Lunar Descent (31 page)

(
SCREEN: Neil Armstrong climbing down the ladder of the Apollo 11 LEM; President George Bush making a speech at the Smithsonian Institution; a session of the U.S. House of Representatives; a session of the Japanese Diet.
)

SCROLL: Yet the launch of the Hiten probe, as seminal as it was at the time, was only the third-most important event of the era. Six months earlier—on July 20, 1989, the twentieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing—U.S. President George Bush announced during a ceremony on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum that the long-range goal of the revived United States space program would be to establish bases on the Moon and, eventually, on Mars (
See Chap.2
). Despite criticism that the new Space Exploration Initiative ignored fiscal practicality—at a time when the United States was dealing with a staggering fiscal deficit, it was estimated that such a program would cost more than five hundred billion dollars over the next thirty-five years—the realization was dawning on governmental and private-enterprise decision makers in the West that space exploration was necessary to maintain a technological lead over its rivals in the East, as well as a means of developing alternate energy sources to free the U.S. from dependence on foreign oil. The first era of lunar exploration had been brought about as the result of a political “cold war” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union; the second era was begun by economic friction between the West and the East, and by the harsh lessons driven home by Gulf War I in 1991.
Press “enter,” please
.

(
SCREEN: a meeting during one of the “Case For Mars” conferences in Boulder, Colorado; diagrams and sketches of advanced rocket engines, space shuttles, spacesuits, lunar landers; pictures of science fiction writers; movie stills; the huckster room of a World Science Fiction Convention; the exterior of the Arthur D. Little Company headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
)

SCROLL: Yet even the Bush Administration's recommitment of the United States to manned interplanetary exploration, in the long run, was overshadowed by theoretical work being done by space scientists around the world. In labs and offices, new technologies were being quietly explored by the next generation of dreamers, both in public and private circles. A whole new batch of basic-research scientists and rocket engineers and policy analysts—the kids who knew Peenemunde only as an item of interest from history texts, who had been weaned on
Star Trek
and who had read science fiction novels by flashlight under the bedcovers—were now huddled together in places as diverse as SF fan conventions (
See Appendix.1
), campus beer-and-burger hangouts, and the industrial think-tanks of the Rand Corporation and the Arthur D. Little Company. There were looking for ways, by hook or by crook, to get people back to the Moon.
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.

(
SCREEN: a chunk of ice; a frosted glass beer stein; still-photos of Watson, Murray, and Brown; an animated map of the Moon, rotating to display first the north, then the south, lunar poles; simulation of a comet striking the Moon.
)

SCROLL: In time, they found just what they needed: ice. When they located, in the dry depths of space, that same substance which encrusted the outsides of their beer mugs, they also found one of the most important resources of the reconquest of the Moon. The possible prescence of permaice in the Moon's polar regions was first postulated in 1961 by scientists Kenneth Watson, Bruce C. Murray, and Harrison Brown (
See Chap.1
). They realized that the deep craters at the “top” and “bottom” of the Moon were never exposed to daylight. These permanently shadowed regions, therefore, could function as cold traps, collecting frozen water and carbon dioxide which might accumulate there. Thus, scientists theorized, if ancient comets had indeed collided with the Moon in its prehistory, ice sprayed out from the comets might have been buried deep beneath the regolith at the poles, never to have been evaporated by sunlight.
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.

(
SCREEN: Apollo astronauts walking on the lunar surface; Surveyor and Lukod probes in orbit above the Moon; spectrographic maps of the Moon; the outside of the SSI's offices in Princeton, New Jersey; artist's depictions of lunar mining operations; animation of comets moving through the Oort cloud.
)

SCROLL: The polar-permaice theory, though, remained largely ignored during the Apollo explorations. Spectrographic and geological mapping of the poles was never accomplished by the American and Soviet probes that visited the Moon in the 1960's and early 1970's Indeed, the question might have lain dormant except as an item of arcane astrophysical interest had it not been for the research of the nonprofit space research group, the Space Studies Institute (
See Chap.2
). SSI researchers realized that a need for water had to be satisfied before large-scale lunar mining could be started, and although harvesting comets from the Oort cloud which passed through the inner solar system was the obvious solution, the technological capability of rendezvousing with these relatively rare comets was impractical, at least for the near-term. On the other hand, transporting vast amounts of water from Earth was economically daunting. SSI began to look elsewhere and, in the late 1980's, it rediscovered the old Watson-Murray-Brown theory of lunar permaice.
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.

(
SCREEN: a model of the SSI Lunar Prospector; footage of its launch from the Baikonur cosmodrome; model of the NASA Lunar Observer; footage of its launch aboard a rocket from Cape Canaveral; diagram of the Moon's north pole; orbital footage of Byrd Crater; Admiral Richard, Byrd at the North Pole; diagram of subsurface permaice deposits at Byrd Crater.
)

SCROLL: in the 1990's, two unmanned missions were sent to the Moon. First, the SSI's Lunar Prospector—a low-cost package containing a spare Apollo spectrometer donated by NASA and funded by several American companies—was launched from the U.S.S.R. by a Molniya rocket. The SSI's lunar probe became the first private-industry extraterrestrial probe in history (although Japan's Hiten was privately funded, it was conducted under the aegis of a government science agency). Three years later, NASA's more sophisticated Lunar Observer was launched by a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, but by then its most interesting mission was to confirm the findings of the cut-rate SSI probe. The Watson-Murray-Brown theory was correct; permaice existed within the regolith of the Moon's northern polar region—ironically enough, within the crater named after the legendary polar explorer, Admiral Richard Byrd. No such wellspring was found on the south pole, but one was enough: a source of lunar water had been located.
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.

(
SCREEN: animated diagram of the lunar north pole; NASA's first base in the Descartes highlands: the digging of the first well at Byrd Station; orbital photos of the Skycorp permaice extraction facility.)

SCROLL: This was the most important event of the 1990's in regard to the industrial development of the Moon. It meant that if a well could be established at Byrd Crater, the moonbase would have a relatively inexpensive source of water; Nature had made a nice deal with mankind, but as is the case in any deal, there was some fine print at the bottom of the contract: no one knew exactly now much permaice existed in Byrd Crater, or how long the supply would last. The answer to that tricky question was not answered until 2024, long after Skycorp had established its Byrd Crater Permaice Extraction Facility.
Key next chapter, please
.

15. Mighty Joe's Jinx

The lights on the airlock's status panel turned green; Lester shoved down the lockbar and pushed open the heavy steel hatch. As he removed his helmet in the antechamber, he heard the metronomic
clicka-click-click
of Butch Peterson's fingers on the computer keyboard in the lab module. “Find anything yet?” he called out.

“Maybe,” she murmured distractedly as she continued working at the computer. Riddell was about to ask if she could help him out of his suit, but noticed that her own hardsuit was buckled into one of the racks. Nobody had been in the ice station's control module to help
her
out, so why should he demand assistance? This was a matter of professional pride. Lester backed into the second rack, buckled the shoulder grommets, then slid back the recessed cover on his chestplate and flipped the toggles which popped the rear access hatch. Can't be that difficult, he thought, as he ducked his head through the neck collar and began to pull his arms out of the suit's sleeves. Just a simple matter of co-ordination …

Nonetheless, it took fifteen minutes of sweating, tugging, and heaving to extract himself from the hardsuit. It was rather like trying to squirm out of a full-body cast; by the time he was done, Lester had pulled a muscle in the back of his neck and had banged the top of his skull on a bulkhead. Finally, though, he was standing in his nylon long johns in the antechamber, freezing his ass off in the unanticipated cold while he disconnected his coolant and urine-collection tubes.

Byrd Station's habitat modules were unoccupied most of the time; although the control and lab modules remained pressurized for the benefit of supply crews from Descartes, the thermostat was kept at 45°F. to keep the instruments inside from freezing. And there wasn't even any clothing in the anteroom for visitors to slip on over their hardsuit undergarments. Rubbing his arms and blowing little puffs of steam, Lester made a mental note to have the next resupply team bring a couple of pullovers up here; the joint was cold as hell, and neither he nor Butch was wearing enough clothing.

He walked into the next room, and suddenly he didn't mind that little annoyance anymore. Butch Peterson was seated cross-legged in a chair in front of the main computer station, intently studying the flatscreen through her glasses. She, too, was wearing only her long johns, but on her they fitted like a second skin. Her long black hair, braided into beaded corn rows, fell exotically around her slender shoulders. For the past few weeks, Riddell had tried to distance himself from Peterson's good looks; this time, though, she unconsciously exuded the sensuality of a nubile teenager in a string bikini.

“Have a little trouble there?” she asked, not looking away from the screen but faintly smiling just the same.

“Umm?” he said, trying to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Oh,
that
! No, no, no. None at all. No problem.”

Butch glanced around at him, giving him a look of don't-kid-me amusement. “Well, maybe a little,” he admitted. “How did you manage to …?”

“Get out of my suit? Try working as a fashion model for ten years. You learn to do stuff with your body that makes limbo-dancing look easy.” Then, as if the long johns weren't enough, she swiveled around in her chair and, with the exhausted sigh of someone who had been staring at a screen for a couple of hours, stood up, reached back with her arms, and stretched until it looked as if her lithe body were about to rip through the seams of the undergarment.

Lester wondered if he was going to start drooling. Cut that out, he reprimanded himself. He swallowed and quickly looked away, focusing on the lab bench behind the computer station. A rack of test tubes held thawed specimens from the deep-core samples she had taken shortly after they had arrived at Byrd Station. While he and Mighty Joe had made themselves busy outside, pumping ice water from Byrd Station's holding tanks into the LRLT's cargo module, Butch had been in here, checking the satellite data she had collected at Descartes Station against the raw data Byrd Station's computers had automatically collated and her own core samples from the underground permaice deposits. He gently picked up one of the tubes at random and peered at it; the water in the tube was cloudy, with fine sediment floating in the water and more lying on the bottom. “Did you get this before it went through the filtration system?” he asked.

Peterson glanced at the tube in his hand. “No,” she said quietly. “That's what came through the filters.” She paused, then added unnecessarily, “It's what we're taking back to Descartes with us.”

At once, all the horny thoughts fled from Riddell's mind. The well at the Byrd Station Permaice Extraction Facility worked on a fairly simple set of mechanics. The permaice which the artesian-style well penetrated was melted
in situ
, a little at a time to prevent vacuum boil-off and evaporation, and pumped into a heated holding tank, drawing it through a series of porous filters which sifted out the contaminants. Of course, the filters couldn't separate all the dirt; microscopic particles were expected to seep through, and they were later distilled from the water back at Descartes Station. But
this
water looked as if it had come out of a roadside ditch, not from the filtered water normally brought home by the long-range crop dusters.

“Before you ask,” Peterson said, “I checked the filters and the pumps. The pumps are up to par. The filters are ready to be changed again, sure, but they shouldn't be, because according to the logbook they were replaced by the last supply crew which came up here.”

Riddell shot her a disbelieving look. “They were changed last
month
?” The filters had a combined efficiency of at least four months. “But this stuff …”

“That's the stuff which came through the filtration system,” Butch insisted, pointing at the tube. “And this …” She picked up another test tube from the rack and held it before his face. “This is the stuff that comes straight from the permaice pack itself.”

The liquid in the second tube looked as if it had come from a sewer; matte-black, almost brackish with heavy particulate, it resembled swamp water from the Okefenokee. Lester took the second tube, uncorked the stopper and passed it under his nose; a pungent odor like discharged gunpowder made his nostril hairs want to curl-up and die. He made a face and held the tube away. “Uh-oh,” he said softly.