“But with four people, there’s not enough backup.”
“I don’t wanna back up. I want to go forward.”
“If anybody gets sick—”
“There’ll be a qualified doctor. But he—or she—will pull other duties, too. Everybody works, all the time.”
“Four is still too few!”
“Hey, the fewer you send, the fewer we can lose.”
This met only silence.
But…orbital mechanics were clear and cruel. The whole round trip would take two and a half years. Due to the shifting alignment of the planets, launch windows for trajectories needing minimum fuel are spaced about twenty-six months apart. The trip each way takes about six months, leaving about one and a half years on the surface.
When he finished, Axelrod stood back and hooked his thumbs in his belt and waited for more howls of protest. There was silence. His direct, no-BS manner had sobered the astronauts. NASA’s big-bucks plan would have taken less than a year, round trip—expensive in fuel, but easy on the crew. The Consortium four would have to hold out on Mars, exploring and staying alive, for a grueling endurance test.
But it would be cheap. And they’d all get rich…if they got back. The salaries would range well into millions. Axelrod tossed off, “For the survivors, that is. And the widows.”
“You can do all that for thirty billion bucks?” someone asked.
“Nope, twenty. Got to be a profit here, folks.”
A long silence.
“Any volunteers?” Axelrod asked. The dozen astronauts all looked at one another. One stormed out, calling Axelrod a maniac. Three others expressed reservations and drifted out the door.
But eight were willing. Eager. Including Julia and Viktor, Raoul and Marc.
Over the next few weeks the eight candidates threw themselves into planning for Axelrod’s risky Mars Direct concept, much as the original Mercury astronauts took a hands-on role in developing the first spacecraft. The ideas had been around for a while, pushed by the Mars Society. Axelrod just knew what to purloin. They had a joyous visit from Bob Zubrin, the Tom Paine of Mars who had pushed the earliest ideas about going on the cheap. Graying but as hot-eyed as ever, Zubrin gave the staff meeting he attended an evangelical fervor.
Axelrod believed in the vigor of private capital, sure, but with the inexorable workings of planetary orbits bringing the launch window ever closer, he knew how to save time. He leased the Johnson Space Center facility for training astronauts—the cheapest, easiest, and quickest way to continue their conditioning.
Getting the private camel’s nose under the NASA tent was not easy. But the Congressional timidity about going had a flip side: joy at a windfall of private money. The long-awaited crisis in Social Security, Medicare, and other overloaded social systems demanded fresh infusions of raw cash. Axelrod came to Congress with a delightful transfusion. Next year Congress would have to face painful cuts, but hell, that was next year.
Soon enough Axelrod was selling camera crews the right to film at JSC the intensive crew training. Grav-stress tests for aerobraking. The glitches in integrating and servicing the food, water, and waste systems. Not least, the medical nightmares coming up due to the six-month-long free-fall flight to Mars. The doctors were sure the crew would be too weak to function once they arrived, one major reason NASA had opted for a more expensive but shorter route. Never before had network anchors worried on the nightly news about zero-g effects, radiation levels, and the subtleties of orbital mechanics.
Even better, they debated a growing mystery. Axelrod’s whole plan was based on buying, cheaply, the prototypes of hardware for NASA’s doomed mission, then converting them into the actual flight modules. But certain key components were missing. No explanation, sorry.
The gone gear was particularly centered around the life-support systems. Julia suspected some of the more remote provinces of NASA were hoarding these for some other venture, in the wake of the agency’s retreat from Mars. Who else would want to hold on to it?
This forced Axelrod to dig deeper into his own pockets to replace them. Grumbling, he did so. Julia got to see him grandly write a check for $2.3 billion. The cameras ate up the whole thing, of course.
Costs mounted. Estimates of future expenses soared even faster.
The whole world watched, and most betting was that Axelrod would fall flat on his underfinanced face well before liftoff.
One day Julia and Viktor were at a swimming pool with the married astronauts, Raoul and Katherine Molina. Twenty feet down, in full pressure suits, they were simulating zero gravity conditions that would occur in the six-month flight. Axelrod came charging in with his usual corps of assistants straggling after. He shouted out orders—after all, he paid the rent—and had them hauled out of the pool.
Dripping, irritated, weighed down by their heavy suits, the astronauts stood watching him. “Big announcement, guys. Had to tell you myself.”
“Suit radios we have,” Viktor said.
“This you don’t wanna hear on those comms. Forget the pool work. You aren’t going in zero at all.”
Another money saver. He and his team had decided on a Russian space habitat prototype that was designed to create artificial gravity in flight. The crew compartment module was connected by a cable to the last stage of the big booster rocket they launched with. By making these two modules revolve about each other, the habitat would feel an artificial, centrifugal “gravity.”
“See,” Axelrod said, “that cuts down on training and gear. Solves other problems, too—those medical worries, to start. Makes the plumbing work a whole lot easier, too.”
So the Consortium mission was a go. But which four of the eight got to fly?
Julia had not been able to sleep the night before Axelrod’s selection announcement. Neither had Viktor. She knew—she was next to him, tossing and fretting.
“You are more the favorite,” Viktor said suddenly. “You must face going without me.”
“Me, the favorite?”
“Better looking. Talk better, too.”
She had never really considered the possibility that he wouldn’t be with her on Mars. That only one of them would be chosen. She had never thought about their future, not in the terms he dryly outlined.
“Each have maybe fifty-fifty shot. Probability we both go, twenty-five percent.”
“You’re the best pilot.”
“You are best biologist and general backup. But without knowing more, those are the odds.”
She held him close. “I don’t like to think of our lives together in terms of probabilities.”
