as I inhale, and I know that this is real.
I shut my eyes and try to sleep, but every time I’m nearly there – my eyes so heavy I can’t open them to see if the darkness has cleared, the filthy noise of the ship so black in my ears that I feel almost physically sick, even through the blunt ache afforded to me by the painkiller – every time I’m nearly there I start thinking of something, one solid thought that breaks me from sleep.
This is impossible, I think. This is utterly, utterly impossible.
3
When I signed up – at the behest of my agent and my editor, both desperate for me to take my career (such as it was) to the next level – there hadn’t been a manned mission in ten years. In 2010 – I think – NASA (as it was then) announced that they were going to start work on Mars missions. Everybody expected colonization (or something) on the Moon, but that never came. Instead they worked on optimizing launches, ways to break gravity better. It would, they thought, save thousands of dollars in fuel costs. Then, in 2015, there was the Indian launch, and the mistakes that they made – not making it to the Moon, even, and losing their crew. They replayed that footage over and over, of the craft exploding like a firework, and we all watched it in grim fascination. After that, all the governments went back into their shells where space was concerned. We weren’t getting anywhere; it was a waste of taxpayers’ money. Everything suddenly became about the private companies, those heads of industry who established small research teams to send probes into space, to look into ways of making fuel more efficient, to develop new propulsion systems. In the 1960s, the race had been to land a man on the Moon, with all the world’s governments desperate to stake their claim. After that, the companies were racing to get a man onto Mars. They put money into places that the governments didn’t: marketing, publicity, the entertainment business side of space flight.
And then an unmanned mission to the red planet came back with news, about the landing, the atmosphere, the temperature; about how it would be impossible to put us – I say Us, but I mean humans, our race – down there with the technology that we had. We developed everything in the wrong way. So they shifted tack. We’re launching anyway, they said. We’re just going, a test case to see how far we can get with maximum power, and how much we would need to make it to Mars when we finally did. I had just left school, was just writing, working freelance for newspapers for no money but bags worth of experience, and nobody understood it. I wrote an article about the launch during a week dedicated to it, about how it was important that we knew more. We send probes and cameras, the article said, but we never send our eyes; this way, we’ll be looking back at ourselves from further away than anybody has had the chance to before, and we’ll – hopefully – be able to understand ourselves a bit better because of it. The craft – unmanned, robotic, piloted from a crew planted on the international space station – ended up alongside Mars. They took samples and pictures and watched everything, and then they came home. A flag – featuring every flag of the world, like a blurry collage – was planted in the soil using a mechanical arm from a remote-controlled UAV, and the footage was played for weeks, the triumphant moment that we took our first planet. Then it came out – via leaked video, up on YouTube, never officially released – that the flag fell over seconds after being planted, blew away in some wind, and people started speaking out about it, talking about the lack of achievement in what happened. It wasn’t even comparable to the Moon landings, they said. In the 1960s we conquered something; here, we barely visited. Make it manned next time, or don’t make it at all: that was the resounding message.
Only, there wasn’t the money to do anything more. The
I shut my eyes and try to sleep, but every time I’m nearly there – my eyes so heavy I can’t open them to see if the darkness has cleared, the filthy noise of the ship so black in my ears that I feel almost physically sick, even through the blunt ache afforded to me by the painkiller – every time I’m nearly there I start thinking of something, one solid thought that breaks me from sleep.
This is impossible, I think. This is utterly, utterly impossible.
3
When I signed up – at the behest of my agent and my editor, both desperate for me to take my career (such as it was) to the next level – there hadn’t been a manned mission in ten years. In 2010 – I think – NASA (as it was then) announced that they were going to start work on Mars missions. Everybody expected colonization (or something) on the Moon, but that never came. Instead they worked on optimizing launches, ways to break gravity better. It would, they thought, save thousands of dollars in fuel costs. Then, in 2015, there was the Indian launch, and the mistakes that they made – not making it to the Moon, even, and losing their crew. They replayed that footage over and over, of the craft exploding like a firework, and we all watched it in grim fascination. After that, all the governments went back into their shells where space was concerned. We weren’t getting anywhere; it was a waste of taxpayers’ money. Everything suddenly became about the private companies, those heads of industry who established small research teams to send probes into space, to look into ways of making fuel more efficient, to develop new propulsion systems. In the 1960s, the race had been to land a man on the Moon, with all the world’s governments desperate to stake their claim. After that, the companies were racing to get a man onto Mars. They put money into places that the governments didn’t: marketing, publicity, the entertainment business side of space flight.
And then an unmanned mission to the red planet came back with news, about the landing, the atmosphere, the temperature; about how it would be impossible to put us – I say Us, but I mean humans, our race – down there with the technology that we had. We developed everything in the wrong way. So they shifted tack. We’re launching anyway, they said. We’re just going, a test case to see how far we can get with maximum power, and how much we would need to make it to Mars when we finally did. I had just left school, was just writing, working freelance for newspapers for no money but bags worth of experience, and nobody understood it. I wrote an article about the launch during a week dedicated to it, about how it was important that we knew more. We send probes and cameras, the article said, but we never send our eyes; this way, we’ll be looking back at ourselves from further away than anybody has had the chance to before, and we’ll – hopefully – be able to understand ourselves a bit better because of it. The craft – unmanned, robotic, piloted from a crew planted on the international space station – ended up alongside Mars. They took samples and pictures and watched everything, and then they came home. A flag – featuring every flag of the world, like a blurry collage – was planted in the soil using a mechanical arm from a remote-controlled UAV, and the footage was played for weeks, the triumphant moment that we took our first planet. Then it came out – via leaked video, up on YouTube, never officially released – that the flag fell over seconds after being planted, blew away in some wind, and people started speaking out about it, talking about the lack of achievement in what happened. It wasn’t even comparable to the Moon landings, they said. In the 1960s we conquered something; here, we barely visited. Make it manned next time, or don’t make it at all: that was the resounding message.
Only, there wasn’t the money to do anything more. The
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