A Funny Thing Happened on the Moon by Joey Rogers

Author:Joey Rogers [Rogers, Joey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781945638039
Publisher: GegoDyne, LLC
Published: 2018-06-14T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

The Final Assembly

Jeremy had to get another project team in the staging area to help him lift the pair of engine rings onto a set of blocks so four landing struts could be attached. They then lifted the capsule into place on top of the rings. These final steps were the most difficult for Jeremy. It wasn’t the manual labor—it was having to ask someone else to help him—but he didn’t have a choice. If he damaged the mounts at this point in the project, there would be no launch.

Jeremy ran a battery of tests on the freshly integrated components. There were a few glitches in the interfaces between the power packs and the engine rings, but he coded some shim routines to workaround the problems. The power packs were only showing 80 percent efficiency. He was sure they would provide enough power to reach the Moon, and there was a 10 percent reserve built into his specs just in case. Once on the Moon, the solar tiles would recharge the power packs for the return flight.

There were two communication modules installed on the spacecraft. One was inside the capsule and handled all communications with Earth. It was used by the telemetry unit and the control system interface. The comm-unit was a stock component used by almost every spacecraft the corporation manufactured. Economy of scale had taken this once expensive item and transformed it into an almost disposable widget. It also took advantage of the communications network set up by the corporation to give an uninterrupted connection to Mars at any time and from any location on Earth. It was so pervasive that reliable communication to and from the Moon was a side effect, and Jeremy planned to leverage that.

The second comm-unit was mounted on the bottom of the capsule. It was self-contained and had several solar tiles that would power it for years. It also had a high-res, omnidirectional camera and utilized the same satellite network as the capsule’s main comm-unit once it was deployed.

In the project salvage area, Jeremy found a specialized device that was normally mounted on a space probe to take samples from whatever asteroid it landed on. It could use either a scoop for soil samples or an annular coring tool for harder materials. The scavenged sample collector, however, was not complete. Its graphene cutting bit used to take the core samples was missing as well as some of its collection bins, but the Moon was covered with regolith and the scoops were sufficient.

Jeremy installed the sample collector on the bottom of the spacecraft next to the deployable communications module. He reconfigured the weight distribution of the spacecraft to account for the additional component and added enough weights to reach the fifty-kilogram cargo weight he had specified for Alice.

The spacecraft was finished, but Jeremy needed one more item. Completing the flight to the Moon and back was one thing but proving he had done it was a different matter. There was no corporate presence on the Moon, or any presence as far as that went.

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