![]() ![]() He wants to discuss her recent scientific paper called “Contingent terrestrial planning for the appearance of a second solar body,” commonly known as “The Juno Contingency” for the name Leslie assigned to an ignited Jupiter in the paper: Juno, after the queen of the gods (as Jupiter was the king). Six months later Leslie is home working late when she receives a call from Ret Feldspar, who introduces himself as the world’s third-youngest self-made billionaire. Her labmates encourage her to join a team that is working on estimating what the impact to Earth would be if Jupiter were to undergo solar ignition. In that case, Leslie is pessimistic that the Peace mission will accomplish anything, as the aliens are so advanced that humans will seem like fleas to them. The predominant belief is that they are stellifying Jupiter so as to ignite it into another sun. Watching the conference, Leslie and her labmates discuss the latest theories of what the alien spacecraft is doing. An international space mission, called Peace, is being developed on a crash course to travel there, to make contact with the aliens, and to determine their intentions. The President reveals that these are really due to a cone-shaped extraterrestrial spacecraft 2,000 km long that has appeared in orbit around Jupiter. The President is disclosing NASA’s findings on what is publicly known as the “Jupiter anomaly,” a series of disruptions to Jupiter’s atmosphere that are visible to amateur astronomers. Leslie Angiers is watching the President give a speech whose contents she has been expecting. With world governments sluggish to respond to the catastrophe, a scientist and a venture capitalist begin developing the necessary solutions themselves. Teaser: Jupiter threatens to ignite into a second sun and decimate life on Earth. It wasn't long before the voice of Astronaut Office chief Alan Shepard came crackling over the radio from down in mission control, an exchange also broadcast to the public.This is a “prelude”-a plot summary for an unwritten novel. "We wanted to get organised before starting a big flurry with the ground so we decided to delay telling them about Bill being sick," says Ed.īut they had forgotten that everything they said on board was being recorded, and that mission control was listening in. So the astronauts were already under pressure when they made their first bad decision. The number of spacewalks was also doubled, to four, to observe a newly discovered comet, Kohoutek. Nasa accepts that mission planners had not given the crew the typical period of adjustment to acclimatise to working weightlessly in orbit and had packed their schedules with large amounts of work. Nasa was very concerned about someone getting sick, which would have meant losing precious time. ![]() The 84-day mission - the longest ever at that point - was on a tight schedule. Skylab 4 was the final mission and as a result it had a long list of tasks to fulfil. The Skylab space station was a research platform in orbit where astronauts helped scientists to study the human body's response to space flight, carried out experiments and made observations of the Sun and Earth. He's the last one of the astronauts able to share the story, because Jerry Carr and Bill Pogue have both died - Carr last summer and Pogue in 2014. ![]() "We felt discouraged because we knew we had so much work to do - that's when we made our first mistake."Įd is 84 now and the Skylab 4 mission began in November 1973 but time hasn't dulled his most vivid memories - the Earth from space, the blazing corona of the sun and the silence of a spacewalk. "Then I remember some bad noises coming from Bill, and a barf bag floating back from right to left," he says. Ed Gibson was sitting between the two men, and remembers the can floating past from left to right before his eyes. But this was the first time the three men had been in space and evidently resistance to motion sickness back on Earth didn't mean much up there.Ĭommander Jerry Carr suggested Bill eat a can of tomatoes to settle his stomach. He could endlessly tolerate sitting in a rapidly rotating chair while moving his head backwards and forwards and side to side, without being sick. It came as a surprise because Bill had been nicknamed "Iron Belly" during training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Bill Pogue got sick soon after the three astronauts arrived at the space station. But Ed Gibson, the only one of the crew still alive, says the idea that they stopped work is a myth. Soon afterwards, reports began to circulate that they went on strike. It's been almost half a century since the three astronauts on board the Skylab 4 space mission famously fell out with mission control. ![]()
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