Mai Dong sat in the command module of the Orion II. She buckled her seatbelt and reached out to turn on the control panel's switch.
With a clear series of clicking sounds, the command module's indicator lights and screens lit up. Following that, there was a humming sound. The slumbering spacecraft gradually awoke as the various systems began a self-inspection.
Mai Dong had never manually controlled the Orion II. Or it should be said that she had never touched the Orion's flight controls.
In the entire mission, the only professional astronauts were Old Wang and Thomp. Both of them knew how to control the beast, while the other payload specialists didn't have the capability to do so. In fact, the manual control system was only a redundancy. The Orion's computers had all the programs needed to return to Earth.
In the past few decades, the Orion spacecraft had gone back and forth between Earth and Mars. The manual control system had never been used once.
