‘Good Morning, and welcome to the Museum of Interplanetary Science here at the headquarters of the Space Foundation. You will now be taken on a virtual reality tour of the Daedalus spacecraft, mankind’s first crew-based extra-solar vehicle. During the next hour, you will learn all about how this wonderful spaceship functions, and what this unprecedented mission will involve. Please lower your helmet visors now.
‘Construction on the beautiful and impressive Daedalus spacecraft was completed in the year 2056. The ship measures a kilometre long on its horizontal axis and it is made up of four component modules.
‘In front of you now is the Command Module, an area divided into three colour-coded areas. Red for Navigation, Green for Communications and Blue for Systems. It is here that the crew performs all mission-related functions.
‘Behind the Command Module is the Science Module, which contains a miniature microgravity lab and a cache of bio-safety equipment. There is, after all, a possibility that biological organisms could violate the Daedalus. Organisms that are alien to us and may need to be contained. Science Officer Harold Gunther is on hand to perform any bio-safety work that might be necessary.
‘Behind the Science Module is the Accommodation Module, which spins at a steady rate to simulate conditions of point eight of a gee. Part of the spinning module is also set aside for hydroponics and zeoponics, which is where the core elements of the Closed Ecological Life Support System are contained.
‘The Daedalus is the second CELSS spacecraft ever. The first was the manned Mars mission launched in 2023. In a CELSS environment, the crew’s food, water and breathable air are regenerated through waste material and plant life. Nothing is wasted. Everything is recycled. The system enables a crew to be entirely self sufficient on long space missions.
‘The major foodstuffs that are grown in the hydro- and zeoponics areas are wheat, potato, lettuce, radish, strawberry, rice, soybean, sweet potato, peanut, coffee and tomatoes. Not a particularly luxurious diet, but nonetheless one that contains all the basic food groups. And as for the coffee? Well, the crew refused to fly at all without coffee!
‘The plants are stored in the CELSS environment at a steady average temperature of 19 degrees centigrade. Inedible organic matter from the food growth process is re-integrated into the soil to encourage further plant growth.
‘It is always necessary to keep these plants in a centrifuge, as the root systems would have no sense of ‘up’ or ‘down’ in a weightless environment, and therefore would not know which way they had to grow. Plants rely on gravity just as much as we humans do. Experiments into weightless plant growth in the past have produced some bizarre and comical results!
‘Air is recycled using the Regenerable Absorption Process. The crew’s exhaled Carbon Dioxide finds it’s way into an ion exchange resin unit. The unit sits behind the absorption vents situated around the craft. As the carbon dioxide passes over the ion pylons, it is chemically and electrically transformed back into oxygen. After a month of use the ion exchange resin unit is exposed to the vacuum in order to be cleansed of waste, but after that it is fully usable again. The whole process is fully automated by the onboard computer. Multiple backup resin units are held in the ships stores, enabling the crew to re-use air for over six hundred years solely from a spaceships single tank.
‘A similar process is used for the crew’s water, which is filtered through similar resin units situated alongside the wastewater drains.
‘In front of you now is the Mars Lander. Notice the smaller centrifuge system. This was because there was a smaller crew, and
subsequently, a smaller hydroponics area. Zeoponics were not used on the Mars mission, and are therefore unique to the Daedalus.
‘The Mars mission proved several fundamental things. Firstly, the CELSS environment worked, and could sustain a crew for an indefinite period of time. Secondly, cryogenic sleep is a feasible method for transporting astronauts over long distances without ageing them significantly. In fact, for every twenty years in cryogenic stasis, a human will only show signs of ageing equivalent to seven months.
‘Lastly, the Mars mission proved that if the correct exercise procedures were followed, it was possible to defeat heart shrinkage and postpone the onset of calcium deficiency and bone degradation in astronauts, especially with the use of the new drug Trizoliphium-i3a.’
‘You are now looking at the advanced propulsion systems of the Daedalus.’
‘The Daedalus uses twelve exhaust accelerators to fire xenon-ion particles at thirty kilometres per second out of vents at the back of the craft. Ample reserves of the heavy gas xenon are stored in high capacity compression tanks at the base of the science module. The xenon cannot be fired out of the vents as it is, so it needs to be electrically ionised. This is achieved by filtering the xenon gas through several flow-pipes to the ionisation chamber, where it comes into contact with the electricity stored in power cells from the photovoltaic scoop, which the Daedalus will perform on arrival at Proxima Centauri.’
‘In front of you now is the accommodation module. The circular outer corridor is commonly referred to as the ‘rim corridor’, and the four ‘spokes’ that connect the rim corridor to the axis are marked as Service Tunnels A, B, C and D.
‘Using centripetal forces to counter the effects of inertia, anyone standing in the module with their feet pointing out towards the stars and their head pointing toward the axis corridor would feel just like they were standing in a room on Earth, only a little lighter.
‘The accommodation module houses all the crew cabins, a recreation room, a pantry, the hydro- and zeoponics areas, and a minigym.’
‘Behind the accommodation module is the cryogenics module, which contains seven pods. The distance to Proxima Centauri is so great that the crew will sleep in these pods for over one hundred years.’
‘Moving round to the back of the Daedalus we can see the acrobatics room and the observation suite. In the past, these rooms would never have made it onto a spacecraft configuration that would have been launched from Earth. On previous space missions, many astronauts claimed that they would have liked a place to perform weightless acrobatics, as it was an enjoyable way to pass the time between work shifts. The Daedalus is the first spacecraft to employ this feature.‘The observation suite provides a similar luxury. The two hundred and twenty degree viewing globe is made out of an enriched polyvinyl butyral plexiglass compound, allowing unprecedented views of the starfield.’
‘On arrival at Proxima Centauri in the year 2171, the first crewmember on the Daedalus will be woken from cryogenic sleep three months prior to interception with the Red Dwarf at the centre of the Proxima system. Once the interception takes place, the spacecraft will pass the star at forty thousand kilometres per hour at a distance of fifty six million kilometres. For a short while, the Daedalus will be under the influence of the star’s gravitational pull, before swinging into its escape trajectory on course for a geo-synchronous orbit over PMC-04-A. It is anticipated that the journey to their destination will take a further two years. During that time the crew will perform extensive studies of Proxima Centauri’s composition.
‘For the time period while Daedalus passes by Proxima, the solar panels aboard the craft will be extended to absorb light from the sun. The converted electrical power, combined with the xenon reserves held on the ship will aid the spacecraft’s braking manoeuvre at PMC-04-A, to enable the Daedalus to be trapped by the planet’s orbit.
‘It will be then, we hope, that they will learn the truth about the origin of the signal they travelled so far to investigate.’
‘All the crewmembers on the Daedalus have been carefully selected to work alongside another based on extensive analysis of their behavioural patterns during initial project planning. If crewmembers were required to spend many years working alongside their colleagues, it was vital that they had a positive working relationship, and that they also be good friends. Though this personality matching technique would never be an exact science, it had worked many times before in some of the Biosphere experiments on Earth in the 1990’s - though the experiments themselves had turned out not to be successful - and in long winter settlements in the Antarctic.
‘Of the seven crew members on the ship, five were placed in cryogenic stasis a week prior to launch so that the pre-launch science crew could monitor the first few days of cryogenic sleep closely. It had been decided at the beginning of the project that if the first week of monitored stasis threw up even the slightest problem, the plug would be pulled on the whole project. Though many were opposed to this view, and were of the opinion that a lot of the necessary troubleshooting could continue after the Daedalus had launched.
‘Needless to say, the whole furore amounted to nothing and the Daedalus undocked from the Rig on time at 06:00 on March 15 2056.
‘But the launch was not without it’s fair share of trauma. During the initial spin-up of the accommodation module, an Automated Maintenance Clamp had failed to remove itself from the side of the module, causing a catastrophic disaster that cost the lives of three astronauts.
‘But from the flames of tragedy rises the phoenix of hope. Hope that, upon arrival at Proxima Centauri, the crew of the Daedalus will discover many wonderful things that will not only enhance our comprehension of the universe, but also allows us to understand our place in it.’
‘That concludes our virtual tour of the Daedalus. Please remove your helmet visors now and wait for the lights to come up before leaving the arena. On your way out, don’t forget to visit the Daedalus gift shop for all your interplanetary souvenirs.’
