Orphans of Apollo - S1 E1
September 2055
From the ashes of forgotten space dreams, a new era of exploration begins.
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“OK, standby for pitchover.”
“Roger,” came Lana’s clipped response.
“9,000ft,” the next call from Carl, the Luna Module Pilot. “Pitchover!”
The tiny spacecraft pitched forward, so it was now flying fully upright in the landing attitude. As it did, Lana got her first proper look at the landing site. Until this point, it had been right at the bottom of her window. Now she could see it clearly. She drew a breath, held it briefly, and exhaled deliberately. Soon she would take manual control of the lander and guide it through the final stages to the lunar surface.
“5,000ft,” Carl called out.
Through her headset Lana heard “Falcon, you are go for landing.”
So far, so good. Lana thought to herself. She briefly moved the controls. “Manual attitude control is good.”
“2,000ft.”
“Copy.”
She was now manually flying the lander. As they descended, she could see more and more surface definition, and with it large boulders littering the landing site. Just like Apollo 11! But this was worse, much worse. Lana had studied many times the film of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s first landing on the Moon. In the final stages of the landing, Armstrong had pitched the lander forward and landed intentionally long to avoid a boulder field. Should she try the same manoeuvre? Maybe, but the field seemed to extend as far as she could see.
The calls from Carl and the CapCom were coming thick and fast now. She was concentrating hard, analysing her options. The calls did not register with her as words in a normal conversation. They were merely data points being fed into her decision-making process. What about to the left or right of track? No. The boulders extended as far as she could see. Abort? No, not yet anyway. They continued to descend. Maybe we could land in between them. What other option was there? This was going to have to be a precision landing!
Then a call from mission control broke her almost trance-like state.
“Sixty seconds!”
There were sixty seconds of fuel remaining until the bingo call, the point at which they would land immediately or abort.
“250ft,” came the call from Carl. Lana thought she detected a little urgency in it. Up to now, all of Carl’s calls had been matter of fact, unemotional.
Yes, she thought, there is a good gap. Once we clear this next bolder, there is a clearing. It’s going to be tight and require some precision flying, but it’s doable.
Lana pitched the lander back slightly, slowing its forward motion over the surface.
“200ft.”
The gap was a little to the right of their ground track and she pitched the lander over to the right slightly to change direction towards it.
“Thirty seconds,” the next call from mission control.
Lana was absolutely focused now, but even so, a thought perturbed the back of her mind. This is ridiculous, selecting such a landing site. How are we supposed to land here? With the amount of data we have about the surface of the moon, how was this site chosen?
“Twenty seconds.”
“150ft.”
“Shit! We’re not going to make it!” thought Lana. But she continued to ease the lander down.
“100ft.”
“Ten seconds.”
“We’re too far right now. I’ve overdone it,” Lana said to herself. She eased the lander back to the left slightly.
“Bingo! Falcon, you are at bingo fuel.”
The briefest of hesitations, then “Abort, abort, abort,” said Lana unemotionally.
The view out the window went completely black. Lana blinked twice and as her eyes refocused slightly, she read the words “Simulation paused.”
“Ok guys, well done. We’ll leave it there. Good job!” the voice of the sim supervisor in her headset.
“That’s it?” Lana protested. “But we didn’t land.”
Carl turned to her. “I think that’s the point. They wanted to see what we would do.”
“I guess so,” Lana said flatly. After the intense concentration of the approach and landing, then the impending possibility of having to perform a rendezvous with the imaginary command module in Lunar orbit. Ending the sim so suddenly left her feeling deflated. After a few seconds, deflation gave way to relief. The door behind them opened, and Lana squinted as the bright light entered the darkened simulator.
“Take five and grab a coffee or something, then we’ll do a debrief.”
“What time is it?” asked Lana rhetorically as she looked at her watch.
“Ten-twenty,” replied Carl.
“Seems like we’ve been in here for ages,” remarked Lana.
“It always does.”
The sim session had been the first and only item on their schedule today. It was the last day of the annual summer camp of the Foundation for the Advancement of Space Settlement (FASS). Some students, many of those who came from overseas, had already left this morning. They would be in San Francisco or Los Angeles in time to catch their international flights. The ones that remained were those from North America and a few others who did not have flights until the evening.
The simulator was in the back of a fairly spacious hangar which formed the middle section of the FASS headquarters building. The hangar doors were open now and there were a couple of younger students, around sixteen, each pre-flighting one of the two small training aircraft in the front of the hangar.
“I thought nobody was flying today,” said Carl as they started their walk across the hangar to the briefing room on the other side.
“I think those guys got pretty close to their first solo yesterday. They must want them to get it done this camp. Be a good way to finish. They also won’t have to spend the first few days of the next camp getting back up to speed before they can go solo.”
“Right. Good idea. When are you leaving Lana?”
“My parents are coming to pick me and Logan up after lunch sometime.”
“That’s cute, they still come and pick you up,” Carl teased
She ignored the jibe. “How about you?”
“I’m on the red-eye back to New York this evening.”
As they approached the door Carl asked, “Do you want a coffee?”
“Yeah, sounds good.”
Rather than going to the briefing room, they headed down the corridor which lead to the Western side of the building. This was mostly administrative offices. A little way down the corridor was the admin staff room. As they entered the room, a small middle-aged lady, one of the admin staff looked up.
“Hi Lana. What have you guys been up to this morning?” she said pleasantly.
“We just did a session in the Apollo Lunar Module sim.”
“They work you hard in those things, don’t they?”
“We had to abort,” said Lana dejectedly.
“Did you crash?”
“No, but I couldn’t make the landing.”
“Like I said in the sim Lana, we were never going to make that landing. That was the whole point of the exercise.”
“Mmmm, I guess so.”
“Lana, you need to have a bit more confidence in yourself. I only ever hear good things about you from the instructors.”
“I know,” she said flatly.
Carl had turned to the coffee machine at the back of the room and was eyeing the different options quizzically. He made a selection, a cup dropped into the dispenser. The machine then started its series of mechanical buzzes soft clanks. “Coffee? Right Lana?”
“Thanks.”
“Well, next time you’re back, you should be able to fly the Neptune sim.”
“That will be good,” said Carl over his shoulder. “It will be great to finally get our hands on something we are actually going to fly for real. I mean, these Apollo sims are good ‘n all, but it’s horribly primitive technology. We are learning some good skills, but I want to fly the Neptune.”
“All in good time.”
“So, what have you been working on this morning?” asked Lana. “You guys will be glad to have the building to yourselves after today.”
The lady smiled pleasantly at Lana. “I’ve been working on the Lunar Analogue for your intake.”
“Cool.” Said Carl excitedly.
“Yes, it will be rather cool.”
“Does that mean we will be doing it in Antarctica?” asked Lana.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you. It’s been a bit of a nightmare organising the whole thing. There are a lot of logistical things which need to be worked out. Plus, as with everything for your intake, it is the first time we have done it, so that always makes it a little harder.”
Carl handed Lana a cup. “We’d better get back.”
“Yes.”
“Say ‘hi’ to your parents Lana.”
“I’m sure you’ll see them, but I will,” said Lana pleasantly.
Lana and Carl headed back down the corridor towards the hangar and the briefing room entrance. As they approached, Lana could see through the window in the door that Tim was already there, standing at the front of the room by the large screen. Lana’s stomach twitched with a brief pang of guilt. We weren’t that long, were we? She thought.
“Sorry we’re late.” Said Carl as he held the door for Lana.
Tim looked up from the tablet in his hand and smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said pleasantly. “That was quite an intense session. You needed a moment to decompress,” he said with a knowing smile. “We’ll get right on with it, shall we? I’m sure you’re itching to get back to your rooms and finish packing.” He gestured to two seats in the middle of the front row. “So, how do you think that went?”
Tim was an ex-astronaut. Now in his mid-forties, he still looked the part. Short in stature, with a lean athletic build, closely cropped hair and clean shaven. He had followed the long established astronaut career path: military fast-jet pilot, test pilot, then applied to be an astronaut in his early thirties. He had flown several missions in low Earth orbit and spent some time at the Luna Outpost. After narrowly missing out on a Mars flyby flight, he decided to leave NASA and pursue other things. Not long after which Christian Larsson recruited him to help with the training of his students.
“I think we did OK,” ventured Carl.
“You don’t look convinced Lana?”
“Well, we-” she corrected herself “I, didn’t make the landing.”
“No, you didn’t. But you followed all the procedures and safely aborted. In that situation, it was the only real option you had. You failed the mission objective, but you would have brought yourself and Carl back home alive. It was a successful failure. What Carl said in the sim was right. That was the whole point of this session. I’ll admit it was perhaps a bit of an unrealistic scenario, but we wanted to force you into a situation where you had to call an abort. Astronauts and pilots are very goal oriented people and there is often the temptation just to push it that little bit further, to get the job done. I’ve seen it plenty of times in my career. It has killed friends of mine.”
“Get-there-itis,” said Carl.
“Yes. Or ‘Plan Continuation Bias’. An unconscious bias which leads you to follow your original plan, even when things start going wrong. The bias gets stronger the closer you get to the objective or culmination of the flight or mission, whatever you are doing. You guys did really well. Apart from a few minor things just after un-docking, the flight was pretty much flawless. The abort was called at the correct point. I wish I could say the same for all the sim sessions.”
Logan, thought Lana. He would have tried to land that. I bet he would.
“Guys, there is really not much else I want to say. Congratulations. We saw just the sort of decision making we are looking for.”
“Thanks,” said Lana contented. Relief washed over her. This camp had been hard, and she had done well.
“Good luck when you head off to college.”
With a pleasant hand shake to both of them, Tim left the room and headed off towards the instructors’ offices in the admin end of the building.
If you know someone you think would enjoy “Orphans of Apollo” or any of the other writing in “Explorations” please share this publication with them.
I hope you enjoyed the first episode of “Orphans of Apollo”. I mentioned a few weeks ago I would put out additional behind-the-scenes content for paid subscribers. Given that I am in the process of starting out and trying to grow this publication, I decided for now it is probably counterproductive to put these posts behind a paywall. For now then, I will put these posts out for free along with the fictional posts. This is all still an experiment, so I may play around with having this content free for a limited time. I’ll let you know how that goes.
Expect the first of these posts in a few days.
Thanks for reading,
Alex