1. To accomplish this task, a supercomputer must be built. It should be able to autopilot the spacecraft and manage the people on board, be capable of anticipating all possible emergency scenarios that could arise during the flight, and making decisions to above all else ensure the wonder-weed is successfully harvested, packaged and shipped back to Earth.
2. The return home should be without the miners who must be left behind under any pretense, even resorting to euthanasia if necessary. This would increase the number of rooms for storing the product and cut the deadweight in half for the trip back to Earth.
3. The return flight must include the spacecraft pilot (who may not necessarily be the commander) and three cryogenic engineers who would ensure that the temperature conditions in the refrigerating modules and the vacated cabins are conducive to successfully preserving the precious wonder-weed.
For two years, the programmers and designers on Earth had been racking their brains over this problem and, finally, built a supercomputer superior to all previous versions by a thousand times. It was called GASSOS, an acronym for a long abstruse name for the super brain of the spaceship – the Global Automated Science-based Spaceship Operating System. But the developers themselves – and the spacemen later on – began calling it just GAS for short, and the computer answered to this nickname with pleasure, accepting it as its proper name.
When installed into the starship, GAS could perform each of the ship’s tasks on its own without any human assistance. It handled all of the starship’s vital systems, charted and set the optimal course mid-flight, toggled on and off the mechanisms necessary to maintain flight, arranged meals for the crew, calculated the minimal daily requirements for air and water, and the controlled the temperatures in the cabins. It could even entertain its passengers with various lectures, songs, stories, jokes, and just have heart-to-heart conversations with them. It knew everything: about the crew, the flight to Hopus, the ship’s functional capabilities, the Solar System and all the stars humanity had studied. GAS’ developers had accounted for everything and programmed it in such a way so that it only obeyed commands from the Center; when it is out of communication range, it should work according to its preprogrammed directives – its main goal was to deliver Hopus’ wonder-weed to Earth. Everything else for GAS was secondary and expendable to the task at hand. Of course, all possible contingencies over such a long journey cannot be foreseen, so the programmer implemented a machine learning function to GAS, functioning much like the human brain, so that it can decide on the optimal course of action in an emergency while following the principle “do no harm to yourself and the cargo.” To assist GAS on the ship the inventors built two androids capable to carry out simple jobs on command related to the servicing the machinery, serving the crew and system repairs if necessary.
While the problem of figuring out how to operate the ship during the long journey was solved, the developers still struggled to find a way to reduce the ship’s total weight to ensure the ship’s return to Earth while in accordance with the approved supplies requirements. The routine calculations for the necessary spaceship supplies were made by the experienced planners and logisticians who were located a floor below, and didn’t fit into the takeoff weight of the experimental long-haul journey. To make these calculations, a separate group of classified specialists was formed to assess the most extreme conditions the flight could undergo. Much like the staff from the old department, they worked in secret during the preparation activities of the classified department to prevent information from leaking to the people, as it often happens.
