Margaritifer Basin (Margaritifer Trilogy Book 1) (15 page)

“Very
good.”

“Why?”

“Because
there’s a lot of interesting stuff there and, well, I kind of like the name.”
Jeff grinned.

“Interesting
stuff? Like what?” said Susan.

“Well,
this is the confluence of the Loire, Samara and Morava valley systems. There’s
a great deal of evidence of past water presence, including fluvial and alluvial
deposits, outflow channels, ponding, chaos regions, volcanic activity, and on
and on. There are terrain regions from all three Martian geologic periods, and
numerous sites of geologic layering. There’s also lots of interesting
mineralogy, including olivine, hematite, phyllosilicates, sulfates, and even a
suggestion of gold.”

Abby
grinned. “Gold?”

Jeff
chuckled. “Maybe. I wouldn’t plan on opening a gold mine, though. It’d cost a
lot more to transport it than it’s worth.”

“Oh, I
don’t know, a nugget of Martian gold might fetch a handsome price on eBay.”

“That’s
possible. Anyway, there are also some interesting looking craters and an
extinct volcano a little farther south. Now, all that said, the Basin is not
without its challenges.” He pointed at two of the red circles. “These were the
proposed MSL landing sites, MB1 and MB2. I’m guessing that this site proposal
was made before they saw HiRISE imagery of these sites.” He pulled out two more
images. “Subsequent to the proposal, the site was imaged by the HiRISE. Check
this out.”

“Oh god,”
Abby groaned, “what’s the scale on that?”

“About
twenty meters to the inch. And if you think that’s bad, look at this.”

“Jesus!
It looks like Hell. What are those? Sand dunes?”

“Yeah,
probably ten to twenty meters high with nothing but craters and boulders in
between.”

Gabe
glanced up at him. “You’re not seriously thinking of landing there, are you?”

“Um... no, I’m not. Could
you imagine trying to collect 36 airdrops and 32 tons of stuff scattered over
ten kilometers of that? It’d take a year and half just to find everything, let
alone move it. And there’s not a ten square meter level spot in the entire
ellipse. Where would we put the MAV?” He pulled out another image. “And here’s
MB2. It’s not much better. So, back to the big picture. These other seven red
circles are alternate landing sites that I picked out, roughly based on the MSL
site requirements. These five on the left I’m not too crazy about as they’re
also located in valles terrain and, in the absence of HiRISE imagery, I
wouldn’t trust them to be any better than MB1. But these two out to the east
are up a bit in elevation and located in plains terrain. We do have a couple
HiRISE images of like terrain, though not of those sites.” He pulled out a
couple more images.

Abby
nodded. “Okay, that’s more like it.”

“Yeah.
Now, Site G, up here in the northeast, is kind of remote. The yellow circles
are all points of interest, collected from various things I’ve read, and you’ll
note that most of them are in the southern part. So, this Site C, down here,
looks to be the most promising. It’s flat, should have good ground, it’s still
some 1,750 meters below the MOLA datum, so lots of air time for the parachutes
to do their job, and it’s big, at least twenty by twenty kilometers. Thirty by
fifty, if we include this eastern section south of that big crater, and just
avoid these hills down here.”

Gabe
shuffled images, spread them out on the table, stared at them for a minute,
then pointed at one. “What’s this?”

“Oh, that’s a THEMIS VIS
image of this crater just south of Site C, and part of the plane just north of
it. At 17.5 meters per pixel, it doesn’t tell us much about the ground, but
it’s better than nothing.”

“How big
is that crater?”

“Um,
about ten kilometers east-west.”

“What’s
your interest in some of the sites? Like, this one? And this?”

Jeff
nodded. “Both of those sites were imaged by the HiRISE, so somebody felt there
was something important there. I don’t have those images here, there up in my
office. These sites over here in the Morava Valles show signs of layering in
MOC images. This up here, I dunno, it’s kind of an odd-shaped sunken area.
Looks kind of like a giant swimming pool. I’m just curious as to what may have
caused it. If we can get up there, take some photos and samples and maybe come
up with an explanation.”

 “Huh.
You’ve really done your homework.”

“Yeah
Gabe, I have. Like I told you, I’m serious about this. It’s not a joke.”

Abby
glared at her. “What? Did you think he was kidding?”

Gabe
shook her head, frowning. “I don’t know what to think.”

Jeff
stared at her for a moment, then smiled. “Say, you guys want to get some air?
Let’s go for a walk.” Jeff led them upstairs, through the great room, across
the front porch, and down the gentle slope of the large lawn to the point of
the promontory on which Wrentham House was built, overlooking the rocky
coastline and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. He clambered up onto the rocks and
sat. “I like it here. Things seem clearer.”

The three women took seats on the
rocky outcropping beside him and sat quietly, taking in the shore and the surf
and the gulls and the blue-green ocean stretching to the horizon.

After a while, Jeff cleared his
throat. “There’s another item we haven’t spoken of yet that I imagine you’re a
bit curious about. This is a job and you will want to be paid. The term of your
contract will be about six and a half years, essentially now until splashdown.
I propose compensation of $250,000 a year, each, of course, plus all expenses –
housing, food, full medical, dental, car, transportation, etcetera, and an
expense account. If you wish to sock some of that away in a 401k, or some other
retirement plan, I’ll match your contribution up to, say, $75,000 a year. If
you have any educational debts, I’ll pay them off. Gabe and Susan, you’ll need
to learn how to fly. So will I. I’ll pay for that, up through a business jet
type rating. Then Abby can take over and teach all of us how to really fly. And
upon our return, I’ll pay you each a bonus of two million dollars. Further,
I’ll establish a one million dollar fund for our – and I use the word ‘our’ in
the collective sense, as it will be a collective effort – child, for education
and other needs. I think that totals out to around $4.1 million each, give or
take.”

They all sat in stunned silence.
Susan sniffed and looked up, “Abby, I think this calls for one of your patented
exclamations.”

Abby laughed softly, “I can’t think
of an adequate one.”

“What happens if we don’t come
back?” Gabe asked.

“Fair question. I’ll set it all up
in a trust fund before we go. Designate a beneficiary. In fact, I’ll put all of
it into trust funds right up front before we do anything else. So if anything
happens to me – like I end up broke, or worse – your money will be safe.”

Abby leaned forward, resting her
elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands. “Well, I’ll say this for you Mr.
Grey, you sure know how to impress a girl.”

Jeff laughed, “I’m not trying to
impress you or, for that matter, bribe you. I’m asking a lot from each of you,
an awful lot. Perhaps, everything you have.” He leaned back and stretched.
“Anyway, when it’s all over, you should be pretty well set. You can continue
with your careers, write a book, go on the lecture circuit at $50,000 an hour,
buy a small Greek island and retire in seclusion, do whatever you want. And for
a while at least, you’ll be the most famous women on the planet.”

Abby sat up, “I think I need a
drink.”

There was a unanimous vote in
support of that idea and they all got up and headed back toward the house.

Gabe walked beside Jeff.
“Realistically, what’s your budget for this?”

“At present, the ballpark guess is
around two billion, may go three.”

Gabe glanced at him with an
incredulous smirk, “It cost NASA two and a half billion just to land the MSL.
And you think you’re gonna put four people up there for that?”

“Back in 2007, SpaceWorks
Engineering published a proposal for an AIAA conference laying out a plan for a
manned Mars mission based on lunar mission technology. They pegged the total
cost at around $100 billion. On their shopping list were a couple of inflatable
TransHab modules for the crew to live in during the mission. SpaceWorks
estimated the cost for the TransHabs at $6.9 billion. But almost simultaneous
with that, Rob Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace was announcing plans to construct
his BA 330 module – essentially the same thing as SpaceWorks envisioned, but
three times bigger – and sell them for $100 million a copy.

“Obviously thinking NASA was going
to be the prime mover in this effort, SpaceWorks went on to calculate that
launch vehicles – four Ares Vs and an Ares I – to put their half-million pounds
of junk in space would cost a bit over $14 billion. But SpaceX can lift that
much into low earth orbit with eight Falcon Heavies for one twentieth the
price, around $720 million. Hell, SpaceWorks even tossed in another $9 billion
just for ‘government program integration’, whatever that is? Somewhere in the
aerospace industry there is a huge price disconnect between what might be done
and what can be done.

“Now look, the entire Apollo program cost around
$22.5 billion in the late ‘60s. That’s about $132 billion in 2008 dollars, a
bit more today. But that was seventeen missions and, though a lot of the work
was based on the Mercury and Gemini programs, an awful lot of what they did was
done from scratch. So, divide $132 billion by 17, you get around $7.5 billion,
now remove all the R&D and tracking station construction and moon surveys –
we don’t have to survey Mars, it’s already been done – and eliminate the
$30,000 toilet seats, I’ll pick one up at Wal-Mart for $8.95, and the $15,000
pens, we can use pencils like the Russians did, and the $5 million treadmills,
I’ll get us a used stairstepper on eBay for fifty bucks, and what have you got?
We’re in the ballpark. For now, my best guess is around $425 million for
launch, and that’s the big cost. I can buy a pound of liquid hydrogen for
thirty-two cents, but it will cost me at least $1300 just to get that same
pound off the ground, let alone to Mars. All we need is some luck. And let’s be
honest, practically speaking, the only difference between a lunar mission and a
Mars mission is consumables, a place to live on the planet, and a year’s worth
of coasting in space. Yeah, admittedly that’s a gross over-simplification, but
the concept is fundamentally valid. It’s just a matter of working out the
details and doing it.”

“Do you have three billion
dollars?”

“No, about $400 million.”

“So where’s the rest coming from?”

“We’ll get it. I was talking to
Abby and Sue about this during your, uh, brief sabbatical this morning, what we
need is a proof of concept. We need a successful cargo launch in 18 months. We
need to put something on Mars that works and proves our point. And we need to
do it cheap. If we do that, we’ll have a line of sponsors at the front door
that wraps all the way back to Bellevue. This’ll be the biggest thing, well…
ever. And no one will want to be left behind. Money will be no problem at all,
and our ship will be stickered up like something at a NASCAR race.”

“You don’t think everyone will just
write you off as a nut?”

“Not if we make our case.”

They all walked back into the
house, straight to the bar and fixed some drinks.

Jeff motioned toward the stairs,
“Come on, let’s go back downstairs and finish off this overview, then tomorrow
we can talk about what I’d want – I think – from each of you.”

Walking straight up to the boards,
Gabe took a sip of her drink and pointed at Jeff’s sketch of the Earth to Mars
transit vehicle, “Okay, so this is a Bigelow Sundancer and… what else?”

“Well, some kind of command module,
a service module, an airlock and the descent vehicle, whatever that may be,”
Jeff responded.

“That’s it?”

“Yeah. What more do we need? It’s
just a place to live for six or seven months while drifting through space.”

“What’s the mass of that?”

“Oh, I dunno, depends on the
hardware. With a fueled service module, I’d guess around 50 tons.”

“Wow. You’d need a Jupiter-130 just
to get that off the ground and a 246 for the EDS.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Six months? That’s a fast
transit.”

“Yeah. There’s a window during the
2016 opposition that can give us a 190 to 200-day transit with about the same
fuel consumption as a standard Hohmann transfer. The good news is, the 2018
opposition is even closer. We should be able to make the return trip in 180
days, give or take.”

“Okay, so we use the service module
to brake into what? A high elliptical orbit? Then what?”

“Right. A very high and fast
elliptical, basically just under escape velocity at periapsis. Then we climb
into the descent vehicle and use its cruise stage to get us to entry interface.
Then we’re on our own.”

“And, uh, now that we’ve used all
our fuel for an orbital insertion burn, how do we get home?”

Jeff laughed, “Damn! Forgot about
that.”

All three women snapped around
toward him.

“Just kidding. We send up a
re-supply ship, around the same time we launch. Then it just sits there waiting
for us. After we take off from the surface we re-dock with our transit ship,
jettison the ascent module, dock with the re-supply ship, transfer fuel, food,
oxygen, water… whatever, and then head home. Simple.”