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 reached into her pocket again. With some difficulty, she drew out a small silver pin. Its 1960s design was tacky: a shooting star soaring upward, a long, cometlike 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 on Mars. 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.”
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 U.S. 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 U.S. “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 again been so close 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 advisors for not producing recommendations for more tangible, down-to-earth scientific spectaculars, such as desalinating seawater.
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 inertia 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 lunarlike 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 cancellations 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 U.S. 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-up 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 naпvetй.
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 counterproductive. Even supporters of more modest programs, given a Hobson’s choice of a huge Mars “boondoggle” or nothing, backed away.