"Eight astronauts strapped to the back of a bomb."
"My bomb."
"Welcome to Icarus 2."
In 2050 humanity sent a manned mission, called Icarus, to restore the dying Sun.
For reasons unknown the mission failed, and the Icarus 2 was
launched some years later as humanity's final attempt to save itself.
The basic design of the ships was the same;
a manned section with everything the eight astronauts needed to survive the journey,
and the payload section consisting of a stellar bomb and a giant sunshield to protect it.
The Icarus 2s stellar bomb was made up of all remaining fissile materials available
from Earth, massing as much as Manhattan island, and took the form of an enormous cube.
This cube had a facility for monitoring and testing the bomb,
as well as a manual trigger in the event that computer control was unavailable.
To protect the payload during the final sundive, the primary sunshield rapidly burned away on descent,
revealing that the cube itself was also contained within its own ablative heatshield.
For the long journey down towards the Sun, the payload and crew sections were protected
from the intense light and solar wind by a vast golden dome.
This dome shape, with the huge mass of the stellar bomb immediately behind it,
made the Icarus’s heading self correcting.
It would always return to directly facing the incoming storm of light and particles
from the Sun, even when unpowered and uncontrolled.
Its face was also largely covered in panels that could be individually raised and lowered,
possibly to provide some directional control.
However, this did introduce a significant number of points of failure,
although the very center of the shield directly in front of the payload did not have these panels.
Another potential point of failure was the observation room,
positioned right on the edge of this unpanelled section.
The window had to be less reflective than the rest of the shield,
and likely made a hot spot right beside the payload.
The trade off was that the crew could use it as an observatory
or place of contemplation, to remind them of what they were up against.
Four titanic engine clusters were arranged around the payload. These drove it and the
primary shield down into the surface of the Sun after separation of the crew segment.
A concave secondary shield lied between the two sections, designed to protect the crew modules
on the return journey, though it wasn’t wide enough to adequately shield the communications towers.
This shield may also have been intended to act as a solar sail for the return journey,
as the main engine faced the wrong way to be used for this.
The docking mechanism for crew to go between the two sections was located right in the
center of this secondary shield, creating a weak point for heat to enter.
An alternative option would be to go around the edge of the shield,
much like how real life spacecraft have umbilicals go around their reentry heat shields.
Taking sixteen months to travel to the Sun, and likely just as many back to Earth,
required special considerations for the crew.
A large greenhouse provided atmosphere recycling and food.
Each crew member had their own living space, with communal areas provided for eating and recreation,
and all rooms and corridors were oversized for what might be expected on a spacecraft.
These were all crucial for maintaining mental health on such a long trip in confined quarters,
with even simple things like cooking being key to keeping a sense of continuity with life back home.
In the event that external repairs were needed,
an EVA airlock with tools and special protective spacesuits was onboard.
This airlock could also dock with other vessels, including the Icarus 1.
Some form of artificial gravity was also aboard, though it was inconsistent with how it functioned.
When the craft was unpowered and the computer offline,
the gravity stayed on, indicating it was a passive system,
but within the airlock it could be turned on and off.
Although the two missions were very alike, there were some improvements made to the Icarus 2
as part of an effort to avoid potential reasons for the failure of the Icarus 1.
The most obvious of these was the inclusion of a psychiatrist in the crew, as well as the
addition of an “Earth room” to help with the mental health of the astronauts.
The primary sunshield was also larger, and the external design of the observation room
on Icarus 1 differed from that of Icarus 2.
The module layout of the crew section was also slightly different; the airlock was placed
much further forward on the Icarus 2, though the two spacecraft could still dock together.
The final component of both vessels was a highly capable computer for controlling every
function of the spacecraft, from flight to separation and triggering the payload.
This computer was immersed within coolant, and could not survive being removed from it for
longer than a few minutes.
With such a capable computer on board, why bring a crew at all?
The answer was to provide maintenance, repair and backups for the most important undertaking in history.
This turned out to be a double-edged sword though, as the unpredictable nature and fallibility of
human beings ultimately caused more problems than they solved.
The loss of the Icarus 1s computer prevented the successful release of the payload, and
every time the Icarus 2s computer was overridden in favor of human control,
"Gonna be taking control here for a while."
"I had to manually override Icarus."
it caused damage to the ship and put the mission at risk.
With the benefit of hindsight it can be seen that this human element was the cause of every
large scale problem on the Icarus 2, and the cause of the failure of the Icarus 1.
If the first mission had no crew at all it's likely that it would have succeeded.
The reasoning for taking people on the journey may have been flawed from the beginning.
Humanity's hubris in that it could overcome any problem echoes the Icarus myth;
the crew did not approach the psychological issues of the journey as cautiously as they should have.
Ultimately though, it was human intervention on Icarus 2 that delivered the payload,
and saved Earth from a frozen future.
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