No. Three more years of this, this constant stream of demands and expectations and assumptions and insults from people who think they know how to do your job because they’re the ones in power. Three more years. Three more years of my health being compromised from cosmic radiation smashing through my atoms and my bone density growing weaker and my GI tract going to shit and my blood pressure becoming even more screwed up. Three more years.
I’m surprised I’ve made it this long. That I’ve lived like this for this long. Maybe it’s because I’ve finally cracked, persisting out of pure spite. Maybe I’m numb to it all. Maybe I haven’t really known for the longest time why I’m still doing this, other than contractual obligation. I don’t know. Honestly, once you get used to the fact of where you’ve been living for the past five years, you lose sight of the fact of what it all means. It’s fruitless to ruminate on meaning anyways because we’ll all find out in the end, I guess. The existential question of eternity answered all at once and never again. The cessation of experience. God, I can’t think about that. Maybe experience is the meaning, and all that these past five years have done for me is embolden the intense yearning for home.
Home. That’s a word I haven’t thought of since yesterday. I’ve been staring at gray walls for so long I’ve forgotten what the sky even looked like in California. I mean, I can say life back in Pasadena was certainly formative for all the reasons I got here. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was just a mere 30-minute drive across town from my house, which was preferable since both of my parents worked there. My Orange County mom and her catalog of southwest cooking recipes, aunties at the ready for Sunday dinner, and a smile that could shame Mother Mary. My old Milwaukeean dad and his ancient Bruce Cockburn CD collection, passionate love of the Toronto Blue Jays, and a cornball personality endearing enough to get away with anything. I look at their faces, stained with worry and pride, wondering and wondering how things are going and when I’m coming home. And I’ll smile again and say I’ll come home soon and everything’s fine.
But who am I kidding? I can’t hide how easy it is to be tired. I can’t hide how often the stress gets to me anymore, or how much I’ve secretly cried in the confines of my room. I mourn the memories I could have made. The friends and lovers I had to leave behind. The faces of people I knew are worn by someone else. The places I’ve been moved 5 inches to the left. I’ve moved 5 years into the future. Throughout this whole period of time I’ve called my life, I’ve become more medically complicated than I’d care to, and all that talk of bravery and patriotism just seems so disingenuous to me now. All that passion and training I’d spent feels so wasted sometimes. God, I miss how blue the sky was. I wish I had looked at it longer.
Maybe I’m just tired. At the end of my wick. I know we all are. We’ve missed half a decade of living amongst the world and have the wrinkles and gray hair to show for it. We’ve forgotten the joys of being alive. I remember watching the Apollo documentaries; those guys had a better outlook yet less time to put it all into perspective when they were here. They spoke of serenity and beauty, feeling welcome on this cold world, waiting thousands of years for humanity to arrive. They jumped and they laughed and played golf on the lunar highlands. They got to work when they needed to focus. They stopped and looked up.
They remind me of Minyard. I’m still amazed at Sarah’s lively resolve in trying to keep our spirits up despite the money pit we’ve been stuck in for the past three years. She’s remained sane; that same enthusiasm underpinned by commitment and diligence. We’ll stay up late in the lab and talk about anything and everything: things like the development of the direct fusion drive, Satterwhite’s weird obsession with old Tom Cruise movies, or whether a worm can have an existential crisis. Dumb little things like that. She’s crazy. The glue that’s kept our weathered little work family together.
I think she explained it to me once when I asked her about how she keeps it all together. I remember her odd smile, goofy as always, but with a hint of sadness I’d never noticed before. “It’s not about just keeping it together, y’know, muddling through, or just trying to survive,” she had said. “You have to have a focus. The thing you live for. You have to. It doesn’t matter how far away the target is, doesn’t matter how long it takes. If you can get there, you’ll get through. And it doesn’t hurt to try and have some fun along the way.”
I hate it when she’s right, of course, the optimist that she is.
I have to remind myself why I’m here. Who I’m doing this for. Mom. Dad. Fyodor. Benji. Sarah. All the rest on that blue star called home. I know it gets to be so much; when I can’t tell the normal days apart and the bad ones come back to haunt me. The good days though, I have to persist for that. Whatever inches I can make on this project is just one more step toward going home. A step for me, a step for mankind, as they say around here. All of that and more will come at the price of patience. Despite all my grief, I am burdened with human kindness. Sometimes late at night, I’ll take a walk down to the Burnell Lab and go have dinner in the solarium; it has a nice observation window to look out over the hills. I’ll take my dinner there, exhausted, tired, and disillusioned, but I’ll stop and look above my head those nights and see the Earth, the same as it ever was. All my hope hangs there, fixed in the dark.