Words: Agent X 2021-01-25 17:49:19
Pluto’s majestic mountains and frozen plains. Think it goes? Photo: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute Want some distance from humanity along with no lift lines and general earthly nonsense? If that’s the case, the pristine methane frosts of the dwarf planet Pluto beckon. While your man X is no Elon Musk fanboy, SpaceX is building the Super Heavy booster and the Starship—just the right ride for this excursion. Given the distance involved and volumetric requirements to support the participants, there is room for maybe 20 rider-astronauts, an astrosports medicine doctor and a team of three tough, whip-smart nurses as I’m getting pretty damn old. By the way, this is shaping up as a one-way outing so there is no looking back. Considering current Terran conditions and events, try it—what have you got to lose? Venturing into the fading twilight of the outer solar system, blackness comfortably envelopes us and distant stars blaze unwaveringly with new intensity. Yet Sol’s feeble photons barely cast a shadow and won’t power an old iron to melt wax. Now is the time to embrace the friendly atom. This means, among other things, nuclear electricity generation, nuclear Hot Pockets, plutonium-powered-Japanese sexbots and an Atomic Dog. Even with a velocity-boosting Jovian gravity-slingshot maneuver, the journey is bound to take the better part of a decade. So there is ample time for board-tuning, gear-sorting and learning to master the fine art of hydroponic cultivation. NASA’s New Horizons probe streaked passed Pluto and its moon Charon back in 2015—researchers continue to extract stunning discoveries from the data and pictures, most recently that ample methane frosts blanket the up to 11,000 foot tall peaks of Pigafetta and Elcano Montes in the Cthulhu Macula region. Featuring highly varied terrain, cryovolcanoes, skyscraper-tall blades of ice, dunes and a likely globe-circling subterranean ocean all jammed into a sphere less than 1,500 miles in diameter, Pluto is about two-thirds the size of Luna. Named after the Roman god of the underworld and though rather puny, Pluto has a tenuous atmosphere and seasonal weather—albeit a year on Pluto takes nearly two and a half centuries. Conversely to how things work here, atmospheric temperature on Pluto increases with altitude and this provides energy for the deposition of methane frosts on mountains via adiabatic flows of gases that cool as they move toward the surface. If one was to sit a spell atop a Plutonian mountain, you could watch methane frosts grow on the exposed surfaces. This cycle of deposition has repeated for millennia so there is no reason to think that the icy deposits are not deep enough to carve and the conditions are likely better than most East Coast boarding areas (though without rope tows). Current mission planning features the Starship landing on a large, stable glacial plateau within Sputnik Planitia (Pluto’s million-square-kilometer pale pink “heart”) in order to mine ices to recover water and to produce oxygen for life-support needs and oxidizer for the main Raptor engines. The mountains of Cthulhu lay to the west of the landing zone. Pluto’s gravity field is about 1/15th of Earth’s so kilometer-long chicanes are possible, and a cargo flyer will shuttle us from base camp to the peaks and back-haul methane ice to use as rocket fuel. All this is doable for a few tens of billions of dollars and one large black bull (the Romans used to sacrifice them annually to appease the god Pluto). Have already submitted a purchase order to the Funny Feelings folks and if they come up short, I’ll postdate a check. Given my current physical state, I might complete the mission as a head in a jar spliced onto one of the love droids, but I still plan on getting first tracks, and once Pluto is old hat, the primordial worlds of the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud are ours for the poaching. I’m ready to go. The question is: Are you?
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HIGH ON PLUTO
https://digital.thesnowboardersjournal.com/articles/high-on-pluto