I would like to thank the committee

They say that space is the final frontier but really it’s the same as all the other frontiers just colder, emptier and we haven’t figured out who gets to mine what yet. My team and I were part of an advance crew to explore the outer rings of a newly discovered gas giant. Sometimes you can get some rare valuable ores and minerals, mostly it’s a lot of work for not much gain. 

Honestly, it’s kind of a pain in the ass. You spend months orbiting a bunch of fancy space rocks only to find that they don’t want tantalum anymore, what they really want is ruthenium and palladium. It’s a kick in the teeth when you make contact again and mission command tells you you’ve busted your butt for six months for nothing.

There were two other people on the team, other than myself. Three-person crews were common, you had someone who could check if the rocks were worth anything (me), a doctor (Doctor Abara), and an engineer (Mz Nguyen) to make sure that the whole ship didn’t explode around you.

We were about three standard Earth days from our destination. It always felt to me like the height of idiocy to keep tracking time-based on Earth days. We were closer to galaxy MACS0647-JD (I know it just rolls off the tongue) then we were anywhere near home. But humans will have their eccentricities I suppose, and the farther from home we are, the more we cling to the old ways of doing things. 

We still mark time the same way, we used old Earth names and forms of address and we still use old fashioned ways of making our ships. Old broken down, stupid piles of rust. I swear the damn things are sentient and their one goal in life is to break apart in the vacuum of space and kill us all. 

I think that if we stopped trying to do everything the way we used to do it on Earth we’d realise that space travel and land travel are vastly different and there are different dangers involved.

I swear Nguyen does their best to keep us all alive, but last time we stopped off at a refuel station they realised that one of our docking bay connectors had worn down and needed replacing. 

Ground control had no interest in replacing the connector, saying that it was too expensive. Both for the parts and for productivity time lost. I’m the leader of this exhibition, so I need to call the shots. 

Do I ignore what ground control said and replace the bolts anyway? That would risk our jobs, we all had families to feed back home and bills to pay. Alternatively, we could keep going and risk losing our lives, and then who would feed our families? There’s not a day that goes past that I don’t regret what happens and I hope to God that someday I’ll sleep again. 

We were eating dinner down in the mess when it all kicked off. Unappetising cubes of protein, carbs and minerals designed to be as disgusting and nutritionally balanced as possible. 

There came a terrifying screeching noise of metal scraping against metal, followed by an even louder crashing noise. The chatter that filled the room instantly ceased as we came to grips with the reality of our situation. We were deeply and truly fucked.

The connecter had snapped. Luckily there was no-one using that area of the ship or they would have been killed instantly. The entire ship leaned sharply to one side, and we had to grab desperately at anything to keep our balance. 

We were faced with an impossible decision. Do we try to save the ship? Or do we jump ship and risk it in the vacuum of space? It was a split second decision. We raced down the corridor and shut off the access points to the broken connector. 

Whatever had been down that side of the ship had been forcefully ejected so there was no point in trying to salvage anything. The next step was to ensure that nothing else had been lost or damaged. You see if there were any “mishaps” regardless of extenuating circumstances your ass was always on the line. 

You could run diagnostics through ports throughout the ship, we checked each of the major areas. The mess was connected to the sleeping bays so we knew those areas were fine; storage was gone: the medbay and engineering areas were fine but wouldn’t be if we didn’t disconnect the last remains of the broken storage unit. 

No, we didn’t double check that there weren't any supplies left. They were ripped out into the vacuum of space. There is no amount of money that anyone could pay me that would compel me to go out into space without the proper equipment. 

We moved as quickly as we could but by the time we were down the overall structural integrity of the ship was compromised, and we’d lost a good chunk of our supplies. Not to mention our oxygen recycler had been damaged in the kerfuffle and we were operating at 70% capacity and our communications array (which was never great) was knocked about. 

So yeah I used the last of our energy to limp to the nearest station so we wouldn’t all die. We went off course and used resources on an unauthorised detour, but if this committee condemns me for that you’re all bigger hypocrites than I thought you were.

My first responsibility is to my crew and if I had acted sooner, then maybe things would have turned out different. Maybe I would have gotten to that station with three crew members rather than two. All I know is that the unsafe practices regularly undertaken by ground control make them not only criminally negligent but murderers.

I thank you for your time.

Statement taken from Crew Leader Moore, second day of the hearing into the accident at Ackland station.