Tom turned toward Brandon, “Brandon, please enable the closed communication session, thanks. After a nod from Brandon, Tom began to greet his friend, “Hi Ty.” Then, popping up to attention and favoring him with a salute, he added, “I mean Commander Cody, Sir! Glad to hear things are under control back home.” He paused for a moment, then continued, “…after the hanging. Ha! I like that.” Tom chuckled heartily, with glee flavoring his tone.<\/p>\n
“Well, we have a great deal to report. I only wish I could be there to tell you in person, just so I could see the look on your face when you hear all of what’s been going on at this end. In the first place, that robotic rover, which we believe to be of Chinese origin, has been permanently… shall we say, deactivated due to an unfortunate tumble into the crater. We discovered it had attacked the fuel processor and the light truck, damaging them slightly. While Brandon and I were out there on EVA earlier, we checked them out further. The rover had bored a few holes into, both the truck’s chassis and frame as well as the exhaust nozzles and landing gear of the lander. The punctures in the nozzles were really ineffectual, since the lander is not meant to re-launch from the planet.<\/p>\n
When we are ready to deploy the pressurized rover, we will still be able to utilize those nozzles by converting them to wheels for the vehicle. I wish I could thank the guy who came up with that unique idea. And, as the truck is un-pressurized, a few holes in the body won’t hurt it either, just so long as it missed the methane and O2 tanks, which I am happy to report, it did.<\/p>\n
“Next are the mounds surrounding the Penny Bright Crater,” Tom paused for about two beats with reflections of his darling, deceased wife playing in his mind. Then remarked, “By the way, you may have observed that everyone here is in possession of unauthorized champagne flutes. Before launch, we swapped them out for the freeze-dried Green Bean Casserole that we all hate. Originally, we stowed away several bottles of bubbly in advance for celebrating our last day on Mars. But as you can see, we’ve already popped the cork on day two of our invasion. ‘Why?’ you may ask. No, we’re not ready to head on home just yet. As it turns out, the samples collected by the rover were diamonds in the rough, and that’s not a euphemism for anything. They are literally carbonados, or space diamonds,” he said, emphasizing the final two words. “But not just any plain old, ordinary space diamonds.” In front of the camera Tom hefted a coarse gem from the bench, the largest of the assortment he and Brandon had fetched on the first EVA. It was the size of a baseball.<\/p>\n
“Brandon and I carried quite a few of these onboard yesterday. Well, to be fair, not all of them were this large. But as you can see from this specimen, there are a myriad of colors shining throughout, much like fire opals. To my knowledge, there are none like this to be found on Earth. In fact, there aren’t many diamonds on Earth that can compare to the size of this one. Actually, most of the ones we saw were more around the size of large marbles and ping-pong balls. But Earth diamonds that are the size of ping-pong balls represent a very small percentage,” Tom turned toward Sally, “Did I say that all correctly?” She was sitting just off camera, laughing into her hands as silently as possible, at his put-on slightly fumbling, absentminded professor act.<\/p>\n
“Oh, and the piles of diamonds,” Tom took a large drink from his glass and went on, “there are close to fifty of them, each about a meter high and a meter in diameter at the base. So, we are estimating that around ten of those piles will pay for this whole fu… fantastic mission. It’s a good thing this isn’t a live feed going out over the networks. But wait! There’s more!” He skewed up his face and took a big gulp, emptying his glass, while everyone onboard hooted at his entertaining parody of a tipsy game show host.<\/p>\n
“Earlier today, Sally and I went for a stroll… well, more accurately an EVA, to the floor of the Penny Bright.” Tom paused a moment as Brandon refilled his glass. “Thank you. We ran sounding tests and determined that in the top thirty-five meters or so of the ground, there are… a lot… more… diamonds!” Tom intoned his best impression of Captain James T. Kirk and it was dead-on. High on adrenaline rather than alcohol, he was really on a roll and thoroughly enjoying every minute of it.<\/p>\n
“But seriously, what did we locate immediately beneath the diamond encrusted dirt?” We found, extended drum-roll please…” Together Brandon and Carl both started beating rhythmically on the console with both hands. “…The source of the diamonds! Hold on! First, let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time, ‘a long ago, in a galaxy far, far away…’ a huge comet came zipping through our solar system and ran smack into Mars. WHAM!!” he exclaimed and clapped his hands together, with a loud crack to illustrate.<\/p>\n
“That collision whacked a few million diamonds off its surface which then wound up embedded in the soil and now, thanks to the dearly departed robot, many of them are massed all around the impact rim. By the way, it has been proposed that the Sponsors take back their five million dollar per person retainer, in lieu of 1\/10 of one percent of the value of the diamonds as a finder’s fee. Perhaps you can negotiate that compromise for us,” Tom smiled and winked broadly at Ty.<\/p>\n
He continued the tale, “The remainder of the comet augured into the terrain and either melted into a huge underground reservoir, or became a part of a much larger reservoir that was already there. Tomorrow, we’ll go out and take soundings at ten to fifteen clicks out from the rim in several directions. If we still find water, it’s an underground ocean. If not, well this lake appears to be roughly eleven and a half kilometers in diameter and a minimum of ten fathoms deep. That’s as much as we could tell from the soundings we took. It could be a lot deeper. What that signifies is: As soon as FP2 has safely landed, we will never need to send hydrogen to Mars again!<\/p>\n
Grinning, Tom kept going, “So, to recap, we can now pay for, not only this mission, but most likely all future missions. Plus, from now on, they will all be cheaper to launch by not lugging around 2.6 tons of hydrogen! On a more serious note, the robotic device which was here had been collecting diamonds for… well, who knows how long, and they never even had a clue about the water beneath the surface. The Bolo One party is on planet less than twenty-four hours and we have discovered the ‘Holy Grail’ and it is overflowing with water.<\/p>\n
Tom spoke emphatically, “Robotic rovers have their place in the scheme of exploration, working as scouts and general laborers, but nothing can ever beat the human drive to succeed, our passion to explore the unknown and our will to survive against all odds. You can’t program any of that into a machine. That which makes us human is what makes us strong; that which does not kill us makes us stronger. No robotic explorer will ever be able to truly realize what it means to be human. A robot can not fall in love, or suffer pain and loss, or thrill to the sight of another sunrise.” Tom found himself once again gazing at Sally and beginning to acknowledge his true emotions and awakening yearnings for this amazing woman.<\/p>\n
Turning back to face the camera squarely, Tom concluded his discourse with, “Plus, no damn Chinese robot can match good, old fashioned Yankee ingenuity. It all comes down to one simple conclusion: If you’re gonna explore Mars, any other planets, or whole star systems, for that matter, ya gotta send humans. From Claire Base on Mars, this has been Commander Thomas Castle reporting, over to you in Houston.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tom turned toward Brandon, “Brandon, please enable the closed communication session, thanks. After a nod from Brandon, Tom began to greet his friend, “Hi Ty.” Then, popping up to attention and favoring him with a salute, he added, “I mean Commander Cody, Sir! Glad to hear things are under control back home.” He paused for a moment, then continued, “…after …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":211,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chapter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":390,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions\/390"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}