Eric Flint: Boundary

"I swear, A.J.," Glenn sighed, "more than half of my gray hairs come from you."

"Well, let me see if I can make your day a happier one, Fearless Leader." A.J. slapped a sheet of paper down in front of Glenn.

That got Glenn's attention. "Paper? From you?"

A.J. grinned, smugly aware of his reputation as someone so far out on the bleeding edge that he considered paper and papyrus to be equally outmoded.

"You won't begrudge me the death of that tree, Glenn."

Glenn's gaze scanned the paper. "They went for it!"

"You better believe they did!" He bounced around the office. "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I get to build Tinkerbell, Ariel, and the rest of my Faeries! And get to make all the rest of your engineers modify the designs on Pirate!"

The latter made Glenn wince. Wince twice, actually, first at A.J.'s official use of the very unofficial nickname of the Automated Arean Reconnaissance Rover and Return module. Officially A^2 R^3 -which had led to its own spate of Star Wars jokes-the longhand acronym AARRR had been pronounced in such a way as to inevitably be followed by "matey," "walk the plank," and so on, thereby causing the obvious moniker of Pirate to refer to the test vehicle.

The second wince was at the equally inevitable complaints the redesign would engender from the engineers.

A.J. recognized both winces with satisfaction. "Hey, Glenn, I told them I would win this one. They should've planned for it."

"Actually, they probably did. But with two more months going by than we'd expected, we were getting pretty settled into the other design."

"So, do I call up NASA and tell them to keep their money?"

Glenn laughed. "Not a chance. We can use all we can get, and none of the critical construction stages have been passed yet- though this was close."

"I'll go get things started in RDD, then. You get someone processing the files-I've already digisigned everything to authorize my end and you'll find the secure contract files in your inbox."

A.J. jogged out, giving another whoop of triumph as he exited the office area. His grin grew even wider as he headed toward Research, Development and Design.

It was finally sinking in. Despite his words, he hadn't been nearly so sure NASA would go for his proposal. It made sense, true, but sense often didn't have much to do with government contracts, especially when the government agency in question was competing with the proposing private organization.

The Ares Project.

It had been A.J.'s dream since he was a kid to be able to go into space, and especially to land on Mars. But despite some initial rumbles in that direction in the very early part of the twenty-first century, the government's efforts to land a manned mission on the Red Planet had progressed only haltingly, with the vast complexity, immense inertia, and often wrongheaded design strategies that had characterized government space missions for years.

With a new generation of engineers agitating for private space missions, the U.S. government had finally authorized a few incentives for private space work. A series of prizes had been established for achieving certain space-travel goals, with a general eye towards eventually reaching Mars.

The prizes involved were mere pittances, needless to say, from the point of view of most government agencies and megacorporations. But they were large enough to warrant an attempt by moderate-sized consortia of interested organizations. The idea itself had its genesis in Robert Zubrin's The Case For Mars, and the Ares Project had been formed to seize the opportunity. Many of the founders were, of course, the same people who had hounded the government into arranging the prizes. Collectively, the group had gained the nickname of the Nuts That Roared, for their Grand Fenwickian victory over the ponderous and generally unswervable inertia of official space programs.

The public had started to take notice when the Ares Project successfully orbited, deorbited, and retrieved a fully functional man-capable space module-and did it for a million dollars less than the prize money for that achievement. But it was the follow-on Ares-2, a smaller but fully automated sensing satellite, that galvanized public opinion. The completely privately constructed spacecraft reached the Red Planet, used aerobraking to achieve orbital velocity, and sent back multiple high-quality images. And did it at a smaller cost than any equivalent government probe to date.

Stung into high gear by these successes, the politicians had showered money onto the space program. NASA and its associated partner agencies suddenly found themselves with quadrupled budgets and a mandate to get a manned spacecraft to Mars-and the unspoken mandate to manage the task before the Ares Project beat them to it.

Politics and government approaches still influenced the work at NASA, of course, and part of that caused NASA to avoid using many of the approaches which Ares used. This suited members of the Project, like A.J., just fine. If NASA decided to copy their methods, it might well outdo the Project despite its current lead.

For A.J.'s purposes, one important way in which they had taken a lesson from the Project was to avoid what Zubrin had called the "Siren Call" of the moon: i.e., to see the establishment of a moon base as a necessary precursor to a Mars expedition. The important way in which they had not taken that lesson was politically connected. The moon-base faction had been persuaded to give up on a Luna base, and a compromise reached: that a base would be constructed on Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars.

This was not something the Ares Project was directly interested in, but it made a lot more sense than building a base on Earth's moon. Phobos had no gravity well to speak of, and aerobraking in Mars' atmosphere could help in achieving a matched orbit at a reasonable cost. That done, the closeness of the moonlet would allow excellent surveying of parts of Mars.

Better still, there had been some indications from prior probes, including the ill-fated Soviet Phobos 2, that there might be some fossil deposits of water on Phobos, which was over twenty kilometers wide. That wasn't really surprising, since both Phobos and its brother moon Deimos were suspected to be captured outer-system bodies, possibly the cores of former comets. So the Phobos project was justifiable on its own terms while still being reasonably well integrated into NASA's overall mission design. And-always a critical factor in the world inhabited by government agencies and the megacorporations with whom they maintained an incestuous relationship-the Phobos project kept the existing vested interests happy. A moon base, after all, was a moon base, regardless of what moon it was on.

It was here that A.J. had seen an opportunity. Obviously, no one-neither government regulatory agencies nor private insurance companies-was going to let the Ares Project blast human beings into space without firm proof that all aspects of the proposed system would work safely. Pirate was an unmanned device designed to demonstrate the most critical aspects of the system: to be able to travel to the Red Planet with no return fuel, just a small store of "seed" hydrogen; to be able to create fuel from Mars' atmosphere; and then return to Earth using Mars-manufactured propellant.

A rover unit was to be deployed during the atmospheric fuel manufacturing stage to do surveying of the area, which was one of the prime locations currently considered for final landing of a manned mission. It would also leave the first "hab"-habitable enclosure-on Mars, although it was a scaled-down version from the full-scale "tuna cans" in the forthcoming main prep flights. The "hab" would serve as a testbed for the long-term operation of some of the systems and as a radio beacon as well.

A.J. had proposed a modification of this mission profile which would serve NASA's interests and those of the Ares Project: instead of immediately landing, Pirate would aerobrake into an orbit close to that of Phobos, and would release a number of independent, remotely controllable sensor-probe units. The probes would survey Phobos carefully from all directions in a number of spectra, helping them to select the best places for NASA's base. Pirate would then deorbit and carry out its basic mission. Though now, probably, with no rover or a much smaller one, to make up for the extra mass of the sensor drones that A.J. called his "Faeries."