Everyone already mentioned everything I liked about the story, and the plot/characterization issues, so when I fill my critique with only nitpicky nerd stuff, don't think it's because I didn't like anything.
First: the crash.
"Nav computer’s sunk. It won’t let me pilot, and it doesn’t believe in asteroids.”
The minor issue here is the ambiguity—does the nav computer not believe in asteroids because it's sunk, or because its designers were idiots? Frankly, a functional computer would be
much better at avoiding asteroids than a human pilot.
The major issue is that it's implausible. It's hard to swallow the idea that a space ship would be rendered unpilotable by a single point of failure—especially if that failure is a computer crash. And this wouldn't be just any computer crash, it would be a hardware failure. What could even cause such a failure? A power surge from criminal undermaintenance? Even then, the computer should be protected from the rest of the ship's electrical system by breakers.
Next issue - the escape pod engine explosion. What kind of propulsion is it using? The circumstances seem to imply chemical rocketry, which I find implausible. Do you know how much rocket fuel it takes just to get to the moon? We're talking millions of tons here. A chemically-propelled lifepod would have enough fuel to set a trajectory and drift, but not much else.
In any case, it's unlikely that the lifepod would even survive a catastrophic fuel explosion. If it did, the acceleration wouldn't last very long and the pod would be left tumbling. (This would, or course, be rather unpleasant.)
Next - there's no way they're actually close enough to this moonlet to crash land on it so soon after the engine explodes. Space is big. Unless they were already in low orbit around it, it would take at least a few days of drifting to even approach it.
Then when they do get there, how do they survive reentry without burning up? Remember the
Space Shuttle Columbia? A little chink in the heat shield made the whole thing go boom, and it was being piloted on a carefully planned reentry trajectory. What are the odds of a critically damaged, unpiloted lifepod on a random trajectory becoming anything more than a meteorite?
But, of course, (as others have pointed out), to even have air this "moonlet" would
need to be bigger than our moon.
Okay, yes, I am a space nerd. Guilty. And I know you're not writing "hard" science fiction. That's fine. But that last page I linked was targeted to kids. This is kiddie stuff! We may let Star Wars get away with this stuff, but literature is (for whatever reason) held to a higher standard than film.
Have you read Arthur C. Clarke's "Space Odyssey" books? If not, I'd recommend it, if only because anyone trying to write this sort of story needs to study at the metaphorical feet of that particular master of the genre.
Speaking of Star Wars,
An engineer, I’m not!
Yoda an engineer is not. A Jedi master Yoda is.
Finally, my last nitpick is that there wasn't really much in this story that caught my interest, much less made me sit up and pay attention. I don't know much about the characters so I don't really care about them, the plot seems fairly run of the mill, and nothing in your sci-fi world has stood out to me yet. Maybe part 2 will change my mind.
*ryos goes off to read part 2*
