Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

But not everybody was a NASA nut. There were plenty of good old boys who looked like they had their heads on upside down, sitting in a wall around the bar and glowering at strangers, cradling Buds and watching basketball on the noisy TV.

Geena didn’t particularly like it here. The Outpost was a close, dark wooden box. It was photogenic, and a lot of times you couldn’t move in here for the TV crews. But what depressed her was the sense of antiquity, the walls encrusted with layers of yellowed photos lying over older pictures, like Henry’s geological strata. The Space Age reduced to a nostalgia object.

But it was inevitable, she supposed; after decades the space program had developed its own history and peculiar human traditions, like everything else people ever did, from baseball to religion to politics.

Or maybe she was just sour because she didn’t want to be here, that somehow her life was still tangled up with Henry’s.”

Geena studied Frank Turtle. She realized belatedly that Jays’s description of him as “young” was entirely relative. Frank had to be forty-five at least. But he dressed young, which she thought was a good sign, in a crumpled denim jacket and jeans and open shirt, and with a tangled mop of greying black hair over thick Coke-bottle glasses.

He wore an electronic button-badge showing the Venus explosion, cycling through that startling burst of light every few seconds.

As he talked, she learned Frank Turtle had done a series of jobs at JSC, getting hands-on experience of space operations by working on Shuttle operations as a mission designer and flight controller. In common with a lot of people here, she suspected he had applied for some of the astronaut recruitment rounds, in his early days. But for the last few years — hell, she realized, more than a decade — he had worked for a department called the Solar System Exploration Division; and, with his buddies, Frank’s job was to blue-sky the future. If you had to get to Mars in a decade — how would you do it? NASA had to be positioned to answer questions like that, when the call came, and that was Frank’s job.

Of course NASA had been waiting for that call since 1969, and it hadn’t come yet. But Frank and his like were still prepared, constructively dreaming, ready to respond.

A lot of careers got kind of stuck at NASA. There was a shit-load of recruitment back in the early 1960s, when NASA ramped up for Apollo, and a lot of those guys were still around now. They liked to work for NASA, and there was really nowhere else for them to go anyhow, and even with all the downsizing over the years it was still difficult for the federal government to shed people from a place like JSC. So here they all are, ageing Boomers, getting older and greyer and using up space; and here was Frank’s generation, in the line behind them, no doubt creating their own logjam in the resource pool.

“…So,” Frank said to her now, wiping a spume of Coors from his mouth. “You want to talk about going to the Moon. Why the hell?”

Because my ex-husband thinks the world is going to end.

“I can’t really say right now,” she said.

“It’s something to do with the stuff they’re calling the Moonseed, isn’t it?” Frank smiled. “We ain’t dumb, you know.”

“I’m sorry—”

“That’s okay.” He held up his hands. “Frankly I’m more interested in getting us back there than why the hell we go. If you came up with a reason, good for you. Now. Jays said you’re looking at a fast return.”

“Yes.”

“How fast? Ten years, five?”

“Try five weeks.”

Frank held her gaze for a few seconds, letting that sink in.

“You think it’s impossible,” she said.

“Have I said that?” He sat back and studied her. “I do wonder if you know what you’re asking for. With all respect.”

“You know,” Jays Malone growled, “we’re further from the fucking Moon now than we were in 1961.”

“There are certainly a lot of barriers,” Frank said. “In a way Apollo fooled us. Apollo wasn’t a lunar exploration system. All Apollo could do was deliver two guys to a place on the near side of the Moon, not too far from the equator, for three days, at a certain time in the lunar morning. And that was it, and even for that you had to fire off a Saturn V every time. There was no real expansion capability, no logical follow-on.”

“Von Braun was right,” Jays grumbled. They should have built the fucking Nova. Forty million pounds of thrust, six times the Saturn V. So big you’d have had to launch it from a barge in the Atlantic. If we had the Nova we’d have been on Mars by now.”

Oh, Christ, Geena thought. Back to the Sixties.

“We had it all,” Jays went on, “and we threw it away. You know, even when Armstrong landed on the Moon, Nixon was ripping apart the space program. NASA worked up a plan that would have had fifty people on the Moon by 1980, Americans on Mars by 1985. Instead it took twelve years after Armstrong to get the Shuttle to orbit, and NASA could start campaigning for the next step, the Space Station.”

“A reason for us all to keep our jobs,” Frank said drily.

“Well, Reagan said it should be built by 1994. And there would have been an orbital transfer vehicle—”

“Yeah, the OTV,” Frank said to Geena. “Now if we had that, we really would be able to get to the Moon quickly. The OTV would have ferried people between low Earth orbit and geostationary, where they put the comsats.” He smiled. “You know, I was there when Michael Duke and Wendell Mendell had their epiphany, as they called it. They figured it takes almost the same energy to go from LEO to GEO as it does to go from LEO, all the way to the Moon. So if we had the OTV, we’d be able to get back to the Moon. That was the start of the Lunar Underground…”

Geena had actually been part of that: she’d attended a workshop in Los Alamos in 1984, and then a symposium in Washington, DC. The bright-eyed enthusiasts there, mixed in with a few Apollo-era vets like Duke and Mendell, didn’t attempt to justify a lunar return. They just assumed it would happen, probably by the mid-90s, when Station and the OTV gave the country the capability again. It was a lot of fun, even if, to Geena, most of it was utterly unrealistic.

Still, she remembered now with an odd tug of nostalgia, it was at the Washington symposium that she’d first met Henry. A wild-eyed geologist with some kind of sketched-out scheme for extended lunar colonies, self-sufficient cities of lunar glass big enough for thousands of people, fuelled by all the ice he believed existed at the Poles. Even then he talked about terraforming the Moon.

Those eager youngsters lobbied hard, and got NASA to set up an Office of Exploration which looked at ways to return to the Moon and push on to Mars.

“We spent years devising mission architectures,” said Frank, nostalgically. “All those imaginary voyages. Christ, we could have piled up the vu-graphs we generated and just climbed to the Moon.”

“But then came Challenger,” Jays said brutally. “And that was the end of that.”

“Yeah. We didn’t even fly again for two years. And all the plans we had were frozen…”

“I was there when Bush made that speech at the Air and Space Museum,” Jays said. “Twenty years after Apollo 11. The Space Exploration Initiative. We’d finish the Station, go back to the Moon, on to Mars. But we screwed ourselves. NASA came up with a report that said it would take half a trillion dollars to get to Mars. And Congress killed it, zeroed out the budget by “91, “92. The OTV was cancelled—”

“They even killed off the Lunar Polar Orbiter,” Frank said. “An unmanned probe, that we’d been studying for twenty years. What a waste.”