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  “I have no idea what you are talking about, Jim. This is the first time I ever saw this,” Stetson replied with a smile. He pulled himself to an upright position and turned to face his friend.

  “You know how long it has taken us to get here. Jesus, what took so long?” Jim said. “You know, I’ve been thinking about the Moon since I was a twelve-year-old kid listening to Reagan announce that NASA was going to build a space station. To think that man walked on the Moon just a year or so before I was born is almost bizarre.”

  “Hell, Jim, I was five the first time I saw this, and it was live. If we wait much longer I’m gonna be too freakin’ old.” Stetson pointed to the frozen image of the lunar surface. “I’m ready. I’ve never been more ready, and I’m getting impatient.”

  “Amen shouted somebody from the choir,” England replied. They’d had this conversation, or a variant of it, many times before, pretty much as long as they had known each other.

  “Mankind just does stuff in fits and starts historically. We went to the Moon for a grand total of three years and then stopped. We just stopped! We took apart the greatest machines ever built by man and put them in museums. Heck, one of them is standing up as a marker for the Alabama/Tennessee state line. Can you believe that?” There were Saturn V rockets in the museums across the country and the Saturn IB at the Alabama Welcome Center.

  “Been there. Seen ’em.” Jim could tell what sort of mood Bill was in. He’d also heard this part before.

  “Did you know that that SOB Nixon decided to kill the Apollo program before Armstrong ever set foot on the Moon? I guess he just couldn’t stand the thought of Kennedy getting all the credit. What a vindictive sonofa—”

  “Whoa, just a minute here.” This direction for the conversation was a twist on the usual one. “This is a new one, Bill. What the hell are you talking about? Nixon?” Though they had talked about how the lunar missions should have continued so that today they’d be having this discussion about going to Mars, and not back to the Moon, Nixon being an SOB had not come up before. At least not in this context.

  Stetson stood up, unconsciously (perhaps) putting himself into the mode where whomever was around had no choice but to listen to what he had to say. Jim was used to it and wasn’t intimidated in the least. He knew Stetson too well for that; he was just curious about what his friend was going on about.

  “Think about it. Yes, Apollo was expensive and there was the Vietnam War going on. Those were tough years, with riots, assassinations, protests, and all that crap to contend with. But Tricky Dick could look past all that and see what mattered to him, not the good of the country or future generations—just to good old Tricky Dick.” He reached down and picked up from his desk his model of the Apollo lunar lander.

  Holding the lander in his left hand and motioning at Jim with his right, he began again. “Nixon was president of the United States—the highest achievement that anyone can aspire to. He’d done it. He’d beaten his adversaries and was riding high. And every time there was a new story on television about the upcoming Moon landings, what did he see?” Stetson paused for effect, not really to allow Jim to answer his somewhat rhetorical question.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. What?” Jim didn’t really care to offer his own opinion, since he wasn’t sure what might tweak his friend too far at the moment.

  “He saw another president getting all the credit. He saw John Fitzgerald Kennedy standing at the podium over at Rice University saying, ‘We choose to go the Moon in this decade and do the other thing.…’ He saw or heard JFK whenever or wherever the Apollo program came up. And that simply burned him. And do you know why it burned him?”

  Jim decided to just keep his mouth shut. He leaned back in his chair and slumped a little to relax. Politics never seemed to help the space program, and bitching about it was almost as fruitful. He decided to just ride the storm out.

  “Do you know who ran against John Kennedy in the presidential election of 1960? That election was the closest election in modern history—until the election of George Bush in 2000, that is. Do you know who he beat to become president?”

  All England could do was shrug. He knew his American history fairly well, but keeping a mental log of who lost presidential elections was not among the facts that he’d memorized in order to pass the public-school history exams.

  “Well, and the kicker, there was controversy about some ballet-box stuffing throwing some doubt on the election outcome even!” Stetson sat the lander back on his desk, thinking to himself, Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. He smiled inwardly and then answered his own question. “Richard Milhous Nixon. Kennedy beat Mr. Nixon for the presidency, just barely, in 1960. Nixon even made a statement saying something about the country didn’t need the turmoil of an investigation into the election at that time.”

  “I don’t recall ever hearing that in school,” Jim said with a raised eyebrow.

  “It’s true. Look it up. So, what do you think Mr. Nixon thought about when he was president at one of the greatest moments in human history and the guy who beat him, perhaps questionably, almost a decade previously—a guy who had been dead for years—was getting all the credit? Do you think that made the man who kept an enemies list happy? No way! The SOB must’ve seethed at the thought, and I am convinced the old man had neither sympathy nor remorse for ending the Apollo program. He probably said good riddance.” Stetson walked a few steps to his window overlooking the complex of the Johnson Space Center. “And that’s why we’re just now going back to the Moon instead of Mars.”

  “Ha, ha!” England guffawed. “Bill, that makes some crazy-conspiracy sense, but I cannot imagine that’s how it came down. The cost of the war, the civil-rights movement, and the Cold War—NASA just became too expensive, and people lost interest. It got boring.”

  “Well…” Stetson, still looking out at the mid-day sun, seemed to have his sails deflated by his friend’s comment. Jim was just glad that it seemed to be calming him down.

  “Come on, Bill,” Jim said. “The U.S. was slipping into a recession then, too. Science fiction movies made space look sexier than the astronauts could. It was a whole bunch of forcing functions in a very complex dynamic system that caused the Moon missions to stop. Apollo 13 was preempted on television during primetime, and that was long before Cernan and Schmitt’s flight. I don’t think it was Nixon at all.”

  Stetson said, “Yeah. All those things are true. Once you’ve gone to the Moon, what else can there be? How do you top that? NASA was given a tough act to follow—its own.”

  England said, “Think about it. James T. Kirk was going to other star systems and hooking up with hot green chicks. All those Apollo guys ever did was bring home some rocks. The public got more out of the price of a movie ticket or a television show than NASA was delivering with their publicly perceived giant budget.”

  “And you and I both know that NASA’s budget is tiny compared to most every other entitlement program or congressional boondoggle.”

  “True.”

  Stetson continued. “Only NASA can make the most complex and challenging endeavor in the history of humankind seem dull. Maybe we should’ve hired George Lucas or Steven Spielberg to do our marketing. Sure, we had great coverage for the last shuttle flight, with lots of legacy stories about the successes and failures of the shuttle program. Though if I’d had to see that video of the Challenger exploding again, I think I’d have puked.”

  “No hot green chicks,” Jim interjected. “We need some hot green chicks. I think they were called green animal women slaves from Orion or some such thing. Yep, we need ’em.”

  Bill ignored the comment and kept on going, “Yes, it was a tragedy, and yes, mistakes were made, but we’ve got to get over it someday and move forward. Think how insulting it must be to the thousands of engineers who made sure that those other one hundred and twenty flights were flown safely. What about the video that shows their successes?”

  “Uh, people like a train wreck
,” Jim reminded him.

  “Humph.” Bill was on a roll and wasn’t ready to relinquish the floor just yet. “And what about the first manned flight of Ares I? The press was there with cameras rolling to see the rocket fly, but I think they’d have been just as eager to see it crash. They probably had their commentaries written for that before they even arrived at the Cape…and the astronauts’ obituaries, too. We were lucky the second flight made the news at all. If it hadn’t been for the Chinese having a launch failure the week before, I doubt we’d have rated high enough to report on.

  “So, now we’ve flown over a hundred space shuttle missions, circling our tails in Earth orbit for decades. We’ve built a space station that people have been living in for fifteen years with the public’s perception that they were just floating around twiddling their thumbs and having fun eating floating globules of liquid astronaut food. We’re rebuilding a capability to go the Moon that we had—we had, mind you—when I was a child and then threw away.” Stetson almost looked angry as he turned to face England. Jim hated seeing his friend getting so worked up.

  “Water under the bridge, buddy. Now, if we can manage to find some of those green animal—”

  Bill cut him off with a very Spock-like raised eyebrow that told Jim he was about to push a little too far. “Jim, we’ve wasted fifty years since Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. Yeah, we’ve done some science, and we’ve supposedly learned about how people will ultimately survive the trip to Mars. I’d never say it in public, but we’ve wasted the legacy of Von Braun and all those engineers who put us on another world before you were born. I want to get back to the Moon and prove to the American people that space exploration is worth it. That going to Mars is doable and worth it. And that going to Mars should not wait another fifty years. Going to the Moon is the first step toward that, and it is what I’m meant to do.”

  “Me, too, Bill. Me, too.” Jim smiled at his friend because he didn’t doubt his last statement for an instant.

  Chapter 4

  Retired Navy pilot Paul Gesling paced in the waiting area outside the office of Gary Childers, president of Space Excursions. Gesling, who was too tall to qualify as a NASA astronaut, looked more like a recently retired professional basketball player than a soon-to-be commercial space pilot. His forty-one-year-old frame was covered with muscle, and his piercing green eyes and coal-black hair gave him the appearance of being some sort of wealthy playboy—at least to the ladies that he frequently found himself in the company of. And they seemed to like it—and him.

  He grew tired of pacing after a while and sat on the plush green couch in the waiting area. Being one of those people who was uncomfortable just sitting around without something to read, he absentmindedly picked up one of the brochures that described the company’s history.

  The Space Excursions headquarters in Lexington, Kentucky, was everything one would expect of a company founded, owned, and managed by a man who had made his billions in coal. Rich, thick carpet and high, ornately carved ceilings adorned every room in the twenty-five-story building that served as the global headquarters of both Space Excursions and Coal Tech, Inc. The glass and steel building might not be the tallest in town, but it was certainly one of the most striking. A French architect, whose name no one could recall without resorting to looking it up online, had designed the building and reserved the top floor for the company founder and CEO’s pet project, Space Excursions. A dedicated elevator running up the north side of the building served to remind all visitors that they were leaving coal country and entering the twenty-first century.

  Gary Childers, having lived through sixty revolutions of the Earth around the sun, as he liked to put it, was a genuine space geek. Born and raised in Kentucky, he had made his fortune in coal. Of course, having started with a smaller family fortune certainly helped. He made his money and career in mining, shipping, and selling coal, but his heart was always in space. His interest became his business after the success of the first commercial human space flight back in 2004 with the launching of the Paul Allen and Burt Rutan project, SpaceShipOne. While other companies were forming to send people to Earth orbit, he decided to do them one better and offer a commercial ride around the Moon. Space Excursions was born.

  He hired the best and brightest engineers and scientists from America and around the world to make his vision a reality. With a manufacturing facility in Nevada near the Las Vegas Commercial Spaceport, Space Excursions quietly took the lead in the next step of space tourism. Over a thousand people had now paid over two hundred thousand dollars per person to make suborbital flights with his competitors, and several millionaires had paid the Russians to take them to orbit. Now it was his turn. Five people had paid twenty-five million dollars each for a seat on the maiden flight of Dreamscape, the flagship of Space Excursions. Twenty-five more had made deposits for the next flights, the first of which was scheduled to occur within six months of the first. It had taken a little over fifteen years to get to this point, and Childers had selected Paul Gesling to be the pilot and commander for the first flight.

  Thumbing through the rest of the brochure, Gesling saw the usual corporate mumbo-jumbo marketing and financial statements as well as some pretty pictures of the Space Excursions Nevada facility, at which he had practically been living for the last three years. He glanced over the section called “Company at a Glance” and saw listed the other two divisions of Space Excursions that sold their wares to either NASA or the Pentagon. He didn’t have anything to do with those operations. Commercial space was his sole interest. The NASA work was done mostly at the Nevada facility. The work for the Pentagon was performed just outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  Gesling was still thumbing through the brochure when Childers’s door opened and the company president waved him in. He tossed the brochure back into the stack and entered the office.

  And what an office it was. First of all, it was large. It had the usual corporate furnishings of desk, meeting table, and bookcases, plus obligatory corporate photos along the walls. What made it stand out were the models. Models of virtually every piece of space hardware that had been flown by the United States, the U.S.S.R. or Russia, China, Europe, a few from India and even Iran. They were everywhere. Suspended from the ceiling was a model of the International Space Station flanked on each side with Russia’s Mir space station and the U.S. Skylab. Along the north wall were models of each of the rockets that had carried humans into space. The east wall was graced with models of rockets that carried only satellites and unmanned spacecraft. The south and west walls were the windows that made his corner office, and high above each window, just out of direct line of sight, were hanging models of spacecraft—well over a hundred of them.

  Gesling took the seat directly across from Childers, and both men sat down at about the same time.

  “So, to what do I owe this pleasure?” Childers began. “Your text said it was important but not urgent. I don’t get many of those. Usually everything is urgent and important.” Childers, with his full head of closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair, looked the part of a corporate executive. He could have been the CEO of any large business or a Wall Street executive. He had “the look”—the look of a man with money and power.

  “Well,” Gesling started. “Gary, you know I am dedicated to this flight. I’ve worked my butt off getting ready. I’ve been with you for seven years, helped you make the pitches to the board and the regulators, faced the media, and I even took that low-blow interview for 60 Minutes that made us—both of us—look like fools eager to part with our money. But I’ve just about had it up to here with some of the pantywaists we’re taking to space.” Gesling quickly moved his right hand to his forehead as he completed the last sentence and then dropped it back down to his side.

  “I’m a pilot, and a damned good one. I flew for the Navy and faced hostile fire more than I’m supposed to admit. That ‘police action’ near Indonesia just about became a war between China and us, and let me tell you, for those o
f us in the planes, it sure felt like war. I’ve been chewed out by the best the U.S. military has to offer. You’ve given me a few that I’d just as soon forget. Dodging missiles is a piece of cake compared to what you’ve asked me to do—and I am not talking about flying Dreamscape. She’ll be a pleasure. It’s the damned customers that are driving me crazy!”

  “You’ve got to be kidding” was all Childers could manage to say. Gary Childers was not usually a man at a loss for words. From the look on his face, he seemed frustrated with Paul. Paul couldn’t understand why.

  Looking exasperated and more desperate than a Navy fighter pilot should ever appear to be, Gesling directed his gaze downward to the floor and then back to Childers’s face.

  “I am not kidding,” Gesling told him. “Take Matt Thibodeau, for example. First of all, he showed up for the survival training late. While he was there, he kept taking calls on his satellite phone and basically tuned out most of the time. He won’t work with his seatmate—says she’s ‘too bossy’ and will hardly give her the time of day. He’s not yet been able to seal his pressure suit correctly and insists it’s everyone else’s problem but his own. He doesn’t have a clue how to share the emergency air supply and shows absolutely no interest in learning. On top of that, he pukes every time we fly parabolas in the trainer and refuses to acknowledge that it is his responsibility during the flight to clean up his own mess. I cannot and will not clean up this arrogant customer’s puke when we are on our way to the Moon!” Gesling gritted his teeth behind his pursed lips. His jaw muscle tightened tensely.