Paul ran the ISR telescope through its test sequence and then played around with it for the allotted thirty minutes he had available in the mission timeline. As he rolled around the planet, he could see Florida coming into view. He zoomed in on the Cape at the launch pads there and could see the Ares Vehicle Assembly Buildings. He could see motion around the pads like a flurry of ants on an anthill. A few minutes later he was over the Atlantic Ocean and couldn’t find much to look at. He put the system on auto and closed the icon on his screen. To close out the checklist for this item, there was only one other thing he had to do. He unstrapped himself and practiced floating back to seat number 2B, where he checked that he could control the ISR system from there. All was well.
After the basic ship checkout and the occasional fun full backflip, he made his way back to his seat up front. It was time to start prepping for the rendezvous with the fuel depot. All the motion through the ship had made him a little dizzy, and he needed to strap himself in and focus to keep from getting motion sick. Microgravity was fun to him, but Paul knew to be careful until he was well adjusted or it could lead him down a dangerous and gut- wrenching path.
At launch plus fifteen hours, the
His soon-to-be partners were reassembling in the VIP area after a celebratory dinner and an abbreviated night’s rest to await the dawn landing of
Looking out the windows, Childers, O’Conner, the VIP entrepreneurs, and the press gazed expectantly at the sky. The sun was barely above the horizon when they caught the first sight of the
The vehicle glided onto the desert runway and bounced only once before rolling to a complete stop. As the air temperature began its daily rise from simply uncomfortable to totally unbearable, astronaut Paul Gesling opened the doors of
Childers didn’t rush to greet his pilot; he was too busy chatting up his new partners, taking their enthusiastic congratulations with appropriate modesty, deflecting credit to his engineers and to Gesling. Childers was an expert at working a crowd, large or small.
The Honda van on that mesa fifteen miles away was also bustling with activity. The roof antennas were being retracted and the hardware fastened down for travel. They had miles to go that day and a mountain of data to organize and send to their faraway homeland. As soon as they got to the local cyber cafe, their mission would be accomplished. Li was glad. He preferred cloak-and-dagger missions to require at least a cloak, if not the dagger, too. This was just too easy.
Chapter 12
Launched twelve months previously on an Atlas V unmanned rocket, the thirteen-thousand-kilogram Lunar Mapper spacecraft had been doing its job of mapping the Moon with quiet precision. Flying just fifty kilometers above the lunar surface in an orbit carrying it from pole to pole, the spacecraft’s high-resolution cameras photographed most of the lunar surface. Multiple overflights of the same terrain at different times during the lunar day, and with a slightly different viewing angle due to the Moon’s slowly changing orbit, allowed stereoscopic images to be created of most of the lunar surface. With Earth-based processing, a 3-D map of the Moon was created.
The scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, had been studying the images for weeks as they worked to narrow down the landing-site options for Bill Stetson and his crew. They knew the landing would be somewhere near the Moon’s equator, selected because it was easier to reach this region of the Moon than the higher latitudes, and because that was where the Apollo missions had explored. They knew that it could be done, so doing it again would be the best and safest way to begin the return of NASA’s astronauts to the Moon. For NASA’s critics, it would just be another example of NASA’s inability to do anything new and different.
On this day, the site-selection team was preparing their final recommendation for NASA Administrator Calvin Ross. Ross had been appointed by the President and had the distinction of being the only former United States senator to be appointed as NASA Administrator. The President had not made NASA a priority, and appointing his former colleague in the Senate, one who had recently been defeated in his reelection campaign, was a signal that he was not taking the direction of America’s space program seriously. Ross was neither an engineer nor a scientist. Before becoming a senator, Ross had been an attorney at a prominent Billings, Montana, law firm. Many viewed Ross’s appointment as a simple payback for some previous political favor or favors. Few in NASA appreciated his political savvy, and fewer still realized how hard he fought for the agency.
The lead scientist for the site-selection team, Dr. Henry Morton, was standing before a wall-sized mural of the Moon made from images returned from the Lunar Mapper spacecraft. He was wearing 3-D glasses and studying carefully no less than six potential landing sites.
Morton was a career scientist from the prestigious Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. He began his career in the late 1970s, when exploring the Moon was no longer “hot.” In fact, at that time, studying the Moon was considered career suicide. Funding for lunar research had dried up with the death of Apollo, and Morton kept his interest alive by winning small research grants and by convincing his management to keep his work funded, although at an embarrassingly low level. Morton had quietly waited in the wings until interest in the Moon resurfaced in the mid-2000s. He then quickly rose in prominence to become America’s leading expert on all things lunar. It helped that he was also virtually alone in the field. Without consistent funding for lunar science, there simply weren’t many others around. It was easier to be a big fish when there was a small pond. And the pond for lunar science had been very small indeed.
“You’d think that since the 1950s we’d have developed a better way to view 3-D than by wearing these god- awful glasses,” said Morton to no particular member of his team. They were all assembled and themselves looking at the wall mural. And, without surprise, no one responded directly to his comment. He was prone to complaining about the glasses.
“I’m just amazed that we can see Surveyor and all of the Apollo sites,” was the closest thing to a response. The comment came from one of the junior members of the team, Saul Britenstein. He continued. “Look here. As I’ve been saying, if we land near the Apollo 17 site we can show continuity with our last mission, and maybe even bring back the picture Cernan left on the surface. Wouldn’t that be cool?”
“And the science benefit is what?” asked Mariam Upchurch, senior member of the team. Morton had heard that she had begun her career as a
