Dead on Mars

“What idea?” Tang Yue leaned over.

“Get lost. Stop disturbing my work. Go write your story about Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of an egg.” Tomcat chased Tang Yue away. “I’m doing the flow computations.”

“The story about Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of an egg has been written.”

“Then draw a duck’s egg. If it’s done, draw a swan’s egg. If that’s done, draw your balls.”

“Can you just divulge something? Stop leaving me hanging at such a critical moment!” Tang Yue held Tomcat. “Mai Dong is also concerned about this problem… Right? Mai Dong?”

“Huh? Can? What canned food?”

The girl appeared in the video comms.

Mai Dong and Tang Yue had discussed the problem before. Even if Orion could safely decelerate, there wasn’t a landing pad on Mars. Orion II didn’t have any landing gear, so if the eighty-meter-tall skewer were to hit the ground, it would likely shatter.

It was too dangerous if Mai Dong were to crash down with it.

It was a height of thirty stories.

There wasn’t a parachute available on the United Space Station, so the option to eject from the spacecraft with a parachute was unavailable. And to jump off a spacecraft that was plummeting at high speeds was an action movie stunt that only James Bond would do. For a lady like Mai Dong to do the same was suicidal.

To most people, parachuting was a very risky matter. In the earliest days, the Soviets had once attempted to eject the astronauts from the spacecraft during the descent and land via parachute, but Yuri Gagarin almost had an accident when the parachutes failed to open. The facts proved that using one’s physical body to resist the harsh environments at high altitudes wasn’t a wise choice. The safest place was forever the command module. Enclosing the astronauts inside a thick metal case sheltered them from the airflow and low temperatures outside.

“Mr. Cat, what solution do you have?”

Mai Dong was also curious as to how Tomcat could resolve the problem. After all, this directly concerned her survival.

Tomcat stared at the colorful figures on the monitor while the workstation beneath the desk was humming. The heat-dissipation fans were at full blast since a fluid dynamics computation was intensive work.

It curled its lips.

“Who told you that it’s a height of over eighty meters?”

Tang Yue and Mai Dong were taken aback.

“Isn’t Orion more than eighty meters long? By descending vertically, wouldn’t that make it over eighty meters?”

“Are you dumb?” Tomcat turned around and leaned back, crossing its hind legs. “Who said that we’ll be sending the entire Orion into the atmosphere?”

“You… You mean…” Tang Yue frowned. He had apparently grasped something and had an inkling.

“Do you know why Orion’s truss has three modules? It’s because it’s modular by design. The entire spacecraft is built from a power module, central module, and dynamic module. Every module is interchangeable. This was considered during the initial design of the Orion spacecraft.” Tomcat raised a claw.

“What does this mean? It means that it can be dismantled. The engineers had long left behind detachable interfaces… We have no way of dismantling the engines, but we can shorten the entire spacecraft.

“The Orion spacecraft is eighty-eight meters in total. At the top is the power module spanning twenty-five meters. There’s no need for us to bring it down at all. Therefore, we can cut it.” Tomcat sliced its claw horizontally, a ferocious glint in its eyes. “Therefore, I won’t be stupid enough to hold an eighty-meter-long pole, vertically, at an altitude of tens of thousands of meters. That would be too risky.”

“Sixty-three meters.” Mai Dong did the math. “So the spacecraft during the atmospheric entry will be sixty-three meters?”

“Yes.” Tomcat nodded. “The power module’s truss can be abandoned. That will shorten it by about a third, making it easier to maintain its balance.”

“How difficult is it? Will it be difficult to carry it out?”

Tang Yue recalled Orion’s truss. It was made out of welded reinforced steel. It resembled a tower when raised. Tang Yue’s first thought, when he heard the about dismantling of the truss, was that of a bunch of workers holding cutting torches while scrambling all over it.

It sounded like a massive amount of work, and the plans they came up with had to be completed by Mai Dong alone. For example, dismantling the rocket engines sounded possible in theory, but if completely impossible in practice it was of zero worth.

“The interface that was left behind are like those that couple trains,” Tomcat answered. “All you need is a wrench to dismantle them. It’s a lot easier than dismantling an engine.

“The second sentence you said is completely unnecessary.

“Of course, dismantling the truss alone isn’t sufficient,” Tomcat said. “We need to completely dismantle the Orion and Eagle lander. We need to empty them out, leaving only an empty shell. We will dispose of all the mass we can! Solar panels, accommodation module, service module, stores module will all be abandoned! We only want the nine engines, giving us the greatest thrust-to-weight ratio.

“By attaching the lander to the Orion, Orion will be the ferry. It will take a trip with the lander on a journey spanning more than a hundred kilometers,” Tomcat described the landing process. “Towards the end of the descent, the lander will disconnect from Orion. Orion will crash and the lander will land.

“And the lander won’t be placed at a high height. It won’t be held at the top of the truss. The Eagle will be connected at the central module, making it a height of thirty-five meters from the engine.”

“Thirty-five meters…” Tang Yue did the math silently. “But thirty-five meters is still quite a distance. That’s still more than ten stories tall.”

Clearly, by removing a portion of the truss and reducing Orion’s total length by twenty-five meters, it helped in reducing the center of mass and ensure its attitude. The Eagle would be interfaced at a height that wasn’t as high as Tang Yue had imagined, but the final obstacle remained. Even with the height of eighty-eight meters reduced to thirty-five meters, wouldn’t jumping from that height still be fatal?

What was the difference between jumping from thirty stories and ten stories?

Perhaps the former needed a shovel.

“The space station doesn’t have a parachute. How are we to withstand the impact of the landing?” Tang Yue asked. “Falling from a height of thirty-five meters would definitely be a problem. The Eagle lander won’t be able to survive the fall either.”

Mai Dong nodded as well.

“Back in college, I had a senior in a PhD program jump from the tenth floor. He died on the spot.”

Tomcat silently held its forehead.

“People of your generation might not be aware. After all, you were born only in this century. Situations that require the use of this method is unheard of… However, it being unknown doesn’t mean it’s unreliable. Certain methods are eliminated from history because of the appearance of better solutions, but they were born from the wisdom of the ancients.

“When we can’t find an answer, we can refer back to history. Often, the ancients have given the best solution.”

Tang Yue and Mai Dong exchanged looks, finding Tomcat’s words incomprehensible.

Tomcat sighed gently and leaned back. “Do you know how the first batch of probes came to Mars in the last century and at the beginning of this century, more than fifty years ago? What did these great pioneers rely on to overcome that final obstacle?”