Frontier Foundations — Trash Can Experiments

Fron­tier Foun­da­tions – Trash Can Experiments
How get­ting the trash cans set up eats pre­cious time

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

From the reader’s van­tage across the Fab­u­lae Lunae, oxy­gen always arrives as a promise before it arrives as air. Heat the rock. Crack the oxides. Call it in-situ resource uti­liza­tion and put a green light on it. Six­ty years before Annie Mac­In­turn­er stood a garbage can upright at Fra Mau­ro, the teams had already iden­ti­fied and dis­missed the water-vapor spikes on the Apol­lo instru­ments as con­t­a­m­i­na­tion brought by the crews and hard­ware. Both expla­na­tions felt inevitable. Under Con­rad Station’s boots, the inevitable part is the clock. A pro­to­type that was sup­posed to buy two weeks of breath in one week of sun­light first had to be unloaded, bal­anced, aimed, and believed by two peo­ple whose EVA was already late.

The Detection / The First Lesson

The Suprather­mal Ion Detec­tor Exper­i­ment at the Apol­lo 14 ALSEP site did not record a sin­gle odd hour and then go qui­et. Milt John­son has the reports. The sig­na­ture came back a few weeks lat­er. That sec­ond pass con­vinced the peo­ple read­ing the tapes that the water had come from some­thing left behind — a mod­el of seis­mic activ­i­ty out­gassing ground­wa­ter, writ­ten up at the time, tidy enough to close the fold­er. Annie hears it and agrees. Some­thing left on the sur­face could have made the sig­na­ture. It makes sense.

It makes sense because the Moon had already taught every­one to dis­trust a water line. Suits out­gas. Descent stages out­gas. A fresh exper­i­ment out­gasses. Fra Mau­ro is not spe­cial until some­one checks the oth­er sites and can­not find the same detec­tion on the oth­er pack­ages. Milt’s case, the one that earns him the seat, is that small: either Apol­lo 14 left it, or the region did. The answer is only at Fra Mau­ro. An ear­ly moon­quake on the sur­face seis­mo­graphs sits in the same fold­er. Lat­er, before the flight, Nils will say the qui­et part in the room — ice in the sky­light under Cone, sun­light warm­ing it just enough for a slight out­gassing of water vapor, and the SIDE close enough to taste it. Annie does not need that speech to feel the first les­son. The offi­cial expla­na­tion was not a cov­er. It was the expla­na­tion a care­ful per­son would have writ­ten. Care­ful is how a real sig­nal gets parked next to the trash.

The Local Problem

EVA one at Fra Mau­ro is not the SIDE and not the golf ball. It is the exper­i­ment cans.

They come off a six-wheeled crawler in fifty-gal­lon-drum pack­ages, the same size a read­er can pic­ture in a shop and the wrong size for one-sixth grav­i­ty. Train­ing had the set­up in three or four hours. Annie and Milt start the work at hour five. She takes the soil-min­er­al­o­gy can because it is hers to take, and it knocks her off her feet. On the Moon, it weighs thir­ty pounds. The mass is anoth­er mat­ter — close to her own, top-heavy, off-cen­ter, car­ry­ing iner­tia the sim­u­la­tor nev­er quite built into the train­ing arti­cle. She will not hand it to the rook­ie. She tells Cy, Cap­com and her hus­band, to have the exper­i­ment design team make a note: hard­ware this close to a suit­ed body’s mass is a bad idea. He offers to have them shined up. She shoves the can upright, anyway.

Putting the can upright is not the exper­i­ment. It is nec­es­sary to take out the anten­na. The solar array has to come out. To break oxy­gen out of the rock, the cham­ber needs to be ready to draw in lunar soil and use sun­light. The design point is blunt enough to bud­get against: one week of oper­a­tion, a two-week sup­ply of oxy­gen, the first hon­est pro­to­type of air that does not have to ride up from Earth with the crew. They are leav­ing hard­ware the way Shep­ard and Mitchell left hard­ware six­ty years ear­li­er, except these cans are sup­posed to breathe, and they run on solar pow­er and new­er elec­tron­ics instead of the old radioiso­tope quiet.

Tan­go-Char­lie-Six gives her a green light. That is not teleme­try. Teleme­try is Cy, after the two-sec­ond speed-of-light delay, read­ing a link that has to hop. TC1 sits a dozen meters off with its anten­na unfurled toward Earth. TC6 has to find TC1 over a local Wi-Fi before Earth ever sees the cham­ber. If that hop fails, she reboots the can and spends more of the hour. Antares is fif­teen hun­dred meters south on a rise, gold foil giv­ing the descent stage away. Steam­boat, their own lan­der, sits some thir­teen hun­dred meters from that rel­ic. The his­toric site is in sight the whole time they are teach­ing a trash can to make air. Every minute on the array is a minute not on the SIDE, not on the rim of Cone, not back inside the crawler with the suit still hold­ing mar­gin. The green light does not give the hour back.

High­land ground is not a gen­er­ous rare earth deposit. Fra Mau­ro is ejec­ta and brec­cia, not a mare basalt bench where the iron oxides look friend­ly on a chart. The can does not get to pick a bet­ter pit. It gets the soil under Annie’s boots, sun­light, and a week. If the pro­to­type can­not do the job here, the lat­er sta­tions do not get to pre­tend the chem­istry was the straight­for­ward part.

What Still Follows

Con­rad Sta­tion does not run on a green light from Fra Mau­ro. The habs — the ear­ly, incom­plete clus­ter, mod­ules scarred and patched, pow­er still an argu­ment — live on buffers. Air. Water. The watt that keeps a proces­sor hot enough to mat­ter. A can that need­ed an hour of EVA to stand up is the ances­tor of every extrac­tor a prospec­tor will lat­er swear is about to pay off. The same regolith still has to be moved, heat­ed, and trust­ed before any­one stakes a claim or sells Luna­dyne a mar­gin. Water remains the oth­er half of the fold­er Milt would not let close: detect­ed, dis­missed, pos­si­bly wait­ing in a cold trap, def­i­nite­ly want­ed by any­one who would rather not fly it from Earth.

The three-day lag is the part the pro­to­type nev­er had to face. Cy could answer in two sec­onds. A failed proces­sor under Con­rad is not a cap­com call. Earth is three days out, and the tanks do not care that a design review once promised two weeks of oxy­gen for a week of sun. Milt, who helped stand the cans and who talked Annie into Fra Mau­ro with a miss­ing detec­tion, lat­er walks those trails with Nils Carmike. The part­ner­ship in Thun­der Moon Tus­sle car­ries the argu­ment with it — what the SIDE actu­al­ly saw, what a cham­ber can pull out of high­land soil, what you do when the hour is already gone and the light is still the only proof. Years lat­er, Gen Miller man­ages the sta­tion that those cans enabled. She does not inher­it the hour.

They got the trash cans set out. They called it a day. The day was short­er than the flight plan, and the air was still a promise sit­ting in a drum with an anten­na point­ed at Earth.

If a week of sun­light was the price of two weeks of breath at Fra Mau­ro, what is actu­al­ly in Conrad’s tanks when the Sun goes down?

---

Fur­ther Reading

• The Luna­dyne Inci­dent and Oth­er Sto­ries — “Golf and Outgassing”
• Thun­der Moon Tussle
• Mask of the Joy­ful Moon
• Relat­ed site posts: Fron­tier Foun­da­tions — The Land­ing at Fra Mau­ro, The Water Econ­o­my, EVA Real­i­ty, The Three-Day Lag, Fron­tier Foun­da­tions — Dark Craters

The Joy­ful Moon is still watching…
and some shad­ows still hold water.

— Torn MacAlester
Still rid­ing the trails with Nils, Gen, and the whole Fab­u­lae Lunae crew