LB–02 · orbital comparison
Gateway Intercept
One Moon. Two mirrored paths. One burn narrow enough to close a door.
This simulation reveals the climax of Cold Soak
It uses the final ascent, Gateway’s delayed burn, and the numbers that decide whether Jack reaches the station.
The 3D engine and mission assets are not downloaded until you continue.
Two polar geometries
Guided overview · drag to orbit, wheel or pinch to zoom, right-drag or two fingers to pan.
Planned Gateway NRHO · north-pole low pass Cold Soak Gateway orbit · southern low pass
The NRHO is drawn in the Earth–Moon rotating frame. The 15-second correction sequence and displayed performance cues follow the chapter; vehicle scale, apparent separation and the 42-minute coast are staged for legibility.
What the manuscript gives us
Rendezvous arithmetic
42 minutes · 58 km at 23.1 m/s reproduces the book's 42-minute rendezvous.
No survivable second pass
Supports a multi-day return · Gateway cannot come round again before the ascent vehicle's life support is exhausted.
Interpretive categories, not a manuscript-specified survival threshold.The ascent vehicle cannot keep him breathing until Gateway comes round again. Paraphrased from Theo’s warning
Default operating range
Selected for the interactive model—not stated in the novel.
- Perilune between 100 and 300 km
- Apolune between 60,000 and 72,000 km
- Period between 6.0 and 7.2 days
A station supporting a surface campaign can trade communications dwell for an inexpensive weekly crew connection. In the novel, Houston communicates with the base directly from Earth.
Why the default orbit is eccentric
The real Gateway is planned for a near-rectilinear halo orbit: a close, fast pass over the lunar north followed by a long arc south. The fictional Cold Soak Gateway orbit borrows that broad visual idea and reverses the low pass toward the south-polar base. It is stage machinery for the simulation, not a precise NRHO or a canonical trajectory.
The eccentric shape does one dramatic job: it creates a useful low pass followed by a long wait for equivalent geometry. A circular low lunar orbit would return in roughly two hours and weaken the ticking clock. The manuscript gives us the outcome—58 kilometres of range, a closing velocity of 23.1 metres per second and roughly 42 minutes to rendezvous—not the complete orbit that produced it.
The close mission view begins from the chapter’s 12.4-kilometre altitude cue, with the 1.8 g sustainer still firing beneath the 1.3-second off-axis correction. The manual hold is the deliberate departure: Jack’s flight computer performs that burn in the novel, then flies the rendezvous without further input.
The high-perilune failure is deliberately first-order. Holding closing rate constant is useful for seeing the constraint break, but a real rendezvous would be solved with full state vectors, phasing and transfer burns.
The queued correction responds to the sliders the same way. Gateway's twelve-second slip displaces the station along-track in proportion to its perilune speed from vis-viva, so a faster low pass demands more delta-v inside a tighter ignition corridor. The default is calibrated to display the chapter’s 23.9 m/s correction, 1.30-second burn and eight-second margin; these values support the interaction rather than define a hidden canonical orbit.
Lunar colour and elevation data: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio, assembled from LRO instrument data. Gateway Core model: NASA/JSC/Gateway Program Office; original model credits Alberto G. Bertolin and Bradley W. Reynolds, JSC Graphics and Animation LAB. NASA does not endorse this fictional simulation.