Asgardia
“I’m sorry,” was the gist of it, given by Officer Jayna Stal, an RKA employee completely unknown to the crew prior to the transmission. Sergei Kremena was looking down an atmospheric curling of clouds above the Bering Sea. A five-inch thick glass window kept him from falling, falling, falling. Losing track of the horizon nauseated him, so that he looked down at his tablet once more, pressed play to watch her mouthing the words again, “I’m so sorry, Commander,” rung in his ears. He saw RKA command room was nearly empty behind her, save for three or four frantic individuals, half in casual clothing, working like mad to some unknowable end. Likely tying loose ends he thought, trying to save what precious little information there was to steal away. He regarded Ms. Stal with a sort of sick appreciation, for at least letting the crew know.
The treaties were breached, and the nuclear codes of five nations compromised. A perfect storm, she said, had rendered politics useless and mutual destruction eminent. NASA and SpaceX were gone; the RKA and CASC had been evacuated. He lost the horizon again, felt uneasy. The subtle buzzing of electricity swelled in his ears and made it hard to think. Dovno, drysna, shit! His blood quickened as Jayna Stal closed her eyes, reaching for the camera, for the switch to shut him off. The last words he received were this: “I’m sorry, Asgardia. You won’t be coming home.”
Five miles every second, he thought, using both hands to turn his back against the porthole. He pressed lightly with his feet, propelling himself forward with no resistance. Everything moved slowly in the station, he noticed, but the station moved at 27,600 kilometers an hour. 16 rotations a day, he would watch the earth go by, and not once had it lost its luster. Kremena was the first to receive the news, that the world had gone to hell and that the second revision of the ISS would consequently become a $340 Billion dollar grave for four international scientists trapped in space. He felt the air, the space between the fabric of his jumpsuit and the hairs on his chest. He heard the blood beat heavy in his ears, and felt the atmosphere close around him as he pushed his way through the cabin, floating swiftly away from earth.
The ISS v.2 (Codename Asgardia, land of gods) would have been considered a wonder of the world if it were meant to last forever. The de-commissioning of the first International Space Station eight years prior signaled a significant jump in space exploration technology. The first Zarya module provided enough storage for short missions but required constant resupply in order to maintain the necessary resources for long term assignments by a fully manned station. The Zarya II (Later renamed DAWN) made six months of supplies for 5 astronauts a reality, effectively tripling the size of the original while maintaining the same structural weight and integrity through the use of lightweight composite materials developed in a collaboration between MIT aeronautics and the Material Sciences department at Stanford. The material advancements made Asgardia an attractive possibility for private companies and nations interested in sending their best scientists into space to perform cutting edge research. The new designs were made public, and it was funded for billions by private corporations, citing potential development in space mining and tourism.
When all was said and done, Asgardia hung above the earth like a jewel suspended in glass. Two massive rings, each constituting a generous 33,080 square ft in living and work space, rotated stoically on either side of a white cross of modules and couplings, different laboratories and system conduits, each a dedicated organ to the whole of the station, a space-faring ecosystem consuming sunshine to churn out hourly reports on everything from universal background radiation to the efficacy of protein transport in microgravity. In order to make all of this possible, the Solar Wing Arrays, just outside the habitation modules had to be completely revamped, a feat accomplished by NASA’s own Dr. Laura Penn, Chief Science Officer. Once completed, Asgardia produced roughly 1MW of power feeding 6 Tons of Lithium-glass Batteries, capable of operating the station’s main computer, an IBM Supercomputer affectionately named by the crew, ATLAS, something of a little brother to their own quantum computer Watson back on Earth. At an incline pitch of nearly 51 degrees, Asgardia orbited the earth in vacuous silence, welcoming the sunrise every 90 minutes of the day. The final transmission came on April 2nd, 2036.
Kremena and Yang
A bomb had gone off inside her head, short-wiring the connection to her extremities, ultimately breaking her clipboard into two uneven pieces. The faces of her siblings flashed in her mind, and then her parents. Her whole family was back on earth, and he was telling her that they’d been evacuated, that they were probably safe somewhere, like a bunker underground. 2.6 billion people in China, and how many bunkers? The reports she held hung tenuously from the clip and fell apart as she clenched tightly with her hand.
Frustrated, she searched her mind for the words that would express her contempt for everything, the rage she felt for the world around her, the feeling that made her stare knife points into the man in her doorway. The coldness in her look said that she wouldn’t be consoled, and that she didn’t want to be. The only thing she wanted right then was to scream into the man in front of her, the Russian with his consoling voice, to fill him up with curses and watch him burst into a thousand bloody pieces. Her hand cramped beneath the pressure of her own tension, and gave way as Sergei moved into the lab, an arm outstretched to grab a hold of her.
“I know you’re upset,” said the engineer. “I’m not trying to make you feel better---you would have found out either way.” He gestured to the tablet stuck with Velcro to the wall. “The RKA was empty, as far as I could tell. That officer, the one in the video– she said that U.S. was gone, same with Beijing.” The two of them leaned into the contour of the cylindrical wall. “The fail safes were compromised, and no politics. Nuclear holocaust.”
“I can only assume the worst.” She whispered softly. Her tears were perfect orbs, tiny and scattered like a halo of jewels beneath the white LEDs. “My family is gone.” Her breathing became intentional, collecting herself as best she could. Steadying her mind against the worry, she pressed a palm to her eyes and cheeks.
“We’ll be gone to if we don’t get moving.” Sergei pulled the Cyclab’s tablet from the wall, navigating the file system with a stylus. He pulled up three documents, and her face went white as she looked at the statistics. The first document detailed an unmanned supply mission, a ground-controlled capsule on its way into Asgardia. The second and third were supply readouts, for oxygen and water, respectively. Liu was terrified. “I-If the shipment is unmanned, then that means that no one---“
“Da,” he said gravely. “6 weeks of water and air, that is if this fucking flying brick doesn’t smash us into pieces in 3. Get up, call Penn and Winters. We need to get off Asgardia.”
Penn and Winters
Dr. Laura Penn made her way to the Biology Laboratory in Hab-bay B, stopping briefly at the kitchen to grab a snack. Rather than eating complete meals, Laura Penn mostly ate small portions, usually high in protein or fatty oils, at even intervals throughout the day. A dehydrated bar of teriyaki beef was her current protein fix, paired with a multivitamin and a cocktail of nootropics, to keep her sharp. She’d drifted from DAWN to the Bio-lab carrying in boxes of soil shipped from the Amazon rainforest. Each sample of roughly 300 held a particular strand of soil-dwelling fungus, which it was thought might just be able to survive in the vacuum of space. “It’s a waste of time and energy,” she’d explained in an email prior to delivery of the samples. “Soil is a living organism itself, and even if the mycelium lives, the soil will die in space. At the end of the day, what you’re looking for is a material that can withstand the vacuum of space, but that material is not mushrooms.”
She spoke the words to herself as she carried the boxes, slightly pleased with herself in saying it, as though she knew better because she did. It was a subtle satisfaction that she had earned, having done well over 400 materials studies on the ISS, and in Asgardia. She mused to herself about how moving in space could be misconstrued as falling, and whether her pushing the boxes of dirt down the narrow halls could be equally seen as dropping them. Near the cross section between Asgardia’s two rings, Laura quickly grabbed onto the case, catching a support bar bolted to the wall with the other hand. Steading herself, she pulled herself lightly through causeway to the labs in Hab-bay B. At the entrance, she felt her weight shifting to her feet, allowing her to stand upright against what used to be the wall. Once she set the case down on the floor, she stopped to check the chore off of her list of daily tasks.
“Winters!” echoed dully through the Hab-bay, mixed with the sound of quick footsteps skidding slightly against the floor. Dr. Penn was gaining speed, almost running, through each and every module before arriving at the Rec. “Winters!” she gasped, pushing through the heavy plastic curtains as she said it, exhausted and annoyed at how unwilling he’d been to answer.
Winters sat silently across from the exercise bench, back bent over against the wall, with his elbows clutched around his knees. Laura tried to regain her breath and doubled over, looking up at him from beneath her tightly knotted bun. She pointed to the monitors, “What are we going to do?” she said. He didn’t look at her. His hands and ears were colored red, except for the white spots where his knuckles clenched against his neck and face. He’d seen the reports: the shuttle, the water, the air, and the RKA transmission---there were no words. Two years earlier he was on the team that designed that shuttle and routed the plan. He knew that without ground control it would inevitably veer off-course, just enough to miss the dock, and unfortunately not enough to avoid a collision.
“I talked to Yang and Kourdakov, and---“
“I don’t care,” he said bitterly, still pressing his palms against his head. His mind was racing, but his senses were slowing. She was offended.
“You don’t care?” she raised her voice with an almost mocking portamento. Her tone was pregnant with an air of disbelief, as though he’d committed treason. Before she could continue on, he looked up to her, wiping away tears as he stared fixedly through bloodshot eyes.
“Stop,” he said. “Don’t say one more thing, because if you do, I think you’ll see me dead before whatever scheme you’ve hatched can come to light. I’ve got it figured; you’ll pick apart Asgardia for food, solar, even water if you’re smart. You’ll pack that into the Soyuz, a ship built for delivery mind you, not retrieval, and run a sortie for re-entry to whatever’s left of the planet Earth, is that it?” He didn’t give her time to respond before he started again. “I don’t know what life was like for you back on Earth, but I had a father, a mother, a wife, and daughter. Where are they now, can you tell me? Of course not, because you don’t know.” He picked himself up off the floor, standing nearly to the ceiling. “Nobody knows anything, and all we have now is time to figure things out, but let me make one thing clear: if and when I feel like taking part in any plans, I’ll let you know. Until then, I’d appreciate if everyone could just leave me alone.”
Again, the words were missing and the cabin was lost in the silence of surrounding space. Captain Winters left Dr. Penn feeling unsure of herself for the first time in years, and the stark reality of their situation crept in with the feeling of one person staying and another person leaving.
The Plan
It was 3 days before all the gears of the re-entry plan really began to turn. Sergei and Yang had begun work calculating a flight plan for the Soyuz Supply Shuttle currently docked at PORTAL-1. Though both were skilled navigators and mathematicians, the work was slow-going. It was important that they preserved the delicate social balance they’d established, and that meant taking numerous breaks and sharing the workload evenly.
“Bozhe, why?” Sergei mumbled under his breath, sifting through a pile of flight calculations. Yang was across the room, swiping her thin pointer finger in small movements on her tablet. Sergei looked up. “I can’t finish this,” he said, “The weight throws everything off; even if we did get the math right, the margin for error is astronomical.”
The two of them had run the numbers for a direct representation, that is, a flight “without notable incident.” Liu Yang laughed a bit, swiping again, looking over.
“I don’t know why you’re so surprised, we’re basically telling ourselves we need to predict the future,” she pushed away from the wall and joined him at his workbench. “It takes 90 people on government salaries working every minute of the day to make a flight successful, so why the hell do you think the four of us will just plan it out?” She smiled in a way that was infectious, and it put Kremena off guard. She continued, “Don’t bother trying with it. Either we die in space or have the slightest chance in re-entry, it’s not like there’s some better alternative we haven’t figured out yet.” She picked up Sergei’s tablet and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. “Play a game of chess with me, I’m tired of losing to ATLAS all the time.”
In the storage bay, a Portuguese cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” was playing from a wireless speaker. Penn had taken inventory of the food and first aid supplies the crew might need to survive on Earth. ADD Surviving on a planet riddled with nuclear destruction was almost comically foreign to her, and she laughed despite herself when thinking about it. She’d been grateful to obsess slightly over the possibility of survival, depending on the landing. With her spare time, she thumbed through the digitized library of congress for wilderness manuals and science fiction to keep her thinking about it. One book in particular, Wilson Tucker’s The Long, Loud Silence was a favorite, detailing a combination of nuclear attack and pneumonic plague. She considered packing the whole Bio lab into the shuttle, just in case a disease had broken out but knew her imagination was getting the better of her, and room on the shuttle was at a premium.
“Queen Bitch” played on the speaker as Penn loaded a pallet with three solar panels, charge controllers, and an inverter for the power. At “Eu tô querendo mudaaaaar, daqui,” she spun herself around, singing and almost cracking her voice. John was in the doorway.
“God! John,” she flailed in the air a bit, quickly pushing herself over to turn off the music, “Give a little warning next time?” she laughed, and so did John.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “What’s that music from?”
“My favorite movie, The Life Aquatic” replied Penn. “Do you recognize it? It’s Bowie”
“Yeah, I knew it was familiar” He smiled uneasily, and rung a hand around the back of his neck. “Look, I’m sorry about before. I know I haven’t been totally present with everyone.”
She moved to him slowly, unsure, placed her arms around him and pressed herself against him. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s been hard for everyone.”
A moment passed while they comforted one another, and for a second the two of them felt hopeful and alive. He gave a relieved sigh and a toothy smile, which she returned with a chuckle. “I’m ready to work,” he said. “I’ll move everything into the shuttle. I spoke with Sergei; apparently, Yang’s figured out how ATLAS can guide the re-entry." He gave a confident smirk. "We might actually stand a chance of getting back in one piece.” The two of them looked over the survival gear, the hazmat suits, the stacks of food, the random electronics, equipment and gauges of wire. John looked down slightly, then again to the pallets and crates. “But, what if there’s nothing left to go back to?” he asked, and for a moment again a quiet was between them.
The Escape
“8 minutes to detachment.” Liu Yang’s voice had a tinny fuzz to it in the speakers with the helmet of their space suits. Liu Yang and Captain Winters began exchanging checks for the port release, going over every possible gauge or button on the infinitely complex controls in front of them.
“Lock in visors,” addressed the crew, and “Visors locked,” was the response, in unison.
“Auto-retract timer set, switching over to internal power,” said Yang. The lights of the panel blinked in a clandestine wave across the console. Above his head, Winters lifted the cover on a switch and flipped it. The sound of a valve opening filled the cabin, and the outer fabric of the space suits was pulled tight in all directions. “Cabin pressure regulated. Three minutes to detachment.” Their nerves were of red-hot steel, hairpin triggers ready to bend and fire at a moment’s notice. The blood rushed to their chests, an autonomic response to fight or flight, pumping sugar and oxygen through the heart, gut, brain, and lungs. “Detachment in T-minus 5…4…3…2…1…”
There was a quick shake as the Soyuz separated from Asgardia’s docking arm and the lights of the shuttle cabin cycled on, then off again. Sergei and the others felt the force of gravity push them hard into their aluminum bucket seats, and through the bullet-proof windscreen the only thing that could be seen was the dull grey-blue of Earth’s hazy atmosphere. For each of them, individuality dissolved within those moments. There was no up, no down, no left or right to be felt. The air in their suits tingled with bodily electricity, and their follicles stood on end. An adjustment came in from Asgardia, a starboard rotation of ten degrees, enough to split the sky into a perfect light and perfect dark.
From behind the arc of Earth’s atmosphere, the crew watched the sun’s blinding light come streaming in from the horizon. Along the edge of the Planet’s surface, sunshine diffused itself in a hot white glow that tapered off, illuminating the heavy cloud cover over some indiscernible land mass. As they flew on, the altitude was dropping by miles every second. “Engaging retro-thrusters,” called out Yang, whose voice was shaking almost as much as her hands within the shell of her pressurized suit. The thrusters engaged, pulling everyone forward against their harnesses, and again the altitude was dropping heavily by the second. Another rotation from ATLAS and the horizon was laid out flat in front of them, rising to fill the view.
The shuttle dove into the Earth’s atmosphere, pushing through a thick confluence of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and other gasses, rushing against the heat shield of the shuttle. At roughly 50 times the speed of sound and lowering, the outside temperature of the shuttle reached nearly 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit, igniting the air around it like a chain reaction through the sky.
It took 5 complete rotations around the Earth, with minor path adjustments along the way, to arrive at landing speed. The air strip they would land at was chosen via satellite imagery, a tremendous patch of green between the Kyrgyz Steppe and the Siberian Taiga, the long abandoned area of Chernobyl. In the final stage of re-entry, the rudders engaged in airbrake as the parachutes deployed behind the shuttle. The guides that would normally give direction to the runway were long gone, and they had to go entirely off the instruments. The runway was long, but the speed was still too much. The rudders were pushed harder, and a final emergency parachute was deployed. A jolt from the force pulled the nose of the shuttle downward, all the while Winters and Yang were arguing about whether to drop or to pull out. Nearing the end of the runway, the landing gear dropped, and the starboard axle broke beneath the weight of the cargo. The large pierce resistant tires gripped the tarmac at an angle as the heavy shuttle twisted the telescoping starboard motor arm 50 degrees. The small difference in weight distribution shifted everything in the cargo bay just slightly so that the shuttle seemed to heave itself upon the starboard wing, driving it into the ground. Pieces of ceramic and aluminum flew up into the air as the craft carved a deep outward-curving gash in the tangled wilderness surrounding the concrete landing.
The world seemed to stand still as Penn and Kremena closed their eyes, pulling themselves internally away from the physical reality of the crash outside. Digging further into the ground, the starboard wing stopped dead against some blockage in the soil. It threw the shuttle immediately on its nose, which sent the heavy fuselage into a roll.
“Brace yourselves!” Winters screamed into the intercom, as the cracked and broken pavement of the runway came to an end. The crew lifted their hands and grabbed the harnesses as the shuttle tumbled through the grass and over railings. There was noise; a horrible shriek of twisting metal and blunt-force trauma to the craft. A symphony of dying frequencies was ringing in Sergei’s ears as he came to, hanging upside down from the stretched harness that held him in his seat. He heard the sound of burning cinders, the whistling of the wind outside. The cabin lights flickered, on and off, on and off. He heard the others breathing in the coms. Outside sound of bugs chirping filled the cool night air. Above the wreckage, a flock of birds squawked, ousted from their nesting trees.