Because my ex-husband thinks the world is going to end.

“I can’t really say right now,” she said.

“It’s something to do with the stuff they’re calling the Moonseed, isn’t it?” Frank smiled. “We ain’t dumb, you know.”

“I’m sorry—”

“That’s okay.” He held up his hands. “Frankly I’m more interested in getting us back there than why the hell we go. If you came up with a reason, good for you. Now. Jays said you’re looking at a fast return.”

“Yes.”

“How fast? Ten years, five?”

“Try five weeks.”

Frank held her gaze for a few seconds, letting that sink in.

“You think it’s impossible,” she said.

“Have I said that?” He sat back and studied her. “I do wonder if you know what you’re asking for. With all respect.”

“You know,” Jays Malone growled, “we’re further from the fucking Moon now than we were in 1961.”

“There are certainly a lot of barriers,” Frank said. “In a way Apollo fooled us. Apollo wasn’t a lunar exploration system. All Apollo could do was deliver two guys to a place on the near side of the Moon, not too far from the equator, for three days, at a certain time in the lunar morning. And that was it, and even for that you had to fire off a Saturn V every time. There was no real expansion capability, no logical follow-on.”

“Von Braun was right,” Jays grumbled. They should have built the fucking Nova. Forty million pounds of thrust, six times the Saturn V. So big you’d have had to launch it from a barge in the Atlantic. If we had the Nova we’d have been on Mars by now.”

Oh, Christ, Geena thought. Back to the Sixties.

“We had it all,” Jays went on, “and we threw it away. You know, even when Armstrong landed on the Moon, Nixon was ripping apart the space program. NASA worked up a plan that would have had fifty people on the Moon by 1980, Americans on Mars by 1985. Instead it took twelve years after Armstrong to get the Shuttle to orbit, and NASA could start campaigning for the next step, the Space Station.”

“A reason for us all to keep our jobs,” Frank said drily.

“Well, Reagan said it should be built by 1994. And there would have been an orbital transfer vehicle—”

“Yeah, the OTV,” Frank said to Geena. “Now if we had that, we really would be able to get to the Moon quickly. The OTV would have ferried people between low Earth orbit and geostationary, where they put the comsats.” He smiled. “You know, I was there when Michael Duke and Wendell Mendell had their epiphany, as they called it. They figured it takes almost the same energy to go from LEO to GEO as it does to go from LEO, all the way to the Moon. So if we had the OTV, we’d be able to get back to the Moon. That was the start of the Lunar Underground…”

Geena had actually been part of that: she’d attended a workshop in Los Alamos in 1984, and then a symposium in Washington, DC. The bright-eyed enthusiasts there, mixed in with a few Apollo-era vets like Duke and Mendell, didn’t attempt to justify a lunar return. They just assumed it would happen, probably by the mid-90s, when Station and the OTV gave the country the capability again. It was a lot of fun, even if, to Geena, most of it was utterly unrealistic.

Still, she remembered now with an odd tug of nostalgia, it was at the Washington symposium that she’d first met Henry. A wild-eyed geologist with some kind of sketched-out scheme for extended lunar colonies, self-sufficient cities of lunar glass big enough for thousands of people, fuelled by all the ice he believed existed at the Poles. Even then he talked about terraforming the Moon.

Those eager youngsters lobbied hard, and got NASA to set up an Office of Exploration which looked at ways to return to the Moon and push on to Mars.

“We spent years devising mission architectures,” said Frank, nostalgically. “All those imaginary voyages. Christ, we could have piled up the vu-graphs we generated and just climbed to the Moon.”

“But then came Challenger,” Jays said brutally. “And that was the end of that.”

“Yeah. We didn’t even fly again for two years. And all the plans we had were frozen…”

“I was there when Bush made that speech at the Air and Space Museum,” Jays said. “Twenty years after Apollo 11. The Space Exploration Initiative. We’d finish the Station, go back to the Moon, on to Mars. But we screwed ourselves. NASA came up with a report that said it would take half a trillion dollars to get to Mars. And Congress killed it, zeroed out the budget by “91, “92. The OTV was cancelled—”

“They even killed off the Lunar Polar Orbiter,” Frank said. “An unmanned probe, that we’d been studying for twenty years. What a waste.”

“Which is why I say,” Jays said to Geena, “we’re further away from the Moon than we were in 1961…”

Geena leaned forward. “Okay. I heard how cruel life is. I heard how hard it is to achieve this. Now tell me how we do it.”

Frank looked up at her. “Five weeks?”

“Five weeks.”

His eyes, hooded by his thick spectacles, narrowed.

“The logic of how you get to the Moon hasn’t changed since 1969,” said Frank Turtle.

Frank started sketching on the back of a napkin: schematic mission profiles with the Earth shown as a flat floor, the Moon as a ceiling above it, and little rockets and landers clambering between the two, like medieval angels flying between Heaven and a flat Earth.

“You need some way to get to Earth orbit, or beyond. Then you need some kind of transfer vehicle, to drive you to the Moon. You need a habitat to sustain you on the journey. And you need some kind of lunar lander, like Apollo’s, to drop you to the surface and bring you back up again. For an extended stay you probably need to double all that, to drop a shelter or surface-stay resources in place.

“Now, Earth’s gravity well is deep. If you want to send a ton to the Moon, you need to throw seven tons from Earth’s surface, most of it lox propellant. Which is why we needed a Saturn V for Apollo.

“But today we don’t have a Saturn V, a heavy-lift capability. The Shuttle’s payload capability is a fraction of Saturn’s. You’d need four Shuttle launches for every lunar mission, or some similar number with low-payload expendables. Like our Titan IV, the Russians” Proton, the Europeans” Ariane—”

Jays said, “If we’d built the National Launch System, we’d have heavy-lift now. But they canned that in “92.”

Geena said, “Maybe the Russians” Energia — ninety tons to LEO—”

“Junk,” Jays said bluntly. “The Energia was a piece of shit, even before they closed down the production lines. Believe me, I went out there for an Apollo-Soyuz anniversary event, and I saw what’s left of it. Energia is not an option.”

“Okay,” Frank said. “Well, alternatively we have those old studies of Shuttle-derived vehicles…”

Geena knew about some of that. There might have been the Shuttle-C, an unmanned throwaway variant of the Shuttle, capable of orbiting seventy or eighty tons. But the cost advantage would have been minimal compared to existing systems like the Titan IV, so that too got canned in 1990.

“But,” said Frank, “there was another baby I worked on called Shuttle-Z. Looked like the Shuttle on steroids: your regular solid rocket boosters and external tank, but then a cargo element that was fatter than the external tank, with four Shuttle main engines. Could have sent a hundred and thirty tons to LEO. One hell of a bird. But that would have meant a lot of changes to the processing and launch facilities, so it wasn’t economical either.”

Jays said, “If we got to sit around and wait for Shuttle II — VentureStar, or whatever the hell they call it now—”

“Yeah. We’ll never get anywhere. But what about reviving the Saturn V production lines? Have you seen those studies?…”

“Enough.” Geena held up her hands. “Let’s get real, guys. In a few weeks we aren’t talking about a new heavy-lift vehicle, or rebuilding the Saturns, or Shuttle-derived vehicles, or any of that. And we ain’t going to get an OTV. We have to think in terms of what we’ve got. We have to develop an architecture based on Shuttle and the available low-lift expendables.”