Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  Her suit was comfortable, warm. She could hear the whir of the twenty-thousand-rpm fans in her backpack. She had hundred-and-eighty-degree vision through her faceplate; she had no sense of enclosure, of confinement.

  She took a few more steps.

  She bounced across the surface. Moving on Mars was dream-like, somewhere between walking and floating. She had no real difficulty in moving around. In fact it was easier than the sims she’d performed on the ground. But she was very aware of the mass of the equipment on her back, and she had to lean forward to maintain her balance. It was difficult to bend at the knees, so that her movement came mostly from her ankles and toes; she suspected her legs would tire quickly. But my monkey toes are strong, pawing through this Mars dust.

  Oddly, she felt as if the shades of Armstrong and Muldoon were beside her, as if she was echoing their first, famous expedition. It was a thought that somehow diminished this moment.

  She turned to face Challenger. The MEM was an angular pyramid, huge before her, silhouetted against the light of the shrunken sun, and propped up in an unlikely fashion on its six fold-down legs. She was still in the shadow of Challenger. The ambient light was like a late sunset, with Challenger drenched in a weak, deep pink color; against that, the rectangle of fluorescent light from the hatch, framing Stone, was a harsh pearl gray, startlingly alien.

  The dominant red tones came from dust suspended in the air. There was about ten times as much dust, she knew, as over Los Angeles on a smoggy day. And no rain, ever, to wash it out.

  She walked away from Challenger now, working her way over into the sunlight, moving along the shadow of Challenger, toward the west. The MEM’s shadow was a long, sharp-edged cone on the rocky surface before her.

  She passed beyond the edge of the shadow and into the light.

  She turned. Sunlight shone into her face, casting reflections from the surfaces of her faceplate.

  Sunrise on Mars: the sky here was different, the way the light was scattered by the dust …

  The sun, rising above the silhouetted shoulders of Challenger, was surrounded by an elliptical patch of yellow light, suspended in a brown sky. It looked unreal.

  The sun was small, feeble, only two-thirds of its size as seen from Earth.

  She shivered, involuntarily, although she knew that her suit temperature couldn’t have varied; the shrunken sun, the lightless sky, made Mars seem a cold, remote place.

  She turned around, letting her camera pan across the landscape. The Martian dust felt a little slippery under her boots as she turned.

  She stepped further away from Challenger, her line of footprints extending on into the virgin regolith. She felt as if the long, thin line of communications attaching her to Challenger and her home planet was growing more attenuated, perhaps fraying, leaving her stranded on this high, cool plain.

  The land wasn’t completely flat, she saw now as the light continued to increase; there was a subtle mottling in the shading. And she made out what looked like low sand dunes, off to the west. But the dunes were more irregular than terrestrial sand dunes, because, she guessed, of the small size of the surface particles; the dunes were actually more like drifts in the dust.

  Away to the west, she saw a line, a soft shadow in the sand. It looked like a shallow ridge, facing away from her.

  She walked forward, further from the MEM.

  After perhaps fifty yards she came to the ridge. It turned out to be the lip of a small crater, quite sharply defined, a few dozen yards across, embedded in the floor. But the crater walls were worn, and there was a teardrop-shaped mound behind it.

  That mound had to be an erosional remnant, streamlined like the remnants found in terrestrial braided streams. And she thought she could see stratification in the sides of the remnant. It was just like the scablands, after all.

  She began to step down into the crater, clumsily; her legs were stiff, and dust swirled up around her, sticking to her legs and her HUT.

  Her faceplate was misted up, her breath rapid. She leaned forward.

  In the lee of the crater rim, something sparkled, something that finally banished the lunar ghosts of Armstrong and Muldoon from this moment, something that made her feel that her life’s circle had closed, at last. I guess I got to step into the picture after all.

  It was frost.

  She leaned sideways, and stretched down to the crater’s floor, awkwardly. She scraped at the dust with her fingers. Her fingers cut easily into the surface, leaving sharp trench marks. I’m like a kid, digging on a beach. A planet-wide beach. Everywhere she dug, she found the same soft, powdery surface, the same cohesiveness, what looked like pebbles.

  She lifted her glove to her face, to get a closer look at the dirt. It was oddly frustrating. The bit of regolith was very light, so light she couldn’t even feel its weight. She couldn’t even feel its texture because of the thickness of her clumsy suit. And the glare of the rising sun in her glass faceplate made it difficult to see, and the whir of pumps, the hiss of the radio, cut her off from whatever thin sounds were carried by the Martian winds.

  She had a sense of unreality, of isolation. She was here, but she was still cut off from Mars. It wasn’t like a field trip at all.

  She closed her fingers over the sample; the little ‘pebbles’ burst and shattered. They were just fragments of a caliche-like duricrust.

  She tipped her hand and let the crushed dust drift back to the surface; much of it clung to the palm of her glove, turning it a rust-brown.

  She took the diamond marker out from the sample pocket on her suit. She held the little coin in her hand; it caught the sunlight and refracted it, turning its glow to a bright scarlet, jewel-like, against the ochre of Mars.

  She felt a sudden, and unexpected, surge of pride. She distrusted patriotism intensely; and maybe this expedition, these few days of scrambling over Mars like rabbits, really was all a grand technocratic folly. But the fact was that her country had – in little more than two centuries of existence – sent its citizens to walk on the surfaces of two new worlds.

  And if some calamity were to wipe Earth clean of life before anyone decided to come again, this little marker, with its flag, would still be here, as a monument to a magnificent human achievement: this, and the remnants of Challenger, and three Lunar Module descent stages on the surface of the Moon.

  And to think we nearly didn’t come here; to think, after Apollo, we might have closed down the space program.

  Carefully she dropped the marker and let it float through the weak gravity down into the hole she’d dug, where it lay, sparkling, in the base of the crater.

  Then, silently, she dug into her pocket again. With some difficulty, she drew out a small silver pin. Its 1960s design was tacky: a shooting star soaring upwards, a long, comet-like tail.

  For you, Ben.

  She dropped the pin into the little ditch, after the diamond marker. Then she kicked dust back into the hole, and scuffed over the surface.

  The footprints Armstrong and Muldoon had left behind on the Moon’s surface were still there – would remain there for many millions of years, until micrometeorite erosion finally obliterated them. But it was different here. The prints she was making today would last for many months, perhaps years; but eventually the wind would cover them over.

  In a few years her footprints would be erased by the wind, the first little pit she’d dug all but untraceable.

  ‘… Natalie?’

  She hadn’t said anything, she realized.

  She turned to Challenger. The human artifact was a squat, white-painted toy, diminished by the distance she had come; the sun made the sky glow behind it. She could still see the pearl-gray interior of the airlock, embedded at the center of the MEM, and above that she could make out the fat cylinder of the ascent stage, with its propellant tanks clustered like berries around a stalk.

  There was a single set of footsteps, crisp in the duricrust, leading from Challenger to where she stood, beyond the circular splash of
dust from the MEM’s landing rocket. They looked like the first steps on a beach after a receded tide; they were the only footsteps on the planet.

  By God, she thought, we’re here. We came for all the wrong reasons, and by all the wrong methods, but we’re here, and that’s all that matters. And we’ve found soil, and sunlight, and air, and water.

  She said: ‘I’m home.’

  Afterword

  LOST MARS

  In our world, Challenger was the name – not of a Mars lander – but of the Shuttle orbiter which was destroyed in January 1986, killing its crew of seven. It was a disaster which brought the US space program, in 1986, to a nadir, rather than the new zenith of a Mars landing.

  But it might have been very different.

  After the liftoff of Apollo 11 in July 1969, an exuberant Vice President Spiro Agnew proclaimed that the US ‘should articulate a simple, ambitious, optimistic goal of a manned flight to Mars by the end of the century.’ And NASA had strong, feasible plans to achieve that goal.

  America has never been so close again to assembling the commitment to go to Mars.

  What went wrong in 1969? Why did President Nixon decide against the Mars option?

  And how would things have worked out, in an alternate universe in which Natalie York walked on Mars?

  In February 1969, a few months before the first Apollo Moon landing, the incoming Nixon Administration appointed a Space Task Group (STG), chaired by Vice President Agnew, to develop goals for the post-Apollo period. The STG was to report to the President in September. (President Nixon’s initiating memo was similar to that reproduced in the novel – but without the handwritten addendum …)

  Post-Apollo planning for space entered its most crucial months. And gradually, over this period, NASA lost the case for Mars.

  To space proponents in 1969, technical logic appeared to indicate a building from the achievements of Apollo to a progressive colonization of the Solar System, including missions to Mars. But the political logic differed.

  The Apollo era – when the efforts of half a million Americans had been devoted to spaceflight – had been born out of an extraordinary set of circumstances, which were not repeated in 1969. Just a week after Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering first spaceflight in April 1961, President Kennedy sent a memo to Vice President Johnson asking for options: ‘Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man. Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win? …’

  Although NASA by this time already had a schedule for a lunar program, there was no overriding logic favoring the Moon goal. In fact, in private, Kennedy berated his technical advisers for not producing recommendations for more tangible, down-to-Earth scientific spectaculars, such as desalinating sea water.

  So when Kennedy made his famous 1961 commitment to put a man on the Moon within a decade, the new program was not intended as a first step in an orderly expansion into space. Rather, Kennedy was reacting, to the early Soviet lead in spaceflight, and his Administration’s Bay of Pigs disaster.

  Thus, in 1969, there was no internal logic which proceeded from Apollo to Mars. This key point was evidently misunderstood by many within NASA in this period. Technically Apollo was an end in itself, a system designed to place two men on the Moon for three days, and it achieved precisely that; its political goals were similarly well-defined – to beat the Soviets in space – and had been achieved. With the completion of Apollo, there was no momentum to be carried forward to future goals – and, in 1969, no perceived threat to drive the necessary political reaction behind a new program.

  Still, NASA had explored the technical feasibility of a Mars mission in as many as sixty study contracts between 1961 and 1968. But the visionaries were dealt a severe blow when the pictures of Mars returned by the early Mariners showed a bleak lunar-like cratered landscape. There were still compelling scientific reasons to go to Mars, but the opportunity for human expansion was clearly limited. NASA suffered deferments and cancelations as a result.

  Meanwhile, throughout the Apollo period, NASA’s overall long-range planning was weak, leaving it ill-prepared for 1969.

  This was in fact a deliberate policy of James Webb, NASA Administrator from 1961 to 1968. Webb believed that Apollo’s success would give US citizens great pride and encouragement, and that any evidence of commitment to an expensive long-term Mars program would lose NASA the margin of strength needed to finish Apollo.

  As early as 1966, NASA budgets began to slide.

  On September 16, 1968, after arguing with Johnson about the latest cuts, Webb resigned. When the STG began its work NASA’s only firm funding commitments for manned spaceflight were for the Apollo lunar landings and a follow-on Apollo Applications Program.

  President Nixon himself was not an instinctive opponent of spaceflight. But – as new NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine learned as he flew with Nixon to Apollo 11’s splashdown – the incoming Administration could not direct large amounts of money into space while the Vietnam War continued.

  Given such strong signals, NASA’s political tactics during this key period, under Paine, showed deep naivety.

  Although in its STG submission NASA formally called for such worthy goals as ‘commonality,’ ‘reusability,’ and ‘economy’ – the program it actually envisaged was outward-looking and very expensive, including a space station, a manned Mars mission, a new generation of automated spacecraft, and new programs in advanced research and technology. These tactics were counter-productive. Even supporters of more modest programs, given a Hobson’s choice of a huge Mars ‘boondoggle’ or nothing, backed away.

  NASA also tried to talk up the benefits of state-managed R&D, but this too was a mistake. There was no doubt that NASA was an astonishing success as a giant technocratic exercise in management science and project control. And only a fifth of Kennedy’s 1961 speech had been devoted to spaceflight: Kennedy had been promoting the space program as part of a greater technocratic solution to perceived threats and problems – eliminating poverty, resisting Communist expansion, promoting development abroad.

  But by 1969 it was clear that technocracy had failed in its greater objectives. Instead there was only the maturation of the power complex of the technocratic state. Nixon seemed to understand the anti-technocratic mood of his day, and also how technocracy was in opposition to America’s older Jeffersonian tradition of local politics and democratic responsiveness.

  Meanwhile, during 1969, funding cuts were made in the NERVA nuclear rocket research program, which had been proceeding in Nevada since 1957. Although the Nevada test station would not be shut down until 1972, the 1969 cuts ended any hopes of flight testing nuclear rockets. Without NERVA, a component NASA believed was vital to a Mars expedition, the case for Mars was essentially already lost. (In the novel, NASA manages to fend off these cuts.)

  Against this background – and without a strong and articulate champion, the role served by Jack Kennedy in the novel – the Agency was soon forced to back off from its more aggressive proposals. The language in NASA’s draft report to the STG, prepared in April 1969, read: ‘We recommend that the US begin preparing for a manned expedition to Mars at an early date.’ By the published version the sentence had been watered down to: ‘Manned expeditions to Mars could begin as early as 1981’ (my emphasis).

  Agnew himself was, however, a champion within the White House of aiming for Mars – even though he was booed when he spoke of the project in public. White House counsel John Ehrlichman later described how he was unable to dissuade Agnew from including a 1981 landing in the STG’s list of recommendations, even though it was already clear that the Mars mission did not fit with the Nixon Administration’s overall budget priorities. Agnew insisted on taking the argument in to Nixon. We do not know what Nixon said to Agnew, but fifteen minutes later, Agnew called Ehrlichman to explain that the Mars mis
sion was being moved from the list of ‘recommendations’ to another category headed ‘technically feasible.’

  The proposals of the final STG report, as delivered to the President in September 1969, were much as depicted in the novel.

  The STG proposed a series of common elements: a Shuttle, space station modules, a space tug, nuclear shuttles, and a Mars Excursion Module (MEM). The modules could be put together into a series of mission profiles to achieve a variety of goals; only the MEM would have been Mars-specific.

  The earliest Mars mission would have left Earth on November 12, 1981, consisting of two nuclear-boosted ships each carrying six men. The expedition would return home on August 14, 1983, and the astronauts brought back to Earth by shuttles.

  A series of funding options were presented, ranging from a maximum-pace sprint to Mars by 1982 to a lowest-level funding option which would curtail all manned flight after Apollo. Three central options were presented: Option I aiming for a 1984 Mars landing at a peak cost of $9bn per year, Option II for 1986 at $8bn/year, and Option III for no firm landing commitment at $5bn/year.

  The STG proposals were designed to allow incremental near-term decision-making, while decisions on more ambitious programs – such as Mars – could be deferred.

  It was widely expected that, given the heavy lobbying by NASA and the US aerospace industry, some elements at least of this vision would survive. But public and political reaction was swift and negative.

  While it awaited Nixon’s formal response to the STG, further pressure on NASA came in the FY1971 budget process.

  Facing further cuts, Paine scrambled to reprioritize. One Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) were the sole survivors of the Apollo Applications Program. Apollo 20 was canceled to free up a Saturn V for Skylab. The remaining Apollo missions, 13 through 19, would be stretched out to place two missions after Skylab. There was no prospect of a post-Apollo lunar program. Viking was postponed to 1975.