The Grissom was one of the four Voyager-class exploration ships of the Unified Solar Navy's Exploration Command. Under Mahesh Pillai she surveyed more stars than the other three together between 2300 and 2318. She charted almost all of what became the Saolea and Binami sectors of the Ciriban Gulf. She found the Mardak Vol capsule at Yildun on 14 December 2307, the first evidence humanity saw that it was not alone. On 21 September 2317, at Cirban, she met the Voor survey cruiser Lorni Indur, and with it the Voor Confederacy, the first living spacefaring species humanity met.
Design
The Voyager class came out of an argument settled by Rear Admiral Sunniva Ekholm, Exploration Command's first commander. The Consortium wanted a dozen small ships that could jump six light years and survey a system each. The Navy wanted four large ships that could jump eight, carry a laboratory and stay out for a decade. Ekholm chose four, on the ground that a survey ship 30 light years from home with a failed coil needed to be able to fix it.
The four were built at the West Rhine yard on Europa between 2296 and 2299, at 90 billion credits each. Each had a long cylindrical hull with the drive coils in six segmented rings around the waist, the fusion plant and torch aft, and laboratory decks and a hangar of 2,000 square metres forward. The hangar carried two atmospheric landers, six survey drones and a courier. A Voyager could stay out for ten years, refuelling with helium-3 at any gas giant. Her flaw was the hangar doors, the largest single mechanism in the ship, which jammed on three of the four hulls in their first year. The four were named Lief Ericson, Asimov, Gagarin and Grissom.
Service
The survey, 2300 to 2317
The four ships left Europa between 1 and 20 January 2300. The Grissom took Brink, Yildun and the long arc south into Saolea and the region the charts would come to call the Ciriban Gulf. Her captain, Mahesh Pillai, set out in his first report the reasoning the Office of Settlement adopted as policy: a buffer of surveyed systems between the Sun and whatever else the galaxy held.
- 2304: Brink.
- 2306: Yildun. In the same year two of the Grissom's crew died in a failure of her hangar doors, the only crew she lost.
- 14 December 2307: on her second pass through Yildun, she found the Mardak Vol capsule, 40 metres long, with its pilot still in the chair, because Pillai's survey doctrine numbered every body larger than a hundred metres.
- 2308: Saolea, with the mangrove moon the Office named Theia.
- 2308 to 2316: Stiridon, Ajam, Izar and Ijax.
- 2315: Cirban, at the Gulf's far edge, with the world that became Bounty.
The Office claimed the Grissom's systems as fast as her couriers brought the reports. By 2317 the four Voyagers had surveyed 800 stars between them, and the Grissom more than the other three together.
First contact, 2317 to 2318
On 21 September 2317 the Grissom was at Cirban's edge, charging for the jump home after two years' survey of the Gulf's far side. At 0322 her sensors recorded a flash 60 astronomical units away that was not a Pillai arrival. Pillai held the charge, kept the torch cold and watched for nine days while a Voor survey cruiser of 1,200 metres surveyed the system. On 1 October it stopped 20 million kilometres away and transmitted the prime numbers, and the Grissom's science officer, Dr Wanjiru Kamau, answered. By the end of the first week the two ships shared a notation for physical constants.
The Grissom's courier left for Sol on 15 October with everything. On 20 October 2317 the Grissom jumped for Haedus in company with the Voor ship, and arrived six hours later to find the Lorni Indur already there, after a jump of forty minutes. She spent November and December 2317 in orbit above Indata Mog and was, on every account, treated as a guest. Her survey log of November 2317 is the first human description of a Voor world. She met the federation's first mission to the Confederacy at Haedus on 9 April 2318 and joined it.
Preservation
The Grissom came home to Europa in the summer of 2318, eighteen years after she left. She was paid off in 2319, the first of the four Voyagers to be retired, and laid up at West Rhine, where she had been built. In 2350 the federation moved her to the Museum of the Expansion, where she has been displayed since with her courier, her two landers and the hangar doors that killed two of her crew. Her log of 21 September 2317 is kept open at its entry for 0322.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.2 "On the Solar Wind: The Four Explorers"
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.3 "In the Shadow of Ancients: Mardak Vol Monuments"
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.6 "Alone No Longer: The Voor Confederacy"