Margaritifer Basin (Margaritifer Trilogy Book 1) (79 page)

Gabe cringed. “Oh my gosh. Um, wow.
I anticipated a lot of different questions, but this wasn’t one of them. Well,
actually Elaine, it’s not an entirely bad question, and Abby’s right, it is a
matter of physics. Um, certainly gravity, over time, is not a girl’s best
friend. And, yes, right now we’re living in a zero gravity environment. Though
that’s not entirely true. We actually do have what’s called microgravity; it’s
measurable, but not perceptible. So yes, for all practical purposes – including
this one – we are weightless. So to answer your question, no, from that
perspective we don’t need to wear a bra. However…” and she found herself
struggling with laughter again, “… however… sorry, never thought I’d be
applying momentum to this subject. The, uh, 17
^th
century English
mathematician, John Wallis, demonstrated that an object in motion tends to
remain in motion.” Abby was absolutely howling and drifting out of her seat.
Gabe looked at her, “Shut up. If you drift off somewhere, I’m not gonna go get
you. Sorry Elaine, where was I? Oh yeah, momentum. Um, our problem here isn’t
gravity, it’s momentum. And like Wallis postulated, things – um, all things –
in motion tend to remain in motion. So in fact, yes, we do wear bras, generally
comfortable sports bras, as the issue is restraint rather than support. Please,
next question!”

“Hello, this is really great. Boy,
I sure hope I can be an astronaut someday. I’m John Rhyne from Sioux City,
Iowa, and I’m fifteen. What’s your day like? What do you do?”

Jeff finally got his laughter under control, “Hello
John. Well, I hope you get your wish. Inspiring young people is, in part, one
of the reasons we’re doing this. I’m gonna let Susan answer your question, since
she basically runs our schedule.”

“Hi John,” Susan waved at the camera, “great
question, and a real important one. Since the beginning of manned space flight
we’ve learned that there are a wide range of potentially serious problems for
people in space, particularly long periods in space, and we will be in space
for seven months. That’s a long time. We’ve learned an enormous amount from
Skylab, the Russian Mir space station, and the ISS, and one of the things we’ve
discovered is that one way to avoid a lot of the potentially serious physical
and mental problems is to have a well-regulated and defined schedule. There’s
no day or night, per se, in space. So if you’re not careful, you lose all
perspective of routine and your body never adjusts. So what we’re doing is, we
have a clock, a 24-hour clock that we set to our time, Eastern Daylight Time,
before we left Earth, and that clock determines our day. We get up around 6:30
a.m., have breakfast and start our day’s work. We break for lunch around noon,
and then work in the afternoon until around 5:00. Then there’s dinner and an
evening of relaxing and around 10:00 p.m., lights out and bedtime. For many
people, sleeping in space can be very difficult. It’s not like being in bed at
home. You’re weightless and there’s always some anxiety. It’s hard, and very
difficult to adjust to. But sticking to a tight schedule makes that a little
easier. So far as what we do during the day is concerned? A lot of things.
There’s navigation to check on, and maintenance checks on the ship, and the
status of our other ships and modules… that kind of thing. We also do a lot of
exercise – a couple hours a day, each – on a treadmill or bicycle, to keep our
bodies in shape. We also have a Bowflex to keep our muscles toned. We also study
a great deal. Our preparation time for this mission was comparatively short,
about four years, and one thing that we didn’t have a lot of time for was
learning about Mars itself: the planet’s geology, weather patterns, atmospheric
conditions, and the like. So, we’re catching up on a lot of that now. But in
the evening, we relax, talk about what we’ve done during the day or plan to do
tomorrow. We have a very large library of books, music, and videos on the
computer, so we may take a look at something there. We’re getting pretty good
at a variety of card games like bridge, canasta and hearts. Chess is also
popular. We try to avoid poker because Abby just takes all our money. So our
days are pretty regimented. But that’s necessary to help us maintain both our
physical and mental health.”

“Hi, I’m Mary Holman from Fort
Wayne, Indiana and I’m fifteen. What do you eat? Do you have regular food or is
everything like liquid in plastic bags?”

“Oh man, if it had been that bad, I
wouldn’t have come.” Jeff laughed and motioned to Susan, “Yours again.”

“Hi Mary, no we eat pretty normal food. It’s a mix
of freeze-dried and solid foods, generally low in bulk to reduce waste but all
in all, not much different than a normal Earth diet. We have scrambled eggs and
sausage and sometimes pancakes for breakfast, sandwiches or chili or something
like that for lunch and steak, potatoes, fish, chicken, vegetables… the usual,
for dinner. We also take regular vitamin and mineral supplements to properly
maintain our body chemistry. But our diet and exercise routine is geared toward
maintaining a pretty constant body weight and general good health. And good
physical health contributes to good mental health. So, we actually eat pretty
well. One other thing I might note, Mary, owing to the migration of bodily
fluids from the lower to upper body in microgravity, one’s taste buds don’t
seem to work quite as well. So, we’re all developing a taste for spicy foods.
And, in anticipation of such, we brought plenty of spices.”

“Hello
Ares
, my name is
Dennis Peterson and I live in Springfield, Missouri, and I’m thirteen, and my
question is: How fast are you going?”

Jeff glanced at Gabe. “All yours.
Keep it simple.”

“I’ll try. Hello Dennis, good question, but not as
easy to answer as you may think. Velocity is relative. How fast are we going?
Well, relative to what? I’ll give you a couple examples.” She glanced at the
trajectory display. “Right now, relative to Earth – where you are – we’re
traveling at a velocity of approximately 4,056 meters per second. In a term
more useful to you, that would be about 9,073 miles per hour – a bit faster
than your family car can go. That is our Earth departure velocity. Now,
relative to Mars, we’re going a bit faster.” She again glanced at the display.
“That would be 19.07 kilometers per second, or about 42,660 miles per hour. And
the reason for that difference is because of where Mars is at present in its
orbit around the sun and our actual solar velocity. We’re closing on Mars very
quickly right now, but that will slow down considerably as we get closer to it.
Now, relative to the sun which, for all practical purposes, is the actual
velocity at which we are traveling through space – that is, if we had mile
markers out here – we’re going 31.47 kilometers per second, or about 70,400
miles per hour. And the reason for that is that, relative to the sun, we have
to add our velocity relative to Earth to Earth’s rotational velocity around the
sun, which is about 66,619 miles per hour. Putting our solar velocity into some
perspective, if you had a car that could travel at 70,400 miles per hour, you
could drive all the way around the world, at the equator, in just over 21
minutes. Of course, you couldn’t actually do that because at that velocity
you’d launch right off the planet and into space. So, that’s probably a more
complicated answer than you were hoping for but, as I said, it’s not as simple
a question as it sounds.” She grinned at the camera. “Welcome to the world of
orbital mechanics.”

“Hello.
Oh gosh, I can’t believe I got picked. Hi, I’m Priscilla Burris from Orlando,
Florida, and I’m sixteen, and I watched your launch from the Visitor’s Center.
Wow! It sure was loud. That must have been quite a ride. Um, what’s it like
being weightless?”

“Hi Priscilla. Hey, that’s great.
Glad you got to see the launch. I think you’re the first person we’ve spoken
with since liftoff that was actually there. Yes, it is loud. We watched the
Juliett
launch the day before from the Apollo/Saturn V Center and, trust me, it’s a
lot louder there than it is over at the Visitor’s Center. In fact, it’s so loud
you can see the pressure wave from the four SSME engines on the J241 coming
across the lagoon, three and a half miles away. Anyway, living in
weightlessness is, um, different. There’s so much that we Earthlings take for
granted in the presence of gravity. We expect to stay put in our bed at night.
For that matter, we expect our bed to stay put. We expect food to stay on our
plate, milk in our glass, water in the bathtub, our feet on the floor, and we
expect hot air to rise and cold air to sink.” Jeff shook his head. “None of
that happens up here, because there is no up or down.” He reached into his
pocket, pulled out a pencil and held it in front him. “On Earth, when you drop
something, you expect it to fall.” He let go of the pencil and it just floated
there. “Nope, not here. Now, parking your pencil in midair may at times be
convenient. However, trying that with a bowl of soup presents a whole bunch of
problems, cause the soup doesn’t know that it’s supposed stay in the bowl. I
think the most challenging adjustment for us was getting used to sleeping in
space. As Sue said earlier, it does take some getting used to. On the other
hand, you can sleep anywhere. Perhaps I can demonstrate.” He glanced at Abby.
“Would you mind?”

“No.”

Jeff retrieved the pencil, grabbed
Abby, held her out in front of him, and let go. She stayed put. “Go to sleep.”

Abby closed her eyes.

“There, nothing to it. And, if
she’s in the way, you just move her.” Jeff grabbed her waist, turned her upside
down, and moved her aside. “Isn’t that convenient? And if you’re in the mood
for some entertainment…” He pulled Abby back over and started her spinning.
“Hours of fun for the whole family. Now, if I get Abby spinning fast enough,
she’ll perceive it, owing to the Coriolis effect on her inner ear. But with her
eyes closed she’ll have no idea how she is oriented; right-side up, upside
down, no clue, as she has no gravitational point of reference.” He grabbed Abby,
stopped her spinning and pulled her back to her chair. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Now, Priscilla, you see us sitting
here in chairs. We aren’t actually ‘sitting’ in them, we’re just kind of
floating somewhere near them. We have furniture in the habitat and, for the
most part, it’s all oriented in the same direction, giving us sort of a virtual
up and down. It doesn’t really exist, but it’s a kind of a psychological
crutch. It gives us a visual plane of reference, the illusion of up and down,
which makes it a little easier to adapt to what would otherwise be a very
strange environment. Okay, um, I think we can answer a lot of your questions by
just taking you on a tour of the ship. So, I’m going to put on a little headset
camera and give you a guided tour.” Jeff donned a Bluetooth video headset.
“Gabe? We have video?”

“Hang on.” She drifted over to the
communications console and punched a couple buttons. “Uh… yeah, you’re on.”

“Okay, well we’re in what we call
the commons. It’s sort of our combination family room, dining room, kitchen,
communications room, etc. We spend a lot of time in here. I’ll try not to move
my head around too fast and get everyone dizzy.” He slowly panned around the
room. “This is the largest room in the habitat, comprising about 25% of the
Sundancer’s total volume. The Sundancer was built for us by Bigelow Aerospace
and is an inflatable habitat. It’s cylindrically shaped with rounded ends, and
is 28.5 feet long, 20.7 feet in diameter, and weighs about 19,000 pounds, not
including all the interior fixtures, furniture, and equipment. The metal
framework you see along the centerline here is called the truss, and it runs
the length of the Sundancer, and is about three feet square. When the Sundancer
launched, the outer skin – which is about a foot thick and is constructed of
around two dozen layers of various materials such as Kevlar, Vectran, and Nomex
– was collapsed around the truss, and the module was not inflated until it was
in orbit. So everything you see – walls, furniture, equipment – was in fact
stored within the truss or wrapped around it, and we’ve spent most of the past
week assembling it all.

“Over here is our kitchen, which
includes most of the appliances and laborsaving devices you have at home. Ours
are just a bit smaller and a lot more energy efficient, as we operate entirely
on solar power. Now, you can see that our sink is enclosed in a clear Plexiglas
box, which has two holes in the front with gloves attached inside. It works
kind of like a fume hood in a chemistry lab. There’s a fan at the top that
blows air in and another fan in the drain plumbing that draws air and water
out. And the whole thing is sealed. This prevents water and other materials
from wandering off. Everything that we do food preparation-wise is done within
sealed containers or inside the sink’s hood. The only things that get opened
are our trays of solid food when it’s ready to eat. We also have a dishwasher
that works more or less like the one you have at home, except that it also has
fans in it – top and bottom – to evacuate the water.

“Now here’s something you may find
interesting.” Jeff pulled the tablecloth off their dining table. “Our dining
table, as you can see, is perforated. And in the pedestal beneath it is a fan
that draws air through the perforations, creating something of a vacuum. Any
food particles that start to drift off get sucked back onto the tablecloth.
That way we don’t have food drifting all over the ship, clogging up our
ventilation system filters, and making a lot of extra work for us; a blueberry
pancake that wanders off is not hard to retrieve, breadcrumbs are another
matter. It also has the added advantage of keeping things that are set on the
table, on the table. Further, over the table you see this hood. When we dine,
we switch the commons ventilation exhaust to this hood, and anything that does
escape from the table – crumbs, droplets of liquid, an errant lima bean,
whatever – gets sucked up into this washable filter.