CHAPTER TWELVE
THE LONG ROAD BETWEEN WORLDS
The transport network, by the end of 1980
The distance between Earth and Mars was too large for anyone to run a sensible transportation system.
So they built one anyway.
The road had begun with Apollo 11*21. On 16 July 1969, Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins lifted off aboard a Saturn V*22 from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center*23. Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin descended toward the Moon in the lunar module Eagle. Collins remained in lunar orbit aboard the command module Columbia.
At 20:17 UTC on 20 July 1969, Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquility*24. Armstrong reported to Mission Control in Houston: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Two men were on the surface of another world. The third was still circling above them, in the spacecraft that would carry all three home.
At 02:56 UTC on 21 July*25—still the evening of 20 July in Houston—Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface. His words reached Earth through the radio link: “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” Aldrin followed him onto the surface. They collected samples and deployed experiments before returning to Eagle.
On 21 July, Eagle’s ascent stage lifted Armstrong and Aldrin back into lunar orbit to rejoin Collins. On 24 July 1969, the three men returned to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. The first crewed Moon landing had ended with its crew safely home.
The next ambition was a permanent workplace above Earth. Planners proposed a station where crews could live between flights and test equipment without returning every experiment to the ground. The first drawings belonged to national programmes. The estimates that followed them did not fit comfortably inside any national budget.
The cost brought the governments to the same table. One country could supply a launch vehicle, another a pressure module, another the power equipment or the instruments that justified sending people up at all. Each contribution came with arguments about access, command and whose experiments would receive time. The agreements were slow. The station went up in pieces.*26 By the time Mars became a funded project, people were already living and working aboard it.
The Mars planners inherited something more useful than a proposal. They had docking ports, crews accustomed to orbital work and a structure to which more equipment could be attached. The station was quickly redesigned as an interplanetary spaceport. New drawings made room for propellant storage, cargo handling and ships too large to launch from Earth in one piece. Laboratories lost their claim to certain berths. Freight schedules acquired it.
That conversion gave the Martian programme a practical starting point. Missions could be assembled and supplied in orbit, with crews and equipment brought up separately. The international arrangements that had paid for the station became the basis for sharing the cost of the road beyond it.
By the end of 1980, the Earth Orbital Transfer Station had grown around its original modules and central truss. Tank farms extended from one end. Docking ports occupied the other. Solar arrays turned slowly in sunlight. Crew quarters, medical rooms, cargo holds and maintenance shops filled the pressurized core.
People who saw the station in publicity photographs imagined a hotel in space.
People who worked there called it the Yard.
Everything passed through the Yard.
Passengers came up from Earth aboard orbital shuttles carrying little more than personal bags and the expression common to people who had just discovered weightlessness was less charming than television suggested.
Cargo arrived in containers marked by priority.
RED meant life support or mission critical.
YELLOW meant operational.
WHITE meant routine.
More than one official discovered that a white container could remain in orbit for weeks while a red valve assembly passed it in a day.
The long-haul Mars ships docked nose-first along the outer truss.
They were assembled for endurance rather than beauty. Propellant tanks surrounded engine sections. Radiators unfolded like black wings. Pressurized cylinders held crew, food, water and equipment. Rotating sleep modules appeared on later ships after physicians concluded that months in near-weightlessness were producing problems nobody wanted to deliver to Mars.
There was no single Mars liner.
There was a fleet moving through a schedule written by orbital mechanics.
At any given time, some ships were outbound, some inbound, some waiting for favorable geometry, some being repaired, some being loaded and one or two being cannibalized for parts while committees argued about whether they were officially retired.
The other end of the route had been built for a more immediate reason. While Hale, Morozov, Richter and Nakamura dug into the red dirt and put together the first camp, the people and equipment supporting them needed somewhere to wait above the planet. Four engineers on the surface could not receive every load at once. Cargo had to remain available without filling the unfinished camp with crates that nobody yet had room to open.
The first orbital support modules provided quarters, stores and a place to prepare the next descent. Crews could inspect a load, separate what the four needed immediately from what could wait, and hold the remainder in orbit. As the campsite grew, so did the work above it. More docking capacity followed. Repair space followed the first equipment failures. The temporary support point became a station.
The Mars Orbital Station was smaller and rougher.
Its crews called it High Mars.
With a working port above Earth and another above Mars, a regular shuttle system was the logical next step. Earth shuttles carried people and freight up to the Yard. Long-haul ships moved them between the two orbital stations. Descent shuttles carried the next load down from High Mars and brought departing crews back up. Each vehicle could be built for its part of the journey. The ships crossing interplanetary space no longer had to carry everything required to land, unload and lift off again.
The network had grown out of successive needs: a place to work above Earth, a place to supply the first camp above Mars, and reliable connections between them. By the end of 1980, those connections were supporting a settlement.
Every person going to the surface passed through it unless assigned to a direct mission. Every person leaving Mars waited there for an Earth-bound departure. Cargo was sorted, inspected, logged and transferred to descent shuttles.
High Mars developed its own smell: recycled air, machine oil, coffee and the faint metallic odor of too many people living beside too much equipment.
Commander Yevgeny Sokolov had been in charge of it for seven months when a young American shuttle pilot complained about the schedule.
“My cargo was supposed to be here Tuesday.”
Sokolov looked at the manifest.
“It is Tuesday.”
“Next Tuesday.”
“Then it is early.”
“It is three weeks late.”
Sokolov handed back the clipboard.
“You are thinking like an Earth person.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you still believe dates.”
The transportation chain shaped Mars culture before Mars had enough civilians to call it culture.
They learned not to promise that a part would arrive.
They said it was manifested.
Manifested was not the same as loaded.
Loaded was not the same as launched.
Launched was not the same as arrived.
Arrived in orbit was not the same as down on the surface.
A crate could cross interplanetary space successfully and then wait ten days at High Mars because dust closed the landing zone.
This was how a colony became patient and impatient at the same time.
It also made the Mechanical Dome indispensable.
Every locally manufactured component shortened the chain.
Every successful repair weakened Earth’s grip by one fraction.
No one described it that way in official reports.
Shaw understood it anyway.
One evening she and Li stood inside the Mechanical Dome watching a machinist cut a new pump impeller from a locally cast blank.
“You realize what this means?” Shaw asked.
Li watched the tool bite metal.
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“It means the pump will work tomorrow.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
He looked at her.
“You are thinking politics.”
“I have to.”
“I am thinking pumps.”
“That is why I envy you.”
Li smiled.
“You should not. Pumps are political now.”