Sea of Tranquility City was our destination. It was amazing to realize that Humankind had finally settled on the Moon, building cities that people lived and worked in. From there, we would take a lunar bus… yes, that's right… a bus… to Cordero Station.
The captain and crew invited me up to the flight deck for the landing at Sea of Tranquility City. They even offered me the pilot's seat, but I respectfully declined, choosing instead the instructor's seat. While I had successfully preflighted the ship, started the engines, taxied out, taken off, reached orbit, and helped execute a flawless TLI, I had never before handled a vessel in zero-G or even lunar gravity. It was safer for everyone concerned if I left it in the hands of those who had.
The moment the seatbelt sign was turned off, everyone was out of their seats like lightning. That was also when I realized something was amiss. The Moon, being much smaller than its parent planet, should've had a gravity 1/6th that of Earth. And yet, as I unstrapped from the instructor's seat, I felt just like I did back on Earth!
"Artificial gravity?!" I gasped, bouncing up and down once or twice.
"First developed back in 3285," Gortu chuckled, giving me a thumbs up.
"Wow!" was all I could whisper.
The ramifications for human habitation of the Moon were staggering!
The lunar landing concluded, I met up with the rest of my family back in the cabin. Then, together, we headed out across the boarding ramp and into Sea of Tranquility City.
As a simple precaution against the solar radiation that bombarded the surface of the Moon, Sea of Tranquility City… the majority of it, that is… was buried under lunar regolith, a natural radiation barrier.
There was one part of the city on the surface, and that's where we would catch the bus to Cordero Station. It also housed the Apollo 11 lunar landing historical site and museum.
"Come on, Onee-san!" Claru cheerily urged, dragging me at a run by the hand. "You have to see this!"
"Alright, I'm coming!" I laughed, struggling to keep up.
At the end of a long hallway, we came to what appeared to be a circular enclosure, like a donut lying on its side with windows facing towards the center.
"There it is!" Claru declared, releasing my hand so he could point through the nearest window. "The first lunar lander!"
I looked past Claru out the window, but my reaction was, "Where?"
"Right there!" he replied, pointing at what appeared to be a slightly squashed upside-down ice cream cone.
"Claru, honey," I tried to explain, "that's not the Lunar Module."
"Sure it is!" he argued, turning to face me. "That's just what it looks like in my history vids!"
"Believe me, Otouto-san," I said, glancing back out at the landing site. "That isn't even close to the real thing."
"You are mistaken, Miss," a stranger addressed us as he approached. "This is where Apollo 11 landed… and that's the Lunar Module."
"And you are?" I politely inquired.
"Framu," he replied, nodding to me. "I am curator of the Apollo 11 museum and keeper of this landing site."
"Then the info you've been given," I said, pointing out the window, "the history as you know it, is severely flawed."
"Now see here!"
"Believe me, I know what I'm talking about," I pressed on.
"And how could you possibly know?" he demanded, planting his fists on his hips. "This is the 43rd century. Those events took place back in the late 20th century!"
"July 20th, 1969, to be exact," I said. "And, believe me, I know what the lunar module looked like."
"Impossible!" Framu argued, becoming more agitated. "No one living today was alive back then!"
"No one… except our new granddaughter!" an elderly man, a woman beside him, interrupted.
"Da! Ma!" Papa exclaimed, smiling broadly as he hugged first the man then the woman.
That done, all three turned smiling faces my way.
"Ogii-sama!" I spoke, bowing deeply. "Obaa-sama! Dozo yo roshiku! I am deeply honored to meet both of you!"
Papa's mother, grinning from ear to ear, wrapped me up in a surprisingly strong yet warm bear hug.
"My dear, it is we who are very humbled and honored to meet you!"
"You should listen to her, Framu," Ogii-sama told the curator. "She knows what she's talking about."
"She's just a child!" the man petulantly complained, gesturing at me. "How could she possibly know what happened back then?"
"Clearly you haven't been paying attention to the news feeds from Earth, then," Obaa-sama chuckled, slipping her arm around mine and giving it a hug. "This is the Time Traveler, Jayden Découverte!"
"What?!" the curator stammered, whirling to stare at me.
"The counselors of Nova Tokyo treated my emergence from cold sleep as a CID," I explained, a gentle smile on my lips. "As such, I was allowed to implant my memories into a new body. This is the one I chose."
"And not long after that, she saved our grandson, Claru, from a near fatal fall off one of the skywalks back in Nova Tokyo," Ogii-sama added, linking arms with me on the other side.
"She'd been in cold sleep since the early 21st century," Papa chimed in.
"2015, to be exact," I finished. "At that time, I was 59 years old."
"59?!" Framu stammered, clearly flustered. "But that would mean…"
"The day Buzz Aldrin and Neal Armstrong landed on the Moon," I told him, glancing once more out at the lunar landscape, "July 20th, 1969, I was thirteen years old… and an avid follower of our country's space program. I even built models of the Columbia and the Eagle."
"That appears to be some sort of single-stage-to-orbit vessel," I said, glancing out the window. "That was a technology Humankind didn't possess back in the 20th century."
I turned back to the curator. "For the most part, the Saturn V rocket, the Command / Service Module, and the Lunar Excursion Module, were designed mostly with the use of a mechanical calculation device called a slide rule."
"Just a second," he interrupted, tapping on the controls of his wrist mounted computer.
An image appeared in the air between us.
"Yes, that's it," I said, smiling as I recognized the device. "However, I had also heard that some very primitive computers were also used at the time to aid the design."
"If that's not the lander," Claru wondered, glancing from the window to me, "then how did they get to the Moon?"
"With a powerful multi-stage rocket," I explained, noting that a crowd had started to gather around us. "The Saturn V rocket, what the astronauts used to get to the Moon, was 360 feet tall…"
"What?!" someone in the crowd gasped.
"Fully fueled and crewed, it weighed approximately six million pounds," I went on.
"How did it ever get off the ground?!" another visitor asked.
"The first stage of the Saturn V was equipped with five Saturn F-1 engines," I replied. "It burned a mixture of kerosene and liquid oxygen. At ignition, the first stage generated 7.5 million pounds of thrust…"
"Enough to lift the entire rocket off the ground," Ogii-sama realized.
"Yes," I responded, nodding to him. "Once the fuel of the first stage was used up, the entire first stage was jettisoned, reducing the weight that the next stage needed to move."
"How many stages did it have?" Papa wondered.
"Three main ones," I replied, smiling. "The first two were used getting the rocket into Earth orbit. The third stage, the S-IVB, was used to transfer the remainder of the rocket to the Moon."
"The remainder?" Framu spoke, clearly puzzled. "Just how much of the rocket was disposable?"
"Nearly all of it," I replied.
"That makes no sense!" someone else exclaimed.
"Actually, it does," Obaa-sama stepped in.
"Explain," yet another visitor demanded.
"By getting rid of those systems that were no longer necessary to the mission…" Ogii-sama began.
"The remaining components become much more energy efficient," Obaa-sama finished. "As our granddaughter just pointed out, humankind back in the late 1960's did not possess the sophisticated manufacturing and materials we do today. They made do with what they had."
With a chuckle, Mama added, "At the time, for them, that was considered state of the art leading edge technology."
"A far cry from what we have today," Obaa-sama said, smiling and nodding at her daughter-in-law. "Yet, despite all the challenges and difficulties, they still put a man on the Moon!"
"Hai, Obaa-sama!" I responded, bowing deeply. "Domo arigato gozaimas!"
"It was really 360 feet tall?!" Claru asked, laying a hand on my arm.
I nodded.
"Even more amazing," I told him as I added a wink, "the whole thing was assembled inside the VAB, or Vehicle Assembly Building, an enormous facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida."
"Wait!" one of the people in the now large crowd spoke up. "If it was assembled inside a building, how did they launch it?"
"With one of the other wonders of the Apollo program," I chuckled as I recalled. "The entire Saturn V was assembled atop a mobile launcher platform while still in the VAB. It was then carried out to the launch site using one of the massive crawler-transporters!"
"That's crazy!" someone in the now murmuring crowd remarked.
"Perhaps," I answered back, "but NASA chose to use the vertical assembly idea and mobile transporter rather than assembling the rocket horizontally then craning it into position at the launch site. Less chance of a mishap and reduced risk of damage to the assembled rocket."
"How… how long will you be staying on Luna?" Framu stammered.
"Papa?" I asked, turning to him.
"We'll be around for at least a week," he replied, laying an arm across my shoulders. "Since this is your first time in space, much less on the Moon, you'll need time to look around and explore." Then, with a wink at his older son, he chuckled, "Check with your little brother. He knows all the good places!"
"Interstellar!" Claru exclaimed, hugging me around the waist.
"Will we be staying here in Tranquility City?" I wondered.
"No," Ogii-sama replied. "We have quarters at Cordero Station. Plenty of room there."
"Where exactly is Cordero Station?" I wondered.
"The far side of Luna," Mama replied.
"It was originally a small scientific outpost built in Gagarin crater," Ogii-sama added. "But it's grown a lot since then, expanding outward from that original facility. I'd say it's nearly the size of Tranquility City… and just as comfortable."
"Now that's interesting," I mused, grinning.
"What is?" Papa asked.
"That they chose to build the facility in the crater named after the world's first human to ever travel into space," I replied, grinning from ear-to-ear, "Yuri Gagarin."
"Miss Découverte?"
"Yes, Curator?"
"I would like to apologize for my actions and words earlier," he said, lowering his eyes. "I knew of Cordero Station, but I was unaware of the significance of Gagarin crater. Please, when you have some time, I'd like to discuss with you your knowledge and memories about space, especially regarding Apollo 11 and this Yuri Gagarin you mentioned."
"Of course, sir," I replied, bowing to him. "Give us a couple of days to settle in and then we can talk."
"Thank you," Framu sighed, clearly relieved.
"Now where's this lunar bus I've heard about?" I asked, turning to my new grandparents. "Can't wait to see what it looks like!"