Around the Solar System in 80 Days

Day 5: Moon Landings

After collecting together our assortment of gear, we manage to squeeze into the CEO’s Deltaglider. Apart from Jay’s handheld camera that he uses for situations where it’s impossible to use the full size beast, all of our luggage is to be packed into crates from the Universal Cargo Company, the second commercial giant that keeps the human part of the solar system running. Deltagliders tend to be considered workhorses of the space-ship world, hardy pack-horses that can get jobs done efficiently, quickly, and at minimal cost, zipping around delivering, servicing and placing in orbit like large triangular hoverflies. Of course, all of that tends to mean no expense spared in the passenger comfort department. Unsurprisingly, not so with Simpson’s private Deltaglider. Using a fairly large chunk of his company’s data streaming systems, he has full HD and 3D television channels piped directly to any vehicle that he happens to be in, allowing him to keep up with all his favourite programs, be he orbiting Jupiter or landing on the moon.

On screen today is a 20th century TV program, a program that actually means a lot to this small, crazy bunch of planet-farers. Michael’s Palin’s “Around the World In 80 Days” was the first replication of Verne’s world-spanning idea. A comedian turned globe trotter, he showed how it was possible to see the world without suffering from how travel “shrink-wraps the world leaving it small, odourless, tidy and usually out of sight.” The solar system is a lot bigger than the planet we call home, but still, modern spaceflight has indeed shrunk the place down to something less glamorous, less beautiful, less awe inspiring than it really should be. It’s a telling point that, despite being in space for just under a week now, I’ve had very few opportunities to stop, admire and gaze the surrounding splendour that is our Universe. Modern space stations have no cosy corners with handy cupolas to look out of, somewhere to be out of the way and not bothered. Nowadays, you’re either lost, selling something, or trying to catch a Star-liner. There’s no alternative.

Today’s BBC-sponsored dromomaniacs are now heading for the most important lunar colony that currently exists. Brighton Beach, perched on the shore of the Bay of Rainbows, the Sinus Iridium, contains the first permanent buildings ever constructed on the Moon, and is a major traffic hub, especially for the tourism and trade industries. Helicorp has a prime floor-space office complex on the first floor (counting down from the surface), a large private landing pad complex and a 75 percent share in the monorail system that links the main ingress tower to the power plant. Rumour has it that it was Helicorp’s influence that got major competitor ReFuel’s pad complex shifted to the much less glamorous North side in order to make way for the monorail.

We touchdown smoothly, and suddenly feel the strange sensation of gravity again, the first time in days. Not proper gravity, of course, just a strange, weak and false version of that inescapable force that dominates everyday life. After crawling through the exit tube from the Deltaglider’s nosecone and into a temporary inflatable airtight corridor, we bid farewell to Simpson before he is engulfed by an entourage of assistants, secretaries and Colony staff and hurried away to his own private apartments. We are left alone.

I, Helen, and Jay; we are travellers, not tourists. Travellers are a different breed to any other people who pass through a place. They visit, they pass through, and they are gone. They don’t hang about. They don’t raid gift shops. They don’t buy T-shirts. So it is, that travellers tend to be left alone in quiet, lonely corridors of lunar colonies, abandoned to find their own way to the elevators, struggle with their own hefty load of film-crew gear, and spend several hours blundering around in circles, deep beneath the lunar regolith, searching for a bed for the night.

Luckily, before anyone gets too philosophical, we accidently bump into a McDonalds, somewhere on the massively extensive level U3 South. It’s dark, cold, pokey, and the food tastes awful after such a long day. But somehow, here’s the perfect place to end such a strange day, in the most distant restaurant from home, which, by now, must be a small blue orb floating on nothing in a dark and black sky.