Author | Stephen Baxter |
---|---|
Cover artist | Chris Moore |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Series | NASA Trilogy |
Genre | Science fiction |
Publisher | Voyager Books (UK) |
Publication date | 21 November 1996 |
Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
Pages | 580 |
ISBN | 0-00-224616-3 |
OCLC | 54247061 |
Followed by | Titan |
Voyage is a 1996 hard science fiction novel by British author Stephen Baxter. The book depicts a crewed mission to Mars as it might have been in another timeline, one where John F. Kennedy survived the assassination attempt on him on 22 November 1963. Voyage won a Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1997. [1]
In 1999, it was adapted as a radio serial for BBC Radio 4 by Dirk Maggs. [2] [3]
The book tells the story in flashbacks during the actual Mars mission of the chronicalised history until the mission's beginning. The point of divergence for this alternate timeline happens on 22 November 1963, where John F. Kennedy survived the assassination (Jacqueline Kennedy was killed, hence the renaming of the Kennedy Space Center as the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center), but was crippled and thus incapacitated, as Lyndon B. Johnson is still sworn in. On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Joe Muldoon walk on the Moon, and Nixon's "most historic phone call" is joined by a call from former President Kennedy, committing the United States to send a crewed mission to Mars, which Nixon backs as part of his fateful decision to decide the future of crewed spaceflight, instead of deciding on the Space Shuttle program as he did in our timeline.
Preparations for this new goal include slashing the number of Moon landings so funding and leftover Apollo spacecraft hardware can go towards the efforts of the crewed Mars mission. Apollo 12 still lands, Apollo 13 still suffers its disaster, but Apollo 14 is crewed by the astronauts of the cancelled Apollo 15 mission to carry out the scientific experiments on the lunar surface, and is the last crewed Moon landing. At the same time, the NERVA program is revived to become the chosen Mars spacecraft development, with larger tests in Nevada, but without containment and plagued with engineering problems.
The book centres around chronicling the lives of the future Mars mission astronauts, NASA and contractor personnel all involved in making the mission become a reality, and the shifts within NASA's astronaut and management hierarchy throughout the mission's preparations, including female geologist Natalie York's quest to become an astronaut, and her stormy relationships with fellow astronaut Ben Priest and NERVA engineer Mike Conlig. Other astronauts include Ralph Gershon, a former fighter-bomber pilot involved in illegal bombing missions in Cambodia during the Vietnam War whose dream is to be the first black man in space, and Phil Stone, a veteran Air Force test pilot-turned-astronaut who has flown in a long-term stay on a lunar orbital station before the Mars mission.
In the 1970s, the Skylab Space Station is launched, but apparently as a wet workshop design that is based on the Saturn IB S-IVB upper stage called Skylab A. The Saturn V that might have launched Skylab in our timeline instead launches Skylab B , a lunar orbit space station unofficially named "Moonlab", also a wet workshop based on the S-IVB. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project is instead a series of visits by the Apollo Command/Service Module to Salyut space stations, and Soyuz missions to both Skylab and Moonlab. To facilitate the latter, the Soviets finally finish work on their N-1. The Skylab/Moonlab programs lead to improvements in the design of the Apollo Command/Service Module. A Block III CSM is produced using battery power in place of fuel cells, followed by the Block IV and V, which have a degree of reusability (modular construction and resistance to salt water corrosion). Also chronicled is the development of the experimental 'Mars Excursion Module' by small aerospace firm Columbia Aviation as it struggles against larger rival contractors of NASA and its engineers working painstakingly against the technical challenges of a working and reliable Mars lander.
A test of the NERVA, called Apollo-N, is finally launched atop the modified Saturn VN, but suffers from pogo oscillations in the S-IC first stage. This damages the NERVA upper stage, which catastrophically fails once fired in orbit; despite returning to Earth safely, the entire crew (including Ben Priest) is killed by radiation poisoning, and the space program nearly collapses from hostile political and public opinion against the use of nuclear power in space, and the seemingly unnecessary risks and reasons of a Mars mission.
In the aftermath, a new Mars mission plan dubbed Ares is drawn up, utilising the upgraded Saturn V-B, which has numerous improvements, including the use of solid rocket boosters to double its payload. Ares also uses on-orbit assembly of a different long duration Mars-ship using wet-workshop Saturn rocket components as the propulsion systems as well as a Skylab habitat module and external tanks to hold extra fuel. Ares performs a Venus flyby reminiscent of the Manned Venus Flyby NASA planned in the aftermath of the original Apollo program, but done in this timeline for gravitational assistance, and finally lands at Mangala Valles on 27 March 1986.
However, as a side effect, a number of uncrewed probes – including the Viking program, Pioneer Venus project, Mariner 10 , Pioneers 10 and 11 , and the Voyager program – are cancelled so that their funding can be redirected to the crewed Mars mission, although another Mariner orbiter is sent to Mars to help prepare for the crewed landing. As a result, although humans walk on Mars, their knowledge of the Solar System, including Mars itself and especially the outer Solar System planets which never get visited without the Pioneer/Voyager missions, is far less than in reality.
The allohistorical setting of the novel was further explored in the short story "Prospero One", in which Baxter focuses on alternate developments in the 1960s British space programme – namely, its first and only crewed flight. The short story was originally published in issue 112 of Interzone , in October 1996. [4]
The character Joe Muldoon is featured in Baxter's 2018 short story "The Shadow Over the Moon," where he is explicitly stated as being the Apollo 11 backup for Buzz Aldrin.
The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the United States human spaceflight program carried out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which succeeded in preparing and landing the first humans on the Moon from 1968 to 1972. It was first conceived in 1960 during President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration as a three-person spacecraft to follow the one-person Project Mercury, which put the first Americans in space. Apollo was later dedicated to President John F. Kennedy's national goal for the 1960s of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" in an address to Congress on May 25, 1961. It was the third US human spaceflight program to fly, preceded by the two-person Project Gemini conceived in 1961 to extend spaceflight capability in support of Apollo.
Apollo 7 was the first crewed flight in NASA's Apollo program, and saw the resumption of human spaceflight by the agency after the fire that had killed the three Apollo 1 astronauts during a launch rehearsal test on January 27, 1967. The Apollo 7 crew was commanded by Walter M. Schirra, with command module pilot Donn F. Eisele and lunar module pilot R. Walter Cunningham.
Skylab was the United States' first space station, launched by NASA, occupied for about 24 weeks between May 1973 and February 1974. It was operated by three trios of astronaut crews: Skylab 2, Skylab 3, and Skylab 4. Operations included an orbital workshop, a solar observatory, Earth observation and hundreds of experiments. Skylab's orbit eventually decayed and it disintegrated in the atmosphere on July 11, 1979, scattering debris across the Indian Ocean and Western Australia.
The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals, the United States and the Soviet Union, to achieve superior spaceflight capability. It had its origins in the ballistic missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations following World War II and had its peak with the more particular Moon Race to land on the Moon between the US moonshot and Soviet moonshot programs. The technological advantage demonstrated by spaceflight achievement was seen as necessary for national security and became part of the symbolism and ideology of the time. The Space Race brought pioneering launches of artificial satellites, robotic space probes to the Moon, Venus, and Mars, and human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and ultimately to the Moon.
Human spaceflight programs have been conducted, started, or planned by multiple countries and companies. The age of crewed rocket flight was initiated by Fritz von Opel who piloted the world's first rocket-propelled flight on 30 September 1929. All space flights depend on rocket technology; von Opel was the co-designer and financier of the visionary project. Until the 21st century, human spaceflight programs were sponsored exclusively by governments, through either the military or civilian space agencies. With the launch of the privately funded SpaceShipOne in 2004, a new category of human spaceflight programs – commercial human spaceflight – arrived. By the end of 2022, three countries and one private company (SpaceX) had successfully launched humans to Earth orbit, and two private companies had launched humans on a suborbital trajectory.
Apollo–Soyuz was the first crewed international space mission, carried out jointly by the United States and the Soviet Union in July 1975. Millions of people around the world watched on television as a United States Apollo spacecraft docked with a Soviet Soyuz capsule. The project, and its handshake in space, was a symbol of détente between the two superpowers during the Cold War.
The Constellation program was a crewed spaceflight program developed by NASA, the space agency of the United States, from 2005 to 2009. The major goals of the program were "completion of the International Space Station" and a "return to the Moon no later than 2020" with a crewed flight to the planet Mars as the ultimate goal. The program's logo reflected the three stages of the program: the Earth (ISS), the Moon, and finally Mars—while the Mars goal also found expression in the name given to the program's booster rockets: Ares. The technological aims of the program included the regaining of significant astronaut experience beyond low Earth orbit and the development of technologies necessary to enable sustained human presence on other planetary bodies.
The Skylab Rescue Mission was an unflown rescue mission, planned as a contingency in the event of astronauts being stranded aboard the American Skylab space station. If flown, it would have used a modified Apollo Command Module that could be launched with a crew of two and return a crew of five.
Skylab 4 was the third crewed Skylab mission and placed the third and final crew aboard the first American space station.
The Apollo Applications Program (AAP) was created as early as 1966 by NASA headquarters to develop science-based human spaceflight missions using hardware developed for the Apollo program. AAP was the ultimate development of a number of official and unofficial Apollo follow-on projects studied at various NASA labs. However, the AAP's ambitious initial plans became an early casualty when the Johnson Administration declined to support it adequately, partly in order to implement its Great Society set of domestic programs while remaining within a $100 billion budget. Thus, Fiscal Year 1967 ultimately allocated $80 million to the AAP, compared to NASA's preliminary estimates of $450 million necessary to fund a full-scale AAP program for that year, with over $1 billion being required for FY 1968. The AAP eventually led to Skylab, which absorbed much of what had been developed under Apollo Applications.
The Space Transportation System (STS), also known internally to NASA as the Integrated Program Plan (IPP), was a proposed system of reusable crewed space vehicles envisioned in 1969 to support extended operations beyond the Apollo program.. The purpose of the system was two-fold: to reduce the cost of spaceflight by replacing the current method of launching capsules on expendable rockets with reusable spacecraft; and to support ambitious follow-on programs including permanent orbiting space stations around Earth and the Moon, and a human landing mission to Mars.
Several planned missions of the Apollo crewed Moon landing program of the 1960s and 1970s were canceled, for reasons which included changes in technical direction, the Apollo 1 fire, hardware delays, and budget limitations. After the landing by Apollo 12, Apollo 20, which would have been the final crewed mission to the Moon, was canceled to allow Skylab to launch as a "dry workshop". The next two missions, Apollos 18 and 19, were later canceled after the Apollo 13 incident and further budget cuts. Two Skylab missions also ended up being canceled. Two complete Saturn V rockets remained unused and were put on display in the United States.
Space Center Houston is a science museum that serves as the official visitor center of NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. It was designated a Smithsonian Affiliate museum in 2014. The organization is owned by NASA, and operated under a contract by the nonprofit Manned Spaceflight Education Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization. The Johnson Space Center is the home of Mission Control and astronaut training.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to space exploration.
Skylab B was a proposed second US space station similar to Skylab that was planned to be launched by NASA for different purposes, mostly involving the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, but was canceled due to lack of funding. Two Skylab modules were built in 1970 by McDonnell Douglas for the Skylab program, originally the Apollo Applications Program. The first was launched in 1973 and the other put in storage, while NASA considered how to use the remaining assets from Apollo.
Saturn V is a retired American super heavy-lift launch vehicle developed by NASA under the Apollo program for human exploration of the Moon. The rocket was human-rated, had three stages, and was powered with liquid fuel. Flown from 1967 to 1973, it was used for nine crewed flights to the Moon, and to launch Skylab, the first American space station.
With the advent of robotic and human spaceflight a new era of American history had presented itself. Keeping with the tradition of honoring the country's history on U.S. postage stamps, the U.S. Post Office began commemorating the various events with its commemorative postage stamp issues. The first U.S. Postage issue to depict a U.S. space vehicle was issued in 1948, the Fort Bliss issue. The first issue to commemorate a space project by name was the ECHO I communications satellite commemorative issue of 1960. Next was the Project Mercury issue of 1962. As U.S. space exploration progressed a variety of other commemorative issues followed, many of which bear accurate depictions of satellites, space capsules, Apollo Lunar Modules, space suits, and other items of interest.