There was a scheme to observe major solar events like spots and fl Ares from the two widely separate vantage points of Ares and Earth, and so there was a whole bunch of instruments which would be directed at the sun: a coronagraph, a spectroheliograph, a spectrographic telescope. The lox tank was used to hold stores, and with its thicker walls it would serve as the crew's storm shelter-shielding them from solar fl ares, if any blew up in the course of the mission.Īnd the top level, closest to the prow of the Ares cluster, was the Science Platform. She could hear the hum and whir of the Mission Module's equipment, and the occasional automatic burn of the attitude clusters as they kept Ares pointing sunward. It was all to drum up interest and enthusiasm for Ares, to allow the great American public to see what they were paying for. Later in the mission-when Ares had burned off its fuel, reducing its mass-the acceleration of the MS-II would be a lot tougher. The rest of the Ares stack-the Mission Module, MEM, and Apollo-would be docked onto the front of the MS-IVB to complete the assembly of the first Mars ship, a needle well over three hundred feet long. The supplementary tanks carried more than two million pounds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, propellant Ares would need to break clear of Earth orbit. The brief burns were placing Ares on segments of successively wider orbits.

The clouds thickened toward the equator, and when she looked ahead, tangential to the Earth's surface, she could see them climbing up into the atmosphere, as if Ares was heading for a wall of vapor. There were scraps of notes, from the crew to themselves, and emergency checklists, and hundreds of tiny round-cornered squ ares of blue Velcro stuck to the walls.

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