Destiny: January to August, 2082
The Interstellar Age, S02E02
When it was completed in 2081, the Destiny spacecraft was the crowning achievement of human engineering.
150 meters long, and with a dry mass of over 1200 tons, it was by far the largest spacecraft ever built. Four 25 meter wide, ringed crew compartments were arrayed along the central spine, each one covered with water tanks for consumption, recycling, and additional radiation shielding. Heat radiators and auxiliary solar panels extended the craft’s width to over 100 meters.
Destiny was designed to carry a crew of fifteen men and women on the three month journey to Mars, then provide them with all they needed to set up a semi-permanent base on the surface, which would have to survive for one year until resupply. Then, Destiny’s drive section would turn around and head back to Earth for repair and refit, and subsequently to pick up the automated cargo section for the resupply mission.
To achieve this incredible, 110 million kilometer feat of late-21st century space travel, Destiny was powered by a next-generation Inertial Confinement Fusion reactor. The design built off of advancements in laser technology made during the war, using laser beams to compress a deuterium-tritium fuel pellet and induce the self-sustaining fusion reaction that would then power the ship, with solar panels and batteries providing auxiliary power.
But only the fusion reaction could power the ship’s massive and revolutionary engines. Even through the end of the Third World War, most spacecraft were powered by chemical rockets, fundamentally the same engines that had powered the first rudimentary space vehicles more than a century earlier. Destiny’s Fūjin Drive provided something entirely new: an innovative hybrid of Nuclear Thermal and Nuclear Electric Propulsion.
In the Japanese-designed engine’s initial NTP phase, the ship’s fusion reactor directly ignited hydrogen fuel to provide extremely high specific impulse thrust—a relatively short, intensive burst of power to escape the Earth-Moon system’s gravity and then rapidly accelerate. Once the desired initial velocity was reached, the engine would switch over to the NEP phase, in which the nuclear electrical system would power ion engines, providing constant, low specific impulse acceleration for the remainder of the journey. As it approached its destination, the ship would reverse, pointing its engines toward Mars, and burn the NTP again for a more rapid deceleration. All these factors substantially shortened the travel time from original estimates of 6 to 9 months using traditional chemical rockets, to between 2 and 3 months.
By August of 2081, after three years of construction and testing in Lunar orbit, Destiny was finally ready to make history. All it needed was a crew.
It would soon have them. After a grueling process, thirty astronauts had been selected from fifteen countries around the world by the time Destiny was completed: fifteen primary and fifteen backup crewmembers. The international crew represented the best humanity had to offer in the fields of science and space exploration—and in the tense, post-war world, where they were from mattered just as much as who they were. Astronauts had been selected from among the Allied nations, of course, specifically the United States, Great Britain, Canada, India, Japan, Taiwan, South Africa, Nigeria, Mexico, Israel, and Brazil. But, in a gesture of reconciliation, the former Axis was also strongly represented, with astronauts from Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and, most controversially, China also joining the crew.
The primary and backup crews trained for the mission together for two years by January, 2082, working together as a highly efficient team. But over the last few months before the mission was to launch, that team would undergo some tragic shakeups. In February, both the Russian primary and backup astronauts were assassinated in a Moscow mass shooting by nationalist terrorists opposed to both the mission and the GDA. The previously eliminated Russian candidates had to be recalled and put through a final, intensive selection process; in May, 2082, that resulted in the selection of Lyudmila Novikova as the primary, a 32 year old biologist and agricultural geneticist from Chelyabinsk.
Later in May, just two months before the scheduled launch, the British primary broke both of her legs in a training accident, meaning she would not be able to participate in the final run-up to the launch. As a result, her backup took her place: Miles Galloway, a 36 year old computer engineer from Dundee.
The mission’s other astronauts were:
Ethan Bishop, United States, Mission Commander
Rachel Cohen, Israel, Pilot / Navigator
Aditi Rao, India, Medical Officer
Kenji Takahashi, Japan, Flight Systems Engineer
Emeka Okoro, Nigeria, Geologist / Planetary Scientist
Sofia Aguilar, Mexico, Robotics & Maintenance Specialist
León Castillo, Venezuela, Security Officer / EVA Safety Lead
David Chan, Taiwan, Power & Life Support Systems Engineer
Fatemeh Shadmani, Iran, Structural Engineer / Habitat Construction Lead
Thando Mbatha, South Africa, Communications Officer
Jingyi Zhang, China, Ecological Systems Lead
Gabriel Ferreira, Brazil, Geotechnical & Drilling Specialist
Chloe Tremblay, Canada, Medical Technician / Health & Wellness Officer
With the recent changes to the crew, some called for the mission to be delayed, so the new team could train together longer. However, it was decided to keep the mission on schedule in order to coincide with Mars’ closest orbit to Earth between August and September 2082, when it would be just over 55 million km away. Making the initial journey as short as possible was considered vital, and the next such close perihelic opposition would not occur until 2084.
But… why not wait until 2084? For such a revolutionary spacecraft, Destiny had been constructed on a remarkably short timeline. There had been prototype versions of each of the modules constructed and tested, but no prototype of the entire spacecraft had been built. In effect, Destiny was the prototype. In light of that fact, some felt that sending it on a months-long mission to carry 15 human beings to another planet for the first time seemed incredibly risky.
But while engineers, mission commanders, and politicians assured the public that the ship was ready to fly, documents revealed years later showed that the mission had been rushed to launch. Senior officials in the program were concerned about the readiness of Destiny and its crew as late as spring, 2082. But at the highest levels—going all the way up to President Ramirez and Prime Minister Samra—they were more worried about what would happen if the mission did not go ahead.
While the global public largely supported, or else were indifferent to, the mission, resistance to it only seemed to calcify with each passing month. Hard-liners like the assassins in Moscow were growing bolder, and classified intelligence showed that multiple groups were planning, or had already attempted, terror and sabotage attacks against the Earth bound elements of the program. In one particularly shocking attack—thankfully foiled by GDA intelligence before it could go ahead—a technician co-opted by a neo-communist terror cell attempted to blow up the Artemis moon base using a uranium dirty bomb, which would have effectively killed the Destiny mission for a decade or more.
Much less the mission itself, Ramirez and Samra worried that the entire GDA project might be at risk. Centrifugal forces had been at play in the Alliance since the end of the war, and while the unifying effort of Destiny had put them at bay, that would not last forever—particularly if the government was forced to scrap the mission, or delay it indefinitely. Both also understood that failure in the mission could be equally devastating, but project leaders continued to assure them that despite their concerns, the spacecraft would make it, and the crew was ready.
The crew was not just ready, but eager to go—the pull of the greatest adventure on which humans had yet embarked was a strong one. But in private moments, some of these brave explorers also expressed doubts. Most notably, Mission Commander Bishop wrote in his diary just weeks before the launch that he had serious concerns about both the hybrid engine system, and the newest member of the crew, Lyudmila Novikova. Nonetheless, he too would swallow his doubts, and go forth on the great adventure—even though one of his concerns would, tragically, prove prescient.
Destiny launched in July, 2082 to massive global fanfare. The ship lighting off its NTP drive to escape Lunar orbit made a great show for the cameras. Then, despite Bishop’s concerns, the switch-over to NEP a short time later went off without a hitch. Celebrations rolled on across Earth and Luna, and Destiny continued its journey toward Mars at a comfortable, constant acceleration.
On route, the crew kept busy by exercising, testing equipment, running simulations of the base setup and emergency scenarios, and conducting scientific experiments. These included studying fluid dynamics in microgravity, the effects of cosmic radiation on tissue samples beyond Earth’s magnetosphere, and studies of interplanetary dust and plasma. Several of these experiments would lead to breakthroughs in radiation shielding and DNA repair, which would make long term space travel and habitation more viable in the decades to come, and help pave the way for the interstellar age in which we now live.
The trip was to take a total of 67 days from Luna to Mars. At that point, the Destiny crew, cargo, and engineering modules would detach and assume Martian orbit. The crew and their facilities, drones, and equipment would begin shuttling down to their chosen landing site in the Vale Marinaris. Secondary, modular fission reactors would power the detached sections and the Mars base itself, but these would not be put together and activated until planetfall. Then, the primary reactor and engine modules would turn around and head back to Earth under automatic control.
For 26 days, the mission proceeded as expected. The experiments discovered fascinating new science, the crew got along famously, and each kilometer took them further into the unknown than any other human had been before.
Then, on the 27th day, disaster struck, in the form of a meteoroid believed to be just a few centimeters in diameter. Of course, Destiny had been designed to withstand meteoroid and micrometeoroid strikes. Sloped armor plating protected crucial reactor and engine components, the water tanks provided cushioning for the crew cabins, and a compartmentalization system would keep localized damage and decompressions from crippling the entire craft. As a last resort, Destiny was also equipped with an emergency laser defense system which might be capable of deflecting or slowing down larger objects which the other defensive measures could not withstand.
The object in question was too small to trigger the emergency laser system. While several other micrometeoroid strikes had occurred without damage earlier in the journey, this one was different. The meteoroid happened to strike the reactor compartment in such a way that it passed between two exterior armor plates, then punched through an interior damage mitigation compartment. The impact of the rock on an interior plate, which successfully deflected it back out of the ship, had an unexpected side effect due to a design flaw.
The impact jostled a support strut for one of the inertial confinement lasers, which had been improperly secured during construction. This resulted in the misalignment of the laser within the reactor chamber. Alarms rang throughout the ship. Engineer Takahashi rushed to deactivate the reactor so the laser could be realigned. Unfortunately, the reactor was at that moment in full operation, having been reloaded with a new fuel pellet barely an hour before the accident. The shutdown sequence took too long.
Within minutes, the confinement laser caused a brief, uncontrolled reaction in the fuel source, setting off a catastrophic explosion. The blast killed Takahashi instantly, and blasted a hole in the reactor compartment’s radiation shielding—specifically, the shielding protecting the rest of the ship from the reactor. Instantly, deadly neutron radiation began showering the Destiny. Tragically, the explosion had also damaged the auto-jettison function on the reactor, meaning it would continue to spew deadly radiation until exhausted, or jettisoned manually.
In seconds, most of the crew had received a lethal dose. The only members of the crew spared this immediate fate were Biologist Novikova and Engineer Galloway, who were in the furthest forward section of the ship at the time of the explosion, conducting an experiment in a lab with additional shielding. But even they would soon be overwhelmed.
In a final act of self-sacrifice, Commander Bishop clawed his way to the emergency control room, into the teeth of the radiation, and triggered the manual reactor release, dying mere minutes later. The reactor sailed away into space, while Destiny’s forward momentum eventually carried it out of the radiation’s path.
With the immediate threat over, Novikova and Galloway were saved—but by then, they were the only survivors of the Destiny mission. And now, the ship was without a primary power source, tens of millions of kilometers from both Earth and Mars.
Back on Earth, mission control lost contact with Destiny shortly after receiving the report about the reactor malfunction. Telescopes tracking the spacecraft saw the explosion, and minutes later, the jettisoning of the reactor. But beyond that, they could tell nothing about what was happening aboard. All over the world, people were glued to their news feeds, waiting for updates on the ship and crew, and fearing the worst.
No news would be forthcoming any time soon. Destiny’s communications had been taken down in the explosion. The two astronauts were forced to remain in the shielded research module for several hours while the neutron radiation decayed from the mostly aluminum and titanium-based materials the ship was constructed from. But while some forward compartments became accessible within a few hours, moving through the rear areas of the ship would be impossible for weeks, possibly months, without heavy personal radiation shielding.
Even if Novikova and Galloway had been able to contact Earth, a rescue mission would have been impossible. The automated resupply ship intended for the followup mission early next year, the Enterprise, could have been rushed to completion within a few weeks; but Enterprise had been relying on the return of the Destiny’s main engine and reactor compartment to power it. The next engine and reactor section under construction was intended for the second crewed ship, Possibility, which was not slated for completion until early 2084. No other human spacecraft could reach Destiny.
The survivors’ only chance was to retrieve one of the modular fission reactors and jury-rig it to the NEP engine, which was still functional. Then, there was a slim chance they might be able to limp to Mars and set up a smaller version of the colony base there, where—using Novikova’s agronomic expertise—they might be able to survive until the second drive section could be completed.
Retrieving one of the reactors would require them to spacewalk to the colony compartment, locate the modular reactor, then activate one of the colony construction drones. Galloway could then reprogram the drone to install the reactor. Given their relative areas of expertise, Galloway would perform the spacewalk, while Novikova remained in the forward sections, with a command console set up on battery power to monitor radiation levels and systems integrity.
The first part of the operation went as smoothly as could be expected. Galloway was able to retrieve the reactor and the drone, which he successfully reprogrammed. He then ferried the drone as far back along the ship as possible before cutting it loose to complete the operation. The drone began the installation while Galloway was heading back to the forward compartments.
Then, a final disaster. The modular reactor and thruster systems proved incompatible, and in trying to link them, the drone caused several thrusters to burst, which sent the ship into an uncontrolled spin. Galloway was cut loose from the Destiny, and began drifting away into space, with no hope of rescue by Novikova, now alone aboard the doomed vessel.
Then, as all hope seemed lost, something incredible happened. Destiny’s few remaining sensors, along with telescopes and monitoring stations on Earth and Luna, detected a large object moving toward the ship from the direction of the asteroid belt. At first, observers on Earth and Luna thought it might be a rogue asteroid or comet which they had somehow failed to detect.
When it changed direction, with the clear intent to intercept the drifting Galloway, that led to an inescapable conclusion: it was a spacecraft. The problem was, there were no spacecraft in the asteroid belt. No human spacecraft.
As mission controllers and spectators on Earth flew into a panic, Novikova and Galloway watched in powerless awe. The unknown vessel, of a strange and bulky design, slowed as it approached the drifting astronaut. An exterior door opened, and the craft maneuvered to gently bring him aboard. He sat then in a strange airlock, until he heard the hiss of equalizing pressure through his helmet. An inner door opened, and an eight foot tall, four legged arthropod with clicking mandibles stepped through.
And it said, in perfect, synthesized English: “Don’t be afraid.”