Station Breaker

4 Hot Mess

"Well kids, any suggestions?" asks Bennet, while we wait to hear our fate from Nashville.

Peterson types away on the console behind me, while I stare at my own matte finish reflection in my screen. Bennet's question was rhetorical, at least in respect to me.

"ISS doesn't have a spare docking collar," says Peterson. "Checking on OPSEK. No, she's only got the Soyuz-type free. What about New Star?"

"The Chinese station?" says Bennet. "Didn't they have a rapid depressurization problem with their airlocks? I think I'll risk burning up."

She left out one option. "There's the Korolev," I point out.

"The K1?" replies Bennet. "There's a thought. Peterson, what do you see?"

"Pulling it up now. They've got a universal dock that looks free. Although they're pretty cagey about non-Russians on there. They say the K1 is for industrial research."

"I think this is an extenuating circumstance. Nashville, did you get all that?"

Even though we use a lot of "overs" and "affirmatives," our comm is always open. That's why the sting of Bennet telling me to keep my hands to myself hurts so much. It wasn't just Peterson who overheard it. Everyone I work with did.

"Affirmative, Unicorn 22. We're checking on that now and putting in a call to Roscosmos. Over."

"I'm going to put a pin on our reentry at this point until we've heard back. Over."

"Roger that, Unicorn 22."

We spend the next half hour waiting for a response from the Russian space agency. While Peterson and Bennet run through their control panels, I stare out the window for the first time since we reached orbit.

Our craft has a small spin so it doesn't get too hot as we go through the sun side over Earth.

While the stars are too hard to see through the internal glare of our displays, Earth is a bright blue and white disc that takes up the entire window when we rotate towards it.

The hard thing to understand, even if you experienced it virtually, is how big the earth is from low orbit. While we're in space, we're still only about 400 times the height of the tallest building in the world.

The distance from the ground to my window is less than the trip from Cape Canaveral to Miami — a three-hour drive for most people — half that for me.

Space, technically speaking, is the place where you can orbit the earth without running into too much atmosphere. If the earth had no atmosphere and was perfectly round, you could orbit an inch off the ground if you were going fast enough.

At our altitude of 200 miles, we're roughly just over 2 % of the earth's diameter away from the surface. Which means the earth looks really fucking huge even from here.

But it's still far away.

There is 200 miles of progressively thicker atmosphere below us. If we were just dropping straight down, that would be no big deal. We wouldn't need a heat shield.

But we're traveling 17,000 miles per hour. People often get confused as to what it means to burn up in our atmosphere.

It's not that the air is a giant oven up here. Quite the opposite.

What matters is our velocity. At this speed, the friction from hitting those air molecules so fast it's hotter than an industrial furnace.

The skin on the bottom of our ship, Pica-Z, is designed to handle atmospheric reentry from even higher velocities. The problem is if one part of it gets a little too hot or there's an uneven spot.

The Unicorn has reentry thrusters and is designed to land via rocket propulsion, but if we have to use them in the upper atmosphere to slow us down, then that means we'll end up burning all our fuel and need a parachute to land nowhere near our intended zone.

The ideal situation is we get to dock with a station and check the sensors before attempting reentry.

If nobody has any room, then we're kind of screwed in the short term.

Worst case scenario; iCosmos sends up another craft on autopilot in a few days to come get us and lets the Unicorn 22 attempt an unmanned reentry.

Theoretically, it's a choice between trying to reenter with a faulty sensor and hoping iCosmos can send up an unmanned craft for us to dock and transfer to — which is a lot easier said than done. Possible, but extremely time consuming.

"Hey, guys, this is Vin here." The face of Vin Amin — the CEO whiz who started iCosmos — appears on Bennet's display. It looks like he's Skyping from his home office. "I just want you to know we're doing everything we can to figure out a solution. We're having trouble figuring out what readouts you're getting, Halsy. But Dr. Peterson says she's getting the same thing?"

"Affirmative," she replies.

"David, right? Any luck with your control panel?"

I'm not sure if telling him Bennet won't let me touch it will go over very well right now. I just say, "No, sir."

He smiles. "Vin. Save 'sir' for Commander Bennet."

"Any luck with Roscosmos?" asks Bennet.

Vin loses his smile. "Well, we're working on it. Zhirov, the head of their space agency, just gave us a flat out no."

"Sounds like that's our answer," says Bennet.

"I don't know about that. I've got a call into his boss, Radin, the head of the Russian Federation. The two have been known to disagree. Plus, there's one more thing…" Vin holds up his phone. "I just tweeted that we're asking the Russians to let us dock at the K1 because of the solar flare."

Bennet shakes his head. "You're hoping a bunch of people on Twitter will make Zhirov change his mind?"

"No. I'm counting on them to persuade Radin. He's a bit more media aware." He looks at something on his computer. "Oh good, our hashtag, 'LetThemDock' is trending!"

Jesus. Christ.

My life depends on a bunch of hipsters retweeting a plea from a man probably sitting on a Yoga ball right now.