Mars L4 Outpost, #1

A Trailing Edge story, by tycho garen
on 2nd September 2008. (commentary)

I present to you another essay from the writings of Leon Winter, our guide for the Trailing Edge stories. This essay will be posted in two parts, and I hope you enjoy.

Though it is hundreds of years past, the collapse of the Mars L4 Outpost remains a vivid and touchstone for most of us that remain.

Outposts and colonies had failed before; but some how, in the early cases, the collapses happened with enough warning to stage evacuations, or before the colony superstructures had become activated.

Mars L4 was different. There was no warning. And no recourse.

Somehow, disasters in space colonization had always seemed like hurricanes: devastating, huge, but visible on the horizon. Mars L4 was an earthquake by comparison: Dangerous, and a known possibility, and seemingly never predictable in the specific instance.

L4/L5 stations were great joys of the orbital mechanics: stable, easy to maintain, large, but particularly as you got further from the sun they were pretty far flung. Though we still do not know what happened to the station–aside from the fact that the air processing system failed–the tragedy was caused by the distance between the station and help.

What we do know is that one of the station’s central air processing unit–and it’s backup(s)–failed. It was 15 days out from the nearest ship.

Any outpost or settlement is always the most vulnerable when it is new, and this is especially true in space before routines are established, when hardware is newly fabricated, and software is largely untested. These factors probably all combined at Mars L4, but in the final analysis it’s difficult to determine if the station collapsed because of simple hardware error or because of some sort of programing mishap. That detail is lost to us, and the station itself has long since been scrapped.

If such a thing had happened on one of the colony structures on, say Mars–as it surely did in the early days of the colonies–there would have been ships, nearby stations, and other colony structures that would have been able to evacuate the population, fix the malfunction and then re-inhabit the structure when it was safe. What might have been lost to history as a routine maintenance situation, is instead remembered as the only instance where a fully populated space colony was lost with all hands in the entire history of human space occupation.

Though to be fair, the extra-solar colonization project is subject to the same challenges as Mars L4, but it will be generations before the news of those outposts reach us. At any rate I hope that we have learned our lesson from Mars L4, but I fear that we have not.

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  1. [...] the writings of Leon Winter, our guide for the Trailing Edge stories. The first essay can be found here, and I hope you [...]

    Pingback by Critical Futures: a next wave science fiction review — 3 September 2008 @ 5:37 am

  2. [...] had a Trailing Edge story in a while, but this story is a follow up on the previous “Mars L4 Outpost” story. This is the first part of five, and a new installment will drop every day this [...]

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  3. [...] had a Trailing Edge story in a while, but this story is a follow up on the previous “Mars L4 Outpost” story. This is the second part of five, you can read part one, here and please [...]

    Pingback by Critical Futures: a next wave science fiction review — 28 October 2008 @ 8:16 am

  4. [...] had a Trailing Edge story in a while, but this story is a follow up on the previous “Mars L4 Outpost” story. This is the third part of five, you can read part one, here, and part two here. [...]

    Pingback by Critical Futures: a next wave science fiction review — 29 October 2008 @ 9:33 am

  5. [...] had a Trailing Edge story in a while, but this story is a follow up on the previous “Mars L4 Outpost” story. This is the third part of five, you can read part one, here, part two here, and part [...]

    Pingback by Critical Futures: a next wave science fiction review — 30 October 2008 @ 9:05 am

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