Voyage

Voyage: A Novel of What Might have Been
© 1996 Stephen Baxter
511 pages

            On November 22^nd, 1963, John F. Kennedy narrowly escaped assassination while touring Dallas, Texas. A gunman’s assault left his wife Jacqueline dead and the president hospitalized, but he lived to see the fulfillment of the mission he set before the American nation in early 1961:  land a man on the moon and return him safely home before decade’s end. During the famed ‘phone call to the moon’,  JFK issued another challenge:  Mars.  Voyage is an alternate history of the American space program in novel form,  the story of man’s successful journey to Mars.   Voyage impresses, not only with its technical detail, but that combined with its even-handed reflection on what a Mars program might have meant in the 1980s.  

Baxter writes Voyage in two paths that rendezvous in the 1980s: after opening with the Mars-bound flight’s liftoff and following its initial  burns and maneuvers to go for Mars orbit,  he switches to 1969, to the beginning of another more arduous journey, when America steeled itself   for a greater challenge and tried to find a way to make it happen.  Going to Mars isn’t easier than the moon shot, and even the momentum gained by  triumph at the Sea of Tranquility evaporates away as the program is stymied by physical requirements. The crew that goes to Mars will need to be self-supporting for over a year, not just a week;  and though they will be far from rescue they can’t afford to take on too many supplies or incorporate too many  backup systems.  When escaping Earth’s gravity well, every gram counts. Politics and economics complicate matters further;  as the Vietnam War escalates and recession worsens, the government is anxious to cut costs. The war and other government programs might cost far more, but NASA’s expenses are as obvious as their rockets climbing into the sky.  The program carries on through sheer grit, urged on lightly by the aging JFK and pushed by the aerospace industry, wholly dependent on the manned program.

And therein lies the rub, for though Baxter makes clear in his afterword that he regrets the lack of an historic push for Mars,  the timeline of Voyage doesn’t shy away from the fact that such an effort would have been a mixed bag.  The will required to make Mars saps energy for everything else; not only are many of the later Apollo landings scrapped, but the exploration of the solar system by probe is missed altogether, and the Space Shuttle is shelved.  The aerospace industry, rather than diversifying to meet the different challenges needed for advanced probes, the shuttles, and the like, is fixated on one line of technology. It’s not a recipe for a healthy industry, either in business  terms or for personnel:  at least one character is hospitalized as a result of the stress.  The turmoil caused by the constant overwork, in addition to all of the challenges of the seventies, makes the weary United States in Voyage a tired, ailed nation indeed;  will those footsteps on Mars be worth it?

In addition to the story of the United States as a nation, meeting this challenge and coping with the consequences good and bad,   Voyage is a personal encounter, one driven by the ambitions and stubbornness of the astronauts who will make the journey. While some characters are historical (Chuck Jones,  who here stays in NASA instead of joining Sealab), most are invented, including  Joe Muldoon, who relegates poor Buzz Aldrin to nonexistence. The crew that lands is entirely fictional, including the book’s chief viewpoint character Natalie York, who is NASA’s first science-astronaut who sees space, since Harrison Schmitt never flew. Natalie is also the first female, and she's somewhat sensitive about the fact that she's breaking into a career dominated by fighter jocks. Part of her own voyage is learning to deal with NASA on its own terms:  the space program isn't going to stick an unspaced rookie onto the Mars team without her finding a way to be indispensable.         

Space junkies will be most pleased with Voyage; I've read at least a half-dozen astronaut memoirs, and the technical detail incorporated into the storyline is on part with the astronauts' actual accounts. This is definitely on the 'hard' side of science fiction, based on real  science, including the NERVA rocket. There are many references to the history-that-might-have-been, from  the head of the Mars program quoting Deke Slayton ("The first men to step on Mars are sitting in this room") to another hanging a lemon in the window of the Mars lander to indicate that he isn't pleased,  echoing Gus Grissom and Apollo.  The modules produced for the Mars programs take familiar names, names like Endeavor and Discovery --  names that the Shuttle fleet used.  Like the Apollo program, there are tragedies, some grievous; but while the Challenger of our timeline proved a source of sorrow,  Baxter's Challenger marks humanity's greatest accomplishment. It -- the ship and the book --  are a fitting salute to the men and women of the space program, and a solid read.

Related:
The Martian, Andy Weir.   Voyage wouldn't have caught my eye were it not for reading this a week or so ago, the story of a man stranded on Mars in the near future.
Contact, Carl Sagan. Natalie York may have been a redhead, but I imagined and heard her as Ellie Arroway.
Mission to Mars, Buzz Aldrin.

Two Sides of the Moon

Two Sides of the Moon
© 2006 Alexei Leonov and David Scott
448 pages

Remember the fifties, those fat complacent days when the Future seemed a century away?

Then up went Sputnik, gave the world a butt-kick, and made it clear tomorrow starts today!

'Beep beep beep' -- hello there! Sputnik sails giggling through the skies

Red flags, red faces jump in the race as the space age begins with a surprise! 

("Surprise!", Prometheus Music)

In another setting, Alexei Leonov and David Scott could have been the cause of the other's death. Fighter pilots from empires at odds with one another, intermittently on the edge of war with the fate of the planet hanging in the balance, they would have surely entered combat against one another had the Cold War ever become hot. But instead, one manifestation of the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Space Race to the moon, made them first respectful rivals, then friends. Two Sides of the Moon is a joint biography of the pair, telling their experience as active participants in the race for the stars. Both men were highly accomplished: Leonov was the first man to walk in space, and Scott commanded Apollo 15, the first explicitly scientific lunar mission.  And yet they regarded the Apollo-Soyuz mission as their greatest achievement, for there they established to all the world their conviction the space race had been the triumph of humanity against the odds and the elements, not one nation or one group of men against another.

Readers will welcome Two Sides of the Moon as a rare look into the Soviet space program, and Leonov is the best man living to deliver an autobiographical account of it, given that everyone more famous than him in the Soviet program is long dead.  Each man takes turns telling his side of the story, from their boyhood days until the culmination of the race in Apollo-Soyuz, in which spacecraft from both powers unite, demonstrating the feasibility of international cooperation, to which the International Space Station is a tribute.  Although their stories are wholly distinct from the other, they do work in references to their shared experiences and this combined effort:  Scott comments upon seeing the Earth from space that they "should have sent an artist":  Leonov, appropriately enough, was a painter. Another reference is Leonov revealing an early death in the Soyuz program caused by a spark in a pure-oxygen atmosphere, a disaster that the United States experienced for itself when Gus Gussom, Ed White (first American to spacewalk) and Roger Chaffey were killed in a launchpad fire caused by the a spark same flammable, pressurized atmosphere. Their accounts offer comments and comparisons about the two space programs: despite their sensitive nature, information leaked through intelligence services reliably. By the authors' account, a feeling of cameradie between the astro- and cosmo-nauts established itself early: despite their being opposing military men, the would-be spacefarers from either side of the Iron Curtain were exposing themselves to extraordinary risks, and under extraordinary scrutiny. When one man from one program fell, they all felt it -- by this account.   The Soviet program was distinct in being lead in its early years by Sergei Korolev, the "Chief Designer": Leonov presents him as a driving force behind the Soviet's organization and planning, and when he died in 1966, their program began faltering. (It didn't help that by that point, ambitions were truly lunar and new rockets were being introduced into both programs -- NASA had far better success with its moon-bound Saturns than the Soviets did with their rockets.)   The American astronauts were wholly unaware of his role in the Soviet program, one of the few complete surprises their joint account reveals.  The book moves more swiftly through the post-Apollo 11 years, mentioning the Salyut project briefly before giving more attention to Apollo-Soyuz, in which the two men both took part.  The book ends with epilogues in which both men comment on the fates of their programs in recent years, and offer musings on what might lay ahead: David Scott offered the idea that nations might have to introduce orbital military patrols to investigate newly-launched satellites.

Two Sides of the Moon  recommends itself to those interested in the space race, chiefly for Leonov's contributions. Although Scott is a fair writer with helpful technical explanations and many interesting missions, there are so many Apollo biographies out there that his is hard-pressed to rise out among them. Leonov, on the other hand, is nearly alone in offering a Russian view for the English market, and as mentioned easily the best man living to offer an account, given that his close friends like Yuri Gagarin, and his old bosses (including Korlev) are deceased.  Two Sides makes the space race out to be an inspiring struggle between two powers whose accomplishments were noble even if their motives were suspect, and reinforces the fact that despite the distinctions and oppositions in our cultures and beliefs, humans are really not so different from one another: underneath the  suit of the American astronaut and the Soviet cosmonaut is the same human flesh.

"When Apollo 11 had soared away from Cape Kennedy I had kept my fingers crossed. I wanted man to succeed in making it to the moon. If it couldn't be me, let it be this crew, I thought, with that we in Russia call 'white envy' - envy mixed with admiration. [...] On the morning of 21 July 1969 everyone forgot, for a few moments, that we were citizens of different countries on Earth. That moment really united the human race. Even in the military center where I stood, where military men were observing the achievements of our rival superpower, there was loud applause."

p. 247, Alexei Leonov

Related:
Into that Silent Sea, Francis French and Colin Burgess, a history of both programs.
Moon Shot, Alan Shephard and Deke Slayton. Likewise a joint effort, this culminates in Apollo-Soyuz.
"Surprise!", Prometheus Music. This celebrates Sputnik and the space age; it's a rather lively tune.