To the Pain

There's an exchange in "The Princess Bride" between Wesley and the Prince that goes along the lines of
Prince "To the death"
Wesley "No, to the Pain."
And that's what this weekend has been like.  To the pain.  Not that at my age I don't expect pain.  Joints and such have been used and abused beyond design standards, and then there's things like falling out of helicopters and other bits of adventure over the last few years.  So pain is something I've learned to live with over the years.  Until recently.  Late in December, my back decided that it had had enough, and two of the vertebrae started rubbing the nerves on the right side. So, I live with constant pain in my right leg.  Usually around the hip, but on extra special days it can extend from mid back to my foot.  Which makes simple things like walking, sitting, standing or even laying down all kinds of fun.  Or, it can lead to things like walking along and loosing the feeling in my leg.  Which is somewhat disquieting when one is near a wall.  When one is in the middle of a room with nothing to grab onto, its an indescribable feeling.  So, I've gotten used to carrying a cane.  No that that always helps.  There are things one simply cannot do while encumbered with a cane.
But we're talking about pain.  It comes in three flavors - dull, throbbie constant, what I call transient pains and fire.  Dull throbbie constant is just that - the pain that is there day in and day out regardless of the meds I take or the levels I take them at.  Pain meds take the edge off and let me move.  That's about it.  Its still there in the back of my mind, affecting everything I do.  Try to stand up?  Not so fast there camper.  The throbbie pain is now the up yours pain.  So, last year where I could just stand and do, now I have to plan things out.  This is especially true of lying in bed - transitioning from horizontal to vertical means planning and being prepared to have some part of my lower body tell me that its done, frag it. 
Then there's the transients.  Sharp shooting pains that appear, leave their love and go.  Imagine if you will, being stung by a bee and hit with a hammer at exactly the same time on the exact same spot.  Fun right?  Along with instant pain, with the transients I get leg jerks and twitching skin.  Twitching skin, I can hear you asking.  Yup, twitching skin.  The skin feels like its twitching.  This makes waking up at zero dark thirty in the morning with your skin twitching a new experience - I wake up feeling like I'm in a horror film, looking about for the strange Japanese chick from the DVD I watched that I shouldn't have to come and drown me. 
Neither of these hold a candle to fire however.  Have you ever seen a raspberry cane?  The vine that raspberries grow on is covered in fine little thorns.  Imagine that made from stainless steel, and dipped in the oil from a jar of jalapeno peppers.  Wrap it around your leg and attach a motor that causes the wires to tension up and dig into your leg at completely random times during the day or night.  And then add in a transient or three in the same area.  It gets distracting fast.
Why am I talking about this?  In part because I keep getting asked when I'm coming back to work.  Easy answer to that is when the doctor says I can - as a side note, I've been told that the best thing that can be done is surgery.  But, because I'm on the large side, it can't be done right now.  The doc's response to my question well, how do I exercise when I cant move that well.  His response?  Bariatric Surgery.  That's so very helpful.  People wonder why folks don't want to go see doctors.  And in part because some days I don't have the energy to write - which is why this is a bit late.  Such is life.

Knowing is half the battle. . . or something like that.

So, you're planning on starting a space colony.  Or, in my case, writing about one.  What kind of things should you take into consideration?
There are things that I'm going to take as a given.  The technology exists to create said colony.  The desire to establish said colony exists.  And we're not talking about a lot of handwavium to make the physics work.
So, we start with local (Sol System) colonies.  Where to colonize first?  The moon makes a lot of sense, even if she is a bit of a harsh mistress.  Upsides to colonizing the moon - its close.  There's a lot of aluminium in the lunar crust for construction.  And there's more helium 3 there than anywhere else close.  Helium 3 is important for fusion reactors, so if you're writing sci-fi its a good thing to have on hand.  Downsides - not a lot of water.  Water is key to earth based life.  So, you can either lift it out of the gravity well on earth (expensive given current technology, and probably not going to get cheaper anytime soon) or hand wave up a way to make it from the oxygen and hydrogen bound in the lunar crust.  But you've got to have it.

So if not the moon, how about Mars.  Mars has water, higher gravity levels and a slight atmosphere, all of which are advantages over the moon.  On the downside, rather than a trip of around 4 days give or take, you're looking at a minimum of seven months on a ship headed to Mars.  That's double (give or take) the time it took Columbus to get from Spain to the Caribbean.  Now, we have experience with long term missions in small metal tubes at this point - US Navy Submarines go out for six months at a time or longer on a regular basis.  One difference would be that you can't pull up to the Sub Tender at the half way point to Mars and say "Fill us up on beans and O2 please.  We've got another three months to go."  So, you've got to haul everything with you, including supplies for the return trip.  Even if you're going to colonize Mars, you're going to want the ship back - its cheaper to reuse what you've got rather than one shot the mission.  If, of course you can avoid the Paradox that was the Space Shuttle.  In my opinion, though, a lot of the cost issues with the shuttle and lack of missions was due to a lack of national will to move forward with the concept of moving people into space.  We lost the will when we reached the moon.

Next time we'll talk about why you want to take a large number of people to your proto colony.  And animals, and plants.

Been a bit out of it for the last couple of days.  So just going to leave a snippet here today.

Just after Conestoga et al left orbit, but before the arrival of the group headed by Sheppard, I got pulled off groundside work and sent back up into orbit to help get De Ruyter Station set up.  The Admiral had already changed her orientation to the planet, and once we got the modules on her reconfigured, she’d start spinning in order set up artificial gravity for the crew who’d be pulling shifts on board.

With a logistics crew of ten, six women and four men, I reported to the hut that was designated for orbital operations. There were a few others besides logistics folks going up, because there were about twenty people total in the ops hut.  Most of the others I knew in passing from training or had worked with while we were loading out for the mission.  With just over one hundred people on the first mission, we were a group that pretty much knew each other.  Prescott Harrison and his pal Bobby from Ride were there, waiting with their suit bags.  At this point in the mission, the suit bags were pretty much the only luggage we had, so they went everywhere with us. 

“Pete, my man.  You get a chance to look into what we discussed?”

“Yeah.  Put it in my report.  Right now the report is still sealed though, waiting on final approval from Mission Control on Earth,” I said, dropping my bag to the deck.  I’d looked into his complaints.  Almost all of them had to do with how he was treated, quality of food on Ride, overwork and under pay, and so forth.  Out of the 327 complaints he had filed with HR by turnover, I found none legitimate.  HR didn’t either, but from what one of the guys in HR told me, that didn’t keep him from filing complaints.  He actually complained that one of the other guys in his section had poor hygiene habits on a low water ship.  Some folks just look for things to bitch about, I guess.

“I understand.  Look man, me and Bobby here are going up to the Admiral.  You on that team as well?”

We hadn’t helmeted up yet.  I raised my right eyebrow at him and gestured at my suit.  “No, just thought I’d get all dressed up formal like and wander around on my off time.”

“Uh . . . ok,” he said, giving me a look most people reserve for someone whose sanity is questionable.

At this point we didn’t have a lot of down time – we were mostly pulling twelve hour days seven days a week – you could get down time for religious reasons, and most of us took one day in fourteen “off”.  Most people spent that time in their quarters, because except for suiting up and wandering around outside (which wasn’t encouraged in groups of less than three for safety reasons) there wasn’t one hell of a lot to do.

I was saved from further conversation when the crew from the shuttle came wandering over. 

“You guys headed up to the Admiral this morning,” one of them said, looking at a tablet.

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m Brumbar.  He’s Harrison, and this is Bobby. . .”

“Robert Flack.”

“Dave Jones.  Glad to meet you guys.  I’m loadmaster on this trip, so dump your bags out on the table over there and we’ll poke through them then get em over to the can so they don’t depressurize on the way to orbit.”

“Poke through them,” Flack asked as we headed over to the table.

“Yeah,” Jones said, “things in orbit are a bit tight right now – we’re shorthanded with everyone down here working dirtside, and we’re enforcing dry ship rules on De Ruyter so we can get work done in the minimum amount of time.”

“I see,” Harrison said, surreptitiously opening his bag and pulling a bottle of “mouth wash” out and tossing it at the recycle bin. 

Jones raised an eyebrow at me and gave me a half assed grin.  He didn’t find anything questionable in Flack’s gear.  I waited while Flack repacked everything, then dumped my bag out.  Since all I was carrying was my tablet, toothbrush, and a few clothing items, it took even less time to go through my stuff than it had Flacks.  I flipped everything back in, then tossed the bag over in the can that was going to ride up to orbit. 

Harrison dumped his gear on the table.  There was a lot of stuff there.  Multiple changes of clothes, two tablets, and a box with what I can only describe as a pharmacy – there were more pills there than I had seen in one place outside a ships sick bay since we left Earth. 

“They’re all legal,” he said “Mostly analgesic pain killers and some anti nausiants.”

“Yeah, I see that,” Jones said, “but do you need so damn many?”

“Well, they didn’t tell us how long we’d be in orbit, so I erred on the side of caution.”

“Ok.  Pack this shit back up and toss it in the can then,” Jones said, looking at Harrison and pointing with his thumb.

“Right folks, let’s get this brief underway,” a second figure said, stepping out of a small room at the rear of the shack.  We all gathered around him.

“My name is Francis Turner, and I’ll be your captain for this flight.  Please be aware that this is a no smoking flight, and there will not be a meal service, so if you’re hungry grab something now.  Otherwise you’ll be waiting till we get over to the Admiral.”  He tossed around some hard copy checklists.

“Hang onto those and review them on the way up.  In the event of a water landing, be prepared to be surprised, cause that means we’ve fallen through a wormhole and, in the words of Dorothy, are no longer in Kansas.  We’ll be going up under pressure, so once we get everything sealed, you can take your helmets off and stow them.  However, in the event of a cabin loss of pressure incident, be ready to jam that bad boy back on while breathing out so your lungs don’t turn to jelly.”

We were all chuckling at this point.

“We’ll be travelling to orbit.  This may cause some of you some distress when we first take off, as I plan to do a fast burn.  You may actually feel briefly like you’re back on Earth, and some passengers have indicated that this causes a desire to evacuate their intestinal tract by the fastest means available.  We ask that you puke in the bags provided, otherwise Mr. Jones over there has to clean the crew cabin, and he hates cleaning puke out of the air filters.”

“Gets in ma hair,” Jones said, running his hand over his shaven head.

“Any questions?  Good.  Got any spare answers floating around out there?  No?  Well, get your helmets on and over to the transfer vehicle.  We’ll be leaving via the west airlock.  See you on board.”

I slid my helmet on and then checked the seal, and made sure the bottle was connected.  One of the ground ops guys came over and checked us all out, then led us to the west air lock.  It was connected directly to the airlock on the truck that would haul us across the field to the shuttle.  I grabbed a seat at the rear of the truck and waited a few minutes while everyone else filtered on.

Jones did a head count, signed off on the ground tech’s tablet and grabbed a seat next to me.

“Brumbar, right?”

“Yeah.  Must be.  Says so right here on my suit.  Otherwise I’m wearing his shit,” I said, grinning.

“Smart ass.”

“So they tell me.  How can I help you Mr. Jones?”

“Please call me Dave.”

“Not sure that I can do that Dave.”

“Funny.  Anyway, how well you know Harrison?”

“Met him in Houston, then ran into him on Ride after the trial, why?”

“Skipper thinks he’s being sent up to the Admiral to be somebody else’s problem.  You’re the only name that the Admiral herself commented on.  She said she’s glad you’ll be coming up, and she’s looking forward to continuing your discussion from before.”

“Figures.  Going to be defending my thesis again against an AI,” I said, shaking my head.

“So, anyway, based on her glowing recommendation, the Skipper wants you to be in charge of this motley crew.”

“More no good deed goes unpunished rewards?”

“Something like that.  You up for it?”

“Sure.  Someone’s got to do it, and I really don’t want to listen to Harrison bossing us around.”

            “Good point.  I’ll let the boss know you said yes.”

            We crawled across the field to the shuttle, where a tech hooked the flexible airlock to the truck.  We crossed over to the shuttle and found seats in the crew area.  This shuttle was one of the personnel only birds – designed to haul crew and their equipment to and from orbit, rather than one of the larger cargo shuttles that were landing and taking off over on the north side of the field.

            The shuttle itself was an oblate lifting body design, with canards and a fin for control in atmosphere.  Thrusters hung on the end of the ship like an afterthought, destroying the otherwise sleek lines that screamed power.  The only things breaking the overall black color scheme were the tail numbers of the bird – TD59847556. 

            Once on board, we settled in our seats, and Jones came through and checked that we were all strapped in. 

            The woman seated to my right offered her hand.  “Stephanie Baxter.”

            “Pete Brumbar.”

            “I’ve heard of you,” she said, settling into her seat. 

            “Yeah, I’ve had people say that before,” I said, grinning as I slid my helmet under the seat.

            “Nice.  Must be nice to be famous,” she said, squirming down into her seat.

            “Not really.  But it does get me into all the best clubs.”

            “So, you going up to run a pod?”

            “Yeah, you?”

            “Commo tech.  I get to bring the Admiral’s full suite of commo gear on line.  Should be interesting.”

            “Whyso?”

            “The Admiral tends to be a bit . . . pedantic.”

            “Tell me about it.  When we were finishing her load out, I spent hours defending my master’s thesis from her.”

            “I imagine that was less than fun.”

            “Yeah, she had access to the entire web at that point, and I was working from memory.  I will give her this much, she’s made a hell of a study in her spare cycles of modern naval development.”

            Laughing, she said, “Well, then, you can keep her distracted while I work.”

            “Probably so,” I said grinning.

            “Ladies and gentle beings,” Jones’s voice came over the speaker, “welcome aboard MarsAir Flight One to orbit.  We’ll be taking off shortly, and the Captain asks that you please return your seat backs to the upright position, and stow your tray tables.”

            The seats were stiff backed and didn’t move.  The closest thing we had to a tray table was a set of clips on the back of the seat in front of us for holding drink bulbs and food packages.

            “You’ll note the captain has lit the no smoking sign.  If you notice any smoking on this flight, please let the crew know, because it means something has gone the hell wrong and we need to know.  In the event of a loss of pressure during flight, make sure that you put your damn helmet on, cause the only thing worse than cleaning puke up is cleaning up freeze dried blood.”

            We were all chuckling at this point, except for Flack, who had turned a shade of green not seen outside of 1970’s home furnishings, and was looking for the vomit bags. 

            “Like the skipper said, in the event of a water landing, we’re no longer in Kansas.  I’m personally going to be looking for the White Rabbit to find our way home.  You can do as you wish at that point.  And now, I’m going to leave this channel open so you can listen to the Skipper negotiate with ground control for our release so we can go to work.”

            The voice shifted, and Captain Turner came on line.

            “Ops, this is Tweedle Dee, requesting permission to taxi to the lift point.”

            “Tweedle Dee, Ops, you’re cleared to taxi.”

Missing days

Sorry this is late.  I'm trying to update on a regular basis (Saturday's and Wednesday's) but yesterday I had to go visit the neurologist and get stuck and electrocuted.  Several times.

But, lets talk stupidity today.

The US Trademark Commission has once again stripped protection from the Washington Redskins because the term "Redskin" is "disparaging to Native Americans".  Everyone is freaking out and blaming the current President and his policies.  I hate to point this out folks, but this has been going on for twenty two years.  The Redskins first lost the trademark protection for the same reason in 1992.  It was then reinstated because of a technicality.  Nineteen ninety two.  The current President wasn't even a member of Congress when they first lost the protection of the trademark.  So, was it Bill Clinton's ebil minions in the Patent Office that first removed the protections?

Level two stupidity. 

Iraq is all Obama's fault.  We went into a country with no experience being a country with a democratically elected government (well, Sadam was elected, but when he's the only choice how democratic can that be?) and expected the locals to understand you have to love each other and work together.  In a society that is barely above the tribal level, we tried to institute the nation state in one fell swoop.  Not going to happen.  Now, we're upset that it didn't work, and its insert national figure here.  Does the Bush/Cheney regiem have culpability here?  Yes.  But so do the Democrats who pushed for us to get the hell out as quickly as possible.  Wait, they did that?  Yeah.  They did.  But we forget that in our rush to blame Bush for everything that has gone wrong since the year 2000.  It has to be Bush's fault, right?  The fact that before we left the Shia leadership in Iraq was at least playing with the Sunni's because we were there to make sure they did, and that once we pulled out as supported by millions of folks who are now screaming about the wasted money and lives in Iraq and how we should have stayed (some of the same folks who were saying its their country let them run it at the time) should surprise no one - the only thing keeping the Shia from getting revenge on the Sunni minority that had ruled the country for the last 40 or so years was the US military.  I actually saw a right wing talking head today try to say that things were better in Iraq under the Ottoman Turks because the Iraqi's were in their separate regions.  Leaving out of course the Turks habit of smashing the living crap out of anyone who started shit. 

Stupid level Epic.

There's a huge kerfluffle in Sci Fi these days - the followers of proper group think are up in arms again because people who think that you have the right to defend yourself, and should be prepared to do so.  Sure, teach people that Rape is bad, but if that's your only defense against being raped, you're not facing reality.  But telling someone to be prepared or learn to defend yourself is bad, mkay?  That violates all good groupthink and you should report for proper re-education right away if you think that part of being human is being prepared for the situtation.

Arya upon hearing the IRS had lost a years worth of Emails.

So, the IRS wants us to believe that they "lost" two years worth of emails, due to a computer "crash".  I picture the IRS official who informed Congress of this using finger quotes.  Because it doesn't pass the reality test.  They might have gotten away with this thirty or forty years ago, when computers were magic devices that no one understood except for programmers (come to think of it, given my experience with the so called most wired generation in history, they might still get away with it) but not today when most people understand how email works.

But, lets look at how the government makes entities that work with it keep records of email traffic, because i have experience with that.  When I worked in Iraq, the government made us keep records of every transaction we performed on an "official" computer (those hooked into the Big Contractor's Network).  How pervasive was this you ask?  To print a document on my printer that was three feet away, I had to send a signal to the server on base.  That signal would go to the uplink on base and from there a satellite, then down to a server farm in the UAE, back to space, down to a server farm in the UK, back to space, then down to a server farm in Houston, where it is to be stored for ten years.  Then the same signal had to make the return trip.  Normally there was no lag time - but the point is, we were storing things on at least three servers.  Now, the IRS says they can find 67000 emails from 2009 - 2013 - except the critical emails from 2011.  If I told the IRS sorry, I can find my records from 2010 but not 2011, take my word for it there's nothing actionable tax wise in that year, they'd be all over it like stink on excrement.  To me it sounds like they're trying to hide the diamonds in the dross - they've been dragging this investigation out saying its a politcally motivated witch hunt, yet every time we turn around there's more data that somehow appears. 

One Week In.

Its been a week that falls under the heading "interesting times".  But, I'm not really going to comment on world events - those are getting enough coverage elsewhere.
Its starting to get warm here.  Of course, its time for the yearly "OMG its so hot!" commentary on the news and by everyone I know.  We go through this every year this time.  Perhaps I'm a bit weird, but when it hits June in Texas, I expect the temperature to go over 100 degrees.  It happens every year about this time.  But for some reason, people seem shocked that it gets hot in Texas in June.  This is the land that Phil Sheridan offered to abandon in favor of Hell - Hell having a more salubrious climate in Sheridan's opinion.  But for some reason, normal weather is unexpected.
The project, which now lives under the title "Martian Aria" has reached 53000 Words.  At this rate, I should be finishing it up and getting it ready for the Beta readers by the end of the month - I've had to go see the doc last week and have to go again next week, and that kinda kills the mood for writing for a day or so.  But, the end is in site (in about 20000 words or so) and the next idea is already forcing its way forward in me brain.  Space Horse Opera, anyone?

Today's snippet -  for your perusal, of course:

“Gear is down and locked.  Horizontal speed is zero.  Vertical speed is zero.  We are hovering at eight meters . . . seven meters . . . six meters . . . five meters . . . we are in ground effect, cutting thrust . . . thrust down to fifty five percent . . . three meters . . . two meters . . . one meter. . . CONTACT!  Burroughs base here, Vostok has landed.”

A roar of applause went through Gagarin, and the tapes show the same happening on Ride.  From what I’ve seen, the same thing happened eight minutes later on Earth when the signal hit ya’ll there. 

“Gagarin Ops to Vostok.  We show you as down.  Congratulations.”

“Thank you Ops.  We’re going to grab a bite to give things a chance to cool off, then we’ll pop a hatch and see how things look.”

“Roger that Vostok.”

We waited.  I fiddled around, and I’m pretty sure everyone else did the same.  We were waiting for the hatch pop and the first step.  The really odd part about the “first step” was that as soon as the second person hit the surface, they were going to turn and make a plaster cast (well, it was a high tech polymer that could be mixed as a liquid and would harden rapidly into a cast, but we called it plaster – humans are linguistically lazy.) of that first step.  Why?  Because when Vostok lifted off on her return trip to Gagarin, that foot print would be obliterated by the thrust, and we wanted it for the future generations.  Or the PR value.  You decide.

Forty five minutes or so later, we all watched as the ramp on the Vostok went down.  The camera’s perspective changed to that of Commander Frank’s chest camera.  We all watched as he went to end of the ramp and paused.  With a flourish, he stepped one foot off the ramp, following it with the other.

“That’s . . . oh shit!”  He apparently had missed a fist sized rock at the bottom of the ramp and stepped on it, causing him to stumble.  We watched as his hands flashed forward as he attempted to keep his balance and he stumbled about ten to fifteen feet forward.  His historical speech for the ages was shot to hell and he knew it.  Once he regained his balance, you could hear the humor in his voice as he said, “Well, we’re here.  Let’s get the show on the road.”