Dalton's car pulled off the freeway, and by now he was late. No one was watching his time clock; he was self-motivated by something greater. Next time, I'll leave earlier, he chided himself.
The day was already warming up. Approaching he office, he saw the mass of protesters which thronged the public sidewalk, leaving the parking lot’s entrance open.
“Let them Eat Space-cake,” one inane sign read, with a large caricature of several trillionaires. It was on of the mass produced vinyl variety.
He didn’t pay attention to them, or the other signs saying things like “Earth 1st, Space Never.” “Stop the Space Race, Save the Human Race.” “Put the X over SpaceX,” and other such slogans.
Dalton hated the protesters, and protesting, but he didn’t know how to show it. As long as they didn’t jump in front of his automated car, he didn’t even see them or their slogans. They were just static and white noise to the thoughts of his day. Their requests were senseless anyway. Furor far too late. The Trillionaire spent the money already building and boosting the probe off to Jupiter. Somehow, the opposition found out where their office was and paid for protesters, increasing as they approached the landing; then the bored mindless joined along (for free).
Dalton saw a protester drop their homemade sign, tense up, and then jump into the street. The automatic driver braked and the seatbelt dug into Dalton's shoulder.
“You're starving the children.” The protester yelled at the car.
Dalton looked back with a perplexed face while the car pulled into a nearby parking space.
He threw on his skinny, long blue polo shirt over his white undershirt and ran a comb through his hair. He walked swiftly towards the building, only to come right back, grab his lanyard hanging from the rear-view mirror, and set out once again.
“Look at him, he’s starving himself,” another paid protester jeered.
The space hecklers looked at him with wary eyes and continued their protest, getting an occasional honk of support from the public road.
No coffee for the late, he thought, and hustled into his cubicle chair, donned his headset, and connected into the control room.
His heart was still rapidly beating when they did the last check of personnel.
The wallscreens lit up, and Dalton flung the second stream on his second monitor. A montage of various ‘happy moments’ from previous missions to the outer planets; New Horizons flyby of Pluto, Europa Clipper’s orbital insertion, ESA’s JUICE mission, Cassini / Huygens, and Voyager and Pioneer flybys. Each showing a high-resolution image of distant worlds no human would see in-the-flesh during Dalton’s lifetime. Distances so far they were absurd to grasp; Jupiter was a half a billion miles away—on average.
A few smiles and claps. Then everyone hushed. Dalton heard only the landing controller recounting velocity and altitude numbers on screen.
The morning mood was alert—everyone was tense and ready. Another snowball brake.
A timer showed on the screen with the countdown to the deorbit burn ticking away.
The head console shouted “Go” for landing. Jim standing there. Top-dog today—like most days.
“Ion thruster. Safe detachment.” The spacecraft showed a red blinking wireframe around the detached part, then grayed out until the spacecraft became one unit less. Europa or bust, there was no return to a higher orbit.
“Orbit’s at two clicks,” new voice replied.
Europa’s topology varied only plus or minus 250 meters, with the occasional peak or mesa at one kilometer. Two kilometers altitude was the record low for any spaceship around anybody in the solar system but plenty for the ice moon. The absent atmosphere allowed for such a tight orbit.
“Retros firing,” said the voice.
On screen, the altitude decreased. At the inclined orbit, an impact was inevitable. A bead of sweat rolled down Dalton’s temple and reminded him to breathe. The anxiety seemed to override his body. He would not impact the ice at fatal velocities, he told himself.
“One kilometer altitude,” another called. An unmuted mic relayed an audible gasp.
Don’t gasp yet, Dalton thought. For fun, he and his buddies spent hours calculating the lowest orbit possible. Indeed, one line circled the planet; which enabled a 500 meter orbit. With gravity of less than one seventh Earths, they calculated how little delta-v needed to leap over a tightly orbiting spacecraft (if a human were to land on Europa).
The orbit decayed. Instead of an orbit, a single arc angled onto the surface with a red blinking red dot showing impact.
“Retros finished. Jettison normal.” Red outlines flashed, then went gray on the lander’s wireframe. Another stage ghosted out. Less mass to brake. Dalton thought.
“500 meters”
“Twenty clicks out and closing.”
“Decline's good.”
“Ventrals at 25%”
Dalton did the mental math, and looks like about 400 meters in distance for every 10 meters of altitude lost. They were really doing this!
“This zone’s got bumps, we want a light touchdown.” Jim said.
“Losing too much altitude, ventrals to 100%.” A male controller called suddenly.
“50 met—Touchdown. Hard landing.” He added.
“Wheel one’s hot—”
“Brake one failure.”
“Wheel one shredding!” Someone else called out to more gasps as the airbags deployed on the digital screen from simulated camera views. The lander was topping end over end. The weak gravity of Europa seemingly unable to hold on to the somersaulting craft which appeared to be flung back into orbit. A few more digitally rendered flips on screen and the vessel landed on bumpy ice. The craft’s outline flashed bright red and the interior area of the wireframe turned a dark red.
“Damage report.” Jim said. Ignorant of the Star Trek reference. He looked around and made eye contact with anyone not glued to their workstation.
A few people pointed at their screens and hacked away at their keyboards.
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“Craft overturned and landed on its back,” said one. “Severe tire damage.”
Over the next few minutes, they tested the systems on the crashed ship and simulated ejecting the airbags and wheels in order to give them the best chance of freeing the cryobot submarine probe from the wreckage.
“Okay, best estimate are up,” an operator said to Jim. The screens flashed a new simulated view. Some trusses deformed with other parts and the screen showed struts ‘magically’ intersecting in the middle of the truss (because of issues with the visualization software). The lander’s left side peaked in the air, while the right, the odd-number wheels, had dug into the ice shredded wheel one gouged.
“Options? Shoot off the left side, then the bags?” Jim asked his operators. “Then hope it levels out and detach the right side? Save point this.”
The lander’s left detached all parts simultanously, as expected. Wireframes again flickered red, then ghosted out, but stayed phantom-white on the ruddy-white ice. The multi-ton submarine probe was still.
As the damage reports rolled in, Jim's face got bleaker, until eventually he sank back into his black chair and observed. The explosive bolts failed to eject the lander. Jagged silver beams of aluminum stuck to the right side of the probe, the cryobot would never melt through now.
“We knew this was a bumpy plain. We’ll try again.” Jim addressed everyone.
The feed went black as the simulation ended. The lander had broken, but the submarine was operative, but doomed to a life above the surface—ultimately trapped meters from its goal. For the rest of its brief life, it would give a fraction of the useful science data, until beat to death by Jupiter’s titanic radiation belts. In the very end, one Trillionaire would gloat over another’s failure. The media would run lurid stories of the failure then move on. Science would lose out and no one would explore Europa for decades. But it had sat unseen for eons.
Jim came back on screen to address everyone. “We’re an international team, but many of us pursued science for national pride. We’re not stereotypical-looking patriots. But we are part of something far larger than ourselves. This is the pinnacle of Western scientific advancement. This’ll sound sinophobic, but if we fail and the Chinese succeed in their martian lander, the media will skewer us and our sponsor. They will broadcast this failure of Western Science.” Jim waved his hands in an exaggerated motion. “They’ll ignore the fact we’ve landed *people* on Mars. And worse, Europa will go unexplored for decades. Some of us won’t live to know what’s under the ice.”
The room was dead silent. His tone was not harsh or angry, but all sat like a shamed puppy.
“Okay, take fifteen. Then we’ll try again.” Jim told everyone.
Coffee time, thought Dalton.
The kitchen was a drab windowless room in the center of the building between the stairwells and bathrooms. A typical sort with zero view. Whether in the private sector or academia, a provost, department head, or director took the exterior-wall square footage. All dead weight—all talkers. Dalton had always thought. None were lifting science engineering the experiments or the landing rovers a billion kilometers away. But still he dreamed of a window office (when not working remote).
Dalton went straight to the coffee, but the last person drained it. At least they had restarted the new drip. Other engineers and graduate students were chatting but most were hurrying out, desperate to maximize the break.
A young woman walked in and approached. “Hey, is the coffee ready?”
The woman didn't seem a hair above twenty-five. Her thin cardigan obscured her lanyard.
“Uh, nope, that’s why I’m hanging here.”
“Oh, cool.” She replied, then tried to make small talk. “I’m new here, so what’s your job?” She asked.
Hired for third shift operations, Dalton thought. He inspected the woman and then replied. “Data engineer; synthetic data engineer.”
“Oh, cool...” With a bit of a hesitating emphasis on ‘cool.’ “So, um, how did you get your job here?”
“Well, I was one of Jim’s undergrad students. I helped him write the paper.”
“Oh wow. Jim’s paper really inspired me to take up astrophysics,” the young lady said. “Life in the IWOWs.” She quoted the paper’s title. IWOWs being ‘Interior Water Ocean Worlds.’
Dalton covered the bottom of his quivering face with his empty cup. “Yeah, well, without me Jim wouldn’t have been able to publish it,” he said with exaggerated humbleness. Jim slipped Dalton’s name in the acknowledgments section of paper. The Paper. The first plausible scientifically accepted paper on Non-Earth Life.
It was only a plausibility paper. The Europa Clipper had arrived in 2030 and immediately sent back data after the first flyby of Europa. One instrument, called SUDA (SUrface Dust Analyser), sent back confirmations of organic compounds. There was roiling chemistry on Europa.
Dalton wasn't an author of the paper, his name wasn’t on it either, more like ‘in’ it. Listed at the end under additional help—third from the last. At least at the very end, one’s name would be marginally prominent. Not the first line, where someone skimming might spy it. Third to the last, blurred with all others, a space everyone skipped.
The dripping of the coffee pot cut through the awkward silence.
She looked down at his lanyard. “Ok, Mr. Dalton. H. Chatsworth.”
“Yup, I’m in the acknowledgments. I wrote the software which collected the data and did the time adjustments between JWST, Hubble, and Europa Clipper. Then I did all the relativity adjustments. You won’t believe how complicated it was to combine adjust time for velocity, gravity wells, and even a timezone or two...” He sensed he was losing her. She glanced over at the coffeepot. No one cared about proper data collection and transformation could translate an impenetrable high dimensional dataset into a discovery business degree graduates could find. Nor did he ‘write the software.’ He committed four functions to production while an undergrad.
The coffee pot beeped and the sound of dripping tapered off. “Ah, looks like it’s done. You first.” Dalton said, but then grabbed the craft.
He poured coffee into her cup and now saw his conundrum. Was she a sort of woman who needed 5% more space for cream and sugar or just the standard 10% margin for walking without burning one’s hand? At 60% he stopped filling and silently scolded himself. He should have let her pour.
“Thanks, um. Well, it was nice meeting you Dalton.” she said as she backed away slowly.
“Nice meeting you too…” he realized he never asked her name.
“Claire,” she said and flipped her badge over, and then walked out.
Dalton saw the badge. Three prominent social media handles, InstaCourse, Grind.io, Tertabuzz—all trendy startups that many of Dalton's age cohort flocked to. A social media starlet, he thought. Hired to keep the buzz up. All for the Trillionaire.
He became sickened. They hired third shift communication interns. The problem with science nowadays was you had to spend billions of dollars and years of your life to refute any claim, then millions to market it.Take Europa. Scientists postulated life was possible under the ice. NASA had to conceive of the mission, lobby for money, sell it to the public, build it, test-test-test, deploy, launch, orbit, boost, and above all, wait. Wait for years! Once it got to Jupiter it had to maneuver, fly-by, hit a plume, sample, compress data, transmit to Earth, decompress the results, and finally wait for the instrument data to be interpreted, all to win a stupid bet with Sammy-Sideline-Scientist who was so sure Europa was lifeless. It didn’t give an answer with finality! Perhaps Sammy was convinced, but the legions of his followers wouldn't: ‘Well, ackchyually the data's inconclusive. The results are contested.’
However, the proliferation of slickness in science was what Dalton was most angry about. Armchair nerds would never die (they would die, and be replaced). It was the high-gloss sheen, perfect hair, the plasticized shrink-film packaging on the produced videos of the science actors which had proliferated—those were the worst in his mind. ‘Like’ seekers, hit mongers, the marketer's the lip-gloss polish of it all and the viewer just offloading trust to well-produced videos.
It left the viewer thinking they knew because they watched—without the experience of ever doing. None of them got their hands dirty with science. None of them had dug a hole, no boots on Mars picking through the rubble of a collapse lava tube.
'Analysts are propagandists with databases,' someone once said, and the Trillionaire had thousands under his employ.
Life on Europa would change it all, Dalton had hoped. Flood the comments of a thousand no-life-on-Europa 'science' videos. All social media noisemakers. Even on his 'side,' publishing weekly or daily recaps of the Europa Project, they were doing it for their channel, rather than the belief. He hoped the discovery would stand on its own merits and market itself.
He looked forward to the allied trolls’ commenting on any no-life videos left up.
Their well produced clips would look good but be wrong. The sheen of science nowadays. And those smarmy, comments in their videos.
Besides, if I wanted to get attention on social media, all one needs to do is something outrageous. Preferably against someone else famous or powerful.