Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

It was moments like this that made her realize what NASA was really all about: it was forty years old now, a well-entrenched piece of Government bureaucracy, where ceremonies like this were an essential part of motivation, the little plaques and medals and in-jokes a measure of the development of your career.

All the applauding NASA managers here seemed to be white males, it struck her, even though the astronauts, the showcase, were a reasonable mix of ethnicity, creed and sex. Many of the managers were of that sleek rotundity that comes to men of bulk and stature in such positions. Men of influence. She looked at Harry Maddicott, for instance. With his jowls grey and dragged down by gravity, it was difficult to remember that he had only been in his twenties during the era of flower power. How had he looked then? And yet now he had seamlessly become the kind of man who seemed to emerge from each generation to run the country, as long as Geena had been alive, and probably a lot longer before.

The inevitability of her own likely metamorphosis with age, into some female equivalent of Maddicott, depressed her. Well, Henry probably thinks I’m there already.

She tried to pay attention to the continuing presentations There was a slide-and-video show of highlights of the mission. Images of the Mission Control Center here at JSC, guys sitting at their blue workstations with their jackets over the backs of their seats, scratching their bellies and working with mind-numbing slowness. The Shuttle’s docking with Station was more fun to watch, with intercuts between computer graphics of the converging spacecraft and the Station docking adapter making a slow geometric sense, the Shuttle flying up an invisible cone to its target, the black dots of the adapter’s Space Visioning System which helped the computers bring the huge spacecraft together. But this too proceeded with glacial slowness, the two huge machines converging at no more than an inch a second.

Now there were pictures from their stay in orbit on Station, usually of an astronaut — sometimes herself — struggling with some incomprehensible piece of equipment in a cluttered interior.

Here was Bonnie Jones, the other woman on the crew, floating around the Shuttle with her long greying hair loose and in a fan around her As a crewmate, that had driven Geena quickly crazy. Of course the media outlets loved it; Henry told her there had been at least two daily occurrences of “bad hair day” jokes. Later in the mission, Bonnie had tied her hair into a rope-like ponytail, which swung around behind her. The novelty of that wore off after the first crew member got a hairy slap in the face.

Geena was, of course, all for equal access to space. But she thought women like Bonnie ought to cut their damn Barbie-doll tresses to a crewcut for the duration; that wasn’t such a sacrifice.

The show limped on. The movement of objects in zero gravity, a milky-slow ballet, had some appeal. But the audience started getting restive, the kids and old people bored. The fact was, the novelty of watching nondescript people performing incomprehensible tasks soon palled, zero gravity or not.

There was a brief sequence of Arkady Berezovoy on board Station, using a Station power tool, floating upside down. He grinned out of the screen, it seemed directly at her. He spoke to camera in his thick, earthy, accented English: It was like a dream when Shuttle came floating up to Station. Last night I slept on the Shuttle for the first time. It was unusual. Station had become my whole universe. After 128 days in space, I couldn’t believe anything existed beyond its walls…

Arkady was still on orbit. Listening to his voice, Geena realized how much she missed him.

The most striking images, the ones that stunned the audience to silence, were those of the Earth: the visible evolution of the three-dimensional diorama of clouds and ocean and desert, filled with blue light, sliding past the orbiter’s dinged-up wing or tail. Here was a slide taken by Geena, the shimmering blues and greens of the coastline near the Bahamas.

And now here came images from the flight deck of the Shuttle’s reentry and landing. Geena’s favourite showed a view from the rear windows of the plasma trail stretching behind the orbiter, a pink road reaching all the way back to Mach 25 and orbit…

The time came for questions for the crew. Most of them came from the journalists, but given the nature of the event these were mostly harmless lobs.

Sixt, how do you feel about your career now? Do you want to fly again? Do you have any regrets?

Sixt Guth prepared his answer. He was an Apollo-era relic still flying at sixty-four, who seemed to be trying to defy age. It was incredible to think he was actually older than Harry Maddicott, she thought.

“I was recruited, in the 1960s, as a scientist-astronaut,” Sixt said. “You have to understand I was actually recruited to go to Mars, maybe in the 1980s. That was what I expected, and so did everyone else, and it was the ultimate purpose of my job. But it didn’t pan out that way. At least I got as far as LEO, low Earth orbit, and I enjoyed my time there…”

Sixt had actually completed seven flights already and was hoping for more. He was an obsessive learner, having taken at least five degrees in with his two-year stretches of Shuttle training. He was undeniably old: he was totally bald, his head and face seemingly polished smooth. He moved with an odd gait, as if awkward in Earth’s gravity, and — like others of his generation — he was, Geena thought, rather clumsy and too brief in his public pronouncements, not so articulate and media-friendly and practised as the rest of them, even Geena. She wondered briefly how they must all look to outsiders: like younger, slimmer, ethnically mixed versions of the Center director maybe, sleek and rich-looking and confident and articulate. The epitome of space travel as a career move.

It was for the sake of this corporate cosiness, she thought with uneasy regret, that Henry’s mission had been broken, Sixt fumbled with his lapel microphone. “You ask me about regrets. We weren’t ready to go to Mars, I understand that now. Spaceflight is not easy. I don’t know personally how I would have fared, psychologically, if, in some other universe, I had ever gotten to do that hundred-million-mile trip to Mars. Months of isolation from my family and home, not just days…”

Sixt, do you still think we should go to Mars?

“Well, I guess so. But it remains a heck of a long way to go. I’ve come to think we should put our hearts into a return to the Moon. Sure, the Moon’s not an ideal destination. It’s a desert compared to Mars. It would be better if Mars was in orbit around the Earth, just three days away, but it isn’t, and we ought to make the best of what we got. But even on the Moon it might be possible to live off the land, if we’re smart enough.”

And then came the questions for Geena. The first couple were about her last flight but two, the first by an all-woman crew in US space history. It seemed to have aroused as much interest and curiosity as if NASA had appointed a team of chimpanzees to make the flight. But Geena had gotten used to handling those questions now.

After that, they got tougher.

Your husband thinks there’s an ocean on the Moon, doesn’t he?

Gentle laughter.

“Not an ocean.”

But enough to flood the Moon, if it was all melted. Is that right?

“It’s a possibility.” She smiled tightly. “I don’t pretend to understand the theory of how it got there. But it seems possible.”

Geena, do you think NASA should have brought the astronauts home from Station?

“No. The evidence we have is that the radiation pulse from Venus was transient. The danger’s already over…”