- Taylor, Travis S. and Les Johnson.
Back to the Moon.
Riverdale, NY: Baen Publishing, 2010.
ISBN 978-1-4391-3405-4.
-
Don't you just hate it when you endure the protracted birthing process
of a novel set in the near future and then, with the stroke of a politician's
pen, the entire premise of the story goes ker-plonk into the dustbin of history?
Think about the nuclear terror novel set in the
second Carter administration, or all of the Cold War thrillers in the publishing
pipeline that collapsed along with the Soviet Union. Well, that's more or less
what we have here. This novel is set in, shall we say, the 2020s in a parallel
universe where NASA's
Constellation program
(now cancelled in our own timeline) remained on track and is ready to launch its
first mission to return humans to the Moon. Once again, there is a Moon race
underway: this time a private company, Space Excursions, hopes to be the first
enterprise to send paying passengers on a
free return
loop around the Moon, while the Chinese space agency hopes to beat NASA to the
Moon with their own landing mission.
Space Excursions is ready to win the race with their (technologically
much less demanding) mission then discovers, to the horror of their
passengers and the world, that a secret Chinese landing mission has
crashed near the lunar limb, and the Chinese government has
covered up the disaster and left their taikonauts to die unmourned to
avoid their space program's losing face. Bill Stetson (try to top
that for a Texas astronaut name!), commander of the soon-to-launch
NASA landing mission, realises that his flight can be re-purposed
into a rescue of the stranded Chinese, and the NASA back-room
experts, with the clock ticking on the consumables remaining in the
Chinese lander, devise a desperate but plausible plan to save them.
Thus, the first U.S. lunar mission since
Apollo 17 launches with an
entirely different flight plan than that envisioned and for which
the crew trained. Faced with a crisis, the sclerotic NASA bureaucracy is jolted
back into the “make it so” mindset they exemplified in
returning the crew of
Apollo 13
safely to the Earth. In the end, it takes co-operation between NASA,
the Chinese space agency, and Space Excursions, along with intrepid
exploits by spacemen and -women of all of those contenders in Moon
Race II to pull off the rescue, leading one to wonder “why can't we
all get along?”
Do not confuse this novel with the laughably inept
book with the same title by Homer Hickam
(April 2010). This isn't remotely as bad, but then it isn't
all that good either. I don't fault it for describing a NASA
program which was cancelled while the novel was in press—author
Taylor vents his frustration over that in an afterword included here.
What irritates me is how many essential details the authors
got wrong in telling the story. They utterly mis-describe the
configuration of the Constellation lunar spacecraft, completely
forgetting the service module of the Orion spacecraft, which
contains the engine used to leave lunar orbit and to which the solar
arrays are attached. They assume the ascent stage of the Altair lunar
lander remains attached to the Orion during the return from the Moon,
which is insane from a mass management standpoint. Their use of
terminology is just sloppy, confusing orbital and escape velocity,
trans-lunar injection with lunar orbit insertion maneuvers, and a
number of other teeth-grinding goofs. The orbital mechanics are
a thing of fantasy: spacecraft perform plane change maneuvers which
no chemical rocket could possibly execute, and the
Dreamscape lunar flyby tourist vehicle is said to brake
with rockets into Earth orbit before descending for a landing which is
energetically and mass budget wise crazy as opposed to a
direct aerobraking entry.
What is odd is that author Taylor has a doctorate in science and
engineering and has worked on NASA and DOD programs for two decades,
and author Johnson works for NASA. NASA is rife with science
fiction fans—SF is the “literature of recruitment”
for NASA. Without a doubt, hundreds of NASA people intimately
acquainted with the details of the Constellation Program would have
been thrilled at the chance to review and fact-check this manuscript
(especially because it portrays their work in an adulatory light),
and almost none of the revisions required to get it right would have
had any significant impact upon the story. (The heat shield repair is
an exception, but I could scribble a more thrilling chapter about doing
that after jettisoning the service module with the Earth looming
nearer and nearer than the one in this novel.)
This is a well-crafted thriller which will keep you turning the pages, but
doesn't stand up to scrutiny if you really understand orbital mechanics
or the physical constraints in going to the Moon. What is regrettable
is that all of the goofs could have been remedied without compromising the
story in any way.
January 2011 