Volume I, Number 1                                                   Summer 2000

Welcome to the premier issue of the Red Planet Gazette, the electronic publication of the National Capital Area Chapter of the Mars Society!

What is the RPG?  My vision is that of something similar to a popular magazine in the vein of Discover or perhaps Analog:  Science Fiction and Fact, but focused on Mars.  While some Chapter-specific news and events may be reported, I feel it should not be the focus of this publication to replicate information already available from other sources such as meeting minutes and press releases (which are readily accessible elsewhere on the website).  Rather, the RPG should be be a forum for the membership to present unique material that would not otherwise be publicized in any other Chapter outlet.

This means the RPG cannot exist without submissions from you, the membership of the Chapter.  So please, send me what you've got!  This could be anything:  non-fiction articles or papers, book reviews, fictional stories, poetry, works of art...let those creative juices flow.  Since the RPG will be targeted for a quarterly publication, there will be rolling deadlines at the end of March, June, September, and December.  These deadlines should not be considered set in stone;  depending on when I receive a submission, it may be either included in the contemporary quarterly issue or simply held until the next one.  The important thing is to send in your stuff.  To quote the stereotypical Uncle Sam, "I need you!"

Enjoy the issue.

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In this series, I would like to profile an imaginary inhabitant of the Mars Year 10 main base camp, and to invite other chapter members to do likewise with other imaginary inhabitants which mine may interact with and/or compete with in agreed-upon ways.

One of 112 members of the base personnel, Bob Hall's main job is to skim the sludge off the tops of the stinking algae vats in solariums numbered 17 to 33. Having been a veteran of two Martian years (almost five Earth years), Bob's duties have allowed him plenty of time for thinking and observing. Yet, no matter what he has witnessed in the world outside, his greatest joy and dismay has been what he has seen within the human minds around him ? and within himself.

As inglorious as his particular job is, Bob is still quite aware of how the algae will be processed into everything from artificial-meat-filler to ice cream-substitute, things marketed as "Fab-Burgers" and "Eiz-Scream". Therefore, to his friends he is known as the "protein and calories procurer" for a large part of the base. Some of these algae are also genetically altered to confer numerous dietary and health benefits, from mineral supply and 100% of every vitamin's daily requirements to insulin and allergy serum boosters. A surplus is also shunted off to drying tanks and then compressed into plastic, rubber, oil, and paper simulants that are then either used in base supplies or else for some of the exportable manufactured items (worth more for their having been made on Mars than for their intrinsic value or utility, such as the "beauty creams made on Mars!"). Types of the algae can also be treated in separate tanks for natural responses to negative stimuli, such that they produce traces of drugs with medicinal value and antidotes to such once-dreaded "bugs" as botulism, foot-and-mouth disease, salmonella, and muscaria drusidosis.

One moons-lit night (note the plural!), while watching Earth rise up over the horizon, Bob was joined by his chess-playing opponent and friend Judy Albright, named for Judy Resnick of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of the 20th century, for whom the main base camp had also been named. Although other deaths and injuries had occurred in humanity’s pursuit of the knowledge and technology needed to land on and colonize Mars, there was still something especially poignant about early pioneers who had perished in their quests: Grissom, Resnick, Adams, Wong, Grasoff, and others whose missions had put them into essentially experimental torture traps in the interests of science, adventure, and human destiny. As Bob and Judy’s Russian co-workers were fond of saying, "We can’t know how far we have gotten unless we can walk over the graves of good men and women who wanted to get where we are now!" Whenever he has heard that cynical statement, Bob has quietly added in his own mind the continuation, "but gave up their lives that we might know the path in the dark!"

From where he was sitting, there was an immense amount of dark all above him through the viewing bubble of the lounge observatory, with only the moons, three planets, and perhaps a million stars clearly visible, some of the visible ones being known asteroids. On clear nights such as this, "shooting stars" could be seen falling by the thousands, but not quite so brightly as Bob had remembered in his youth on Earth. Only a month before, there had been nothing visible except for whorls of dense dust, and the exterior of the bubble had been so scoured by the dust particles that it had to be re-polished and resurfaced a week before our story began.

Judy Albright gently tugged at Bob’s sleeve so that he would come below and join her in the well-lit cafeteria area. Bob’s eyes took some time to adjust to the brightness as she led him by the hand to a table she had already set up with a chess board and pieces on it. They had adjourned their game the night before with Bob a full piece ahead for two pawns, but Judy was in the midst of a ferocious attack that would either succeed against Bob’s best defense, or else add one more to her deficit of 104 wins for Bob, 63 for Judy, and 562 draws (they kept score sheets and radioed their results back to earth where Bob's 2,570 rating placed him in the top 2% of the chess universe).

Judy’s preference was to take risks, play intuitively, and she would rather lose a swashbuckling attack than to win or draw in a tepid positional game (moreover, she didn’t mind taking losses to higher rated players as long as her diminished rating would allow her to "sandbag" overrated opponents in tournaments back on Earth, in which she might rake in lots of prize money).

Judy knew what she wanted and she had no patience for anything which might stand in her way. In this game, Bob believed that she must eventually lose, but he still admired her spirit in trying. He was the base chess champion, but even so he had not yet won against the central computer’s "Kasparov Konqueror" program element. On the other hand, he had watched as Judy had won no less than five times against the program, and some of the Russians, Australians, and Japanese had beaten it even more often, realizing that in positional conflict it was unbeatable, but in intuitive, take-no-prisoners sacrificial play it could be "thrown out of book" and forced to compute into unfathomable realms where its intrinsic valuation of material was an impediment. Bob knew that like the bundles of energy called "matter", in chess each piece of "material" was merely a bundle of potentiality and spatial-domination which could be transformed into either an advantage or disadvantage based upon his opponent’s responses and his own insights. Technology was still far from "mind-over-matter" mechanics, but in Chess Bob knew all about "mind-over-material" and how that could be transformed into victory or defeat.

Bob still enjoyed human competitions, although his inability to overcome the computer had long driven him from that theater, with "streams of smoke coming from his aft engines" as his Chinese friend Soo Mei had loudly whispered to the crowd watching him, despite his motioning to her for silence. The subsequent laughter had not helped his concentration at all. But, Bob was confident that the only downed pilot this evening would be Judy Albright, and the only thing required from him was "flawless technique in winning a won-game".

To be continued in Part 2: Judy’s Gambit.

Ron Hess is the chairperson of the National Capital Area Chapter of the Mars Society.

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Ruthanne Smith was the former Secretary of the National Capital Area Chapter of the Mars Society.

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Book Review

By Eric Choi

Voyage by Stephen Baxter

HarperPrism, 772 page paperback

ISBN 0-06-105708-8

The 1997 landing of Mars Pathfinder fuelled hope for a human expedition to the Red Planet. Unfortunately, the political will to mount such a mission remains absent. Mars, we are told, is still decades away. In Voyage, Stephen Baxter shows how we could have been there almost 15 years ago ? but at a price.

But Baxter wisely avoids the simplistic "one great person" theory of history. Having JFK’s support is not enough to save the post-Apollo space program ? NASA must also work to save itself. In Voyage, this is personified by a fictitious NASA Administrator named Fred Michaels who is selected by Nixon to replace the visionary but ineffective Thomas Paine (in real-life Paine was succeeded by James Fletcher, a proponent of the Space Shuttle). Unlike the politically naïve Paine, Michaels is a savvy pragmatist in the same vein as James Webb or Dan Goldin. He manages to build up public support while convincing Nixon that a Mars mission ? dubbed Project Ares ? could be done affordably with (mostly) off-the-shelf technology.

So instead of the Shuttle NASA develops the Saturn VB, an upgraded Saturn V augmented with four solid rocket boosters (a similar concept is presented in William Barton’s alternate history story "In Saturn Time", which is also about a post-Apollo Mars landing). It is here that the price is paid. In addition to losing the Shuttle, NASA cancels all the lunar landings after Apollo 14, and the Solar System exploration projects are decimated. There is no Pioneer, no Voyager, no Viking, and remaining Mariner missions are scaled back to be mere photographic surveyors for Ares. Ironically, we know more about Mars today than the astronauts and scientists in the novel.

In the end, faced with the deficits of the Reagan Administration, NASA is forced to cut back even further. The planned series of Ares missions is collapsed into a single "flags and footprints" spectacular in 1986. NASA had reached Mars, but in doing so ossified itself as a one-shot "heroic" agency rather than becoming the mature organization that Dan Goldin is still trying to build. This is one of the most fascinating questions raised by the novel: Is Baxter’s alternate space program really any better than the one we actually got?

Though rich in historical and technical detail, Voyage suffers somewhat in structure and execution. For one thing, there is little in the way of suspense. The novel begins with the Ares launch, so the reader already knows that things will work out. This can be rather annoying because a fair portion of the book deals with the crew selection process, focussing on the ambitions of a geologist named Natalie York. But since the reader already knows York will be on the flight, scenes like those in which she agonizes between her career and her personal life lose much of their impact.

Baxter also jumps back and forth between the "past" and the "present", as well as several different sub-plots, over the course of the novel. This results in a rather disjointed narrative, and the weaving of plots doesn’t always work because some threads are more interesting than others. The technique does, however, make the novel seem more like a historical document rather than a work of fiction.

Much of Voyage will be familiar to those versed in space history. Baxter borrows heavily from non-fiction works on the Apollo program, notably Mike Gray’s Angle of Attack and Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon (the basis of the Emmy Award winning HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon). There appear to be whole scenes taken from these books with just the names changed and "Mars" substituted for "Moon". Apollo 13 is glossed over, but Baxter pretty much recreates it in Apollo-N, a horrific incident involving a NERVA-type nuclear rocket engine. The Challenger accident doesn't happen in Voyage (the Ares lander is given that name), but again Baxter resorts to familiar imagery to describe the destruction of a Saturn VB test vehicle ? right down to the solid rocket boosters flying out of the explosion.

In many ways, Voyage is much like the real-life space program it depicts. Despite its flaws, it still manages to inspire and spark a sense of wonder. There is a poignant scene at the end where Natalie York looks up at the Martian sky and notices that the constellations are exactly the same as they are on Earth. Humanity had pushed the limits of technology to undertake an arduous journey across the Solar System ? but in the grand scale of the Universe had managed only the first tiny, child-like step. In our world, even that small step has not yet been taken. It’s about time we did.

Eric Choi is the editor of the Red Planet Gazette.

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