Red Hope by John Dreese

Author:John Dreese [Dreese, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Amazon: B00RA7QOHY
Publisher: JOHN DREESE
Published: 2014-12-20T08:00:00+00:00

Days passed and daily calls to home were helpful with the inevitable cabin fever. Adam especially cherished his family video calls.

“It’s like being in an elevator that is falling faster than it should,” he would tell them, “but not quite fast enough for me to start floating.”

Adam was talking directly to the iPad video conferencing software. On the other end of this video call was his family. They were very excited to get their daily 15 minute call to Dad on the Little Turtle. The astronauts were hurtling through space towards Mars. As of today, they were far enough out for there to be a twenty second delay between when Adam spoke and when he would hear a reply.

Adam’s daughter Catie laughed and asked, “But I thought you floated in spaceships?”

Adam grinned proudly. “Normally that’s true, but this spaceship is special. The motors never shut off. They just keep pushing, making us go faster every second. It’s just enough to keep us planted against the floor of the ship. It’s like walking on Earth if you barely weighed a few pounds. The launch from Earth to the International Space Station went great aside from me and Molly getting motion sickness. The launch from the Space Station toward Mars was a snap.”

Over the next twenty seconds, Adam’s message would travel from their long-range antenna through the inky blackness of space to the antenna on the Space Station. At that point it would be relayed to Mission Control in Houston.

A return message would take a similar length of time, but the time lag would get longer and longer as the mission continued. When Mars is closest to Earth, called perihelic opposition, the best-case round-trip communication time was only about seven minutes. Once they were on Mars, though, due to the planets having moved some distance apart, it would take a full ten minutes or more for the communications round trip (five-plus minutes each way). The longer they stayed, the longer that round trip took. When the two planets are farthest apart, that same round-trip communication can take almost 44 minutes. Radio waves move very fast, but Mars is very far away.

“Okay Dad, we’re going to the park after this call. We’ll talk with you tomorrow,” Cody announced.

Adam looked down briefly, then back at the screen.

“Okay guys. I’ll talk with you all tomorrow. Love you.”

The screen went blank.

Adam closed his eyes for a few seconds and thought of being home. Then he thought about the million dollar bonus and put on a fake smile. He put the iPad back in the cabinet.

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