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New Course
The Undiscovery
Suffocation
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Why Chiron
Chiron Facts
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Survival Facts
Oort Diagram`
Brainstorm Ideas
Primary Document
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This is the story that we wrote for the survival portion of the project.

The Suffocation
By: Samantha E. Foster
Team Plomet Author

I was in the air reserve room just doing the basic check ups and I noticed that the monitor of tank C-1 was blinking red and blue. Tank C-1 was our air tank. We had others that contained water, nitrogen, helium, fuel for certain things on the ship and other various necessities. I contacted MacKay, “Laenie to MacKay. Laenie to MacKay. I’m in the life support reserve room and tank C-1 is losing air. Could you confirm that for me, MacKay?”

"Uhh… Sure, hold on…” There was a brief pause of silence. “We only have about a weeks worth of air left! What happened?” He sounded panicked. That wasn’t surprising since we knew what would happen if there was no oxygen available to us. Suffocation sounded like a painful way to kick the bucket.

I looked around the sides of the tank that were visible to me. I found no problems. What could have caused this? I went through the possible answers in my head. Could it have been deliberate?
I sent a probe out to scan the outside of the tank. Half of the tank was visible to me and the other half was only visible from outside of the ship. The probe kept checking around the tank and eventually found a piece of aerogel missing from the side of the tank.

Aerogel is a sponge-like substance, used in the late nineties for the Stardust expedition to space. It trapped the dust from the comet tail and brought samples back to earth for observation. The sponge-like consistency of the aerogel stopped everything. Even things going 12 times the speed of a bullet! It was 99% air, and it was so strong that only a handful could hold up a car. It also provided us great protection from severe heat and numbing cold. So we used aerogel to insulate Argos and our tanks.

There must have been a fault in the aerogel structure or maybe a space object was going faster than the aerogel could handle. I relayed this back to MacKay.

"What kind of space object? Are we talking about a little speck of dust or a rock? I need details here, Laenie.”

"Well, I don’t know exactly. It could have been anything, really. Do you have any suggestions on what we could do?”

"You could use duct tape…” he offered. I rolled my eyes and at his pathetic suggestion. What was it with men and duct tape ?

"Never mind. I have another idea.”

"Really? What?”

"Well, we have a lot of water on this ship. You know? Because it’s a byproduct of the fuel.”

"Yeah…your point?"

"And water is made from hydrogen and oxygen,” I continued. “So I was thinking that I could extract the oxygen from the water and use that.”

"Is that even possible?”
"Well you usually go the other way around. You would take hydrogen and oxygen, mix them together and the finished product is water. I think this will work though.”

For the next week I worked on getting an invention put together. I took a page out of Carver’s book and didn’t eat or sleep almost at all. If anybody wanted to talk to me, they either had to use the headset or come to my laboratory where I was working. I finally got it up and running. The last thing I remembered was switching on my headset to tell everyone that we would live! I opened my eyes a month later in the sick bay.

Cadence, our ship doctor, told me that I had been breathing pure oxygen for about a week and it caused serious damage to my body. If the crew hadn’t found me out cold on the floor, I could’ve gone blind or even have died. In the end everything was ok. We could breathe and had enough water to extract oxygen.