The Chronicles of Monster Planet
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Having entered my compartment, I kicked off my shoes and dropped to the bed. I didn't feel well after the conservation. There was nothing special about the room: a bed, a table, two chairs, a shower and a toilet. According to my estimates, the room measured roughly ten square feet.
Well, it seems that our mission failed for some reason. Now we are probably at a military base. Though, it doesn’t really look like a boot camp. I wonder if the flight has been postponed or completely canceled. What happened? Julia will be happy, I thought, recalling my girlfriend's face. Although I made it clear to her that my goal was to fly.
On my last visit to Washington, we met at a cafe on Massachusetts Avenue. I had to get my paperwork done, and she already knew I was leaving. I couldn't even stay the night with her, as my orders required getting back to Houston in the evening. She shed some tears. It was our last date.
“Max, why won't you change your mind? My parents are willing to give us their second house. With your outstanding education, you can find a job anywhere. You know, you could work as my father's deputy.”
“Listen, we've been over this so many times already. I’ve spent years of my life and a ton of money to get on the crew. It was a sheer stroke of luck that the primary candidate broke his arm. Don’t you understand?! My whole life has been leading up to this flight. And when they told me I qualified only as a backup crew member… and then this chance…” I continued after a pause. “Do you really want me to throw it all away?”
“But you're not coming back, are you?” she asked, choking back tears.
“No. It's a one-way ticket. But I was honest about that when we first met, and I think it played an important role in what we had. You've always been flattered to be an astronaut's girlfriend, haven't you? Making your friends go green with envy.”
“I always thought you'd stay. I never thought it was serious. And, like you said, you… you were just a backup.”
She started crying again. But I wasn't thinking about her anymore. I was re-living that elation I felt when I found out that Alan broke his shoulder during hockey practice. There I was, standing still, gazing upon a monument to the first astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, but my thoughts were far away in the sky. I will fly, I will be there, I will become one of the first settlers on another planet. Out of billions of people, I was one of the lucky five.
But now… I shrugged away the memories, the picture changed. It’s over. Cancelled. What if we don't fly anywhere at all? So much time, money and hopes wasted. The Hope. That was the name of our ship. It was an allegory, the hope of humanity. Our planet was almost irreversibly destroyed, and we could not prevent its further deterioration. So-called presidents and prime ministers of developed countries paid lip service to environmental protection, participated in various congresses and public organizations, but all of them still remained miserable slaves of private capital, which was bleeding the planet dry. Oil, natural gas, shale gas, open-pit mining, deep-sea mining, carbon dioxide emissions, greenhouse effect, ozone holes, endless wars and much more. The planet was dying and there was a part of society that understood this very well. Among those were some very rich and influential people who managed to push the corruption-riddled United Nations into arranging an international space expedition.
Our expedition became possible only after the Pullman-Anderson drive was created. Based on the Pullman effect, the Anderson Design Bureau managed to develop a uniquely fast sub-light drive.
Our mission was to gather intelligence. To land on a designated Earth-type exoplanet, send the Hope back home and wait for the Ark, a new larger ship with settlers, which had just entered the design stage at the time of our launch. The Hope was essentially a large house that could be detached from the carrier and work autonomously on nuclear power for hundreds of years. We were to confirm that the planet was, in fact, habitable.
Our target planet was located more than a hundred light years from Earth, thus, induced suspended animation – deep conservation – was required. The DC machines developed at that time were tested on us. Time was precious.
Nearly two hundred years in a capsule with an artificially maintained microclimate, including pressure to simulate gravity. That's what we had to endure. Then it was either “new Earth” – or not. The latter option was not a pleasant one.
According to the scientists, it was highly likely that the planet would be similar to Earth. It was discovered a long time ago with the help of NASA's Kepler telescope. The telescope operated from 2009 to 2013 and made it possible to discover over three thousand exoplanets. Planets outside the Solar System. And the very first exoplanet was discovered at the end of the twentieth century, orbiting the orange subgiant Gamma Cephei A. Our destination star was also orange, although it was a dwarf. It was located in the Vela constellation, the largest star of which was nicknamed after astronaut Roger Chaffee.
Thus, our goal was a planet orbiting an orange dwarf. To be clear, an orange dwarf is a cross between a red dwarf and a yellow dwarf like the Sun. Something in between in terms of luminosity and size. That orange dwarf was seven tenths the size of the Sun, yet had the same luminosity. Possibly, there were other bodies in orbit around it, but only one was confirmed by the Kepler telescope. The planet was solid – in contrast to gaseous ones; there are four such planets in the Solar System. The planet was about one and a half times the size of Earth, and it was closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun, but within the habitable zone. The planet had an atmosphere and presumably water on its surface.
After several years of heated debate, the scientists selected it from a rather long list of candidates. The list included about three hundred planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Some of them were rejected due to qualitative characteristics, others – due to their remoteness. Our spiral galaxy is about one hundred thousand light years or zero point six quintillion miles in diameter. Can you imagine that? I can't. The Solar System is closer to the edge of the galaxy, at a distance of two-thirds of its radius from the center. That being said, the closest star is four light years from the Sun, while the farthest systems are about eighty or ninety thousand light years away.
The concentration of stars, and likewise, of planets, is higher in the center of the galaxy – for instance, in the Sagittarius constellation. If we could explore planet after planet, like in science fiction novels, we would fly there. But in reality, we could only fly along the route from point A to point B. Moreover, the crew was in a suspended animation state during the flight, so it was the automatic systems of the ship that controlled everything. The flight plan was as follows: the ship takes off from Earth via a launch vehicle. The Pullman-Anderson drive is activated in orbit, sending the ship along its course toward the stars. The ship then enters the orbit of the orange dwarf planet and detaches the housing and research modules. These modules descend to the surface with astronauts on board. In a month or less, at our command, the Hope was supposed to take a reverse course and bring the research data and information we had transmitted from the surface back to Earth. In any case, we, the Hope crew, would not live long enough to see the second ship. In addition, the chance that the ship would safely reach the planet and return back was significantly lower than the chance of the planet being similar to Earth.