bermudatetrahedron_prologue_WIP

PROLOGUE-. //date undecided.

Jeremy Robert Miller stood with his little brother outside the visitor complex at the Kennedy Space Center. The *Heart of Gold* stood in the distance on its launch tower. The space ship gleamed a golden orange against the dull blue shadow cast onto the atmosphere by the Earth itself--just below the pink belt of Venus. The sun hadn't gone down below the top of the rocket yet, but it would soon. It was 10 minutes to launch of the fifth Mars spaceship. The sixth and seventh would be launching the next day, and the fourth had launched the day before--the Space Conglomerate was trying their best to maximize use of the biennial Martian transfer windows. They had a colony to build after all, they weren't going to get it done with one shipment every two years.

Jeremy had grown up just as the space race was beginning again. Government science budget was being drained, the International Space Station was being decommissioned, but still the private sector rose to try to fill NASA's shoes and more. Many angry internet discussions about whether this was a good thing or not were had--and Jeremy had his fair share of them. The major problem with privatizing space is that it had to be profitable. You don't just go to space for science without someone else pulling the purse strings. SpaceX nearly went bankrupt trying to do just that. The cancellation of their Falcon Heavy launch vehicle before its launch to make way for their Interplanetary Spaceship was a bold move, and it was probably the wrong move. Their spaceship never flew, its development was cancelled and the Falcon 9 was put back into production to save the company.

A newer company, Houston Aerospace, ended up solving the problem. While other space programs worked as hard as they could to develop new technologies to reduce costs in the long run, Houston Aerospace had a different goal. Utilize dirt-cheap, off-the-shelf technology as much as possible, Overwork the staff, and build slowly. The initial investment was just barely enough to get the plan into action--and the profit margin would be tight. But if it was successful, it could pay for deep space exploration and manned space flight.

Houston Aerospace launched payloads on 10 Falcon 9 rockets over 5 years. The payloads were individual components of a robotic spacecraft that would stick around in orbit until they were all up there. Once they were ready, the ship would slowly spiral outwards with an Ion engine on a many years long trip to the asteroid Psyche. That rock had already been prospected in 2026

//blah blah blah i need to go back and clean this up (it's kind of a weak, expodump prologue and that shouldn't be done.), suffice it to say that Houston mined Psyche for a profit with a reusable robotic ship  and then later joined with SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the United Launch Alliance to form the Space Conglomerate.

The constellation of four spaceships, after completing the rocket burns to insert them into the transfer orbit to Mars, did not travel separately. The ships traveled in pairs, but each pair held station half a kilometer away from each other. The IPS *Heart of Gold* was paired with the IPS *Bigger On The Inside*, and the IPS *Endurance In The Face of Harsh Conditions* was paired with the IPS *Discovery of Things That Are As Yet Unknown*. Each pair, after engine cutoff, were connected by a 15 meter tether and spun around six times a minute. Each ship would therefore experience 60 percent Earth gravity. Enough that returning to Earth would be a minor issue, but movement on Mars would be just fine.

One morning, one month, two days, and four hours into the mission, the crew and passengers of the *Bigger On The Inside* woke up without gravity. The crew in particular woke up to alarms and red lights shining into their eyes. The Mission Director, Charlie Borman assembled a meeting of the Mission Control team in the ship's bridge immediately. The bridge has a few viewports in the wall to look out into space, including the docking window which looks up directly towards the *Heart of Gold*. The crew all assembled at their stations, in an attempt to figure out what was the matter. Before they could boot up their monitors, Gary Druman sat down at his pilot's station and looked up through the docking window. "Uh, Charlie?"

"What is it?" Borman looked at the pilot's computer monitor, then Gary, and then the docking window. Borman kept staring, and then he looked around at the other mission control officers, gulped, and said: "Does anyone happen to know where the *Heart of Gold* went?"