Get Back, Get Back...

The young Friar read a lot of science fiction, and among those offerings were Robert Heinlein's "juveniles" series for Charles Scribner. Those stories and a number of Heinlein's short stories in his "future history" series were all set inside our solar system. They dealt with what were at the time science fiction ideas of space stations and trips to the moon, things that later became reality. They also dealt with ideas that have yet to come to pass, such as moonbases and manned travel to other planets in the solar system, as well as ideas which have been proven wrong or unlikely by later exploration, such as life on Venus or advanced civilizations on Mars.

Back to the Moon, by NASA scientists Travis S. Taylor and Les Johnson, brings to mind some of those old Heinlein juveniles, following in that author's path of accurate scientific descriptions and real-world feel of the technology and situations. Heinlein, in writing for younger readers, didn't varnish his style a great deal, nor did he spend a lot of time adding depth to his characters. Neither do Taylor and Johnson -- the lead character is a stalwart astronaut named Bill Stetson, fer cryin' out loud -- and they don't display half of Heinlein's style and skill even though they're not writing for a younger crowd.

But those things aide, Back to the Moon is still a fun romp, a just-the-facts-ma'am kind of story about events surrounding the United States' first manned mission to the moon since Apollo 17 left in 1972. The time frame seems to be the early 2020s and relies on the now-canceled Constellation program as the basis for the U.S. effort. The manned mission is only months off when a private company also launches a flight to the moon, although this one is just a flyby carrying wealthy tourists. The tourists, though, catch a distress signal from a wrecked Chinese moon mission. What had been announced as a robotic test flight had actually carried a crew and is now stranded on the moon's surface. Stetson convinces his NASA superiors to scramble his planned flight for an immediate launch to rescue the stranded Chinese crew. But will the glitches shown in test flights mean his ship can't reach the moon? And will the Chinese crew, facing political pressure from a system that would rather have a failure on its own than success with help, actually go through with the rescue?

Taylor and Johnson move us through the mostly predictable plot with an engineer's straightforward prose -- no frills and not a lot of flavor. The appeal is in watching tried-and-true heroes do tried-and-true heroic things and seeing resourceful quick thinkers solve the problems that come their way quickly and resourcefully. Back is also fun because it uses recognizable and plausible technology instead of way-out stuff like warp drives and hyperspace jumps that are far beyond anything current science can manage.

Of course, a moon landing in the early 2020s is also far beyond anything current NASA technology can manage. In an afterward, Taylor describes how bipartisan presidential and congressional indifference starting with the Nixon administration starved the space agency of funds, requiring it to put off spacecraft development time and time again in order to keep what it had running. That culminated in the current administration's myopic ending of manned U.S. spaceflight, it being one of the very few things that the president and congressional leadership didn't want to spend money on. Both the possible Chinese moon mission and spaceflight by private corporations could happen within Back to the Moon's timeframe, but the idea that there would be a NASA mission waiting in the wings could not.

Taylor and Johnson offer a clue about what they probably think the solution is, as their privately-owned spacecraft and its wealthy owner play important roles at crucial points in the story. Private enterprise and free-market forces may or may not be the actual future of humanity's presence in space, but at least betting on them takes the matter out of the hands of people who ask whether or not additional soldiers on an island might make it capsize.