The Helium-3 Conspiracy by Colin Setterfield

Author:Colin Setterfield [Setterfield, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Colin Setterfield
Published: 2014-08-16T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

The Lunar Platform

Tuesday, July 14, 2026

2320 hours

Ian Masters and Darryl Thompson were dozing when the alarm went off. Both men were instantly awake and began checking the Super Shuttle's flight control instruments. There was nothing amiss and they quickly realized that the alarm was standard, indicating their close proximity to the mission's objective. The men looked through the front viewing port at the moon, which was growing in size every few seconds, signaling that it was time to call up Lunar Base Control.

Captain Thompson turned to the lunar frequency and called into his microphone, "Lunar Base Control...this is Captain Thompson, pilot of the Spirit of Victory, requesting permission to dock at the platform. According to our instruments we are approximately five thousand kilometers out from our entry to moon orbit and closing at a speed of four kilometers per second. We will be there in twenty-one minutes. Do you copy?"

After a silence of one full minute, Darryl repeated the request, but to no avail. He turned to Ian Masters and said, "No go, Colonel."

Ian Masters looked grimly out of the viewing port at the approaching moon.

"We'll have to initiate manual docking procedure. It appears that their auto-dock hasn't been turned on. They must have known we were coming so something is definitely wrong. Contact Earth Mission control and ask if they've heard anything."

Darryl called up Earth Mission Control and was told that there had been no contact from the Lunar Base. He called Ken Masters, Ian's brother, at the Bigalow International Space Station. When the BISS Commander came online, he sounded dejected. "Ian, Darryl...nothing from the moon so far. Proceed with caution. You will need to initiate manual docking if their auto-dock has not been turned on."

Ian answered his brother. "We have it all under control, Ken. I'll call you after docking has been completed."

The Super Shuttle, traveling at 15,000 kilometers per hour, had made the journey in twenty-six hours, shaving forty-five hours off the first moon mission flights of the previous century.

Under normal conditions the Lunar Base Control would turn on the auto-dock system that used the latest super computer to control the docking procedure. The space platform was a cylindrical structure comprised of a docking area for spacecraft, attached to a large anteroom with air-lock which allowed astronauts, exiting the elevator, to remove their spacesuits before boarding a docked shuttle. On the side of the structure was a space crane for handling various payloads which was operated from within the pressurized room.

The space crane removed payloads from the holding hooks on the sides of the elevator, redirecting them to an area on the platform for temporary storage. The Super Shuttle's on-board crane would then move the payloads from the platform's temporary storage area to shuttle storage.

The platform, with its own orbital maneuvering system, was tethered by a one-hundred-mile carbon, nanotube cable to its tethering base on the moon's surface, keeping it in a stable, geostationary orbit. The nanotube cable worked on the counterweight principal, the counterweight being

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