I guess I’m going to have to become one of the grown-ups now, he thought.

But what the hell am I supposed to do?

From Joe Muldoon’s point of view, the arguments and decision making about the future shape of the space program accelerated dramatically over the next few weeks.

Reagan asked his White House counsel to review options. A small meeting was pulled together in a room of the White House, overlooking the South Lawn. Tim Josephson briefed Muldoon on how the session had gone. Just a handful of men had been in there, talking and arguing for hours: the counsel, the budget director, Fred Michaels, Josephson and a couple of assistants, and Michaels’s old adversary, Leon Agronski.

“It was important to us, Joe. It could have been maybe the single most important meeting since the decision to go to the Moon. But we spent most of the time bitching about the lousy decisions that have landed us in this mess in the first place. And you had Agronski weighing in yet again about how manned spaceflight is a waste of time… I still feel Reagan is looking for something positive, and feasible, and real, that he can unite us all around; but so far we haven’t come up with anything. We’re in danger of being picked apart; Reagan will find his prestigious morale-boosters somewhere else, and we’ll end up flying nothing but goddamn low-orbit spy missions.”

Muldoon wasn’t sure why Josephson was getting into the habit of taking him into his confidence. Muldoon guessed Josephson spent a lot of time making tentative calls to a host of other contacts inside NASA and out, trying, in his own way, to help Fred Michaels through this difficult time.

Josephson had said: We haven’t come up with anything. Muldoon knew that was true.

So Muldoon — already working all his waking hours on the Apollo-N investigations and organizational changes — started using the hours he should have been asleep to do his own research.

“What kind of program can we run?” he asked Phil Stone. He riffled a pile of photostats, journals, and books on his desks. “If I could eat proposals, I’d be a fat man; the one thing we’re not short of is ideas. Should we go back to the Moon and start mining it for minerals? Or maybe we should capture an asteroid, push it toward the Earth, and mine that. Maybe we can build colonies at the libration points of the Earth-Moon system. Maybe we should have factories in space, making crystals, or drugs, or perfect, seamless metal spheres. Maybe we could build huge hydroponic farms in space, where the sun always shines. Or maybe we ought to put up square miles of solar arrays, for clean power. Maybe we could mine the Earth’s upper atmosphere for lox…”

NASA wasn’t short of visionaries, and new ideas, and proposals of all sorts. But there was no unity. Historically, NASA as an organization was lousy at long-range planning; fragmentary ideas and plans came bubbling up from the bottom, from the centers, and almost all of them fell afoul of turf wars.

Stone waved a hand. “All this stuff is great, Joe. But I don’t see what’s distinctive about any of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Soviets are already ahead of us in putting together big structures in orbit, and they have more experience of long-duration spaceflight. So we’re behind before we start. Whatever we try to do in this area, the Russians ought to be able to pass us easily. And there’s something about all this, factories and power plants in orbit, that’s kind of…”

“What?”

“Lacking inspiration. It’s dour. Russian. Joe, with this stuff we’re not going anywhere; and we haven’t been anywhere since Apollo.”

“So what do we do? Some kind of stunt?”

“Go to Mars. That was the point of the last ten years anyhow, wasn’t it?”

“But we never had a Mars program, in the way that we had a Moon program back in the sixties. The point was that we were going to develop the technology bit by bit — the nuke rocket, and new heat shields, and new navigation techniques, and long-duration experience, and so on. All of which could be put together into a Mars mission one day, if we chose to; but it would all be modular, and able to be configured into a lot of flexible mission requirements—”

Stone laughed. “You’ll have to get out from behind that desk, Joe. You’re beginning to sound like you belong there.”

Muldoon grunted and rubbed his eyes. “Well, anyhow, we sure as hell ain’t going to Mars. Not anymore; not in my lifetime or yours, Phil.”

“You’re so sure? We’ve got most of the elements. We do know how to survive long-duration missions.”

“Sure I’m sure. The fucking nuke rocket blew up in orbit, remember. The Russians are still sending down pictures of the damn thing glowing blue in the dark. From what I hear there’s no way we’re going to be allowed to fly a NERVA again. And without NERVA—”

“There goes your Mars mission. Unless you fly chemical.”

“Yeah,” Muldoon growled. “But how? Here — look at this thing.” He grubbed on his desk until he found a glossy report, full of spectacular color images. “This is from Udet and his guys, at Marshall. They’ve reworked some old papers that go all the way back to the early sixties. Have you heard of the EMPIRE studies?”

“Nope.”

“Marshall and a couple of contractors, back in ’62 and ’63. Back then, Apollo-Saturn had just about crystallized, and the engineers were asking, what the hell else can we do with this stuff? And they came up with EMPIRE — Early Manned Planetary-Interplanetary Round-trip Expeditions. Look at this. Some of the options needed nuke stages, but others were chemical only. There were a lot of studies like that, from that period. Soon after, every aerospace engineer in the country had his head up Apollo’s ass, and the flow dried up.”

Stone leafed through the report. “So what is Udet doing with this now?”

“He wants to revive a chemical-only Mars flyby option. A couple of S-IVB third stages in orbit, ganged together and fired off on a minimum-energy trajectory, looping around Mars. You’d need two, maybe three Saturn launches to do it.”

“A flyby of Mars? What the hell kind of mission is that?”

Muldoon rubbed his face. “Well, you’re talking maybe a seven-hundred-day round-trip, and about one day of useful work at Mars.”

“Whipping by at interplanetary speeds…”

“Oh, and by the way. You’d pass on the dark side.”

Stone laughed. “You’re kidding.”

“Well, that was the kind of mission they were proposing, back in 1963. The point was to go — just like Apollo, really — nobody cared what you did when you got there.”

Stone threw the report on Muldoon’s desk. “You can’t approve this, Joe. We’re beyond stunts like this now. Aren’t we? In the long run, they come back to bite you. Damn it, Udet and his boys ought to know better than this. We’d probably get laughed out of Congress anyhow.”

Muldoon shrugged, cautious. “Hell, it might get past Reagan, Phil.”

Stone looked reflective. “Look at it this way. What would Natalie York think of this?”

Muldoon laughed; then the laugh tailed off, and he studied Stone. “You know, you’re right. York’s a good touchstone.” Awkward pain in the ass as she is, if she wouldn’t approve a mission, he thought, it’s probably not worth flying. “All right. So we need to find some way of devising an all-chemical mission that will deliver a crew into Mars orbit for a respectable chunk of time — including a landing. But that brings us back where we started; it doesn’t look as if we can do it with chemical.”

Stone shrugged. “So find some smarter way of getting there.”

“Like what?”

“How should I know? Joe, you’re head of the program now, for Christ’s sake. There are a lot of smart guys around here. Use them.” He looked thoughtful. “Natalie York, huh.”