Chapter 26• Daring venture
*Still Day 13 of Origenes Crisis*
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After what felt like forever, we were allowed to take our visors off; "Free to move about the cabin"- so to speak.
I felt a myriad of things then. Light, woozy- actually, outright sick to my stomach. But, I leveled out pretty well after a few minutes.
Arlo lifted his visor and laughed, first giving a paw-bump (fist-bump) to Weston in the seat next to him.
He turned to me and offered me a paw-bump of my own.
"Whew, was that insane or what!?", he said, still elated from the ride.
"It was incredible! I mean, I almost can't….put it in words", I said.
"Don't try- that's what I'm doing anyway", Weston said.
He then added, "Though I really wasn't expecting it to feel so smooth. That wasn't bad at all."
"No, it was smooth as silk. Other than the first-stage kick and the second stage ignition", Arlo said.
I smiled, trying to hide my discomfort. If they weren't feeling it, I decided I wouldn't either.
Weston stretched as he unhooked himself from his seat. I heard a loud crack and his eyes went wide.
"Auuughhh", Weston winced.
"You okay?", I asked.
"Fine", he said stretching again as another loud pop emerged from his back.
Arlo also groaned as he left his seat.
"Yeesh, we have been sitting for hours, haven't we?", he said.
I unhooked myself very slowly.
I thought you were supposed to feel good while in zero-gravity.
Once I got moving, I felt like I had just sat through a standardized test. Kind of groggy, though I was still wired and focused on what lay ahead.
The sensation of constant weightlessness was fun, yet extremely jarring at the same time.
If you had ever been temporarily suspended above the seat on an amusement park ride, like a roller-coaster before it drops, you'd know what I mean.
It took time to get the hang of controlling momentum in that space.
Just because your weight carried you out of your seat didn't mean you were helpless until you hit a wall.
Before I left my seat, however, I asked Arlo if he didn't mind enquiring on the status of the booster landing.
"Hey Houston, did the first-stage landing go as planned?", he asked.
*Beep*
"Yes sir. Just touched down about ten minutes ago. Landed just right off the coast on the barge to the chorus of two sonic booms. The spectators were all about it!"
*Beep*
"Glad to hear it, our heroes in the engineering and testing department put together a beautiful piece of machinery. I'm glad it made it back to fly another day", Arlo said.
It took approximately 95 minutes for the booster to go around the Earth after detaching from us, moving at about 17,500 miles per hour.
After one orbit around the Earth, the first stage de-orbited itself and landed off the western coast of Clearwater, Florida. The landing pad was situated on a barge, so people could see the landing from the coastline.
Speaking to the technological sophistication of the craft; It reentered over the Gulf of Mexico, to ensure it would land in water in case it went haywire during its descent.
Its descent slope was steep and precise, so that the barge could be moored a quarter of a mile to the West of Clearwater and not have to move an inch.
Sure enough, exactly one hour and thirty-five minutes after its separation, the booster fired its landing engines, riding a pillar of flame that slowed its 17,500mph (7km/second) freefall, and landed upright on the boat to the cheers of thousands of onlookers.
I wished I could have seen it.
The booster was a lot larger than the reusable boosters that SpaceX rockets used, which made it the largest reusable booster ever to successfully land itself.
It felt good to know that, even if the telescope couldn't be saved, at least I could count myself as an eyewitness to multiple things that hadn't been done before in all of history.
As I left my seat, I floated freely for the first time. I couldn't help but giggle as I slid into an effortless double front-flip.
"Ooh that was smooth, check this one out!", Arlo said before he also left his seat and joined in the fun with a triple-diagonal flip that looked like he was chasing his tail.
"I promised my comrades I would do that the first chance I got", Arlo said.
I laughed as I reoriented myself into an upside-down position.
Weston smiled at us though he raised an eyebrow.
"What's that look for?", Arlo questioned.
"Nothing, I just wasn't expecting you to jump out of your seat without a warning or something", Weston replied.
"Parking orbit means we're 'parked', nothing for me to do until we hit our fifth revolution, aside from enjoying the views", Arlo said.
"Well then", Weston started as he checked a gauge and opened the two hatches that separated the command and lunar landing modules, "At least use the good windows for sightseeing".
Weston was giving us clearance to enter the lander-half, which held our EVA suits, the portable ascent engine components that would move the telescope, and anything else that needed special storage while astronauts were on the surface.
Its size was meant to accommodate and lower a lunar rover under normal circumstances.
It also had the widest windows so that the pilot could see while landing on the moon.
One push off the backs of our seats was enough momentum for Arlo and I to float all the way down to where Weston was.
Stopping ourselves was the less fun part.
Before I knew it, I almost floated past Weston, but he reached out and grabbed me by my suit's tail while Arlo stopped himself using a metal bar that was vertically attached to the wall.
"Yeah, you'll get used to that", Arlo chuckled as we all turned to the window.
The view was gorgeous, like a bay-window overlooking a third of the planet.
One thing you wouldn't realize until actually going to space was the peculiar sense of positioning.
Earth is not 'upright' as we would think it is. There wasn't a 'bottom' to space. There were stars all around us, including beneath us.
Whatever the space equivalent of vertigo was, I felt it in that moment.
We couldn't exactly feel the sensation of us moving, but we could surely see it.
I looked back up all the way through the hatches to the cockpit.
This 50-60 feet of space would be our home for the next eight days at minimum- if fixing Origenes took a day.
Wishful thinking.
Weston's watch made a noise.
"Storage check!", Weston exclaimed before he pushed from the window and floated down to check the cold-storage units below us.
This was one of Weston's many responsibilities in his module- or rather the one he and I would eventually be sharing.
The portable ascent engine components had their own readings- its two parts stored in separate compartments that were kept far from one another.
"Looks good! Still cold", Weston said.
"Wait, when did you have the time to program your schedule into your watch?", Arlo inquired.
"Well, Kingsley did it for me, just to keep me on a timetable similar to the one I'll have on the moon", Weston replied.
"Hmmm, and you didn't think to recommend that Rocky do the same?", Arlo said.
Arlo wasn't using an accusatory tone, but it seemed as if he were referring to a conversation that I was not present for.
He was advocating on my behalf, presumably to bridge this odd tension I still felt between Weston and myself.
"Oh, well….I didn't think his schedule would be so easy to plan out- I didn't want to make unnecessary confusion is all", Weston replied somewhat subduedly.
"Rocky, not to order you around or anything, but why don't you take a look at the radiator and see what it says", Arlo said.
"Sure, I can do that", I said.
I floated to the radiator, which was doing its job- rejecting heat from the on-board active thermal control system.
"There's a line of 7 numbers, they're all counting upwards", I said.
"Are they yellow?", Arlo and Weston asked at the same time.
"Yep", I said.
"Good, that's what we want!", Arlo smiled.
"Thank you, Rocky…...Going forward I might ask you to check some random things, I'm not trying to assign you busywork- just want to keep you frosty and alert. We don't want you feeling left out along the way", Weston said, then added, "If that's alright with our fearless commander."
Arlo, who was back at the controls smiled and said, "Turn your radios back on, It's the White Team!"
The White team would be our force of guidance from our Trans-lunar injection maneuver (TLI) to when we'd finally engage the moon. The White Team took the control positions previously held by the Green Team; The difference thereafter would be that they and all of the remaining teams would be headquartered in Houston instead of Cape Kennedy- with the exception of the black team.
"Good afternoon, Cygnus, White Team here!"
*Beep*
"Good afternoon, White Team, how's home since we left?", Arlo replied jokingly.
"Pretty much the same, though I can't say folks aren't already missing you", came the reply.
"Hey, do me a favor, can you pass a message to me?", Arlo asked, "Tell my JAXA classmate Hakuo that the answer to his old question is 'Yes, I have', alright?"
"Are you sure you don't want to say anything to your wife- or mate?", the voice of who I assumed was the leader of the White Team asked with a chuckle.
"She's my wife, and we've been talking plenty in the past couple of weeks, I promised if there was anything I needed to add, I'd do it once we reached the moon", Arlo answered.
I made a mental note to ask him what that exchange meant.
Arlo led in the pleasantries, but it was likely that a lot of the team members were the same people from the Green Team that just had responsibilities that carried beyond launch protocols.
However, we still had another rotation to go before we'd be ready for Arlo to take the controls and pilot us through the burn that would take us out of Earth's pull.
"We actually sent a team member out with a telescope after launch to look for you all from the ground as you were wrapping up your parking orbit checklist– We've got a special lens that creates a dark backdrop like the night sky to see contrast during the day", the White Team head replied.
"Oh yeah? Is it too cloudy, or could they see us?", Arlo pressed.
"Cygnus is looking good- About 185 miles high (300 km), moving at the speed of a commercial airliner", came the reply.
As the White Team continued on, they shared the good news. Houston was still getting signals from Origenes on the moon- though they were sparse and weak.
So far; Good enough to keep going. We just had to keep putting one paw in front of the other.
The next step was coming soon, yet I couldn't keep myself from taking one last glimpse beyond the glass.
I had seen pictures from orbit before. But no picture could recreate seeing it for real.
We could have been falling for all I knew, but we weren't.
The Pacific Ocean was underneath us at that point in its brilliant blue glory, dotted with vibrant green islands.
Orbit wasn't bad, not at all.
A part of me wanted to just stay up there forever.
Since I hadn't been looking out of any window during the majority of our first rotations, I was fortunate to be in the position I was at that moment.
I almost looked down- my bad habit that only seemed to come while I found myself deep in thought- to once again lament the family I'd just left behind.
I kept my head up though, and found my heart skipping a beat for an entirely different reason.
"Woah…...", I gasped quietly, as I took in the brilliance of the sun 'rising' from around the circumference of the Earth.
Nothing else mattered in that moment.
***End of Ch. 26***