‘Old Woman and the Moon’ Ch. 4 + NASA’s Crewed Lunar Rovers

Short story continues from prompt “‘Old Man and the Sea’ but on the moon, with ladies”. For this week’s In Real Life, I talk about the OG moon buggy and NASA’s new ride plans

Moonwalk Back to Chapter 3

The great expanse of the moon seemed to unfurl in welcome. Serena gripped the control column for the first time since training.  She’d pored over the map data and had made these decisions in a clear headspace with no stress. She’d checked and double checked them.

Serena pressed the rover onward.

She bobbed up and down shallow craters surfing the terrain. The further she got from Base, the way turned more rocky. Serena’s neck prickled with sweat. Bobbing and weaving around boulders that popped out of the darkness in the rover’s lights was an inefficient use of power and her mental math got crowded quickly with the price of micro-adjustments. She began to dread the darkness in the craters and wished she had planned a route that prioritized staying out of them as much as possible, riding the narrow plateaus between craters instead. But ‘as the crow flies’ had been her mission mantra. She was maxing the speed at a whopping eight miles per hour, because she’d run out of air before reaching anything interesting at half that speed.

An icon of a water glass popped up on Serena’s visor. Somehow it had already been two hours since she’d left the Hab. She dismissed the notification. She’d have to take a sip every other notification to make her water supply last.

Another hour went by before Serena scaled the the rover up a crater wall and reached a long plateau. The way was flat without rocks for the next kilometer. Serena forced herself to enjoy the scenery. Twenty minutes ago, she’d passed the point where she’d become the first human to go this deep into the dark side of the moon. But she’d barely seen anything except what was right in front of her.

Something was glowing out there.

Serena stopped the rover.

Across the adjacent crater to her right along its rim, there was a ring of rocks. In the center of the ring,  there was tall, slim boulder. Atop the boulder like a lavender lighthouse, a purple light pulsed and strobed.

“Serena, please cease high—“

Serena silenced Watchdog and cued her suit’s camera to zoom in.

Upon somewhat closer inspection, the thing atop the boulder was roughly the size and shape of an ostrich egg. Serena snapped a photo and called it up in her visor screen.

A glowing purple rock.

On top of a boulder in the center of a ring of rocks.

No footprints or signs of rover tire tracks leading to or away. Just a perfectly impossible, inorganic formation here on the dark side of the moon, glowing like something out of a fairy tale.

The Russian and Chinese outposts were miles in the opposite direction from the US Base.

None of the outposts were older than ten years.

The US had just gotten this crew rover capable of this distance, and even so, it was only possible with all the safeties turned off.

And yet, someone had taken a lot of trouble to build a monument?

Serena belatedly looked around in all directions, critically scanning the terrain for tread marks or footprints or—what?

There was nothing.

She looked behind her. The twin lines her rover’s tire tracks had drawn would be there forever, only disturbed if other missions rolled over them. The moon, unlike the Earth, cherished every footprint, every mark on its surface undisturbed. A world without atmosphere was a time capsule canvas.

Serena turned back, half expecting the weird glowing rock to have disappeared.

It had not. She ran some quick calculations on what it would take to get closer.

The diameter and apparent angle of descent and assent out of the crater between her and the monument would add an equivalent flat distance of about 300 feet.

A small expense.

Serena paid it, unbuckled, and stepped out of the rover.

Up close, the monument was so perfect, it stopped her in her tracks. Each of the rocks in the circle was the same size and shape. The circle they formed was perfect. A swirling pattern crawled up the boulder toward the glowing egg-shaped rock atop it.

Serena hesitated.

Snapped another photo.

Hesitated.

Stared at the perfectly pristine monument and the perfectly pristine regolith as far as the eye could see, except her and the rover’s tracks leading here.

If no other humans had been here…

Serena occasionally read a paperback sci-fi. She enjoyed debating over beers with her geologist friends, and she came down hard on the side of extraterrestrial life being a statistic inevitability.

But she couldn’t allow herself to think about aliens. Not here.

Not here 1) because why would intelligent life come so close to Earth, note it indeed must also be populated by sentients, and not make contact?

Not here 2) because she was exposed and alone on what was meant to be a barren planet that she was potentially sacrificing her life to explore.

Monument, statue, art, grave—whatever this was—made a comedy of her mission.

Serena’s mind tunneled down to two options. She could leave it. Or she could get better photos of what made that thing glow such a soporific and soft shade of purple. That option risked mucking up the monument with her footprints for future forensic investigation.

Her Little Mermaid night light had been that shade of purple.

Her feet were moving like something had hooked her like a fish, reeling her forcefully into the center of the monument.

Her gloves wrapped around the glowing rock. Up close, the rock was smooth on the outside, glassy and clear, with a thorny bud of purple crystals in the center. Each point of the purple crystal flower trailed an undulating string of purple light, as if the fine line of a lasers were caught in the rhythm of the tides. The strings of light straightened and reached for Serena’s gloves like Tesla’s lamp.

Serena’s hindbrain told her to flinch, to step away, to clench her hands behind her back, to stay safe.

But Serena’s forebrain was an explorer. Serena’s forebrain had been ready to die for a long time.

The dancing coils of light reached the clear stone beneath Serena’s gloves. Vapor hissed into the air, curling around Serena’s wrists.

Joy flooded in as if the suit was filling with that pure warm light of loving kindness that Serena only felt when meditating.

Her mind settled back, bright and calm.

The landscape—bright white, greyscale and black— blushed into warm colors, until everything was lilac and lavender, amber and honey. Then the landscape of the moon seemed to dissolve, overwritten by the vista of another world.

Purple flowers she couldn’t name waved gently in a breeze around the monument. An unfamiliar sun was setting over a latticework of rocky arches of some unfamiliar landscape as far as the eye could see.

Soft giddy pressure was on her cheek, for a moment and then gone, a smile marking the spot where love had just visited.

Serena’s face flushed in someone else’s memory. The horizon of that someone’s heart was studded with fireworks and fanfare, celebrating the serenity her body savored like a poem.

Lilting low tones sounded close, like a lover whispering in her ear. Serena turned from the landscape toward the voice.

A constellation of eyes on a broad, flat face gazed down at her.

Four ice-blue eyes formed the points of a diamond in soft lilac flesh.

Four brown eyes formed the points of a square encapsulating the diamond constellation of blue.

Four golden eyes formed a twin lines on each side of the face, framing full lips.

The creature—the alien—the someone deeply in love spoke again—

Serena stumbled back.

Dropped the stone.

Fell to her knees in a wave of white dust.

“Suit breach, Serena, suit breach! Predicting location…” Watchdog said. “Glove palms. Cover and wrap immediately.”

Serena looked at her palms.

Constellations of melted holes hissed air, pummeling through the dust like sunlight through clouds.

To be continued…

Author’s Note

On Emotional Translation

The moon as a time capsule isn’t a novel concept, but I like to think I’ve done something new here.

Currently, there are companies investigating whether there’s a market for using the moon as a final resting place for their loved-one’s ashes. Also, the first human footprint on the moon is still there, and thanks to the lack of atmosphere—it’ll be there for longer than bears thinking about. That is, unless we return to those Apollo landing sites in future for anything other than making a museum of all the flotsam and jetsam left behind (including 3 rovers!)

When I plotted this story out, I decided that this time capsule Serena stumbles upon was planted there by a couple commemorating a romantic anniversary of some sort, before Earth had hatched her Earthlings. I’ve since been thinking about how hard it is to communicate complex emotions even with our loved ones, which called to mind the telepathic tail greeting from the Avatar movie.

I find myself hoping for some sort of wearable augmentation that you can connect to others to help boost their mirror neurons to interpret how the other is feeling more accurately.

BRB, have to drop a note in Apple’s idea box… (jk, mostly…)

Science In Real Life

The OG Lunar Rover and the Artemis Remix

Right now, NASA is in the early stages of information gathering from companies to define the next generation of lunar rovers. There have been a few revisions to their request for information, and the specifications are still pretty broad. Want to see the casting call—here’s NASA’s RFI.

The first moon buggy, the Lunar Rover Vehicle (LRV), and the future Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) for Artemis have quite a few similarities.

Things they have in Common

• Neither are pressurized vehicles, so you need to be in a suit to use them*

• Both are electric vehicles

• Neither are built for speed, ranging from 8-11mph

• Both able to climb in and out of craters with slopes +/- 20 degrees

So, what’s new for Artemis?

• The LTV will be rechargeable

• It will have to survive the lunar night with temperatures at -208F/-130C

• It’s navigation system will be quite a bit more modern!

◦ The ‘OG’ LRV had sensors in the wheels to translate the number of times the wheels turned into distance so you knew how far you’d gone. In order to figure out which direction you needed to go, you had a compass pointing to lunar north, and a paper map (see it strung to the front there!!) and every so often you’d reference the sun shadow device which amounts to a sun dial to measure the angle of the sun dial’s shadow.

So basically, besides the sun shadow device, lunar drivers had the same instruments as everyone on Earth before the 2000’s.

◦ The ‘Remix’ LTV’s navigation system is currently in a big open sandbox of a development referred to as LunaNet, but NASA has been qualitatively describing what they’re after as the “mobile smartphone experience”

So basically future lunar drivers will have the same instrument interface and user experience as we do now.

*Note: there is a Mobile Habitat in the works from the Japanese Space Agency—it’s a key part of the whole mission which I lovingly dubbed “Brick House” back in Chapter 3.

Check out the Mobile Hab’s test drive!

Disclaimer

Though I am aiming to write near-future, mission-plausible sci-fi with the boost of accuracy granted me as a space industry professional, there are many ways I take artistic license. Any resemblance to my employer’s or customers’ technology or their private technical development strategies are purely coincidental. I will not write about topics that are too conflicted to avoid the appearance of impropriety. The sci-fi section of my newsletter is fiction inspired by scientific advances that are described in the public domain, or already published at trade shows or other vectors. Primarily, I lean on what NASA and space companies advertise, but quoting and annotating everything as fact or fiction would infringe on the enjoyment of the story. If you have questions or concerns about something I’ve written, please don’t hesitate to reach out!