The Martian

Mind you, it hasn’t been that bad. I’m well in to Terra Meridiani now, and the driving is a little easier here than the rugged ass-kicking terrain of Arabia Terra. Schiaparelli is almost due east, and if my sextant and Phobos calculations are correct, I’ve got another 1030km to get there.

Accounting for air days and presuming 90km of travel per sol, I should arrive on Sol 505. Not too bad, really. The Nearly-Mark-Killin’ storm only ended up delaying me by 7 sols.

I’ll still have 44 sols to do whatever MAV modifications NASA has in mind.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 487

I have an interesting opportunity here. And by “opportunity” I mean Opportunity.

I got pushed so far off course, I’m actually not far from the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. It’s about 300km away. I could actually get there and pull a Pathfinder on it. It would take about 4 sols.

Thing is, it’s not worth it. I’m only 13 sols away from the MAV. Why go out of my way to dig up another broken-ass rover to use as a makeshift radio when I’ll have a brand new, fully functional communication system within a couple of weeks.

So, while it’s kind of neat that I’m within striking range of another rover (man we really littered this planet with them, didn’t we?) it’s not relevant.

Besides, I’ve defiled enough future historical sites for now.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 492

I need to put some thought in to the bedroom.

Right now, I can only have it set up when I’m inside the rover. It attaches to the airlock, so I can’t get out if it’s there. During my road trip that didn’t matter, because I had to furl it every day anyway. But once I get to the MAV, I won’t have to drive around anymore. Each decompress/recompress of the bedroom stresses the seams (I learned that lesson the hard way when the Hab blew up) so it’s best if I can find a way to leave it out.

Holy shit. I just realized I actually believe I’ll get to the MAV. See what I did there? I casually talked about what I’ll do after I get to the MAV. Like it was nothing. No big deal. I’m just going to pop over to Schiaparelli and hang with the MAV there.

Nice.

Anyway, I don’t have another airlock. I’ve got one on the rover and one on the trailer and that’s it. They’re firmly fixed in place, so it’s not like I can detach one and attach it to the bedroom.

But I can seal the bedroom entirely. I don’t even have to do any bullshit hatchet jobs on it. The airlock attachment point has a flap I can unroll seal the opening with. Remember, I stole the airlock attachment from a pop-tent. It’s an emergency feature for pressure loss while in the rover. It’d be pretty useless if it couldn’t seal itself off.

Unfortunately, as an emergency device, it was never intended to be reusable. The idea was people seal themselves in the pop tent, then the rest of the crew drives to wherever they are in the other rover and rescues them. The crew of the good rover detaches the pop tent from the breached rover, and re-attaches it to theirs. Then they cut through the seal from their side to recover their crewmates.

To make sure this would always be an option, mission rules dictated no more than 3 people could be in a rover at once, and both rovers had to be fully functional or we couldn’t use either.

So here’s my brilliant plan: I won’t use the bedroom as a bedroom anymore once I get to the MAV. I’ll use it to house the Oxygenator and Atmospheric Regulator. Then I’ll use the trailer as my bedroom. Neat, eh?

The trailer has tons of space. I put a fuckton of work in to making that happen. The balloon gives plenty of headroom. Not a lot of floor space, but still lots of vertical area.

Also, the bedroom has several valve apertures in its canvas. I have the pop-tents to thank for that again. I just needed swaths of canvas so I stole it from wherever I could. I stole a lot from the pop tents, and they had valve apertures (triple redundant ones, actually). NASA wanted to make sure the emergency shelter allows the crew on the outside to get air in to the crew on the inside.

In the end, I’ll have the bedroom sealed with the Oxygenator and Atmospheric Regulator inside. It’ll be attached to the trailer via hoses to share the same atmosphere and I’ll run a power line through one of the hoses. The rover will serve as storage (because I won’t need to get to the driving controls any more) and the trailer will be completely empty. Then I’ll have a permanent bedroom. I’ll even be able to use it as a workshop for whatever MAV modifications I need to do on parts that can fit through the trailer’s airlock.

Of course, if the Atmospheric Regulator or Oxygenator have problems, I’ll need to cut in to the bedroom to get to them. But I’ve been here 492 sols and they’ve worked fine the whole time, so I’ll take that risk.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 497

I’ll be at the entrance to Schiaparelli crater tomorrow!

Presuming nothing goes wrong, that is. But hey, everything else has gone smoothly this mission, right? (That was sarcasm.)