IF YOU LOOK at a globe, just to the east of New Guinea and south of the red line of the equator lies a small chain of islands stretching from the northwest to the southeast: the Solomon Islands.
Most Japanese knew them for Guadalcanal, where lots of the heavy fighting took place during the war in the Pacific. These islands first appeared in Western history books in the sixteenth century when Spaniards discovered them, but oceanic peoples had been living there since at least one thousand BCE.
Most tourists visiting the islands were Japanese come to see the old battlegrounds, but in recent years their numbers had dwindled. It wasn’t until four years ago that new ties were formed between Japan and the Solomon Islands with the construction of the Solomon Space Association on Maltide, a small island ringed with coral reefs and covered in jungle.
The SSA existed entirely on the funding of the OECF, Japan’s Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund. The association’s founder was one Isao Nasuda, a relatively unknown space enthusiast at the time. How he had managed to lobby his way into a position of such power was still something of a mystery.
“As part of our overseas development aid, we need to provide the Solomon Islands with broadcast education and a complete communications network,” he had argued. “And the best way to do that is with communication satellites.
“Building dams and bridges is all very well and good, but if we build them and don’t provide for their upkeep properly, we get burned by the critics. Maintaining a communications satellite network is no different, and it costs a hefty amount of money.”
Everything up to this point in Nasuda’s argument was pretty standard fare. It was the next part that upped the ante.
“In order to pull this off at the lowest possible price point, we need to deploy a manned spaceflight support network.”
Nasuda was nothing if not self-serving.
Anyone with the least bit of experience in space development would have seen through his ploy in a moment. What he was suggesting was akin to building a factory in order to fix a flat tire on a bicycle. However, thanks to the uninformed officials hearing his case, the program had passed with no objections. Of course, what Nasuda really wanted was to realize low-cost manned spaceflight in order to seize a piece of the growing pie that was the global space industry.
Due to a general lack of media interest in foreign aid efforts, construction on the base had begun without the slightest reaction from taxpayers. Development of an entirely proprietary manned spaceflight system was soon under way. Everything was going swimmingly until plans stalled during the testing phase of their large-scale booster rocket. Nasuda had just received official notice that he had six months left to realize manned flight or the entire thing would be scrapped. That was right about the time Yukari Morita visited the island.
With a single, lightweight pilot like her in the orbiter, they might just be able to get away with the small-scale rockets they had already developed. Finding the similarly built Matsuri for a backup crew had just been icing on the cake.
In the end, they were able to send someone into space before their deadline, and the SSA survived. Not only that, but they were able to realize such a dramatic cost improvement that Nasuda’s lie had transformed into a truth of sorts overnight. They had realized his vision of a manned space-repair service. Now the eyes of the world were on the SSA.
It was after this that they rolled out the MOB2 series of multiple-seat orbiters. However, they were still obliged to use the smallest astronauts possible. By reducing the weight of a crewmember by a single kilogram, they could shave all of seventy from the total weight of the rockets. By limiting crew height to 155 cm, they could reduce the weight of the orbiter alone by a whole seven hundred kilograms.
Which is how the future of the SSA came to rely on short, female pilots. Of which at present, they had only two. Two pilots to NASA’s five hundred…
✦ ✦ ✦
Five days after the orbiter’s emergency splashdown in Yokohama.
The top staff were gathered in the meeting room on the third floor of the main SSA building for a roundup of the last mission.
“…Luckily, the soy sauce and vinegar compound did little damage to the cockpit controls. All of the electronic components are shielded, of course, to resist the effects of a small amount of moisture,” chief engineer Hiroyuki Mukai reported. “As long as nothing seeps in through the outer hull.”
“What about the momentary loss of power due to water damage? Is that something we should work on improving?” Kazuya Kinoshita asked. Kinoshita was the number two man at the SSA.
“I doubt there’s any need. After splashdown, it doesn’t really matter what breaks.”
“Well, as long as the fuel cells don’t explode.”
“Which is why they jettison them before splashdown.”
“But Yukari likes hanging on to them,” Kinoshita noted. “Fuel cells make for a lot more power once you’re on the ground. You can operate the air conditioning and use the radio without worrying about your batteries.”
“Well, we’ll just have to train her not to expect those luxuries.”
“That’s a possibility,” Asahikawa noted. She was the chief medical officer in charge of every aspect of the astronauts’ daily lives. “But there are limits. Actually, the problem with Yukari is she’s been trained so well, she’s starting to look for shortcuts to everything.”
The room filled with laughter.
“Who would’ve thought that following fashions and studying for school tests would prepare someone so well for a career as an astronaut? Memorizing an orbiter manual is nothing to a homework-hardened schoolgirl,” Nasuda said.
“Let’s not underestimate Matsuri, either. Recall that she was somehow able to smuggle an entire durian into that capsule.”
“How did she do that, anyway? We checked that capsule completely before liftoff,” Mukai asked. He had been responsible for the prelaunch check.
“Apparently, she used a sort of hypnosis. By placing the inspection crew under a kind of trance, she made them unable to physically see the durian.”
“Excuse me? Is that even possible?”
“I can’t see any other way that she could have pulled it off. The Taliho tribe claims to have been doing this sort of thing for thousands of years, after all.”
Satsuki had already debriefed the inspection crew. She had even tried hypnosis on them herself to get to the bottom of what had happened just before the rocket took off—but no clear answers were forthcoming.
“But wait,” Mukai cut in. “If they can do that, why don’t the Taliho all go off and make a killing robbing banks?”
“Let’s just be grateful that they seem to have wisdom in equal amounts to their power. Mind you, I’m going to keep Matsuri confined to quarters until we’re ready to strap her in next time.”
“What happens if she hypnotizes the guards at her door?”
Satsuki frowned.
“We just have to trust them, both of them,” Nasuda said. “Thankfully, the durian did no real damage, and Yukari jettisoned the fuel cells as she was supposed to. If you don’t mind, I’d like to discuss the malfunction in the sequencer next.”
“Malfunction? You make it sound like there was something wrong with the electronics.” Mukai snorted. “What happened was, Yukari left the protective cover on the activation switch open while she was dealing with the goldfish, and she accidentally bumped the switch. Yukari says so herself, and that account fits the telemetry records.”
“So it was operator error.”
“Not that I blame her. Everything happened with incredibly bad timing,” Kinoshita said. “What Yukari is saying is that we can’t have one person doing two jobs up there. Well, I suppose it’s two people doing two jobs, but both of them are supposed to be checking the other’s operations, so when you add an experiment to their list of duties, it’s too much. They get confused.”
“So they need a third person?” Nasuda crossed his arms.
Everyone in the room was aware that on the U.S. space shuttle, duties were divided between mission specialists and payload specialists.
“How is development going on the three-person orbiter?”
“As smoothly as could be wished for. All we’re basically doing is cramming another seat into the MOB2 transport locker space.”
“The trick is finding a mission specialist with the same dimensions as Yukari and Matsuri.”
“No kidding. Whoever it is, they’ll have to cram into a space barely fifty centimeters across.”