His location to the suit’s internal temperature. Inside was an array of computer displays projecting everything from What the hell? The outside of his visor was gold-coated, the world’s costliest sunglasses. If he hadn’t been tethered to the station, that push would have sent him spinning off at a rate of ten feet per second on a trajectory toward Jupiter.
He pressed again, harder, the force of his fingers against the bright red button pushing him backward in the weightless environment of space. Well, he thought as he pressed it, this was fast on its way to becoming one. He reached for the manual override and lifted the cover that protected the emergency-open button. Hatch.” It was as if the system couldn’t hear him. He said it again, emphasizing each word this time to allow the voice-recognition software to lock on. Farmer approached the hatch to reenter the space station. “Daddy needs a helmet because sometimes his job can be really hard.” He hadn’t told them that in his line of work, it was the mundane stuff that was the hardest. He remembered the time his twin boys had played around with his flight gear on the eve of his first deployment to Afghanistan, half a lifetime ago. With a PhD from Caltech in systems engineering and over four thousand flight hours in everything from T-38 trainers to F-22 stealth fighter jets, Farmer knew that big, complicated things sometimes just did not work as they were supposed to. He chalked up the silence to another one of those technical problems that made daily life in space so difficult, rather than the romance NASA still spun for the media. That message was the last Farmer had heard from the mission commander after he’d made his way out of the station to repair the fluky number four solar panel. It had been twenty-four minutes since he’d been able to raise Vitaly orĪnyone else in the station on his suit’s radio. Farmer rechecked his tether, more for mental reassurance than any need. The odd thing was that Cosmonaut Vitaly Simakov’s voice had been unaccompanied by his usual booming laugh.
Different rules when you’re floating outside, only a thin tether keeping you hooked to the station. The most recent had involved their sewing him shut inside his sleeping bag and then wide-casting his reaction for the whole net to see.
Air Force colonel Rick Farmer was used to being the target of the Russian crew’s practical jokes. But, ultimately, it is a work of fiction, not prediction.įorward 243 Miles Above the Earth’s Surface “I am so sorry.” What did Vitaly mean by that? As the sole American astronaut on the International Space Station, U.S. The following was inspired by real-world trends and technologies. Singer, August Cole Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War
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