Voyage
What if John F. Kennedy survived?President Nixon, with the help of former president JFK, has just green-lit NASA’s first manned expedition to Mars.Aboard, Natalie York, a geologist who risks everything she loves for the chance to go to space; Phil Stone, former X-15 test pilot; and Ralph Gershon, a Vietnam War hero intent on being the first African American to reach another planet.Exploring mankind’s presence in the extra-terrestrial expanse, VOYAGE chronicles the incredible story of what could have been.
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STEPHEN BAXTER
VOYAGE
THE NASA TRILOGY
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 1996
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 1996
Cover photo © NASA
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Stephen Baxter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content or written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780008134518
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN 9780007445400 Version: 2017-04-25
‘Tom Clancy meets Tom Wolfe.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘If you liked The Right Stuff you’ll like this too.’
Interzone
‘Voyage is a splendid nostalgia trip to times when astronauts were still the Right Stuff.’
New Scientist
‘For SF fans it encapsulates not only the traditional “sense of wonder”, but also – because the story it tells was this close to being true – a warm and thrilling sense of “I wonder …” A brilliant book.’
SFX
‘Based on NASA’s actual shelved Mars plans, but throughout, Baxter concentrates on the people involved, not just their hi-tech ventures, and the result is a compulsive and intelligent page-turner.’
Focus
‘Baxter is emerging as the most credible heir to the hard sf tradition previously monopolized by Clarke and Asimov.’
Time Out
For my nephew William Baxter
Contents
This is Ares Launch Control, Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center.
We have passed the six-minute mark in our countdown. Now at T minus five minutes, fifty-one seconds and counting.
Ares waits ready for launch on Launch Complex 39A.
We are on schedule at the present time for the planned lift-off at thirty-seven minutes past the hour.
Spacecraft test conductor has now completed the status check of his personnel in the control room. All report that they are go for the mission and this has been reported to the test supervisor.
The test supervisor is now going through some more status checks.
Launch operations manager reports go for launch.
Mission Control at Houston reports that all systems on the Ares orbital booster cluster are also nominal and ready to support the mission. The need to be in plane with the cluster, to enable the docking, is imposing a tight window on today’s launch.
Launch director now gives the go. We are at T minus four minutes, fifty seconds and counting.
At launch time, you may wish to look out for flights of pelicans, egrets and herons, from the marshy land here on Merritt Island. Forty years ago Merritt pretty much belonged to the birds, and they’re still here, although nowadays they’re disturbed every few months by a new launching.
It has taken nine Saturn VB launches so far to put the Ares complex into orbit. Today’s will be the tenth. So nesting isn’t so good any more.
T minus four minutes and counting. As a preparation for main engine ignition, the fuel valve heaters have been turned on. T minus three minutes fifty-four seconds and counting. The final fuel purge on the main engines has been started. That’s the vapor you can see there, billowing across the launch pad, away from the Saturn booster.
The liquid oxygen replenish system has been turned off, so we can pressurize the tanks for the launch.
The wind is below ten knots, and we have a thin cloud layer. That’s pretty nearly perfect launch weather, well within mission rules.
It is typically hot, humid Florida weather here, on this historic day, Thursday March 21, 1985.
T minus three minutes forty seconds and counting.
I am told that there are an estimated one million here with us today, the largest turnout for a launch since Apollo 11. Welcome to all of you. You might like to know that among the celebrities watching the launch today in the VIP enclosure are Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Joe Muldoon and Michael Collins, cosmonaut Vladimir Viktorenko, along with Liza Minnelli, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, William Shatner, sci fi authors Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, and singer John Denver. We’re sure you aren’t going to be disappointed
