Into the last twenty seconds now. She reached out and clasped Viktor’s hand. She could get away with that, tense moment and all—if anybody noticed. (Or had they noticed long ago, even before she and Viktor got together, and cut them both to the second team?)
“We have a burn,” came the flat, factual incantation, used now for over half a century at the Cape.
The huge white booster, bigger than the Saturn V, lifted gracefully upward—and a spurt of virulent yellow leaped sideways from it. The explosion ripped apart the feeds just above the nozzles. Angry yellow climbed up the sides and, before she could gasp, engulfed the payload. Already the booster had begun to topple to the side.
It was the worst sort of accident.
Always feared, impossible to completely eliminate. A failed wall buffer at the high-pressure point. Fuel blockage. A pressure-driven chemical excursion.
The enormous, ripping convulsion destroyed the gantry, support structures—the whole launch area. The six crew tried to eject but the whole event was far too fast for even astronaut reflexes. They all died, mercifully fast. So did an electrician, standing half a mile away, struck by flying steel.
Julia went through the days of uproar in a glassy daze. Mourning for friends. Avoiding TV crews. Watching as the disaster undermined NASA’s support in Congress. Letting the days creep by as the gray pall over her life slowly lifted.
Soon enough the strident voices from the House floor claimed an even larger victim than the booster. The entire Mars campaign was “halted for the duration,” as one craggy-faced pol put it. The duration of what? Apparently, of the minimum-energy launch window that beckoned in 2016. After that, it would be 2018 before the next launch window. But once stopped, would the Mars program ever restart?
Slowly Julia sank into depression. She had been buoyed up for so long by the taste of opportunity. To have it snatched away so abruptly left a big hole in her life.
She had been riding on hope ever since, six years before, the United States had negotiated the Mars Accords. At the time it had seemed brilliant. The true trick of getting to Mars was how to do it without squandering anybody’s entire Gross National Product. When President George Bush called in 1989 for a manned mission to Mars on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 Apollo landing, he got the estimated bill from NASA: $450 billion. The sticker shock killed Bush’s initiatives in Congress. The price was high because everyone in NASA and their parasite companies tacked every conceivable extra onto the mission. An expanded space station. A moon base. Redundancy.
Multiple backup systems are the key to safety—but the more backups, the higher the cost. NASA’s $450 billion program was an enormous government pork farm.
So a radical idea arose: the advanced nations could get this adventure on the cheap by simply offering a prize of $30 billion to the first manned expedition to return successfully from Mars.
European governments had long used this mechanism for risky explorations, going back to the Portuguese in the 1400s. In 1911, William Randolph Hearst offered a $50,000 prize to the first person to fly across America in less than thirty days. Human-powered flight got a boost from a $200,000 award claimed in 1978 by the Gossamer Albatross. The method worked.
The advantages were many, and political: governments would put out not a dime until the job was done, and only reward success; only private investors would lose if their schemes failed. Politicians could be proud, prophetic patrons of exploration and, simultaneously, enemies of make-work bureaucratic programs. And if astronauts died, it was on somebody else’s head, not an embarrassment to a whole government.
To win the Mars Prize, it would not be enough to fly a flags-and-footprints expedition. More like a treasure hunt, the Accords specified a series of scientific explorations—geologic mapping, seismic testing, studying atmospheric phenomena, taking core samples, looking for water and, of course, fossils or life. Samples returned from Mars would be immensely valuable: a full range of specimens weighing three hundred kilograms would be turned over to the Accords Board in exchange for the $30 billion. Anything over and above that was for the investors.
On the surface, the Mars Accords were international treaty obligations to open Mars for a global effort. Actually it was grudging support for NASA, whom everyone expected to eventually claim the prize. Julia and the other astronauts had been in training under this initiative.
But not now. Nobody else had taken up the challenge, and NASA had been slowly assembling an effort to fly at the minimum-energy planetary orbital window in 2016.
A week after the blowup, a day after the big state funeral, President Feinstein announced that the U.S. would “redirect its energies to near-Earth projects.” Like building another wing on the space station, a notorious pork barrel beloved of Congress.
Mars seemed dead. All the astronauts were dejected, their years of training wasted. A few took sudden leaves. One went skydiving. Some started hanging out in bars, not part of the approved health regimen.
Julia tried to wear her Doris Day mask through the whole thing, but it kept slipping. She consoled Marc and Raoul, men who ditched good careers to train for Mars. Even then, she kept quiet about being romantically involved with Viktor. In the tight little world of astronaut politics, nobody knew what would happen next. Conceivably, just having kept it secret might knock them out of space station missions—the only game left.
Then a slim, beautifully dressed man walked in on the Mars astronaut team at Johnson Space Center.
He came with a trailing wedge of suited, alert men and women who formed a bow shock wave for him, enabling a dramatic entrance. He shook a few hands, traded short sallies, and worked the room almost like a politician. Julia knew she had seen him somewhere before. His gaze swept the NASA staff like a searching though affable spotlight. The whole room seemed to focus around him as people talking to the side stopped to watch.
His swift gaze found the dozen astronauts. He paused for effect, then asked, “Who still wants to go to Mars—on the cheap?”
John Axelrod. Ready smile, tanned good looks, darting blue eyes that gleamed with wary assessment. She had felt an uneasy fascination with him from the first moment.
His money originally came from Genesmart, a biotech firm he helped start, that brought to market Tourex, an antibacterial to combat Montezuma’s revenge. It had become the indispensable traveling companion for tourists and business travelers worldwide. When he took Genesmart public, he was an overnight multibillionaire. But from his early years he had been the kind of man who would bet on whose bag came off the baggage claim carousel first. His interest in Mars ran back to childhood. He had been a washout in early astronaut training, but had kept a keen interest and had some insider, good ol’ boy contacts at NASA.
He knew NASA’s unmanned return ship, the ERV, had launched for Mars over a year ago. It had landed in Gusev Crater and refueled, using the Martian atmosphere, and was ready even now to fly a crew back to Earth. And he didn’t want to see the Mars mission die.
“Plus,” he had said to the astronauts, “there’s money to be made.”
In just a few wheeler-dealer days, Axelrod had put together a consortium of big corporations to win the $30 billion Mars Prize.
“But we estimated sixty billion dollars to go,” one astronaut interrupted.
“That’s with bureaucrats and paperwork.” Axelrod grinned, white teeth against tanned skin. He looked to be in his forties, fit and bristling with peppery energy. “That, I’ll cut.”
He had a risky but inexpensive method for a red planet mission first suggested in the early 1990s. Instead of using NASA’s costly orbiting return module, the Consortium crew would return to Earth directly in the NASA return ship.
“But the ERV is government property!” an astronaut called.
“It’s an abandoned ship. My lawyers will argue that the Law of the Sea applies here. With no crew, it belongs to whoever gets to it.”
“That’s not fair!”
“Life ain’t.”
“NASA will need it when they go.”
“It’ll be a junker by then.”
Cutting the crew to four also allowed the Consortium to launch a smaller manned habitat vehicle. The crew of four would land near the ERV.
“That’s dangerous, outside our design protocols.”
“Mars is already dangerous, and outside your control. I’m gonna minimize costs.”
