When the Moon Hits Your Eye by Scalzi John

Author:Scalzi,John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Books

Day Fourteen

The Moon | Above the Lunar Surface

Jody Bannon discovered something important about space travel: It’s fucking boring.

In a very real and significant way, this fact was entirely Jody Bannon’s fault. Follow: Jody Bannon wanted to go to the moon. Jody Bannon knew he had neither the time nor patience to go through real astronaut training. So if he was going to go to the moon, he was going to have to buy an aerospace company (which he did), make a credible bid to build a next-generation lunar lander (which he did), and then have it built with so many automated and redundant systems that even an untrained dipshit (which he was) could make it to the moon and back, just by pressing the occasional button.

It wasn’t sold to NASA like this, obviously. From NASA’s point of view, the automated systems with their deep learning and autonomous control and ability to be flown with minimal staffing were just redundancies and emergency backups for highly trained and competent crews. And indeed, if the Major Tom was staffed with a trained and competent crew, that’s all they would be. NASA did like its highly trained astronauts. They really did their best when they were under the illusion that space travel needed people who knew what they were doing.

Jody Bannon, on the other hand, kinda felt that was a bunch of smug mechanistic bullshit. Especially these days, when a computer could simulate landing on the moon millions of times a day, learning from each experience. Landing on the moon wasn’t actually a challenge for any computer more advanced than a Raspberry Pi; it was just physics applied to gravity, with a basic optical recognition program that would keep a lander from trying to perch partway on a boulder, or on the side of a crater.

Likewise going to the moon and back; that was even less physics. The Major Tom could have been powered by an iPhone and still have handled the whole trip, with enough computational headroom left over to play video games and take selfies.

The Major Tom was not powered by an iPhone or a Raspberry Pi, of course. It was powered by several computers, all multiply redundant and running in parallel, which had been shielded against errant cosmic radiation and hardened for the rigors of space. They could run even if the interior of the Major Tom opened up to the black, blasting its occupants into the void, the near vacuum of space both dropping the ambient temperature to a few degrees above absolute zero and making it difficult for the heat generated by the computer to dissipate.

It was, in point of fact, the most advanced, most protected, and safest automated system humans had ever put into space. It had to be—not because Jody Bannon wanted the best for the NASA astronauts, who he actually mostly wanted the bare minimum of everything given the cost constraints the lander construction was under, but because he wanted the best for himself. Jody Bannon

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