Chapter Text
Kathryn Janeway knew the risks all too well; her father had died in a test pilot crash. Yet she still looked to the stars; Admiral Paris had recognized and encouraged his colleague’s daughter’s scientific aptitude. His own child also dreamed of space. Tom’s Navy disciplinary record was an embarrassment, but his piloting skills were something to be proud of.
John Glenn was a hero to most Americans, but Kathryn did not care for his opinion on women in space. Likewise, Chuck Yeager was a United States icon, but Timothy Russ blamed him for astronaut candidate Ed Dwight being rejected. Valentina Tereshkova in Earth orbit and then that smiling Russian lady on the Moon proved Glenn wrong, which really got a bee in Nixon’s bonnet and then Tricky Dick lit a fire under NASA’s ass. One of the results, Danielle Poole, proved both of them wrong.
Tim certainly had the right temperament – cool, calm and collected even under great pressure. During the Apollo 13 near-disaster, the craft had experienced a crippling mechanical problem, and the astronauts and Mission Control were levelheadedly analyzing the issue and developing a solution. That’s how Mr. Russ was expected to behave if there were a crisis on his watch.
He was married with four kids, three boys and a girl. He was not Catholic, however – he considered religion to be highly illogical. He also felt it would be highly illogical to announce this.
Russ tolerated the Apollo 8 Genesis reading as a literary reference, but on faith he disagreed with some of the men he intended to join. Buzz Aldrin, an active Presbyterian, had quietly taken Communion on the moon, and quoted the 8th Psalm in a TV broadcast on the way back home. After Gagarin’s flight, Khrushchev had claimed there wasn’t any God up there, but Ed White would beg to differ after Gemini 4. Sadly, Astronaut White was now permanently in the heavens.
The ghettos had immediate problems, dramatized by Gil Scott-Heron’s poem Whitey on the Moon about not having money for his sick sister’s treatment, yet was that really NASA’s fault? Nixon’s pullout from Vietnam in 1969 freed up resources for the Space Race but it also allowed more to be allocated to the Great Society programs. Even so, long term big picture goals were not to be forgotten even in the face of present need.
So too did the reservations and the Natives that had moved away from them. Russ respected the American Indian Movement for doing for their race something similar to what the likes of the Black Panthers were doing for his race. He’d met one of their activists, a fellow named Chakotay.
Would Ed Dwight come back to flying? 11 of the 13 women given the Mercury Program tests had stopped flying by the time NASA reconsidered, but Tracy Stevens had returned to the cockpit after a long absence.
Ed Dwight had turned to sculpture after leaving the Air Force, but Alexei Leonov had shown that art and space did not have to be mutually exclusive. Leonov had chosen flight school over art school but had not lost the former ability or interest. He’d managed a box of colored pencils in weightlessness by tethering the box to his arm with rubber and tying down each pencil in the box.
Alexei had beaten Neil and Buzz. Rubbing salt in the wound, from the lunar surface, he extolled the supposed value of the Marxist-Leninist way of life. Ed Baldwin and Gordo Stevens could’ve beaten the red, but they had stuck to the overly cautious Apollo 10 mission plan of doing everything short of the actual landing.
Having to play catchup had given NASA renewed enthusiasm, and ensured the politicians and the military didn’t lose interest. It was ironic that the Communists were illustrating an advantage of capitalism, that the single-party dictatorship was showing an advantage of democracy – that competition pushed for quality improvement.
Molly Cobb, besides the milestone of the first American woman in space, had helped secure one of the victories. She pushed for the risky landing and exploration of Shackleton crater which found water on the moon for the site of the first moonbase. Much of crewed space travel now involved Jamestown and the Soviet knockoff Zvezda.
The Jamestown crew needed to be relieved. It was lonely up there. Ed Baldwin knew that better than anyone. He’d been going crazy even with the company of Gordo, and Danielle Poole, even more so once they were sent home for medical reasons. Apollo 23 had been intended to replace him, but exploded on the launch pad. Once 24 was finally cleared for launch, it ran into technical difficulties in Earth orbit. A repair attempt with 25 was a partial failure, and it had required more heroics to bring 24 down to the lunar surface.
Ad astra per aspera, a rough road leads to the stars, as read the Apollo 1 memorial plaque on the Cape. Chaffee, Grissom and White had not and would not be alone as casualties of space exploration. Apollo 11 had also left memorials for Vladimir Komarov of Soyuz 1, and his comrade Yuri Gagarin, later to die in a conventional aircraft crash.
After that, a crewed Soviet craft had crashed on the Moon, and the three cosmonauts of Soyuz 11 had died during preparations for reentry. Ed Baldwin had been one of their pallbearers. On the Western side of the Iron Curtain, some astronauts and astronaut candidates had died in vehicular accidents on Earth, including Patty Doyle. She made it to the Moon only as one of the names on a memorial plaque as her friend Molly Cobb left the Earth for real. Molly had been stone-faced about her classmate’s death, including in placing the Fallen Astronaut statue.
Since then, Gene Kranz and eleven ground techs had died in the 23 explosion. Harrison Liu of 24 was killed immediately in the repair attempt, and Deke Slayton died of his wounds. The lone survivor, Ellen Wilson, had given an impassioned speech from Jamestown about how it was still worth the risk. Now it was time to bring her home.