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#8: leave iothera? but all my STUFF’s there!

#8: leave iothera? but all my STUFF’s there! published on 5 Comments on #8: leave iothera? but all my STUFF’s there!

Cassandra’s kind of oversimplifying the preparations necessary for any long-term assignment in space. Anybody going further into space than low Iothera orbit is required to pass the Astronaut Orientation Program. For, say, a civillian researcher, who’s going to just be flying out on a spaceplane and working in the shirtsleeves environment of a modern hab dome, it’s fairly basic, and can generally be completed in as little as a month. Still, it’s expected that any space worker have basic emergency survival skills, including putting on and sealing a space suit, moving around in freefall, cycling airlocks, the fact that your head doesn’t really explode in a vacuum, etc. Part of the reason Ariadne has become the epicenter of civilian spaceflight is because of the extensive (and highly regarded) AOP-certified training facilities Matsuda-Lowell Astronautics runs there. Matsuda-Lowell takes the AOP very seriously. Spaceflight Director Sasaki Hanako doesn’t want to wake up one morning, pull up the front page of the Times, and see a headline like, “BLOWN SPACEPLANE AIRLOCK SUCKS THIRTY ASTRONOMERS INTO SPACE”.

Also, the gentlemen explorers of Expedition Six would have never deigned to drink something so uncivilized as moonshine, although they might permit themselves a hint of a smile over the delightful wordplay inherent in drinking moonshine on the moon. Instead, they devoted precious payload to carrying a supply of the finest liquors the Restored Empire had to offer. Because, if you’re going to spend a year somewhere as ghastly as Luna Manjor, you might as well be drunk most of the time.

Luna Major c. 1007 was basically the McMurdo Station of Iothera.

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