Complex Numbers

Forty years...

Really, there's not much I can say about this that hasn't already been said. It's one of my earliest memories, so it's personal to me. It is what inspired me to go into a technical profession (though my work is right here on Earth.) It is what caused me to read and write science fiction. The motivations may have been suspect, but the dream was pure and the positive results were undeniable (we didn't "waste" money. It stayed, for the most part, right here on Earth, creating jobs and advancing technology across the board).

So I'll let my characters, Peter Sorrelle and Delphine Lovell, speak for me. From my novel in progress, Prototype:

On the screen, hanging against a background of stars, was a spacecraft unlike any Del had seen. Lacking the utilitarian frame of a cargo transport or the retro-futuristic look of a passenger liner, it was something else altogether, looking like a pair of spheres connected by a thick shaft – though one of the spheres was truncated, as if a quarter of it had been sliced off. The other sphere sported a duraglass dome, protruding from the sphere’s pole.

“I’ve never seen anything like him,” Del said. “I didn’t even know he was under development.” She struggled with scale; against the background of space, there was no way to tell whether it was a small, one-person craft or a larger transport. She put a hand on the back of the chair she’d just vacated, leaning on it.

“I remember when all ships were called ‘her,’” Sorrelle mused. “It still sounds odd to me.”

Del glanced at him; he was watching the screen. “Isn’t Neil a man’s name? It’d be weird calling him ‘her.’”

“Yes, I suppose it would. Do you recognize the name?”

Del turned back to the display. It wasn’t a still picture; as she watched, a maintenance pod detached from the ship and blasted toward the left of the screen. Since maintenance pods were standardized, Del finally got a feel for the scale: the new craft was large, bigger even than the Olympic. “No, not really. Some scientist?”

Sorrelle chuckled. “No, no. He was… I guess you could say he was a pilot, like you. They called them ‘astronauts’ back then.”

“I know what an astronaut was. They were also called ‘cosmonauts.’”

“Not by the same people. At the time, there was a big race between astronauts – from America – and cosmonauts from Russia to see who would be the first to land a human being on the moon.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember something about that from school,” Del said, continuing to watch the ship even though nothing else happened. “The space race. The Americans won, I think.”

“That’s right. Here, let me show you something.” He tapped buttons on his wrist and, after a moment, the view of the Neil Armstrong blinked out, to be replaced by a grainy picture.

It took Del a moment to figure out what she was looking at. A red tower attached at several points to a long series of cylinders, each cylinder smaller than the one below it. Behind the rocket was blue sky with a few clouds. “A rocket,” said Del.

“Not just a rocket,” Sorrelle corrected her. “The Saturn V, one of the biggest rockets ever built, and the biggest one ever launched successfully. Back then, over a century ago, no one had ever been to the moon, and there were no facilities in orbit, so one ship had to make the journey by itself. No transfer stations in LEO.”

“I guess you have to start somewhere,” Del said. “I can’t really tell how big the rocket is, though.”

“Just over a hundred and ten meters from nose to nozzle,” Sorrelle said. “But it was about 90% fuel. You see the little cone near the top? Just below the skinny framework.”

“Sure.” Delphine took a step closer to the screen, ignoring twinges in her leg.

“The crew was in that cone. Most of the rest of the rocket was fuel.”

“Damn.”

“By the way, if things had gone a bit differently, there would have been a Lovell in there. Jim Lovell was part of the backup crew.”

Del turned back to him. “Yeah? Ancestor of mine?”

“Not directly. At least, your father never mentioned it, and I’d think he would have. In any case, one of the three astronauts who did go was Neil Alden Armstrong.” Sorrelle tapped his CuffLink again, and the view changed. This time, it was from the top of the gantry, the rocket foreshortened, red arms from the gantry with their tenuous hold on the Saturn V. The picture moved, tendrils of white steam coming from near the bottom of the enormous craft. Sound came on, low quality but clear: a male voice, counting down from five.

At “zero” the steam turned to fire blossoming at the base of the rocket. At first, it seemed as if nothing would happen, and then… movement. The gantry arms swung wide. The flames brightened, and the rocket picked up speed.

The video switched to a view of the rocket blasting through the atmosphere. Sorrelle cut the sound. “Other missions had already swung around the moon and back, without landing. This one, called Apollo 11, would fulfill a promise made less than a decade earlier: to put a man on the moon.”

Del stepped back and grabbed the plush chair she’d been sitting in, turned it around, and settled back into it, finishing the rest of her water but still holding the empty glass. “And that man was Neil Armstrong?”

“That’s right.”

“Who were the others?”

“Buzz Aldrin, who was the second person on the moon, and Michael Collins, who had the unenviable job of staying in lunar orbit while the other two got to go sightseeing.”

Del watched as the rocket’s trail disappeared into blackness. The video switched to a view from the craft itself; in a burst of flame, the enormous first stage separated and fell away, discarded forever.

The scene cut again, this time to a metallic craft detaching from the orbital module, a craft with spidery legs and wide footpads. “That must have been exciting,” Del said, after a time. “To know, beyond doubt, that you’re going where no one’s ever been.” The familiar lunar surface scrolled by on the screen, framed between struts of the landing module. After a time, it stopped moving; the craft had touched down. Sorrelle turned the sound back on. “-the Eagle has landed…”

“That was quick,” said Del.

“It actually took four days. Most of it was boring, as you well know. Here it comes,” Sorrelle told her. “Probably the most famous single moment in history.”

The video’s quality diminished further, but Del could still make out the shapes: a ladder hanging from the landing craft’s hatch, and a human figure descending, trapped in a bulky spacesuit. “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.” Del shook off a chill.

“Yes, I do remember this,” she said. “I never paid much attention in history class, I’m afraid.”

Sorrelle stopped the blurry video with a touch to his CuffLink. “I’ve got that site preserved,” he told her. “It wasn’t a part of the moon that people visited much. Most of the mining operations started down south. But I had them build Tranquility Base where it is specifically because of that site, even though it’s not real convenient to the olivine deposits. The tourists love it.”

Del shrugged. “I guess that’s good. I haven’t been there.”

“Del, with what you did on the Olympic, you’ve more than proven yourself as a pilot. You can write your own ticket from here on out. The Sorrelle Corporation owes you a great deal. I owe you a great deal. But what I’d like you to do is pilot the Neil Armstrong.”

So maybe this 40-year anniversary will get me off my butt - actually, ON my butt - and editing that novel.