Inspection

1800 hours, 19^th November 1966

Soyuz-7k-3 landing site, Sinus Medi, Luna

 

Lieutenant Richard Daniels, Joint Government Marines, could see nothing but darkness. This was to be expected, since it was the middle of the lunar month (as measured by the Chinese lunar calendar), meaning that the nearside of the moon was facing away from the sun – and would continue to do so for the next week or so.

He shrugged once to ease his body into the Mk. VI Suitport, and looked directly upward.

The full Earth glittered in the lunar night, a blue orb sheathed in white cloud, reminding the lieutenant what he was fighting for.

He tilted his helmeted head downward, and tapped a button on his wrist, activating his cap-mounted starlight/IR scope. The moonscape in front of him – a grey, featureless, plain of lunar dirt (tinted green by the scope) – came into view.

The brightest feature on his scope (besides the glowing orb a light-second above) was a glowing dot, approximately half a kilometer away – the Lunakhod 1 lunar rover, the only piece of Soviet equipment at the site fitted with a radioisotope thermal generator.

Designed to characterize the landing site for the LK lander (and, in a pinch, transport the landed cosmonaut to a backup lander for return-to-orbit), the solar-powered lander could only function during the 14-day long lunar day.

As such, Lieutenant Daniels, and his team of military astronauts, had been sent to inspect the landing site of the first Soviet manned lunar landing (by none other than the Office for National Intelligence) at night.

Their mission had actually begun a week ago, when, as night fell across the lunar surface, Lieutenant Daniels and his team had set off from the lunar base (and strip mine) at Yeager, Mare Tranquilitatis. Their Mobile Surface Laboratory (a large, enclosed caravan powered by a thermomechanical Sr-90 RTG and a CARBOX liquid methane fuel cell) had taken the better part of a week to navigate the 500 kilometers or so of broken terrain to the Soviet landing site, and remote observations (with a small, fuel-celled rover) had occupied another two days.

The light in Daniels’ helmet changed to green (indicating that the airlock on his suit’s backpack had sealed), and Daniels disengaged his suit from the outer hull of the Mobile Surface Laboratory.

He jumped, landing on the powdery regolith with a soft thud.

Five other figures, clad in identical hardsuits, followed.

The Soviet landing site consisted of three individual elements, separated from each other by a kilometer or so: the Lunakhod rover (to scope out the site and serve as a beacon for the landers to follow); a backup L-1 lander (in case the primary failed), and an L-1 lander (to ferry the cosmonaut, in this case Alexey Leonov, to and from the lunar surface).

Since the primary L-1 lander had crashed into the moon (after transferring Leonov to an orbiting Soyuz spacecraft) half a year ago, and the Lunakhod Rover was too functional to discreetly inspect, the only thing the Office of National Intelligence could inspect was the backup lander.

Said lander was now a mere hundred meters away.

The six astronauts moved quickly over the lunar surface, stirring up clouds of thin, powdery, electrostatically charged regolith, which hovered over the lunar surface like a thin bank of fog – and coated matte-grey hardsuits (optimized for military operations) with patches of dirty grey.

Mission specialist Clara Wu, lugging the bulky cart of instruments and work lights, was the last to arrive at the site. With a smoothness that could only have come from repeated practice (the team had inspected a Soviet Luna lander just the previous month), the team went to work erecting lights around the site, taking care not to trip over any wires – or hit the fully-fuelled lander.

While the incident had officially never occurred, everyone remembered the disastrous Kosmos 345 retrieval mission, which ended with a damaged shuttle, no useful intelligence, and three astronauts in body bags.

Lt. Daniels gave the signal, and six astronauts turned off their starlight scopes. Four work lights came to life, bathing the lander in a harsh glow, giving Lt. Daniels his first good look at the lander.

A tiny, bug-shaped affair with a bulbous, open crew compartment (capable of seating one cosmonaut) atop a cylindrical engine compartment, resting on four squat legs, the LK-1 was utilitarian, inelegant, and somewhat ugly.

Just like any spacecraft, thought the Lieutenant. Finding the scene before him visually striking, he pressed a button on his chest, and his suit-mounted camera clicked once.

It would be a cold day in hell before JOINTGOV let the Soviet Union sneak up on the moon without knowing what technologies they were using to do so.

 

END

Trailblazer – Science, Science, Science!

JPL, you’ve got competition!  

Trailblazer-D The unqualified successes of the Trailblazer Probes in 1962 led immediately to re-work of existing probe projects to deploy via aerocapture apparatus, and the Trailblazer project team immediately set about fulfilling some desperately desired missions that could only be done using aerocapture. Prominent among these missions were Titan, Uranus, and Neptune missions, as well as missions requiring spacecraft insertion into circular orbits around Jupiter and Saturn. Unlike the Trailblazer B and C spacecraft, the Trailblazer-Ds were built on a modified 3-axis stabilized hexagonal bus (now referred to as the Trailblazer bus), modified for Outer Planetary operations with the addition of Stirling Cycle RTGs.
Name	Launched	Description	Mission	Status
Trailblazer 11	1964	Stirling Cycle RTG powered, octagonal, 3-axis stabilized probe with the latest in sensor technology – charge-coupled displays, synthetic aperture radars, hard disks, etc. High-temperature multi-fuel (Americanium + Plutonium) Stirling Cycle RTGs used for improved efficiency and more constant power outputs. Optimized for respective destinations.	Enter Uranian Polar Circular Low Orbit, conduct close observations of Uranus (especially the weather) from 1970 onwards.	Success
Trailblazer 12				Success
Trailblazer 13	1965		Enter Neptunian Polar Circular Low Orbit, conduct observations of Neptune starting from 1974.	Success
Trailblazer 14				Success
Trailblazer 15	1966		Enter Jovian Polar Circular orbit, replace failing Trailblazers 7 and 8 from 1967 onwards.	Success
Trailblazer 16				Success
Trailblazer 17	1967		Enter Saturnian Polar Circular orbit, replace failing Trailblazers 9 and 10 from 1967 onwards.	Success
Trailblazer 18				Success
Trailblazer-E The Trailblazer-E series probes were prototypes for the subsequent Trailblazer-F probes that studied the small moons of the Outer Solar System, and were optimized for the Titan mission. Due to the added complexity of the planetary mapping suite, the Trailblazer-E program went 50 million (200%) over budget, leading to an acrimonious debate in the legislature over the high cost of the space program – especially with a war on in JOINTGOV’s own SE Asian backyard.
Trailblazer 19	1967	Highly optimized for Titanian investigation mission – fitted with unitary RTG-powered balloon lander (modeled after skydiver probes)	Enter Titan Polar Circular Orbit, map Titan from Orbit. Deploy Titan Hot Air Balloons to image large chunks of Titan’s surface and study geology and meteorology of Titan.	Lander failure
Trailblazer 20				Success

Trailblazer -the Road to the Jovians

TRAILBLAZER RIDES AGAIN

OUTER PLANETS TRAILBLAZER

Following the successes of the Trailblazer-A probe series (which flung open the doors for a variety of corporations to deploy their own (far more capable) weather and communications satellite networks (especially over Mars) to support the ongoing probe effort, the program was wound down, and the Trailblazer name was left behind, its purpose served.

By 1955, entire spacecraft – notably Applied Scientific Trimodal NTR tugs – were employing aerocapture to return to LEO, and ballutes were undergoing testing over Earth.

In 1957, the first quartet of ballute-equipped 300-metric-ton spacecraft (a hefty investment in an era of increasingly reliable probes) skimmed the atmosphere of Mars – and emplaced cheap supplies on Phobos, Deimos, and two strategic Martian surface sites.

Other, less ambitious aerocapture units deployed constellations of (ridiculously expensive) reconnaissance satellites (fresh off Lockheed’s Keyhole production lines), communications satellites, and high-resolution surface mapping radars.

Aerocapture was moving on.

But so was the scope of human exploration.

That same year, Pioneer 21 and 22, the first probes of the Pioneer-G series, dropped off three probes each as they screamed past the King of the Outer System – Jupiter, providing mankind with its first glimpse of the of the Jovian atmosphere.

The moment the data started streaming in, someone had the bright idea of plugging the figures into a computer model for aerocapture maneuvers.

And found that such maneuvers, with just a wee bit of technological progress (particularly in the field of advanced ceramics and ultra-strong composite fibers – like the ones orbital factories were churning out), were completely feasible.

Naturally, the businessmen who were interested in perhaps setting up a Jovian or Saturnian communications network were quite concerned with whether any figures had been fudged.

For Science, Engineering, and Commerce, Trailblazer-B (and beyond) – otherwise known as the Outer Planets Trailblazer Program – was given the go-ahead to demonstrate aerocapture over the Outer Planets – and do as much Science as they could on the way.

THE BUS  

The Trailblazer-Bs (and beyond) primarily relied on ballutes for orbital insertion, as the extremely high encounter velocities resulting from plunging so deep into the gravity wells of the massive gas giants rendered traditional heat shields quite inadequate.

Trailblazer-B The failure of Trailblazer-B delayed ACG’s Outer Planes exploration program by three years (including the time needed to validate the aerocapture apparatus with a successful mission), demoralizing ACG at a time when JPL was pushing ahead with their Voyager Orbiter (a.k.a. Galileo, Cassini, and Herschel) missions. Nonetheless, the far more ambitious – and far more capable – aerocapture system succeeded eventually, and allowed CUE, ACG, and JPL to make the most of their place in the sun (before it was snuffed out by the Kronos manned missions to Jupiter and Saturn in the mid-late 70s).
Name	Launched	Description	Mission	Status
Trailblazer 5	1958	Small Stirling Cycle RTG powered three-axis-stabilized probe possessing a heat shield and basic instrumentation suite mounted on an octagonal bus.	Enter Low Jovian Polar Circular Orbit (by aerobraking) in 1960. Map Jovian gravitational and magnetic field, conduct close inspection of Jovian cloud-tops. Test aerocapture setup. Beat JPL’s Galileo Orbiter to Jupiter Orbit.	Failure
Trailblazer 6	1958			Failure

Trailblazer-C Following the complete failure of Trailblazer-B (from radiation damage leading to a systems failure in the ballute deployment system, an event that had not occurred over Mars and Venus), it was evident that some readjustment of the follow-on spacecraft would be needed, and Trailblazer’s schedule was set back a full year (well, a full Jovian launch window) to early 1961. On the bright side, this additional year gave ACG time to improve the designs of both the aerocapture apparatus and probe, incorporating lessons learned from the pricey failures of the Trailblazer-B probes. The result was a superb spin-stabilized magnetic field/low gas giant orbit probe – Trailblazer-C, which completed its scientific and engineering objectives to the fullest extent possible and then some – paving the way for the widespread use of Gas Giant Aerocapture in probes.
Name	Launched	Description	Mission	Status
Trailblazer 7	1961	Stirling Cycle RTG powered, octagonal, 3-axis stabilized probe with the latest in sensor technology – charge-coupled displays, synthetic aperture radars, hard disks, etc. Planetary investigation probe – not the system of moons, the planet itself.	Enter Low Jovian Polar Circular Orbit (by aerobraking) in late 1962. Map Jovian gravitational field, conduct close inspection of Jovian cloud-tops. Validate improved aerocapture setup.	Success
Trailblazer 8				Success
Trailblazer 9	1962		Make up for lost time (started life as backup/engineering articles) Enter Low Saturnian Polar Orbit (below the ring plane) in 1965. Map Saturnian gravitational field, conduct close inspection of Saturn’s cloud-tops.	Success
Trailblazer 10				Success

Trailblazer – Pioneers of Aerocapture

ADVANCED CONCEPTS GROUP

The Trailblazer Program:

 

AEROCAPTURE

“Aerocapture” is a maneuver to inject a spacecraft into orbit around a body with an atmosphere by conducting a pass through the body’s atmosphere, during which aerodynamic dissipates the excess kinetic energy of the spacecraft, reducing the spacecraft’s velocity from a hyperbolic trajectory to an elliptical orbit. A subsequent maneuver then circularizes the orbit, or alters the orbit such that another pass through the atmosphere can be executed to lower it further.

The first experiments on aerocapture were conducted by the Center for Unmanned Exploration (headquartered at Nanking) during the Second World War. Using data collected from sounding rockets and reentering Mercury, Corona and Eyeball capsules (all employed en masse for wartime reconnaissance), CUE was able to develop routines (and more importantly, computer programs) permitting fine control over the trajectories of reentering spacecraft – or 40-metric-ton pods filled to the brim with submunitions of high explosives and incendiaries (lobbed with startling frequency at the industrial centers and bases of the Axis Powers).

This did not go unnoticed by the more farsighted scientific staff at Nanking, and they successfully lobbied for a “more comprehensive* test” of their automated guidance software using modified surplus Corona film buckets.

Over the course of twelve launches between ’43 and ’44, the CUE reentry vehicle guidance team succeeded in aerocapture of the test buckets into Earth Orbits from increasingly high reentry speeds, culminating, in August 1944, with the entry of a probe sent on a lunar free-return trajectory into Low Earth Orbit after three passes through the atmosphere.

Their patents granted and techniques refined, the engineers quickly stamped their system “de-bugged” and moved on to what they were supposed to be doing – or other frivolous misuses of scarce wartime resources.

The programs developed by the engineers at CUE soon found applications in the Apollo Program, which employed a complex “pond-skipping” system to keep the deceleration of the Apollo capsule survivably low. Aerocapture was further developed by Orbital Solutions (among others), which, by 1952, was regularly employing aerocapture and aerobraking to return the reusable motor pods of space tugs to LEO to enable docking with a fresh propellant tank and payload.

Other corporations also saw value in a technique which would greatly lower propellant mass for return of lunar raw materials to Low Orbit – which would be a surefire money-maker once the lunar mining industry got off the ground – and invested R&D resources accordingly.

Further-sighted corporations also hoped to gain experience in a technique that appeared useful for interplanetary exploration – and colonization.

*The aerocapture experiments were obviously a misallocation of wartime resources, but this is what happens when scientists get just a tad too much freedom… (Awesome stuff gets done!)

 

BLAZING A TRAIL THROUGH THE CLOUDS OF THE PLANETS

BLAZING A TRAIL FOR OTHERS TO FOLLOW

TRAILBLAZER – A

By 1953, aerobraking and aerocapture were mature, commonly used techniques, employed by spacecraft of increasing size, bulk, and complexity over the skies of Earth. Data collected by the Skydiver probes had ascertained the feasibility of the technique over the skies of Mars and Venus.

All that was left was to actually try aerocapture in the atmospheres of Venus and Mars.

Enter the Trailblazer program.

A pioneering initiative to demonstrate aerobraking large spacecraft over other planets, the Trailblazer program consisted of four missions to Mars and Venus, all employing aerocapture for orbital insertion of demonstrator payloads – communications satellites and weather satellites.

The success of the Trailblazer program cleared the way for the extensive use of aerobraking apparatus to deliver satellites and supplies to the surfaces and orbits of Mars and Venus – and, with the industrialization of the solar system, colony supplies, trade goods, personnel, and cargo as well.

 

THE BUS

The Trailblazer-A bus, like most cargo return vehicles at the time, consisted of a large, saucer-shaped heat shield strapped to a spaceframe, on which the payload and orbital insertion LCH4/LO2 motor were mounted. The heat shield was immediately discarded upon completion of the aerocapture maneuver, greatly decreasing the mass of the propellant needed to circularize the resultant orbit.

 

Trailblazer-A The trailblazer-A probes successfully demonstrated aerocapture (of relatively small spacecraft) into circular orbits around Venus and Mars, and established the feasibility of dedicated off-Earth communications and weather satellites. Notably, the (tiny) satellite constellations deployed remained operational far beyond their expected 10-year lifespans. The final surviving satellite of the constellation, Trailblazer 3a, remained operational as a backup relay until 1979 – by which point Mars was a thriving colony with thousands of inhabitants.
Name	Launched	Description	Mission		Status
Trailblazer 1	1953	Aerocapture heat shield and propulsion bus 1 & 3: Pair of demo 4-mT communications/weather satellites (labeled a and b). 2 & 4: Pair of demo 4-mT polar-orbiting sun-synchronous mapping/weather satellites.	Deploy rudimentary communications and weather satellite network over Mars and Venus. Demonstrate feasibility of such a network & interplanetary aerocapture	Insert satellite pair into equatorial orbit.	Success
Trailblazer 2	1953			Insert satellite pair into polar orbit.	Success
Trailblazer 3	1953			Insert satellite pair into equatorial orbit.	Success
Trailblazer 4	1953			Insert satellite pair into polar orbit.	Success

Territorial Organization of the Joint Government

As a multi-continental multi-planetary (since 1960) civilization-state with a population (circa 2000) of 6.2 billion people, the Joint Government is organized along federal lines, with the Province as the core component of local governance. Each Province (usually with a population exceeding ten million) is responsible for (some) lawmaking, (some) law enforcement, local transportation, and local infrastructure, as well as components of the JOINTGOV-wide centralized education and healthcare systems (well, how else do you maintain a culturally unified polity with citizens fit to vote on a restricted list of affairs?). Tracts of land with too few people for Provincehood are organized into Territories.

Substantial devolution of executive power also exists to manage this horribly complex super-state streamline operations. Due to the continental boundaries separating the many Provinces of JOINTGOV, Provinces located on the same continent/planet are generally grouped together to form an “Administrative Area” to manage affairs common to a particular continent. As such, this is primarily an executive rather than a legislative division; legislation pertinent to Administrative Areas has to go through the Legislature in Atoll. The executive-only nature of Administrative Areas is to prevent nationalistic secession of the Administrative Area (which, unlike a Province is powerful enough to survive as a state, if not a great Power) avoid the red tape that comes with an additional layer of legislative power.

Provinces, in turn, are comprised of Cities or city-equivalents, like Prefectures (which possess their own legislatures) and Administrative Regions (which do not). The main distinction between a City and a Prefecture is the degree of urbanization.

Cities (or city-equivalent Prefectures) are in turn comprised of Counties (which are not urbanized) or Districts (which are).

As of 2000, there exist eight Administrative Areas. In order of size, they are:

1. North American Administrative Area (NAAA) – includes all of Continental North America from the Greenland to the Bering Strait to the Darien Gap, as well as an island or two (not Cuba). Integrated 1776.
2. Jointland Administrative Area (JAA). Includes the entire continent of Jointland, from the Sunrise Coast to Far Peace to the Horizon Peninsula. Integrated 1645.
3. Antarctic Administrative Area (ANAA). Includes the entire continent of Antarctica, outlying islands, and the Falklands. Integrated 1918.
4. Chinese Administrative Area (CAA). Includes China from Taiwan to the Great Wall (South Manchurian border) to Tibet, Sinkiang, and Dzungaria. Incorporated 1645.
5. Australian Administrative Area (AAA). Includes all of Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, and Guam. Integrated 1776.
6. Indian Administrative Area (IAA). Includes most of the Indian Subcontinent from the Bangladeshi border to the Pakistani border, as well as the District of Ceylon. Integrated 1854.
7. British Administrative Area (BAA). The smallest Administrative Area (with only four districts), and the only one retaining a monarchy (as per the Acts of Integration). Includes Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales. Integrated 1645.
8. Extraterrestrial Administrative Area. Includes the Province of Lunar Habitats, the Province of Martian Habitats, and the Province of Space Habitats. (No sovereignty – but legal jurisdiction is exercised over the surface of the moon in order to avoid the ire of the rest of the world while making cash allow the freest use of the virtually limitless resources of space by all of mankind).

An example of an address in the Joint Government would be:

68 Maple Drive, Bertsville, Upperton Prefecture, Tranquil Province, Jointland Administrative Area

Cubicle 57, 85th floor, Everest Tower, 2 Goddard Lane, Downtown, City of New Edinburgh, Province of Antarctic Peninsula, Antarctic Administrative Area.

*This author does not believe that such an imperialistic super-state could or should exist in the real world. This site is intended for entertainment only.