Hard Tech & Science — Eight Minutes

Hard Tech & Sci­ence – Eight Min­utes
A CME alarm, a cel­lar under Hab D, and the water stacked over your head while 100 MeV pro­tons arrive.

Moon base hard sci­ence fic­tion: air, water, pow­er, and the nar­row buffers that keep the Habs alive.

The con­straint is light-time. Pho­tons from the Sun reach the Moon in about eight min­utes. The radio warn­ing rides with them. The pro­tons do not. A coro­nal mass ejec­tion throws charged par­ti­cles; the high­est-ener­gy ones arrive close behind the light. At Con­rad, that inter­val is the entire deci­sion. Eight min­utes from the alarm to the most ener­getic par­ti­cles. After that, the flux is in the cor­ri­dors, and mass you are not stand­ing under does not count.

The Constraint

Doc Keller’s mon­i­tor, once she is under the water, reads the num­ber. Over four thou­sand 100-MeV pro­tons per square cen­time­ter per sec­ond, and ris­ing. A 100-MeV pro­ton trav­els at about forty per­cent of the speed of light. It los­es lit­tle ener­gy as it knocks elec­trons free. It leaves a line of ion­iza­tion through tis­sue — cell walls frac­tured, DNA bro­ken, the dam­age local to the track and still whole-body in the count. Radi­a­tion is a spacer’s worst ene­my. A CME is the worst of it.

Earth habits get peo­ple killed inside that win­dow. Grab the bag. Fin­ish the sen­tence. Doc reach­es for the radi­a­tion mon­i­tor, and Nils has to take her wrist. They tum­ble in one-sixth g. The mon­i­tor is the right instru­ment and the wrong sec­ond. Tilly Mas­ters is twen­ty min­utes from the near­est hatch in a crawler. Twen­ty is not eight. The clock ignores the fact that no one has set­tled the tab at Alex’s Bar. The most ener­getic par­ti­cles do not wait for a per­son still decid­ing whether the alarm is for them.

How It Works at Conrad

Con­rad does not stop the pro­tons. It puts mass between a body and the Sun. Regolith buried Hab D until it reached an effec­tive­ly under­ground posi­tion. Most of the station’s water sits in the room above the cel­lar. Water is the shield because it is already the con­sum­able — dense, hydro­gen-rich, and paid for. McPher­son clos­es the upper hatch and straps foam blocks over it. The foam is the habit from free space, where radi­a­tion arrives from all direc­tions. A solar pro­ton event is direc­tion­al. The floor foam does not help. The water over­head does.

Pow­er is solar-plus-bat­tery and irrel­e­vant to the pro­tons. Oxy­gen crack­ers and recy­clers keep run­ning, or they do not; the storm does not nego­ti­ate with the air bud­get. Seals keep the dust out. They do not stop 100 MeV par­ti­cles. A crawler has less mass than a buried hab and no water stack. It is a pres­sure ves­sel on wheels, not a shel­ter. The only way to reach Tilly is to accept a dose, or to leave her in the open. One good answer exists in the archi­tec­ture, and some­one already occu­pies it.

What Fails First

What fails first is any­one not under mass when the eight min­utes end. The sta­tion pop­u­la­tion makes it. Tilly does not. She is off the net­work. The retrans­mit finds her. She has twen­ty min­utes of trail and a med kit. Doc has her take what pain reliev­ers and stim­u­lants she is car­ry­ing and hopes she stays con­scious enough for a maneu­ver that is already an exper­i­ment. The mon­i­tor in the cel­lar is the source of truth. Four thou­sand and ris­ing is not a fore­cast. It is the room.

The three-day lag does not repair this. Earth can­not send a bet­ter shield or a sec­ond opin­ion that arrives before the ion­iza­tion tracks are in the tis­sue. The treat­ment, if there is one, is what Doc brought in the bag and what Nils can do with a crawler. The fail­ure mode is not a bro­ken recy­cler. It is a body that was twen­ty min­utes from the hatch when the light arrived.

When the alarm is the pho­tons and the pro­tons are eight min­utes behind them, who is still out­side the water?

Fur­ther Reading

• The Luna­dyne Inci­dent and Oth­er Sto­ries — “CME”
• Thun­der Moon Tussle
• Mask of the Joy­ful Moon
• Relat­ed site posts: Hard Tech & Sci­ence — Storm Cel­lar, Life on the Fron­tier — When the Alarm Sounds, Life on the Fron­tier — Solar Radi­a­tion, Hard Tech & Sci­ence — Retriev­ing the Rover

The Joy­ful Moon is still watch­ing…
and the mar­gins still have to hold.
— Torn MacAlester
Still rid­ing the trails with Nils, Gen, and the whole Fab­u­lae Lunae crew
🚀🌕

Stories The sto­ries of Torn MacAlester are sci­ence fic­tion, where the sci­ence is well-ground­ed. I inten­tion­al­ly made any devi­a­tions for spec­u­la­tive pur­pos­es. To main­tain max­i­mum real­ism, I restrict the scope of these deviations. Read More

Articles I write arti­cles of sci­ence fact and sci­ence fic­tion. The arti­cles here span the knowl­edge of mod­ern sci­ence and the spec­u­la­tions of fic­tion. I try to caveat every­thing that is an assump­tion. You will find arti­cles about space­flight, the pos­si­bil­i­ties of alien con­tact, and descrip­tions of tech­nol­o­gy used in my stories. Read More

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