10
Washington, DC
The space agency’s headquarters occupied an uninspiring structure of concrete and glass that could have easily been mistaken for one of the surrounding hotels or office buildings that littered the nation’s capital.
Traci and Roy were greeted by an aide in a garish tie and curly hair worn a bit too long, suggestive of someone vainly striving to hold onto his fading youth. “Blaine Winston,” he said. “Administrator Cheever’s executive assistant. After me, please.”
Ah, she realized. The power behind the throne. She exchanged a quick glance with Roy, who nodded and gestured her on ahead of him. Winston led them down a long hallway adorned with familiar images of NASA spacecraft and the worlds they’d visited. Being open to the public, the first floor was bursting with reminders of the agency’s glory days.
After a quick elevator ride to the top floor, they were ushered into an anteroom adjacent to the administrator’s office. There, they found a quartet of wingback chairs arranged around a mahogany conference table inlaid with the iconic blue “meatball” logo. Following Winston’s lead, they remained standing until the administrator arrived.
They didn’t have to wait long. Almost on cue, Jacqueline Cheever emerged from her office. Her pantsuit and bun hairdo reminded Traci of a perpetually annoyed schoolmarm, like a secondary character out of the frontier romance novels which she still occasionally indulged. Wisely keeping any amusement to herself, it at least provided enough reason to display a sincere smile as she greeted the NASA boss.
It soon became clear that she would need to keep her humor at arm’s length.
“Colonel Hoover, Major Keene,” Cheever began curtly, “thank you for coming.”
“Our pleasure, ma’am,” Roy said on their behalf, with a graciousness Traci wasn’t used to seeing. She eyed him warily; they’d been warned the administrator didn’t care for such outdated gender-centric norms, and the chief astronaut had just signaled that he really didn’t give a damn.
Cheever ignored his subtle slight for the moment and took her seat, a signal for the others to do so as well. “I’m not much for pleasantries and my schedule is quite full, so let’s get to it.” She studied each of them. “I know you’ve become aware that your ship has been found and that Jack Templeton is apparently alive. We will discuss how you came upon that information later.”
Roy, for his part, wasn’t intimidated. “May I ask why you say he’s ‘apparently’ alive?”
“The HOPE team has received text messages via the Deep Space Network which appear to be from him, but his biomonitors are offline.”
“So he’s talking to you,” Traci said hopefully. And who else would it be?
“Texting,” Winston interjected. “We haven’t ruled out the possibility that it’s the onboard AI communicating with us.”
“Daisy wouldn’t do that,” she objected. “There’d be no point to it. Deceit is not in her nature.”
Cheever was unmoved. “We can’t know that for certain.”
“You’d know if it was Daisy,” Roy said, leaning forward and pointing to himself and Traci. “Or rather, we’d know. That is, if all the information had been shared with us in the first place.”
Cheever was unmoved. “As I said, we’ll get to that. Today we are going to discuss the ‘freelance’ work you’ve undertaken since learning of Templeton’s situation.” She wrinkled her nose to signal her disapproval.
Roy swept a hand toward Traci. “Keene’s the expert on this,” he said. “Best to let her explain.”
She hadn’t needed much encouragement, and eagerly took his cue. “I work in Future Applications, Dr. Cheever,” she said, consciously avoiding offending her with a gendered address, though ma’am would’ve been so much easier. “My job is to investigate potential mission architectures using existing capabilities.”
“I’m aware that’s your official role,” Cheever said. “So tell me what you’ve actually been doing.”
No sense taking the long road, she decided. “Developing plans for a recovery expedition using Columbus.”
“I see.” Cheever and Winston exchanged knowing looks.
She couldn’t see what they’d found to be so amusing. Probably they were just trying to throw her off. She swiped at her tablet and projected a spacecraft diagram onto a nearby monitor embedded in a wall. “The vehicle is in a minimum payload configuration: one hab module and the control cabin.” She zoomed in on the forward structure. “The four-point docking node aft of the hab can be loaded up with prepackaged supply modules. Cradles and ports along the main truss can be outfitted with cryo tanks for hydrogen and oxygen. The upgraded chiller tanks will mitigate the boiloff issues that required Magellan to be refueled on our previous mission. Most of the hydrogen is reaction mass, with some kept in reserve with O2 to run the backup fuel cells, which will also supply drinking water. In this configuration the vehicle can support three crew members, the third being Jack on the return leg. Estimate three months of acceleration and deceleration on each leg at one-tenth g, with a gravity-assist flyby of Neptune. It’s ambitious, but we can outfit Columbus in time if we get started right away. The mission itself would take thirty-eight months total, including rendezvous time at the destination.”
“With only two people?” Cheever challenged her. “That is rather ambitious, considering your last expedition had a crew of four.”
“We also had a more complex mission profile with multiple probe launches and two different excursion craft to tend to. After our experience on Magellan, we’re confident the onboard AI can handle the workload on a stripped-down vehicle.”
“We’d be there for oversight and any necessary intervention,” Roy explained. “The service bots can do a lot, but activities like external maintenance need a human touch.”
“You say ‘we,’” Cheever noted drily. “You speak as if you’re intending to do this yourselves.”
“We’re the most qualified out of who’s left in the astronaut office,” Roy said. “There’s no time to train up a fresh crew for an extended-duration mission.”
She eyed Traci. “Keene hasn’t been medically released for flight duty.”
“Excuse me, I have a First Class FAA medical with zero-g endorsement. I could get a job flying civilian spaceliners today if I wanted to. But here I am, still waiting on our docs to clear me. This mission is too important for us to be bogged down in minutia.”
“Nor do we have time to be tilting at windmills,” Cheever said tartly. She folded her hands in her lap. “I’ll remind you that there is no mission yet.” She turned to her assistant.
“We are developing other, less challenging options,” Winston said. He tapped at a keyboard and another diagram of Columbus appeared on the wall monitor, this one with noticeably fewer logistics modules attached. “This configuration assumes a fully automated vehicle, guided by the onboard AI. It can be outfitted in less time and would carry enough life support to sustain Templeton in hibernation throughout the return.”
“We considered that as well,” Roy said. “It’s not as straightforward as you think. You’re talking about doubling the time Jack would spend in hibernation, with no humans to manage his care. I’m comfortable doing a minimally crewed expedition with AI support, but I don’t believe artificial intelligence is ready to run this type of mission unsupervised. You’ve got rendezvous and docking, crew transfer—”
Winston smiled thinly in a display of practiced tolerance. “On the contrary, I think you may be overcomplicating the issue. We’ve been sending unmanned probes into deep space for decades, all of them controlled from Earth. How is this any different?”
“Because it’ll be under near-constant acceleration, for starters,” Roy reminded him. “It’s not some dumb probe passively coasting to its destination. It’s under power and gaining velocity with every passing second, and that requires constant trajectory management. The light delays get longer by the day, way too long for anyone on the ground to intervene. AI was installed to back up the crew when mission control is out of reach, not to take over. Daisy still had to wake Jack up when it was time to enter orbit.”
Cheever stepped in. “The bottom line is we don’t have the budget to finish equipping the vehicle for a crewed expedition. AI technology has advanced considerably since your mission, and we have high confidence in its readiness.”
“It’s a fine alternative to ground support,” Roy said, reiterating his argument. “But speaking as chief astronaut, I’m not ready to put one in the pilot’s seat yet.”
“Jack Templeton did.”
Traci had stayed silent about this until now. “He didn’t have a choice,” she reminded the group. “One of us had to draw the short straw. He put his life on the line, betting that he was right.”
Cheever remained solicitous, but her tone held an implicit threat. “We all understand you have strong feelings about this. Be mindful that they don’t cloud your judgment,” she said, reminiscent of the vexatious social-credit algorithms. Her implied message was Stick with the program, Keene.
“My point is he wasn’t just flipping a coin and hoping it came up heads. We spent years working with Daisy before leaving Earth. We helped her grow from just being good at filtering through accumulated knowledge to being able to help us solve problems. To think creatively. In the end, she even had Roy’s confidence.”
“You just made our point,” Winston said triumphantly. “We can safely use AI as a substitute for humans.”
“No, you’re missing my point,” she said, leaning in toward him. “We helped her—and I still can’t believe I’m gendering a computer—to evolve. Daisy didn’t become sentient through clever programming; it required years of personal interaction. Think about it—if it takes a human mind a couple of decades to fully develop, why wouldn’t an artificial mind need time?”
Roy folded his arms. “Exactly. These artificial brains aren’t mature enough yet to fly solo. They’re no substitute for a trained crew.”
“This one will have to be,” Cheever said. “Our allocation is what it is. This is the best use of NASA’s limited budget.”
Roy decided it was time to play their hand. “HOPE can do it for less money. According to their contract, they still have the legal authority to do so.”
“Not if the mission isn’t sanctioned,” Cheever reminded him.
“You’re telling me it isn’t? Are you telling me NASA is changing the public position it’s held for decades? That we’re not going to go after a stranded astronaut?”
“Ultimately it’s not up to us,” Cheever said, so apologetic as to be almost believable. “Congress will be considering this in a special budget resolution, which is the purpose of tomorrow’s hearing. I don’t expect them to fund a risky, expensive expedition when it can be automated for far less.”
Traci’s heart sank. So that was that—the agency wouldn’t be advocating for a crewed expedition. As Cheever studied her from across the table, it became obvious she was being brought along as a prop to lend credibility. To put a human face on Jack’s plight. She was not expected to actually participate.
Cheever maintained her poker face, confident in her ultimate victory. “There is a budget reconciliation bill going to committee this week,” she explained patiently. “Among other things, I can tell you that it will be considering substantive changes to allocations for the vehicle and our agreement with the HOPE consortium.”
Traci frowned. The one thing politicians could do quickly was pull funding if something threatened to make them look bad.
As Winston began briefing them on what to expect and which senators to be especially cautious with, she decided it might actually be in their interests to find a way to make NASA look really bad. If they weren’t going to allow the astronauts who’d actually been out there to do something, then maybe someone else could.