Leaving Earth Flash Fiction
Peter Fisher
Isolation
For what might literally have been the millionth time, Anna Gelding, agriculturalist and communications specialist, thought back to her childhood summers, when her family would spend weeks on end touring America in their mobile home. How she hated those weeks cooped up inside a van with the same three people for company.
How she longed for those weeks now, for two reasons.
The first was that being cooped up with three people in a mobile home for two or three weeks was infinitely better than being cooped up with nine people in a mobile-home-sized spacecraft for ten years, eight months, and eleven days. (To be fair, the ten crew members of the USS Andromeda took two-week shifts “on duty” with two people per shift and spent the rest of their time in cryogenic slumber, but Anna had still spent a total of two years, two months, and four days awake thus far.) The second reason was that on her family trips, she could always look forward to going home. With the earth a wasteland and the Andromeda 5.76 billion kilometers away, she had no hope of ever setting foot on her homeworld again.
For the first two years of their voyage, the crew had received periodic messages from home. Slowly, though, the messages had become more and more sporadic, and shortened to simple, one-line inquiries: “Everyone still alive?” The last such message had been a little over three years ago. The earth had surely all but forgotten about the Andromeda by now. In truth, there was very little for Anna to do as a communications specialist. The only reason she still made any effort to remember how to work the long-range communications array was so that she could broadcast one final message in, if all went well, about two hours: “Achieved touchdown on Charon surface. Andromeda out.” It would be the last signal ever sent between Earth and the Andromeda.
All of that was two hours in the future, though. For now, Anna had a much different job to do: wake up the eight people currently deep in the throes of cryo-sleep. The coming hard deceleration to Charon’s surface would cause unacceptable turbulence in the 77˚K liquid nitrogen used in the cryogenic chambers, and thus they were unusable during deceleration.
Anna went along the row of chambers, pressing one button after another. After all of the chambers were deactivated, Anna had about five minutes to kill while blood flow stimulation took place, so she walked to the back of the ship, opened a hatch, and took out a small cardboard box. Inside was a small handmade token of merriment, something that Anna had made herself with a tiny fraction of her exorbitant spare time: a red banner with large yellow block letters: HAPPY LANDING DAY. She strung it up and turned to see the first of the crew members emerging from his chamber. The two exchanged a wordless greeting, and the new arrival, noting with amusement the message on the banner, walked over to a forward-facing chair and strapped himself in.
Anna’s fellow “on-duty” crew member for that two-week period, Patrick Buchanan, popped his head back into the crew quarters. “Hey everyone,” he addressed the crew members as they emerged, “braking in five minutes.” Patrick, the Andromeda’s primary pilot, was the one who would guide the ship into a smooth descent and landing. Five minutes later, Anna and the other eight astronauts were strapped into their seats, facing forwards.
At 4,790 kilometers above Charon’s surface, Patrick pivoted the ship 180 degrees so that its impulse engines pointed towards Charon. The deceleration, when it came, felt not unlike the start of a roller coaster, with the astronauts all pressed back into their seats by the five g’s of acceleration. Rather unlike most roller coasters, though, this particular ride maintained a constant acceleration, had no twists or loops, and lasted exactly 7.8 minutes. The Andromeda’s arrival was heralded by a soft thud followed by an eerie silence, broken after a few seconds only by a low, apathetic cheer from one of the crew members. Clearing her throat in a vain attempt to rid it of the sudden lump that had welled up, Anna unbuckled herself and walked unsteadily towards the front of the ship. The artificial gravity had been disabled, and the only gravity was a paltry pull of 0.288m/s^2 towards Charon’s center. Once seated in the cockpit, Anna’s fingers flew over the keyboard with practiced ease, spelling out the Andromeda’s final transmission. Her fingers gave only the slightest of trembles when she pressed ‘send.’ When she was finished, she sat back in her seat and exhaled, the reality of the situation only now occurring to her. Assuming Earth was still listening, they would receive her message 5.33 hours later. The astronauts weren’t expecting a reply. For the first time, they were completely and permanently alone.
Isolation
For what might literally have been the millionth time, Anna Gelding, agriculturalist and communications specialist, thought back to her childhood summers, when her family would spend weeks on end touring America in their mobile home. How she hated those weeks cooped up inside a van with the same three people for company.
How she longed for those weeks now, for two reasons.
The first was that being cooped up with three people in a mobile home for two or three weeks was infinitely better than being cooped up with nine people in a mobile-home-sized spacecraft for ten years, eight months, and eleven days. (To be fair, the ten crew members of the USS Andromeda took two-week shifts “on duty” with two people per shift and spent the rest of their time in cryogenic slumber, but Anna had still spent a total of two years, two months, and four days awake thus far.) The second reason was that on her family trips, she could always look forward to going home. With the earth a wasteland and the Andromeda 5.76 billion kilometers away, she had no hope of ever setting foot on her homeworld again.
For the first two years of their voyage, the crew had received periodic messages from home. Slowly, though, the messages had become more and more sporadic, and shortened to simple, one-line inquiries: “Everyone still alive?” The last such message had been a little over three years ago. The earth had surely all but forgotten about the Andromeda by now. In truth, there was very little for Anna to do as a communications specialist. The only reason she still made any effort to remember how to work the long-range communications array was so that she could broadcast one final message in, if all went well, about two hours: “Achieved touchdown on Charon surface. Andromeda out.” It would be the last signal ever sent between Earth and the Andromeda.
All of that was two hours in the future, though. For now, Anna had a much different job to do: wake up the eight people currently deep in the throes of cryo-sleep. The coming hard deceleration to Charon’s surface would cause unacceptable turbulence in the 77˚K liquid nitrogen used in the cryogenic chambers, and thus they were unusable during deceleration.
Anna went along the row of chambers, pressing one button after another. After all of the chambers were deactivated, Anna had about five minutes to kill while blood flow stimulation took place, so she walked to the back of the ship, opened a hatch, and took out a small cardboard box. Inside was a small handmade token of merriment, something that Anna had made herself with a tiny fraction of her exorbitant spare time: a red banner with large yellow block letters: HAPPY LANDING DAY. She strung it up and turned to see the first of the crew members emerging from his chamber. The two exchanged a wordless greeting, and the new arrival, noting with amusement the message on the banner, walked over to a forward-facing chair and strapped himself in.
Anna’s fellow “on-duty” crew member for that two-week period, Patrick Buchanan, popped his head back into the crew quarters. “Hey everyone,” he addressed the crew members as they emerged, “braking in five minutes.” Patrick, the Andromeda’s primary pilot, was the one who would guide the ship into a smooth descent and landing. Five minutes later, Anna and the other eight astronauts were strapped into their seats, facing forwards.
At 4,790 kilometers above Charon’s surface, Patrick pivoted the ship 180 degrees so that its impulse engines pointed towards Charon. The deceleration, when it came, felt not unlike the start of a roller coaster, with the astronauts all pressed back into their seats by the five g’s of acceleration. Rather unlike most roller coasters, though, this particular ride maintained a constant acceleration, had no twists or loops, and lasted exactly 7.8 minutes. The Andromeda’s arrival was heralded by a soft thud followed by an eerie silence, broken after a few seconds only by a low, apathetic cheer from one of the crew members. Clearing her throat in a vain attempt to rid it of the sudden lump that had welled up, Anna unbuckled herself and walked unsteadily towards the front of the ship. The artificial gravity had been disabled, and the only gravity was a paltry pull of 0.288m/s^2 towards Charon’s center. Once seated in the cockpit, Anna’s fingers flew over the keyboard with practiced ease, spelling out the Andromeda’s final transmission. Her fingers gave only the slightest of trembles when she pressed ‘send.’ When she was finished, she sat back in her seat and exhaled, the reality of the situation only now occurring to her. Assuming Earth was still listening, they would receive her message 5.33 hours later. The astronauts weren’t expecting a reply. For the first time, they were completely and permanently alone.
The purpose of this project was to learn about kinematics and then apply kinematics equations, particularly the conservation of energy, to determine the resources necessary to send a spaceship to another body in our solar system. The idea was that Earth is dead and we must colonize another planet to survive as a species. Since I'm a Star Trek nerd, I decided to use a Danube-Class Runabout as my ship. Using statistics on the inertial confinement fusion reactors used in the Star Trek world, I calculated that using a Hohmann Transfer to get the ship to Charon, which I decided to colonize, would require 9,810kg of deuterium fuel. As a finale to the project, I wrote a flash fiction story (less than 1,000 words) about the journey that included some of the calculations I had done.
All of my calculations were done on a Google spreadsheet. In order to complete the project, I had to extensively research the ships and reactors of the Star Trek world. Luckily, the fandom came through for me, and I found a 200-page technical manual of the Deep Space 9 star base (https://cudebi.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/franchise-star-trek-deep-space-nine-technical-manual1.pdf if you're curious) with everything I needed to know, including the dimensions and weight of the Danube-Class, its power supply, and statistics on fuel usage and power output of Star Trek fusion reactors. Using this information and some supplementary research on the dimensions and masses of Charon and Earth and the distance between them, I was able to use the conservation of energy and constant-acceleration kinematics equations to calculate the amount of fuel needed and the time of flight.
I was already familiar with most of the kinematics that we used, but I was very interested to learn what a Hohmann Transfer is and how it works. A spaceship goes into orbit around the earth, which means that it initially has the same orbit around the sun that the earth does. Then, the engines are fired to give the spaceship an impulse that breaks it out of orbit around the earth and sets it on an elliptical orbit around the sun, the perihelion of which intersects the orbit of the destination planet. Once the destination orbit is intercepted, the engines are fired again to put the spaceship into the same orbit around the sun that the destination planet has. The whole thing is timed so that the spaceship reaches the final orbit when the planet happens to be where the spaceship ends up.
I think that in general, space travel is essential for us as a species to master eventually, but is not as important as many issues on Earth. I think that the vast majority of government funding should go towards solving societal or global problems as opposed to research into space travel. That said, I'm all for private-sector research into space travel, such as that currently being done by SpaceX. I don't think that non-governmental research detracts from the focus that should be on solving our problems here on Earth.
All of my calculations were done on a Google spreadsheet. In order to complete the project, I had to extensively research the ships and reactors of the Star Trek world. Luckily, the fandom came through for me, and I found a 200-page technical manual of the Deep Space 9 star base (https://cudebi.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/franchise-star-trek-deep-space-nine-technical-manual1.pdf if you're curious) with everything I needed to know, including the dimensions and weight of the Danube-Class, its power supply, and statistics on fuel usage and power output of Star Trek fusion reactors. Using this information and some supplementary research on the dimensions and masses of Charon and Earth and the distance between them, I was able to use the conservation of energy and constant-acceleration kinematics equations to calculate the amount of fuel needed and the time of flight.
I was already familiar with most of the kinematics that we used, but I was very interested to learn what a Hohmann Transfer is and how it works. A spaceship goes into orbit around the earth, which means that it initially has the same orbit around the sun that the earth does. Then, the engines are fired to give the spaceship an impulse that breaks it out of orbit around the earth and sets it on an elliptical orbit around the sun, the perihelion of which intersects the orbit of the destination planet. Once the destination orbit is intercepted, the engines are fired again to put the spaceship into the same orbit around the sun that the destination planet has. The whole thing is timed so that the spaceship reaches the final orbit when the planet happens to be where the spaceship ends up.
I think that in general, space travel is essential for us as a species to master eventually, but is not as important as many issues on Earth. I think that the vast majority of government funding should go towards solving societal or global problems as opposed to research into space travel. That said, I'm all for private-sector research into space travel, such as that currently being done by SpaceX. I don't think that non-governmental research detracts from the focus that should be on solving our problems here on Earth.