taking inventory of deep space decisions
Pre-launch, in the supply closet. Plants’re aboard; cross that off the docket. The closet has pots, a drum, and vase. Each plays some role in outer space. The pots are clay. The vase is plastic. The vase looks modern; plant pots, classic. The drum revolves like a hamster wheel. Lights in the centre within a cage of steel. Secure their place, mark their status. After lift-off, they’ll all be weightless.
On Earth, gravity draws plant roots down into the soil. The stem grows up toward the light. Without gravity, both roots and stem grow into a tangled ball. A spinning drum can create artificial gravity. Roots grow toward the outside. Stems grow toward the light at the centre. You place the plants in the revolving drum.
Console lights glow, main thrusters start. Lift-off is imminent, time to depart. There’s a cot, a chair, and overhead rail. Which posture is best, least likely to fail? The rail is a handhold as found on a bus. It tethers your space suit, so that part’s a plus. The cot and chair both have seat-belts, though crush of acceleration is most likely felt as the craft thrusts up reaching for space, bodies press backward. Best take your place.
During lift-off, acceleration is 10 to 20 times the force of gravity on Earth. It pushes blood from the head of someone standing or sitting into lower extremities. The result is loss of consciousness. Sitting-up, loss of consciousness occurs even at 4 to 8 times the force of Earth gravity. Laying down, one might tolerate up to 17 times the force of Earth gravity for a short while. You lay down.
In the middle of the command module, a cupcake floats head-height right beside you. It has a single lit candle plunked in the centre. A year in deep space, you’re the first to enter. The flame is small, but easy to see. It forms a tight ball where there’s no gravity. You feel a little light in the head. You’ve no helmet on, air fills the cabin instead. Douse the candle, rotate the ship, switch on the fans or put a helmet on quick.
On Earth, a flame points up. Hot gasses are lighter than air and rise like a hot-air balloon. As they rise, fresh oxygen enters to keep the flame going. In the absence of gravity, a flame forms a sphere. Carbon dioxide forms a bubble around it and the flame goes out. Carbon dioxide will similarly suffocate anyone breathing uncirculated air in zero gravity. You switch on the fans.
A source of energy is thus on this low gravity planet first order of business. Two buttons here, a handspan apart, while tapping the third so the rotors’ll start. A button for one hand, a button for each. No hand for the button 2 meters from reach. One part to spare: a large foil square. A glider might reach there in low-grav air. Unless, of course, you have a plan to increase the force or reduce the span.
A glider would likely slide over the button and not depress it, especially in low gravity. The sheet of foil has the same mass when flat, folded, or crumpled. When crumpled into a sphere, it concentrates weight on a smaller area—pressure to press the third button. You toss the ball of crumbled foil onto the button.
Window for lift-off rapidly closing, but without a fuel charge this ship isn’t rising. No rendezvous with celestial road, unless, that is, you lighten the load. Toss out the bed, maybe the sink. Find some other way to sleep and drink. Or lose the chair and some of the plants. Taking fewer breaths might give you a chance. Then again, one more plan: dump the vents and ditch the fan.
Keep the chair, plants, and fan. The chair to avoid injury on lift-off. The plants for food and oxygen. The fan to push away exhaled carbon dioxide. Weightless, you can sleep in a bag attached to a wall and squeeze water from a bottle. You jettison the bed and sink.
Back on the celestial road with more experience and less payload. Good to be free from gravity. This calls for a drink: coffee, cocoa, maybe tea. Distilled water from a bottle squeezed into the kettle whose heater is metal. Nothing wrong with the tool, but ten minutes later the water’s still cool. Turn up the heat or stir the water. Make the tea stronger or let it heat longer.
On Earth, water heats, expands and rises in the kettle. These are convection currents. There are no convection currents in a weightless environment. Water on top would be heated only by conduction with the warmer water below. Since water is a poor conductor of heat, the process is slow. You stir the water.
Lacking material to model a shape: an O ring for the pod, if need to escape. The ring is large and slightly porous. Donut shaped, you know—a torus. Based upon the prototype, O-rings can be made almost overnight. For modelling material, improvise. Open a soft drink, the bubbles won’t rise. Squeeze a rubber ball, or twist a plant. Use a water globule or maybe you can’t.
The rubber ball and water globule will return to a spherical shape. A sphere is not the same as a torus, which has a hole. In deep space, carbonated bubbles don’t rise in the liquid. They distribute evenly throughout the can. This makes a malleable foam held together by sugars in the soda. You open a soft drink.
A deep space-walk, but not going far. No more fuel in the jet reservoir. The ship has a portal over that way. It seems to be open on the pod door bay. Given the usual astronaut gear, now how to get out of here? Removing a boot for jet of air might get you killed—or push you there. Fix the pack, make a chain of tools, or thrust them away; use the reaction as fuel.
No need to fix the jet pack. It’s empty, not broken. Your belt holds small tools, not chain linked. For every action, however, there is an equal and opposite reaction ( Newton’s third law ). By tossing tools in the direction away from the ship, you will be pushed toward the ship. Adjust direction with each tool tossed. You break the rules and toss the tools.
Having survived the deep space gamut, you’re ready to shuttle to destination planet. It’s similar to Earth, that much is clear, in composition, gravity and atmosphere. One craft is a large wedge, like a doorstop prop when angled on edge. The second shape is somewhat like a tube or torus, basically a donut. Finally a bulb, the incandescent kind. Each shape has a purpose within its design.
The donut- and wedge-shaped crafts will overheat by friction with the air. The lightbulb-shaped shuttle has a blunt nose, like the re-entry vehicles used by Apollo astronauts. That creates a shockwave through air, extending beyond the sides of the shuttle and pushing away friction-formed heat. You take the lightbulb-shaped shuttle.
