“Off the shelf and to the Moon.” Frank grinned.

“And what,” Jays said quietly, “about cost?”

Geena took a deep breath. What she was about to say went against years of ingrained NASA cultural orientation.

“Forget about the cost.”

Frank spluttered. “What?”

“I know. It’s hard. But cost isn’t going to be a factor here. Timescale is all. It’s a mind game, guys. The rules are, assume you can spend what you like, but all you can do is requisition existing components.”

“Umm.” Frank pulled at his lip. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…” He pulled over another napkin, and sketched Earth and Moon, this time as two spheres. He drew tight circular orbits around each of Earth and Moon, then a figure-of eight around the two worlds.

“Let’s be specific about what we have to achieve here. If we are restricted to the current fleet of medium-lift vehicles, we have to consider Earth orbit rendezvous. Several launches, by the Shuttle and other vehicles, carrying up the components of the mission, to be assembled there. Probably using Station as a refuelling shack.

“First of all we need propellant for the TLI burn.” He drew a little arrow, at the Earth end of the figure-8. “Trans-lunar injection. We coast for three days to the Moon. We need our habitat vehicle to keep us alive. Then LOI: lunar orbit insertion, another burn, which we have to carry fuel for, to place us in orbit around the Moon. Next, into the lander. A deorbit burn, descent, soft-land standing on your rockets. More fuel, of course. Ascent back to orbit, maybe using the same engines — maybe not, like Apollo. Rendezvous in lunar orbit. Then the trans-Earth injection, coast back to Earth, probably aerobrake to orbit and have Shuttle come pick you up.”

“Pretty much like Apollo,” Jays said.

“Well, the rules of celestial mechanics haven’t changed. Almost certainly this architecture is going to provide us with the minimum-weight configuration. You could consider direct-ascent, for instance, where you take your whole ship, transfer habitat and all, down to the surface… But we ran some studies a few years ago along these lines, about how light, how cheap you could get. It wasn’t encouraging.”

“Stick to what you have,” Geena said.

“Let’s start with the lander. Everything else is going to scale to that. Now, the old Apollo Lunar Module was around sixteen tons, full up weight. But that included a surface shelter for six man-days on the Moon, effectively. And there were a lot of structural costs in the mass estimates, because of the split between ascent and descent stages, and the nature of the design. We did some studies that showed you could cut that to maybe a quarter.”

Jays snorted. “Bull hockey. Believe me, that old LM was just a bubble of aluminum. Those Grumman guys shaved it thin.”

Frank grinned. “Old man, that bird will look like a Chevy compared to what I’ll show you now.” He quickly sketched an Apollo LM, the familiar spidery descent stage, the bulbous ascent stage. “The whole thing stood maybe twenty-three feet tall. Now look at this.” Alongside he sketched something that looked like a scale model of the Apollo descent stage. There,” he said. “Six feet tall. Nothing but fuel tanks, legs and a rocket engine. The structural integrity is actually expressed through the tanks themselves.”

Jays looked closely. “No ascent stage?”

“You use the same engine for ascent as for descent. You refuel on the surface, from an unmanned tanker.”

Geena, looking at the blurred little sketch, said uneasily, “Where’s the cabin?”

That wolf grin again. “What cabin?” And Frank sketched on two stick figures with space helmets, side by side, standing on the platform, holding onto some kind of rail. “We call it the open cockpit design.”

“Jesus,” Jays breathed.

“Well, we had to keep the weight down,” Frank said. “It was a strong, closed design.” He sighed. “But we never got to build it, of course. And we couldn’t do it now in a couple of weeks. So I guess we can’t use any of this.” He made to crumple the napkin, but Geena covered his hand to stop him.

“Hold it. What about the Shoemakers? Henry’s unmanned sample-return probes. Two flight models and a fully functional test model, now sitting in a white room at JPL, unused, cancelled, requirements deleted.

Frank put her through another of those long silences of his. Then he said, “In fact, the Shoemaker design borrowed from some of the conceptual work we did on the manned lander. Building the structure around the tanks, for instance. But now — shit, you’re talking about using the Shoemakers to put humans on the surface?”

“Why not? Those sample-return packages must be heavy. The mass estimates are—”

“Comparable.” Frank pulled his lip thoughtfully.

“But,” Jays said, “those robot probes are designed to land themselves. What’s the pilot going to do?”

Geena took a deep breath. Here I go breaking another piece of NASA conditioning. “Jays, it doesn’t matter. Not for this mission. If this would work, if the Shoemakers would get us there, we should accept giving up control.”

“Oh, sure. And would you fly this thing?” Jays asked. “Would you risk your ass on some hacked-over piece of shit that was meant to be unmanned, ride it down in your space suit, without even piloting it, for Christ’s sake?”

Geena thought it over. Realistically, if I push this through, then this isn’t an academic question. It really could be me. With no abort options or training or — She forced a grin. “Hell, yes. Wouldn’t you?”

Jays was thoughtful. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “That’s the honest truth. I don’t know. And I’ve been there.”

“We could probably give you some control,” said Frank. “I’m not too familiar with the Shoemaker’s specs… some kind of override option during the final powered descent. Just in case you found yourself coming down on a crater wall or some such. But—” He shook his head. “I got to tell you I don’t see any way we could get those crates man-rated. Not in the timescales you’re talking about.”

“Well, I accept that,” Geena said. “Here’s another break with the culture. This isn’t going to be a safe mission.”

“That’s for sure. Just figuring out the abort options will be—”

“There may be no abort options, for long stretches of the profile,” Geena said, “But it doesn’t matter. Not this time.”

Frank eyed her. “It seems that somebody wants to go to the Moon, real bad.”

She said, “We’re all going to have to think out of the box on this. If you can make this fly, we’ll go anyhow, and accept the risk.”

Jays thumped the table. “Damn it, I’ve waited since 1961 to hear someone say that. If we’d been grown-up about the risks, accepted our casualties, we’d be orbiting fucking Jupiter by now.”

Geena saw Frank blanch. It was a common enough view, but Frank had spent a working lifetime being coached in the opposite direction. She leaned forward to cut Jays off.

“Suppose we can make the lander work. What about the rest of it?”

Frank looked warily at Jays, before turning back to Geena. “Well, we’re still in trouble. We never did build that handy Orbital Transfer Vehicle, so we got nothing to push us from Earth to Moon.”

“But we do have the PAM-Ds,” said Geena. “And the IUS.” The Payload Assist Modules and Inertial Upper Stages were small boosters carried into orbit in a Shuttle’s payload bay, to boost satellites to geosynchronous orbit, or send interplanetary probes on their way.

Jays laughed. “The ‘I’ in IUS used to stand for ‘Interim’, because it was only supposed to be operational until the OTV came along. When they found out they would be flying it in the 1990s, they figured they’d better change the name.”

Frank said, “The PAMs won’t work. Sorry. They’re spinners. That is, they depend on spinning for stabilization and thrust-vector control.”