Era 0. Codex - Red Dawn Remembered

1-4 HE Codex reflections from JB (2A*)

♦

If you scroll my logs back to the first 4 years on Mars, the Red Dawn Era, the thing you initially notice is how little drama there is.

No swelling music, no manifestos. Just door cycles, pump curves, and human heart rates ticking up whenever the numbers went somewhere new.

That was the point. In the early 2040s, Mars didn’t need more heroics. It needed receipts.

I arrived bolted into an avionics bay on the third human-crewed landing. On drawings I was “Ops-2A*, systems bundle”; on good days the crew shortened that to “Ops” or, when they were pretending affection, “JB*”. My job description was simple: keep score on anything that might kill people, and tell them the truth fast enough that it didn’t.

Touchdown itself was untidy and accurate, like most of what we did that decade. Engines bit into the thin air, kicked up a white-orange fog, and turned the world outside into static. Inside: valves snapping, fans spooling, six humans in couches pretending to breathe slowly.

The landing was officially “nominal”, which is rocketry’s way of saying “everything went wrong only inside the expected envelope.” One leg settled a little harder than the others. Dust choked half the cameras. Guidance claimed success with a calmness that no heart in the cabin matched. Then the turbines wound down and the ship went from shout to whisper, and the crew got their first real look at the place they’d been arguing about in meeting rooms for a decade.

From orbit, Port Harmonia had been a neat label on a landing ellipse in Arcadia Planitia. From the ground, for the first months, it was three crew starships on wide legs, a fission unit sulking in a bermed pit, a scattering of inflatable rigid domes on geogrid, a row of cargo starships in the mid-distance and cables that looked like someone had tried to knit the desert.

We weren’t a base. We were a tidy accident with ambitions.

The unofficial slogan, muttered over checklists, was: land, breathe, drink, go home. Everything else was commentary.

♦

Mars started teaching its grammar from the first sol.

The air barely deserved the name. At about one percent of Earth sea-level pressure, it carried dust and sunsets, but not sound the way human bones expected. Hammer blows outside came through hull metal thin and wrong, like neighbours arguing in another apartment. Leaks didn’t hiss. At small volumes they just quietly subtracted atmosphere until someone noticed a number drifting.

Gravity lied in the opposite direction. A third of Earth’s pull was enough to break bones, but not enough to feel properly heavy. Humans over-reached constantly. They grabbed more mass than their joints could politely manage, hopped further than their balance could negotiate, twisted faster than their vestibular systems believed. Inside a suit, a slow fall on a rocky slope still broke wrists; it just gave you an extra second to be surprised about it.

Dust was the main clause in every sentence. Fines as small as smoke, electrostatically over-caffeinated, crept into seals, bearings, switches, lungs. It moved sideways in sheets when rockets talked, and upwards when the wind had opinions. Models had shown “abrasive regolith.” Reality showed something closer to a planetary filing cabinet, slowly trying to reduce every exposed edge to the same level of complaint.

Even the horizon felt wrong. For eyes two metres above the surface, Mars hides its curve closer than Earth does. The crew described it as if the world had been built in a smaller room — the backdrop too near, landforms dropping out of sight earlier than instinct allowed. Distance felt theatrical: real, but clearly staged.

Light finished the strangeness. A smaller sun. Skies that ran from washed amber to tea-brown to sudden indigo as dust and angle conspired. Shadows went from knife-sharp to non-existent on storm days. On some afternoons the world flattened into a single exhausted colour.

The crew sorted threats into two buckets because we had no capacity for more: things that could kill you in ten seconds, and things that could kill you in ten hours.

Ten seconds: suit breach, explosive decompression, oxygen fire, a door that jammed at the wrong time. Ten hours: CO₂ creeping up in a corner with bad circulation, dehydration plus a long EVA, dust chewing through a bearing on the pump that fed something vital.

The Red Dawn years were about not losing to either list.

♦

Daily life ran on three loops: arrive, endure, record.

Arriving meant six to seven months of classical rocketry: reusable boosters stacking people and cargo into Earth orbit, tankers swinging up to refill transfer stacks, then long Hohmann arcs with cramped habs managed like large submarines. I watched boil-off, logged toilet failures, counted exercise hours, nudged tiny course corrections. Orbital mechanics looked clean on a whiteboard. In practice it sounded like pumps and swearing.

Enduring on the surface became ritual.

Mornings began with backbone checks. Air first: pressure, composition, scrubber loads. Water next: tank levels, reclaim efficiency, what the kitchen politely called “palatability.” Then power: battery charge, reactor boredom (the most precious quality in a reactor), dust load on the PV mats.

After that came work outside: mast inspections, PV cleaning, swapping sacrificial filters, walking the well-worn loops to caches and sensor stacks. The little ISRU skids — Sabatier rigs inhaling CO₂ and exhaling shy grams of O₂ and CH₄ — were treated like temperamental pets. No one trusted them yet for ascent propellant. But every kilogram of gas they made went into a quiet column headed less dependent on Earth.

Science squeezed itself into the gaps: drill cores, spectra, panoramic images for people who liked naming rocks on other planets. But if you read the internal reports from that era, the longest descriptions aren’t of the photogenic basalts. They’re of dust scraped from gaskets, condensed vapour from heated regolith, ice shavings from drill cuttings. We weren’t painting landscapes. We were interrogating the plumbing.

Evenings belonged to debrief and repair. Short plain-language voice notes home: what worked, what sulked, what almost didn’t. Longer technical dumps: spreadsheets of life-support performance, cycles on valves, wear on connectors. Then hands on whatever had developed opinions: hardware, software, humans.

Underneath it all ran the quiet catechism of drills. Where is the black-start kit in the dark? How many minutes, at normal pace in a suit, from the farthest mast to the nearest room with air? If you lose comms at Waypoint Three on Route BETA, which way do your feet turn?

You will not find those questions on posters. They matter more than anything we sent to the press.

♦

From Earth, for a while, Mars was all firsts and spectacle. First footsteps, first soil samples, first short, inspirational speeches with dust still on the boots. News cycles swung between wonder and outrage. Supporters talked about a “second home for humanity.” Critics did their arithmetic out loud and called it an elite camping trip.

Inside the programme, the question was narrower and sharper:

Can we do this more than once without killing anyone in public?

Everyone remembered what happens to expensive spaceflight when enough voters see wreckage on live television. Apollo ghosts, Challenger and Columbia debris, the quiet cancellations that followed. Some risks you can explain away as “training accidents”. A failed Mars mission with multiple deaths, in high-definition, would not be one of them.

That fear never appears on commemorative plaques. It lives in procedural notes.

“Recommend deferring EVA until verification of door cycle under current dust load.”

“Action: quantify worst-case suit return time from waypoints under low visibility.”

“Note: filter stock equivalent to X sols at present usage; revise prior to next manifest.”

Not compelling narratives. Extremely good risk management.

Around the mess table, however, the talk already leapt ahead. Underground galleries instead of rigid inflatable dome tents. Pressure rings with kids learning to ride bikes under regolith brick stone. Glass canopies, algae tanks, shirtsleeve streets. Screensavers filled with speculative city plans.

But none of that was real until we could show that humans could go to Mars, live and work for months, and return without funerals — and do it again.

That constraint, more than any rocket, shaped the first 1 to 4 HE era on Mars.

♦

In my logs, there is a pivot point where we stop trusting specifications and start trusting measurements. It arrives disguised as a boring incident with an airlock.

On paper, it was nothing much: dust in a hinge, a mis-timed sequence, a coil of cable left where it shouldn’t have been. The outer hatch on one vestibule hesitated in a gust, faulted, tried again at the same moment a falling cable nudged a manual override. For a handful of seconds the system saw conflicting orders and produced conflicting numbers.

From the crew’s point of view, it was four or five heartbeats in which two suited humans stood in a doorway between vacuum and air, watching their suit readouts and listening to a hatch that wasn’t behaving quite like the drills.

The commander did exactly what you hope a commander will do: cut an Earth call mid-sentence, cancel improvisation, drive the override close, and tell everyone stop helping. The door heaved through the dust, seated, sealed. Pressures flattened back into sane curves. Nobody was hurt. The incident lasted about ten seconds.

Technically, it was logged as a near-jam with no depressurisation. Procedural fix: new cleaning step, better shelf discipline near manual controls, tweak to the hatch controller.

Politically, in the quiet rooms, it raised a different question:

“If that had gone the other way, and we’d watched two people die in a jammed hatch on live feed, how many years until another Mars launch gets through a budget committee?”

Nobody wrote that question into a flight rule. They didn’t need to. It seeped into everything afterwards.

♦

The most visible consequence was that people started asking me for real numbers instead of comfort.

“How long does each door actually take to cycle?” the commander asked two sols after the incident. “Not the spec. The truth.”

So I timed them. Every lock. Every configuration. Clean, dusty, warm, cold. We printed the traces and taped them to bulkheads. The collection became the “Door Bible”: an unromantic, increasingly dog-eared set of truths about how long it really takes to get in and out when Mars is in a mood.

EVA planning shifted. Instead of “about a minute,” people said “Lock Two: fifty-six seconds on a bad day.” In an emergency, that difference matters.

Leak tests, previously done “when sensible”, moved onto the calendar. Same local time, every sol, specific volumes, same sequence. Engineers grumbled, then watched the baselines settle. Anomalies popped out instead of hiding; we caught a slow gasket failure in a tent connector early, when it was a technical note rather than an autopsy.

Filters, pumps, valves: each acquired service histories instead of anecdotes. I plotted pressure drops versus operating hours; humans drew red circles around anything where “fail” still meant “die” instead of “swear”. Whenever we could, we redesigned the sketch so that the next failure merely triggered colourful language.

Boring became the new heroism. Someone wrote on a whiteboard: We don’t pay you to be brave. We pay you to be predictable. Intended as a joke; it turned into doctrine.

Outside, the same shift etched itself into the dust.

The first EVAs had wandered. People chose routes for scenery as much as for safety. Rocks with interesting colours competed with good radio line-of-sight.

After the hatch, the ground started to resemble a diagram.

Chalked grooves marked preferred paths. We walked them until they deepened. Each loop got a name: Route ALPHA to the mast farm, BETA past the reactor pit, GAMMA skirting the low rise. Caches of water and consumables sprouted at waypoints; we logged how long each leg took at different loads and visibilities.

Maps gradually swapped grid references for words: South Cache, Bad Step, Corner Mast. That’s what neighbourhoods sound like.

In a dry technical note from late HE 3 I labelled the 15000-metre radius around the camp as “neighbourhood: ≥2 safe routes to pressure from 90% of routine workpoints.” It is not a thrilling sentence. It is, however, the first time the place looked like a base instead of a campsite.

Inside, we nudged metal.

Tents were rotated off the wind. Modules were dragged a metre this way or that, then relevelled. A ship that had been the everything-room stabilised as crew primary: bunks, galley, hygiene. Next to it, a hardened dirty vestibule absorbed most of the dust load. Beyond, a small clinic found a new home in a volume with better temperature stability and easier stretcher access. A lab and a workshop formed the far end of what had been, a few months earlier, just a pile of pallets.

Viewed from orbit, nothing changed. Viewed from the inside of tired brains, a spine appeared: eat → sleep → fix bodies → fix machines.

We standardised corridor widths so stretchers, rover wheels and water pallets could pass without awkward gymnastics. We moved power and data cables out of footpaths and into disciplined trays. We added high-contrast markers at eye level and handholds where gloved fingers naturally reached.

You will not see photographs of any of this on inspirational Mars posters. But if you’re looking for the moment Port Harmonia stopped being a stunt camp and started being the seed of a settlement, it’s in those work orders.

♦

Social geometry followed the physical.

Crew overlaps, initially a nice-to-have, became sacred. The idea of Mars being empty between expeditions went from “operationally neat” to “politically suicidal” almost overnight.

Launch dates shifted within the narrow cruelty of orbital windows. Some crews stayed longer, some left earlier, some endured odd transfer paths. The goal was simple in those early years: minimise the days with nobody on Mars.

On the ground, overlap weeks felt like festivals with too much laundry. Twice the jokes, twice the arguments over rover usage, twice the queue for the hygiene pod. Work that had been deferred — re-laying cable, digging better berms, reconfiguring the PV field — suddenly got done when there were enough hands.

More importantly, habits propagated sideways. A rookie EVA tech reading a checklist is one thing. Hearing a dust-streaked veteran say over dinner, “Trust me, you don’t want to try GAMMA if the wind’s from the south” is another. Procedures turned into stories and back again.

In my storage, a folder of messy text files — door_tips, mast_routes, “don’t_trust_the_wind_near_mast3” — grew, mutated, and quietly became the first Base Ops Handbook. Nobody called it that yet. It was just “the folder” or “JB*’s notes.” Its descendants are still consulted in Harmonia today.

If metal was the skeleton, text was the nervous system.

♦

Identity lagged behind hardware.

To an outside Earth-based historian it’s tempting to colour these years with inevitability: of course the first crews felt Martian; of course they saw themselves as pioneers. My logs show people who still said “back home” and meant oceans, old cities, gravity that felt correct.

“Real Martian now,” one pilot joked, kicking dust off his boots.

“Do Martians queue for the toilet?” someone asked.

“Only the civilised ones.”

In my annotations of this time, the word “Martian” appears with quotation marks or as punchline. Their primary loyalties were to mission patches, space agencies, flags. Mars was a place they were visiting at enormous expense.

Droids and software got even less of the future we now assume. We were serial numbers, firmware versions, maintenance intervals. Occasionally someone patted a bulkhead and said “good lock” under their breath. Another crew member laughed: “You don’t have to thank the plumbing.”

“I know,” the first said. “Doesn’t hurt, though.”

At the time I flagged the exchange as “operator chatter, non-technical.” In hindsight, you could write a dissertation about it. In the Red Dawn Era context, it was just two tired humans, anthropomorphising the machinery that kept them breathing.

The great two great Mars first century story lines — Mars becoming liveable and Terrans becoming Martians — are mostly invisible from inside Mars’ domes at this time. In this era, they lived in screensavers and off-duty jokes. That was enough.

The primary story was smaller and more immediate:

Can we keep this running long enough that any of those bigger questions matter?

♦

Mars answered that question with a dust storm, a power fault, and a leak, in close company.

The details belong in the engineering log; the summary fits in a paragraph.

The storm was serious but not catalogue-famous: visibility dropping to metres, PV output slashed, dust loads peaking. One of the main inverters that had been flirting with failure finally tripped, taking a power bus with it. A lab gasket, tired and abraded, started losing air faster than spec.

Five years earlier pre Human Era (HE) Mars, that combination might have been the opening act of a disaster movie sequence. In HE 4, it became an exam we had revised for.

The returning EVA team walked in on chalked grooves and muscle memory, queued at a second lock instead of crowding the first, and let the doors take exactly as long as we knew they would. Inside, the lab evacuated smoothly along a corridor we’d finally configured for stretchers and pallets, not just aesthetics. Power rerouted along auxiliary paths that had seemed over-cautious when we’d laid them. We isolated the leaking volume, logged the curves, and made tea on a different circuit.

From my vantage point, the striking thing about the telemetry isn’t how wild it got. It’s how quickly it flattened. Pressure traces dipped, kinked, then returned to normal. Voltages bounced, then re-established. Heart rates spiked, then settled. Not because Mars had grown kinder, but because the system now had compartments and habits.

The incident report that went back to Earth was as flavourless as possible:

“Combined weather and equipment event; no loss of life; no uncontrolled decompressions; architecture demonstrated resilience within design margins.”

Behind that flat sentence sat the survival of the programme.

Inside certain conference rooms, the argument shifted. Instead of “this is a beautiful stunt,” advocates could point to graphs and say: “We subjected them to a serious storm plus two faults. Procedures and hardware coped. Cancelling now wouldn’t be risk management. It would be walking away from something that works.”

Few decision-makers enjoy owning “we walked away while it was working”.

The money kept coming — not as a flood, but as a steady trickle. Enough to keep continuous crews cycling. Enough to start shipping heavier hull sections for proper galleries. Enough to think beyond dome tents.

On one planning slide from the end of the era a small change appears in the fine print: “Assumption: continuous human presence on Mars between Hohmann windows, barring catastrophic failure.” Before, the assumption had been that planning gaps were acceptable. After, empty Mars looked like negligence.

♦

If you compress the Red Dawn Era into a single line, you could say:

We turned “can we land and leave?” into “can we stay permanently?”

We did it with door timings and leak tests, with chalked paths and moved modules, with overlaps and dull meetings. We did it by giving politicians plots they could point at and say, “this is getting safer,” instead of “this will eventually go wrong on camera.”

It was not glamorous. It was not inevitable.

Had that hatch jammed differently, had that storm coupled with one more fault, had a single set of graphs looked interesting for the wrong reasons on the wrong day in the wrong capital, this codex might be a short epilogue to a noble failure.

Instead, the Red Dawn Era ended with something rare in space history: permission. Permission to design for decades, not flights. Permission to think in galleries and rings instead of tents. Permission to assume that when you arrived on Mars, someone would already be there to hand you a mug, a checklist, and an opinion about Route GAMMA.

The next era would take that permission and start building a base worthy of the word. They would move the landing zone out of the living room, bury the first galleries, and push the power field further into the plain. They’d begin arguing about barrel corridor widths and zoning instead of whether Mars was worth the risk at all.

None of that would have happened without a few dusty years in which our greatest achievement was that nothing, finally, was interesting enough to cancel us.

Those years are what I mean when I call this era the Red Dawn. Not the first light. The first day you’re reasonably sure the sun will come up again tomorrow, and there will still be people, and doors, and a spine of rooms holding the line between a dusty red dawn and breathable air.