2057-2060 Titan PPC Gathering
Normally for PPC Gatherings, I leave home a couple of hours before they start, and take a picture of myself with a clock. In this case… well, let me put it this way: the trip to Titan would take three years. Marking the exact time I left seemed a bit silly.
So I did it anyway.
Yes, I know; I forgot to take an actual photo. Shh.
You know what still gets me after all these years? That we built Concorde - a supersonic passenger plane! - and then just… gave up on it. I mean, all right, we’d’ve had to scrap it by now, and flying to America by zeppelin (eh, ‘blimp’ just sounds so pathetic) is pretty awesome - but Concorde could have made it to New Mexico in under four hours. And yes, I know, pollution blah, environment blah. I even agree with it. But… that’s pretty cool however you look at it.
Environmentally friendly and hideously slow.
So: Spaceport America. We’ve all seen it on the news - the new runways, the vertical launchpad - the emergency crews after the Lady Godiva went down, the smug spokesperson when it was determined that the passengers had been the cause, not the ship itself (still not sure how convinced I am, but one accident in the past fifteen years doesn’t worry me much). But there’s one thing all the news reports etc etc failed to mention, a major feature present at SA that they just ignore:
PPCers!
No, that’s a security guard.
Camera-shy PPCers! Well, you know how it is these days. But they’re there! Just out of shot. Nine of us had signed up for the Gathering, including all four of us Ancientestbies - hey, you take care of the PPC for half a century, you’ve got to get some perks, right? So we spent the first couple of hours gossipping over lunch, and then proved that age has no impact on a PPCer’s capacity for mayhem by playing ‘stalk the Sue’ around the spaceport.
(A lot of people on the Board suggested we should try out ‘hunt the Slash-Wraith’, but what were we supposed to do - follow every couple we saw? Maybe for the next Earthside Gathering someone can come up with, er, actual rules)
In classic me-fashion, I completely failed to take any pictures of the WightKnight (yeah, I know - call it an in-joke) or SpaceShip that actually took us up to orbit. I did try to grab a few shots on the way up - I actually took what I thought would be a really nice one of the WightKnight (heh) as we pulled away from it - but almost all of them came up blurry. The only one that didn’t…
This is what going to space looks like.
Our ‘private yacht’ was waiting for us up at the ICSS, and I admit, it wasn’t much to look at:
It looked better on the brochure.
But that didn’t matter - for the next six, seven years, it was ours. We filled in the last of the paperwork, sent someone out to stencil the ship’s new name on the outside of its hull, and we were set.
Vingilot departed eight hours after we reached the ICSS. We were on our way to Titan!
Bye, Earth! See you in seven!
… and then there was an awful lot of nothing.
That’s the problem with these long-distance Gatherings - all the down-time en route. Even Sea of No-Tranquility-Here back in ‘51 had the same problem - and it’s only three days to the Moon. We had three years to kill.
Pictured: the view.
We left the entire Middle-earth series – all nine films, plus the first four seasons of The Silmarillion (season five, by unanimous vote, was stricken from the record) – on permanent loop during the trip. I calculated it – in the three years of our flight, the series ran almost three hundred times. That’s a lot of hobbits.
Fortunately, there were a few sights to break up the endless black of our journey. Through what I’m assured was blind luck, we actually passed close enough to an asteroid in the Belt to see it (barely) with the naked eye. Without any information on which asteroid it was, we decided it ‘simply had to be’ 2675 Tolkien, coming to wave us off. Thanks, Professor Asteroid!
Taking photos of space is hard.
Because we were following a Voyager-esque trajectory, our gravity assist took us nicely close to Jupiter. We actually skimmed the atmosphere of Io, which was great because writers and scientists alike have frequently compared that little ball of volcanic fury to Mordor. We couldn’t stop and take a trip down to the surface - even if our flight plan had allowed it, our suits are built for cold, not sulfurous heat! - but we could and did drop off a camera drone and project the feed onto the common room walls.
Io was spectacular - and spectacularly scary! Our viewpoint flew through the plume of an erupting volcano on the way down, and came out smeared with sulfur - not that it mattered, since the whole view was yellow anyway. When it finally reached the ground, it landed hard on what looked like solid (if, y’know, yellow) ground - only to break through and fall straight into lava. We didn’t get any more footage after that. Naturally, we dubbed the landing site ‘the Cracks of Doom’, and retroactively named our drone ‘Smeagol’.
Smeagol’s last view before the Cracks of Doom cracked (with doom)
Then we were past Jupiter, and into… almost as much nothing as we’d had before it, and now with some extra burdens.
For one, Vingilot was now far enough from the sun that our heating systems were having to work hard - which meant they broke down more often. Most of the time the automated systems took care of it, but we still had to step in occasionally - and that’s not exactly why we’re on this trip!
Worse, Deep Space Network starts to break down once you get past the science stations on Europa (which is the last place that really uses it). We never actually lost Internet access, but it got awfully patchy and slow. We couldn’t stream movies or TV any more - even downloading them took days - and, worst of all, even the Board started taking an hour or so to load. At one point we had to institute a ‘two refreshes a day’ rule, which… well, you can imagine how that went down.
Not well, is what I’m saying.
We found a few ways to distract ourselves. The fact that there were nine of us meant it was very easy to roleplay the Fellowship - and as the months stretched on, we really got into our roles. We must have played out full-scale AU Ring Quests a dozen times or more. I was Legolas, for obvious reasons (hint: elf (wrong sort of elf, but still)), and… actually, you can probably figure out the others. There wasn’t a lot of arguing, surprisingly - we all found a role we fit into perfectly.
I think we all half forgot what we were doing out there. I mean, space is so big, it’s hard to imagine there are really any planets or moons out there, let alone that you could ever find one.
But they were there, and as 2060 drew on, we finally approached the most impressive of them all: the Lord of the Rings himself.
Satron. Or is that Sauturn?
After years of sitting around in Mirkwood Rivendell Vingilot doing nothing, we were suddenly all systems go. Three years of spin-gravity furniture and accumulated junk had to be shuffled around to prepare for thrust-gravity. We burned into a high Saturn orbit (on automatic, of course - no chance we were going to try and muck about with the controls ourselves! (Well… one of us tried. But we all sat on her)), then transited into Titan’s domain.
Not a blurry photo. It really looks like that!
From orbit, the solar system’s only moon with an atmosphere was pretty unimpressive. But that was okay - we weren’t here for the view from above! We climbed into our lander, bickered about what to name it (we eventually settled on Eärrámë, after Tuor’s shop, because of course we did), and set off down to the Gathering.
The view beneath the clouds
Titan was… well, orange. With it, Io, Saturn, and Jupiter, we were definitely at the red end of the spectrum for this trip. But that was okay, we’d expected it going in. We landed safely (obviously, or you wouldn’t be reading this!) on the edge of the Adiri highlands, and you’ll never guess what we found there: evidence of intelligent life!
What manner of creature could have… oh.
Yep, we managed to land right next to the very first Titan lander, Huygens. We very carefully did not take any parts of it as souveniers; we’ve been accused of being bullies often enough, let’s not add vandalism to the list.
By the way, you see those ‘rocks’? They’re made of ice. Like, water ice. Titan is cold.
We decided to take the rover up to our next destination, rather than flying Eärrámë over. On the way across, we went through a belt of methane snow - and promptly had the coldest Snowfight on record. Sadly we didn’t quite have the time (or energy!) to rebuilt Snow!Nargothrond… but it was there in spirit.
Finally, our destination - the true start of the Gathering - was in sight: Taniquetil!
Mount Ever-orange
It may not be the tallest of Titan’s mountains, but come on, it’s named after the Holy Mountain of Valinor - where else where we going to go? I still have no idea what possessed the IAU when they decided to name Titan’s mountains after Tolkien’s (though I wonder if the SO popped in to have a word with them), but I’m glad they did!
We didn’t even try to climb Taniquetil (the Valar probably wouldn’t have liked it). Instead, we stopped at the bottom to sing Quenya songs and English filk, read from the books, discuss whether balrogs had wings (and whether they could fly on Titan), and all the other things good Tolkien fans do when they’re at Gatherings.
There, see? I did take pictures of people.
The trip back to Eärrámë was… sombre, I guess. It wasn’t like Tolkien had had any connection to Titan - he actually died years before even Voyager I made it out this far - but despite that, it felt like we were on… not quite sacred ground, but something close. Like this ball of hydrocarbon-coated ice and rock (and don’t forget the ammonia!) actually meant something. It may have been silly, but… well. There it was.
Of course, we’re the PPC. Our serious faces didn’t last that long.
Our second - and last - destination was on the far side of the moon. We hopped in the lander and zoomed off. It seemed like ages before we saw it:
Can you see what it is yet?
That pillar of steam and smoke is rising from Sotra Patera, the most famous cryovolcano on Titan. And in front of it as we flew in, obscuring it, the highest mountain in the world: Mount Doom.
Like I said, I don’t know why the IAU did it, but…
We landed on the slopes of Mount Doom itself. Frodo would have had an easier time if he’d owned a spaceship! (And yes, we seriously considered renaming the lander Gwaihir, or perhaps The Eagles Take The Ring To Mordor) The view was… amazing.
Snow on Mount Doom, ice in the sky.
Those volcanos - just two of the complex around Sotra - aren’t venting lava. Or rather, they are… but the lava on Titan is molten ice: water. You can wade in it (in fact, we did) with no problems. But it melts the rocks (which, you remember, are ice themselves) and boils the oceans (liquid methane); it’s just as dangerous to Titan as lava is to Earth.
Still, though, it made for some pretty surreal moments. Normally, when you see something like this:
The Cracks of Doom! No, wait, that’s on Io.
… your first thought isn’t to walk straight through it. Instead, you’d be more likely to step into this:
What a beautiful beach!
… which is a methane ocean, and would freeze your suit solid.
Confession: this is the point where my camera broke - and it was entirely my own fault. Yes, my suit loved walking through the ‘lava’ jet… but my camera was specially designed to work at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Oops. I didn’t even realise until we were back in the lander, so I have no photos for the rest of the Gathering.
Which is a real shame. We threw our specially-made replica One Ring - ice with a completely degradable gold coating - into the fires waters of Mount Doom’s nearest neighbour, then pulled out our wings from the lander. Did you know it’s possible to fly on Titan by attaching wings to your arms and flapping? We played ‘Eagles vs. Nazgul’ around the cryovolcano, catching ammonia updrafts, wheeling above the orange landscape beneath the crimson sun - it was incredible.
But, eventually, we had to leave. We do have homes to go to, you know! We packed everything away, climbed into Eärrámë, and headed back to orbit.
… oh, all right. No, we didn’t actually spend three years flying out to muck about on Titan for less than a day. We actually did loads of stuff - watched the tide flood through the Throat of Kraken, built butane-castles in the waxy deserts, dug into hillsides of ice and made replicas of Menegroth, Nargothrond, the Halls of Mandos… we were down there for months.
But… I don’t know. We want to share it with you, of course we do - otherwise I wouldn’t have written any of this - but at the same time… it’s ours. Telling you everything we did, even if I had the time or space (I don’t!), would somehow take it away from us.
I know, it’s not fair. But it’s how it is. If you want to know what it’s like - Titan is still there, waiting.
Anyway. We returned to Vingilot, methane-stained, low-gravity-acclimated, and utterly thrilled with what we’d experienced. We unpacked everything, made it all safe… and activated the autopilot to take us home.
I don’t think any of us stepped away from the window as we left Titan behind. We still had the photos (though, like I say, not quite all of them), but it wasn’t going to be the same. We watched it until it faded into the dark. Then we dispersed, and I, for one, sat down to write this report.
As we pulled out of orbit, we dropped off one final camera drone, which we named Maglor (since we were leaving it a very long way from home). It gave us one last picture - a farewell from Titan, and from all of us here at the Gathering.
See you all back on Earth in another three years.
Because how better to end than an art shot?