Stephen Baxter: Voyage

Meanwhile, York’s geology was likely to take her away for months at a time. Their relationship was going to be odd, to say the least.

It was strange to think that his whole life might be shaped by the success, or failure, of a nuclear rocket. I really am living in the future, he thought.

To Conlig, nuclear rockets were the simplest, most beautiful machines in the world. You didn’t burn anything, as in a Saturn. You just heated up high-pressure liquid hydrogen in a reactor core, and let hot gas squirt out of the rear of your ship.

A nuclear upper stage would outperform a Saturn V by a factor of two; Moon payloads could be increased by more than half.

But there were major technical challenges.

The working fluid was liquid hydrogen at twenty-five degrees above absolute zero. Once it was pumped to the reactor the hydrogen had to be flashed to above two thousand degrees.

Cooling systems were Mike Conlig’s specialty.

There were other difficulties. Like, if you were looking at space applications, there was the need to shield the crew from radiation. And the fact that you couldn’t cluster too many of these babies in a given stack, because their neutron emissions would interfere with each other, and, and…

Still, the project was making progress. In the short term they were aiming for a RIFT, a Reactor-in-Flight Test. But there was a hell of a lot of work to do before then. You couldn’t cut corners with nuclear technology: nobody wanted a live nuclear pile to be smeared over Florida thanks to some fuck-up at Kennedy.

But, Conlig thought, they’d fly one day. They had problems to solve. But they’d solve them. Just as soon as Nixon gave his go-ahead to the Space Task Group’s proposals.

The Space Task Group was a committee, headed by Vice President Agnew, which Nixon had set up to formulate post-Apollo goals for the space program. The STG were due to report in September. The rumors were they would endorse a manned Mars landing program. And when that happened, Conlig’s project would get some serious money to spend.

Ben Priest was still talking Natalie through the details of the XE-Prime. They looked good together, Conlig thought suddenly. Relaxed. He felt a remote stab of unease.

But Natalie was giving Priest a hard time. She was talking about politics, as usual.

Natalie York laughed, uncomfortable; a shiver of awe — or maybe disgust — swept over her, as she studied the slim XE-Prime.

“You said there have been nuclear rocket developments here for ten years?”

“Yes,” Priest said.

“Why? We’ve not been considering Mars missions that long, have we?”

Priest scratched his ear. “Well, the original objectives of the site didn’t have much to do with spaceflight, Natalie. Back in the late 1950s, big chemical rockets were still a thing of the future. And the nuclear weapons were bulky, heavy—”

“Oh. They were building ICBMs here. Nuclear ICBMs.”

“Just engineering experiments,” Priest said evenly. “In case of need. And remember, the USSR was well ahead of us then, with their big, heavy-lift chemical ICBMs. But our chemical rockets got bigger, and the bombs got lighter, and the need went away. Later NASA thought they might need the nukes for Apollo Moon missions. But then the Saturn rockets came along…”

“And now, we still need to build nuke rockets because we’re going to Mars.”

“Hey, Ben,” Mike said. “Maybe you’ll be the first man on Mars. In the nuclear rocket ship Spiro Agnew.”

Ben snorted. He cupped his hand over his mouth, and intoned, Cronkite-style, “And now we take you live to the aptly named Jackass Flats, where the good ship Agnew is ready to lift Man In Space to his new destiny… over to you, Dan.”

“Thanks, Walter, and here, as I stand under the painted sky of Nevada, I cannot but help recall…”

On they clowned, like two kids, laughing and bumping against each other. Petey came away from the fence, drawn by their laughter, and pulled at his father, punching his back playfully.

York, indulgently, let them walk ahead of her.

She looked around more carefully, trying to figure the layout of the place. When the laughter had faded, she said to Priest, “Tell me how they operate here.”

“Well, the rail track is the key to everything.” He pointed. “The track runs out of that building, the Radioactive Material Storage Facility. The test articles aren’t too radioactive, you know, until they’ve been fired. They are delivered on their flatwagon trucks to the test cells, and go through their firing. Afterward they are taken to a dump over there, at the eastern end of the track.”

“Because they are too radioactive to recover?”

“Yeah.” Priest shrugged. “Mike talks about restart capabilities, but it looks more likely now that an interplanetary ship is going to have a whole host of big NERVA rockets clustered together. After you’ve fired one, you’d dump it, to save the crew from the radioactivity. And you’d use them all up at Earth departure; you’d stick to chemical rockets for mid-course corrections.”

“Good grief. And this strikes you as a rational way to fly?”

He grinned at her, his teeth pale in the gathering darkness. “If it’s what it takes to get me to Mars, hell, yes.”

“Have they had any accidents here?”

“Sure. It’s a development site. What do you expect?”

“What kind of accidents?”

“Ruptured cores. Ozone production in trapped air bubbles. Loss of moderator—”

“And injuries?”

“Ruptured ear drums. A few burns.” Priest looked uncomfortable. “Natalie, what do you want me to tell you? The NRDS was born in a different age. You have to see things through the eyes of the times.”

“Oh, sure.” A different age. But we’re still using this hideous place now. And Mike works here, for God’s sake. She shivered, as if she could feel old Cold-War radioactive particles sleeting through her flesh.

She looked around. “How do they do their containment? When the test rockets fire. All that radioactive hydrogen, pluming into the air—”

Ben said, “What containment?”

They all piled into Ben’s Corvette and roared off down the interstate toward Vegas, where they were going to spend the night and Sunday. Petey quickly drifted off to sleep, his head lolling against the seat cushion.

Ben turned on his radio. A news program was broadcasting; York, sitting up in front with Ben, listened desultorily to dreary statistics from Vietnam.

Outside, light leaked from the sky, and hard starlight poked through the desert blue.

Ben leaned forward and turned up the volume. “Hey, Mike, listen to this. It’s Agnew.”

“…the three options identified by our Space Task Group represent a balanced program… a wide range of manned flights, unmanned planetary expeditions, and applications satellites — serving people on Earth and increasing international cooperation in space…”

Wernher von Braun’s cultured voice came on, testifying to the Senate. “I say let’s do it quickly and establish a foothold on a new planet while we still have one left to take off from…”

“So they’re still talking about going to Mars,” York said.

“Sure they are,” Ben said. “Agnew’s three options are all about going to Mars; the only difference between them is, the more you spend per year, the faster you get there. Although—”

“What?”

“Although he did put in a fourth option, where we give up manned spaceflight altogether.” Priest stared at the road ahead. “We’re just going to have to see, I guess.”

“Agnew is an asshole,” York said mildly.

“Maybe, but he’s an asshole who likes spaceships and astronauts,” Mike said, leaning forward from the back. “And that makes him my kind of asshole.”