The Chance of a Lifetime (1/2)

[pushingrobot]

This is actually the backstory for a challenge...which, despite my best intentions, took on a life of its own. It has some information mildly beneficial to the challenge, mostly concentrated at the beginning and end.

A warning tone sounded; behind a thick layer of dust, the reserve battery gauge had just ticked down to zero.

Please, just three more minutes...

Moments later, the rover's lights dimmed.

Two more minutes?

The filthy instrument panel begain to flicker.

ONE minute?

The motors slowed to a halt.

Elijah Kerman sighed, leaned back, and stared out at the sunrise as its light began to peek into the cabin. It was a fitting end to a perfect night.

As he sat, his father's constant refrain rang in his ears: "Study hard, Eli, and one day you'll walk on the Mun!"

All his childhood he had dreamed of nothing but becoming an astronaut--his father had made sure of that. While other kids played catch, Eli built rockets and learned to fly planes; models at first, but soon enough Eli's father had his son behind the stick of his lemon-yellow Piper Cub. After graduating, Eli signed up for the air force. He became a fighter pilot, then a test pilot, and after a few close calls found his way into the space program. He volunteered for the most dangerous tests, trained and studied harder than anybody. When he was finally picked for a Mun landing, Eli hardly felt surprised; in his mind, every day of his life--every ounce of his being--existed only to bring him to that moment: hands trembling, unfolding the letter from command.

Since that fateful winter evening, his life could only be described as grueling. He was training even harder than before. Command wanted him in peak physical condition for the flight, much more than the orbiter crew. He had to master a variety of controls and practice endless scenarios for every 'anomaly' the engineers could come up with. He even had a session with an Air Force shrink whose job was apparently to train Eli to meet his end with dignity, should he find himself trapped on the Mun with no means of rescue. But every hour--no matter how miserable--moved him inexorably closer to launch day, and this thought propelled Eli forward with manic energy.

It was launch day. Sleep had escaped him the night before, and before dawn Eli stepped out of the quarantine barracks to sit and gaze at the starry sky. It was the most incredible feeling, seeing the Mun hovering above the horizon and knowing that within a few hours time, it would be something more than a light in the night sky. It would be a destination, and he would be streaking toward it as fast as any man has ever traveled. The morning was a blur of checks and re-checks. Not until he was strapped into his seat did the reality begin to sink in. It settled on Eli's chest like a heavy weight. This wasn't a boyhood daydream. It wasn't a simulation. He was sitting in the world's biggest roller coaster, and in a few moments he'd set out on the wildest ride of his life.

And one of the shortest. When the first stage cut out he was certain that something had gone horribly wrong, but a peek at the instruments and the calm demeanor of his crew mates proved that they were quite on trajectory. Eli marveled at the power required to lift a skyscraper (for that is how it had seemed on the pad that morning) to the very edge of space in what felt like mere seconds. He tried to lean forward to get a better look out the pod windows, hoping to take in the view from this altitude, but he had barely moved an inch when the second stage began pushing them into a stable Kerbin orbit.

Soon the second stage, too, had expended itself, and the third stage gently put them on course for the Mun. They were cruising now, and despite their tremendous speed, the journey took place in complete serenity. If not for the lack of a planet stretching out beneath them, it could have been any of Eli's test flights. Under the pretense of testing the reaction wheels, the crew periodically turned the craft from the Mun to Kerbin and back. Finally, Eli had seen his planet like few had ever done before: It was like an enormous, round painting, with rough, dappled blotches of green, tan and brown paint atop a canvas of brilliant blue, covered in wispy brushstrokes of slowly shifting white. It took up the entire window the first time he saw it, and yet seemed far too small and distant; for the first time in his life, a vast gulf separated him from everything he had ever known. Since then it had grown ever smaller as the Mun loomed larger and larger ahead; each time the craft rotated, his heart skipped a beat at how much each world had changed in the hours they had been turned away.

He was close enough to make out tiny mountains and valleys on the Mun now. Jagged edges and perfectly domed craters jutted up here and there; there was no wind or water to soften this world's harsh visage. Nothing moved or changed on the landscape which would have been quite at home among Dante's hells. It had a strange, forbidding beauty; yet, despite all the years Eli had looked forward to this day, he could not shake a feeling of great foolishness--that he had been mad to trade the beautiful, blue, living world behind him for the barren gray waste that lie ahead.

But such thoughts had to wait. They had reached the Mun, and the next few hours were spent following endless checklists. Decelerating into a stable equatorial orbit, detaching the Mun lander, carefully docking, and before Eli knew it he was shaking hands with his crewmates and sliding into the cramped lander. As his crewmates--his friends--closed the hatch, he caught their faces one last time. For a second, he was back in the sappy psychiatrist's office.

"Wherever you find yourself, Eli, you will not be alone. As long as you keep them in your heart, your family, your comrades, your nation will always travel with you."

And then they were gone. Eli pulled out the pre-landing clipboard from beside his seat and began checking off each step: Batteries, fuel, RCS, engines one, two, three, four, ascent engine, thrusters, oxygen, scrubbers, reaction wheels, landing legs, navigation, radio... soon he had reached the end. Everything checked out. He reached the descent node. Fired the engines. It was happening. He was landing on the Mun.

It was all he'd ever dreamed, Eli reminded himself.

Everything went smoothly until the final descent. As he hovered a hundred meters above the surface, watching the dust scatter as the lander slowly crept downward, one of the engines suddenly gave out. Eli's had trained for this; moments later he had switched off the opposite engine and killed his rotation with some well-timed RCS bursts. Unfortunately, he was now descending fast and the two remaining engines would never stop him in time. As he hit the ground, he heard a loud crack, several pops, and the terrible creak of twisting metal reverberating through the cockpit.

For what felt like hours Eli sat in stunned silence. He was alive. The instrument panels all showed good readings, and there were no obvious fuel leaks. He took a deep breath to steel himself for whatever he found outside, turned the handle, and pushed open the hatch. Blackness. He could just make out a faint patch of gray past the bottom lip of the opening; the landing lights seemed to be working. Still, for safety he tapped the button near his shoulder and the tiny pod was filled with the piercing white of his headlamps. Eli unbuckled his safety harness, grabbed the handles on each side of the opening--his hands were sweating inside their thick gloves--and pulled his way out of the tiny pod.

He regretted it almost immediately as shooting pains ran up and down his back. Eli had repeatedly complained about the seat's shock absorbers, though the engineers had assured him that they would work much better in the Mun's gravity. Engineers. The pilot's natural enemy, they only listen to their slide rules and think every contingency can be planned against from a drafting table in an air-conditioned office.

The immediate adversary, though, was the lander itself. It was tipping precariously as he stood leaning out of the pod, and seemed fit to topple the moment he climbed out. Eli sat back in his seat, wincing as fire shot up his spine. He was more than five meters off the ground; normally he would have no problem leaping such a distance and tumbling to safety, but he couldn't risk tearing his suit on knife-like rocks below. He picked up his clipboard again, held it in front of his head, and dropped it. Slowly, comically, it pirouetted down before gently coming to rest on his lap. This is the Mun, Eli reminded himself. Gravity works differently here. It may look like a two-story drop, but here it was no different than hopping of the back of his pickup truck.

(continued)

Edited August 6, 2012 by pushingrobot

[AncientAstronaut]

This was REALLY good. I saw this on the Challenge Pack.

Nice story. Very well written. What do you do in the ESA?