K sleeps. His mind is slow. His synapses fire languidly, once an hour maybe, a metronome. He dreams of things past and yet to come. He is content.
It is 1959. In his hands, sticky with emulsion, is the photograph of the moon’s far side transmitted by Luna 3. The unknown disc is a welter of craters, devoid of the near side’s waterless “seas,” an alien landscape whose blurred features will be given Russian names.
Bring back living things alive.
It is 1960. The Americans give an unfunded dream the name “Apollo.” Sputnik 5 returns two dogs safely to the Earth. K sends Jackie Kennedy a pup.
Put a man in orbit.
April 1961. Preceded by three more dogships (one a dog-killer), Yuri Gagarin puts a bridle ‘round the globe in ninety minutes. K’s call that the N-1 be assigned the highest priority is declined. Across the ocean, a gauntlet is thrown down.
You will fly a woman.
1963, Valentina returns from orbit, is given to the second man in space as bride.
The moon? That is your rival’s task. You will prepare the N-1 to fly a warship.
K watches the premier and his son inspect a wooden mockup of “Orbiting Station-1,” wondering what Tsiolkovski would make of his starry dacha reborn as a bomb-throwing castle.
We must remain ahead! Three men of ours will precede Apollo, a space-walking cosmonaut their Gemini.
October 1964. Komarov, Feoktistov, and Yegorov endure two days in Voskhod 1. Not for years will that spacecraft be shown the world. It is to K a circus-act, a thing of shame. The following March, Alexei Leonov and Pavel Belyaev circle the Earth in Voskhod 2. K sweats out Alexei’s fight for life, wondering how many more men he will show death’s door.
The N-1 is behind schedule. Lend its parts to your rival’s moon-rocket. In the meantime, should we lose out on the landing, we must still beat the Americans to the moon. You will put a Soyuz atop your rival’s Proton. Since we disavow involvement in the “moon race,” you will call the lunar flyby ship the Zond.
January, 1966. K marvels at his Luna 9’s first photographs from the lunar surface. Two months later, Luna 10 becomes a satellite’s satellite, beating the Americans’ Lunar Orbiter 1 by five months.
The N-1 is to send cosmonauts to the moon. Make it so!
April, 1967. On hearing of Komarov’s death, K curses the day he ever heard of rockets, tries to foreswear his work, cannot.
Congratulations, Comrade Chief Designer, on the N-1 mockup test. You will launch by 1969.
January, 1968, K sees his N-1 off. But for its payload, it is perfect, a dream of a machine. Its thirty engines fire true, their thrust 4,620 metric tons. Ten minutes later, a shell packed full of death is circling the Earth. It does not beep like Sputnik. It is louder.
March. Yuri Gagarin dies in the crash of a jet fighter, is laid to rest within the Kremlin wall. This April 14, on Cosmonaut’s Day, K lays his first yearly rose at Gagarin’s tomb, and weeps.
April. Apollo 6, an unmanned test, takes flight from McKinley Rocket Base. Its payload, though built to seem a moonship, is actually an H-bomb. Headed for Earth orbit, the Saturn V goes awry. Miraculously, the warhead detonates 103 miles up. The world’s superpowers stand down, foreswear such weaponry in space, conceal from newsmen what has happened. Postflight investigation shows a failure of the guidance system, common to the smaller Saturn I, whose launch pad, once a pyre, will troubleshoot the computer with a series of unmanned flights. Kennedy’s deadline looms; the next Saturn V must carry men.
October. Apollo 7’s crew have headcolds, but perform a textbook flight.
November. The third Soyuz-model Zond does a quarter million mile figure eight. Its parachute deploys prematurely, a fatal mishap, had it been manned. K stares at its Earthrise photograph, imaging himself its taker. In December, the words of Genesis are read in English from the moon. Apollo 8 disappears behind the moon a final time, making ready for its return. K prays the single on-board motor will fire true. It does.
January 1969. Soyuz 4 and 5 perform the first docking of manned spacecraft in Earth orbit. Two men pass from one ship to the other, performing the transfer in open space, in preparation for how a single cosmonaut is to board his lunar lander.
March. Apollo 9’s Saturn V flies true. Two men orbit the Earth in their moonship Spider, a spacecraft incapable of re-entry.
February. The second N-1 rises. Two motors are accidentally turned off before it clears the tower. At one minute six seconds, a fuel line ruptures. The rocket catches fire. Four seconds later, its computer shuts all engines down, triggering the emergency escape tower. K watches the pilotless spacecraft, meant to swing ‘round the moon, describe a long arc into the sky, descending on its parachutes. I would have killed no men today, he thinks, had there been men aboard, thinking too that, had there been, a daring pilot could have ridden out the fire, knowing first-stage cutoff almost due. Thank God our premier gives no cosmonaut such control. Thank God our men are baggage, lest they be ordered to press on.
May. Apollo 10’s crew orbits the moon, their lunar module Snoopy descending below fifty thousand feet.
July third. The third N-1 stands ready, NASA’s moonbound Saturn too. K thinks of Yuri Gagarin, flown to orbit in the aftermath of the preceding flight’s explosion. Were Khrushchev living, our boys would be racing theirs, he thinks, as the N-1 lifts off unmanned. Almost instantly, it fails. A piece of metal falls into an engine pump; the motor blows apart. Afterward, film will show a fire breaking out. K’s eyes see only the huge cone of the rocket tipping over, falling, crashing back onto its pad and disappearing in a ball of flame. The second pad is damaged too.
July thirteenth. Luna 5 races Apollo 11 to the moon, its mission undisclosed.
“One small step” -- you have failed. Fortunately, the Americans know nothing. Launch a space station.
July 21, Luna 15’s lander crashes.
November 11. Soyuz 6. Two men.
November 12. Soyuz 7. Three.
November 13. Soyuz 8. Two men. First tripartite flight of manned spacecraft. TASS calls the stunt is called “the world’s first space station.” It is neither.
November 18. Apollo 12 puts down on the moon in sight of the American Surveyor 3 probe, landed some years before.
April, 1970. Apollo 13’s crew returns alive.
September. K holds in his two hands a hundred grammes of lunar dust. The Americans own pounds and pounds – but this is his. Were it his child, he could not love it more.
November. Lunokhod 1 “moon car” begins 11-month traverse.
January, 1971. America’s first astronaut returns to space to drive some golf balls on the moon.
June. The Russian people revel in the twenty-three day mission of Salyut 1, whose crew observes the fourth N-1 awaiting launch. The twenty-seventh sees its liftoff. Soon after, the rocket begins to spin so rapidly it comes apart. Two days later all Russia is in mourning. K cannot say if his tears are more for the three men, or his machine.
July. Apollo 15’s crew drives a moon car.
April 1972. Apollo 16’s does the same.
November. N-1 Number Five. At ninety seconds, six engines die. The shock ruptures the other motors’ feedlines, setting the rocket afire. This time, K does not turn his eyes to the escaping capsule, whose empty couches he has no care for. He is counting seconds. Between a hundred seven and 110 elapse before the last N-1 is dead. Thinking of projects gone before, he wills himself to stay alive. He is sixty-six years old. Time remains for his success.
December, the last Apollo. A dozen men have walked the moon.
They are finished. We will best them yet. Perfect your rocket. You will build a base and put down cosmonauts for six weeks at a time.
April 1973. Skylab is dubbed by the U.S. “the world’s first space station.” Damaged on ascent, it is repaired in orbit. It will host three crews that year, then be abandoned.
You are fired. Go. Write your memoirs, if you like.
1976. The final Apollo spacecraft, flown without name or number, docks with Soyuz 19 to perform a handshake in space. Alexei Leonov enjoys his second and final flight, once-grounded would-be Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton his first.
1996. The rocket rises. I can feel it. Have felt it…it is finished. It is impossible I know this, but I do. It is a gift, God’s gift to see me through the interregnum between my last sleep and my awakening. My N-1 is no failure. Eight of them have fired together, a myriad more their engines too, to put this ship on course. Past all my sorry country’s monuments, past the abandoned Mir – bound for the stars we are. I am…yes. At last.
I can see it, my creation. What matter at whose bequest or why? Someday it shall serve another purpose, this ship, this dream. Today it has served mine.
Those fools. Those “supermen.” So unbridled in their conceit they did not guess that so old and frail a man as I might interfere with their divine plan. Might dare defy them, yes. And in so small a way! En route the stars, engines feeble, drifting, across so terrible a distance any divergence in the course would ensure the ending never comes. They slept thinking their ship perfect. As it was. Hand-crafted by my heart. I could not love her more, nor would I harm her, not for anything. But she is mine. I would not have her turned to war, however distant that war may be.
Thus, I turned her. Just a little. Turned her by my own design, by inspiration of when I first tried everything, to take the highest place there was. Back when my goal was but the moon, and there was no time, no testing-time, no time to fire engines on the ground, to prove my N-1, as for Khan. Back then, I meant the KORD, the motor-control computer, to turn one engine off, opposing one that failed, to ensure my beast flew true. It did not work, not then – but I made it work just right, today. Turned Khan’s ship off its course by turning one entire side the N-1s’ motors off, turning off one-half the encircling, final-boosting second stages, to put the ship awry. Success, from failure of long ago. Success.
I could feel the ship resist. Feel her, the spaceship, the starship, yes, sight upon the stars and try and true its course, try to find its way again along the route that Khan had chosen. So many stars he looked at, trying to guess which, if any, might bear a world for him and his. Picked one, finally, as from a sack. Laid its place and speed and vector-towards into the ship’s controls, that its silly on-board brain correct the route if not quite right – but I bested that machine, set its tiny, spineless engines a task they could not serve. Think, Khan, on my N-1s! Can you, do you, dream of it? We are not on course your world, your never-land of future conquest. No. We are lost in space, the two of us, you and I and your band of vicious brothers, sisters, lost forever on this ship I made for you, ill-wrought just for you, smiling, finally, when laid to rest, aboard what you never knew you named precisely right –
– the ship I call the Flying Dutchman, which you, you vegetative thing, named Botany Bay.
Afterward
But for his death in 1966, and another universe’s events, this has been the story of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, Russian rocketry’s “Chief Designer,” anonymous when alive. Some dramatic liberties are taken with material from James Harford’s biography, and types of torture drawn from Solzhenitsyn (though Korolev’s jaw was indeed broken). The pseudonym “K” is a fabrication, but the OS-1 is not; its history may be found on Mark Wade’s “Encyclopedia Astronautica” website.
It is fashionable in certain circles to poke fun at the Russians’ Mir, whose continued maintenance NASA resents. Nor do we pay much respect to our own “conquests.” John Glenn’s first launch pad was dynamited some years back, for instance, for lack of money to protect it from salty ocean breezes. The launch pad where three men died bears but a simple plaque and stencils of “abandon in place” – the most fitting epitaph, perhaps, for Apollo. The last two Saturn Vs lay on their sides today, just one moved inside of late, repainted and refurbished. Skylab fell in 1979, Shuttle too late to save it, unmanned salvation shunned for fears of losing funding of a new station; the second Skylab is in the Smithsonian, a door cut into it for tourists.
All cosmonauts, though (save those given shuttle seats) ride the same rocket as launched Sputnik. Their Soyuz’s design dates to the 1960s, that of Mir’s core to the same years. An also-ran at moonflight, Russia has many times the man-and-woman-years in space than those amassed by astronauts, and looks at Mir not as an antique, but a proud reminder of triumphant days. Our shuttle flies today, as always, without means of launch escape for its crew, of whom seven perished back in ’86 not at the moment of explosion, but on impact with the sea (three recovered emergency air packs showed depletion by the time it took Challenger’s cabin to fall). Three men only of the those flown by Russia have so been hostages to fate – but our land’s post-disaster “redesign” left the shuttle flying solid rockets still (boosters incapable of being shut down), thoughts of fitting the cabin with escape motors (or barring those too-heavy things, a parachute) gone without trace.
If men and women are to live in space, to win the planets, let alone the stars, we must give them means to do so. We must look honestly at two nation’s records in opening the final frontier, and do all we can to make all future treks both practical and safe. We must accept that lives will still be lost, and prepare ourselves to bear the burden. Above all, though, we must do all we can to make use of our resources. There is no time to waste, no energy to squander. Just once we have stirred ourselves to the real frontier of space, lobbying our leaders to name the first true space shuttle Enterprise. This is not enough; indeed, it is a joke. That shuttle never went to space, was not designed to. Its name may soon adorn a little adjunct module to the International Space Station, made to broadcast television. To think that legacy shall send future generations of adventures to a world all but forsaking real spaceflight is ludicrous. Our beloved show, of late, has sent crews to Mars some thirty years hence, their spaceships mere tin cans – but once, three decades past, it was said the year of 1996 saw a three-hundred-foot ship star-bound. We do not think much that was possible, not any of us, not even we who dream of Kirk and Spock and all the rest – but it was. Our enemies could have done it. One day, maybe, someone shall. Let us not leave that time to fate or fancy. Let us fight to make it so.
It is 1959. In his hands, sticky with emulsion, is the photograph of the moon’s far side transmitted by Luna 3. The unknown disc is a welter of craters, devoid of the near side’s waterless “seas,” an alien landscape whose blurred features will be given Russian names.
Bring back living things alive.
It is 1960. The Americans give an unfunded dream the name “Apollo.” Sputnik 5 returns two dogs safely to the Earth. K sends Jackie Kennedy a pup.
Put a man in orbit.
April 1961. Preceded by three more dogships (one a dog-killer), Yuri Gagarin puts a bridle ‘round the globe in ninety minutes. K’s call that the N-1 be assigned the highest priority is declined. Across the ocean, a gauntlet is thrown down.
You will fly a woman.
1963, Valentina returns from orbit, is given to the second man in space as bride.
The moon? That is your rival’s task. You will prepare the N-1 to fly a warship.
K watches the premier and his son inspect a wooden mockup of “Orbiting Station-1,” wondering what Tsiolkovski would make of his starry dacha reborn as a bomb-throwing castle.
We must remain ahead! Three men of ours will precede Apollo, a space-walking cosmonaut their Gemini.
October 1964. Komarov, Feoktistov, and Yegorov endure two days in Voskhod 1. Not for years will that spacecraft be shown the world. It is to K a circus-act, a thing of shame. The following March, Alexei Leonov and Pavel Belyaev circle the Earth in Voskhod 2. K sweats out Alexei’s fight for life, wondering how many more men he will show death’s door.
The N-1 is behind schedule. Lend its parts to your rival’s moon-rocket. In the meantime, should we lose out on the landing, we must still beat the Americans to the moon. You will put a Soyuz atop your rival’s Proton. Since we disavow involvement in the “moon race,” you will call the lunar flyby ship the Zond.
January, 1966. K marvels at his Luna 9’s first photographs from the lunar surface. Two months later, Luna 10 becomes a satellite’s satellite, beating the Americans’ Lunar Orbiter 1 by five months.
The N-1 is to send cosmonauts to the moon. Make it so!
April, 1967. On hearing of Komarov’s death, K curses the day he ever heard of rockets, tries to foreswear his work, cannot.
Congratulations, Comrade Chief Designer, on the N-1 mockup test. You will launch by 1969.
January, 1968, K sees his N-1 off. But for its payload, it is perfect, a dream of a machine. Its thirty engines fire true, their thrust 4,620 metric tons. Ten minutes later, a shell packed full of death is circling the Earth. It does not beep like Sputnik. It is louder.
March. Yuri Gagarin dies in the crash of a jet fighter, is laid to rest within the Kremlin wall. This April 14, on Cosmonaut’s Day, K lays his first yearly rose at Gagarin’s tomb, and weeps.
April. Apollo 6, an unmanned test, takes flight from McKinley Rocket Base. Its payload, though built to seem a moonship, is actually an H-bomb. Headed for Earth orbit, the Saturn V goes awry. Miraculously, the warhead detonates 103 miles up. The world’s superpowers stand down, foreswear such weaponry in space, conceal from newsmen what has happened. Postflight investigation shows a failure of the guidance system, common to the smaller Saturn I, whose launch pad, once a pyre, will troubleshoot the computer with a series of unmanned flights. Kennedy’s deadline looms; the next Saturn V must carry men.
October. Apollo 7’s crew have headcolds, but perform a textbook flight.
November. The third Soyuz-model Zond does a quarter million mile figure eight. Its parachute deploys prematurely, a fatal mishap, had it been manned. K stares at its Earthrise photograph, imaging himself its taker. In December, the words of Genesis are read in English from the moon. Apollo 8 disappears behind the moon a final time, making ready for its return. K prays the single on-board motor will fire true. It does.
January 1969. Soyuz 4 and 5 perform the first docking of manned spacecraft in Earth orbit. Two men pass from one ship to the other, performing the transfer in open space, in preparation for how a single cosmonaut is to board his lunar lander.
March. Apollo 9’s Saturn V flies true. Two men orbit the Earth in their moonship Spider, a spacecraft incapable of re-entry.
February. The second N-1 rises. Two motors are accidentally turned off before it clears the tower. At one minute six seconds, a fuel line ruptures. The rocket catches fire. Four seconds later, its computer shuts all engines down, triggering the emergency escape tower. K watches the pilotless spacecraft, meant to swing ‘round the moon, describe a long arc into the sky, descending on its parachutes. I would have killed no men today, he thinks, had there been men aboard, thinking too that, had there been, a daring pilot could have ridden out the fire, knowing first-stage cutoff almost due. Thank God our premier gives no cosmonaut such control. Thank God our men are baggage, lest they be ordered to press on.
May. Apollo 10’s crew orbits the moon, their lunar module Snoopy descending below fifty thousand feet.
July third. The third N-1 stands ready, NASA’s moonbound Saturn too. K thinks of Yuri Gagarin, flown to orbit in the aftermath of the preceding flight’s explosion. Were Khrushchev living, our boys would be racing theirs, he thinks, as the N-1 lifts off unmanned. Almost instantly, it fails. A piece of metal falls into an engine pump; the motor blows apart. Afterward, film will show a fire breaking out. K’s eyes see only the huge cone of the rocket tipping over, falling, crashing back onto its pad and disappearing in a ball of flame. The second pad is damaged too.
July thirteenth. Luna 5 races Apollo 11 to the moon, its mission undisclosed.
“One small step” -- you have failed. Fortunately, the Americans know nothing. Launch a space station.
July 21, Luna 15’s lander crashes.
November 11. Soyuz 6. Two men.
November 12. Soyuz 7. Three.
November 13. Soyuz 8. Two men. First tripartite flight of manned spacecraft. TASS calls the stunt is called “the world’s first space station.” It is neither.
November 18. Apollo 12 puts down on the moon in sight of the American Surveyor 3 probe, landed some years before.
April, 1970. Apollo 13’s crew returns alive.
September. K holds in his two hands a hundred grammes of lunar dust. The Americans own pounds and pounds – but this is his. Were it his child, he could not love it more.
November. Lunokhod 1 “moon car” begins 11-month traverse.
January, 1971. America’s first astronaut returns to space to drive some golf balls on the moon.
June. The Russian people revel in the twenty-three day mission of Salyut 1, whose crew observes the fourth N-1 awaiting launch. The twenty-seventh sees its liftoff. Soon after, the rocket begins to spin so rapidly it comes apart. Two days later all Russia is in mourning. K cannot say if his tears are more for the three men, or his machine.
July. Apollo 15’s crew drives a moon car.
April 1972. Apollo 16’s does the same.
November. N-1 Number Five. At ninety seconds, six engines die. The shock ruptures the other motors’ feedlines, setting the rocket afire. This time, K does not turn his eyes to the escaping capsule, whose empty couches he has no care for. He is counting seconds. Between a hundred seven and 110 elapse before the last N-1 is dead. Thinking of projects gone before, he wills himself to stay alive. He is sixty-six years old. Time remains for his success.
December, the last Apollo. A dozen men have walked the moon.
They are finished. We will best them yet. Perfect your rocket. You will build a base and put down cosmonauts for six weeks at a time.
April 1973. Skylab is dubbed by the U.S. “the world’s first space station.” Damaged on ascent, it is repaired in orbit. It will host three crews that year, then be abandoned.
You are fired. Go. Write your memoirs, if you like.
1976. The final Apollo spacecraft, flown without name or number, docks with Soyuz 19 to perform a handshake in space. Alexei Leonov enjoys his second and final flight, once-grounded would-be Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton his first.
1996. The rocket rises. I can feel it. Have felt it…it is finished. It is impossible I know this, but I do. It is a gift, God’s gift to see me through the interregnum between my last sleep and my awakening. My N-1 is no failure. Eight of them have fired together, a myriad more their engines too, to put this ship on course. Past all my sorry country’s monuments, past the abandoned Mir – bound for the stars we are. I am…yes. At last.
I can see it, my creation. What matter at whose bequest or why? Someday it shall serve another purpose, this ship, this dream. Today it has served mine.
Those fools. Those “supermen.” So unbridled in their conceit they did not guess that so old and frail a man as I might interfere with their divine plan. Might dare defy them, yes. And in so small a way! En route the stars, engines feeble, drifting, across so terrible a distance any divergence in the course would ensure the ending never comes. They slept thinking their ship perfect. As it was. Hand-crafted by my heart. I could not love her more, nor would I harm her, not for anything. But she is mine. I would not have her turned to war, however distant that war may be.
Thus, I turned her. Just a little. Turned her by my own design, by inspiration of when I first tried everything, to take the highest place there was. Back when my goal was but the moon, and there was no time, no testing-time, no time to fire engines on the ground, to prove my N-1, as for Khan. Back then, I meant the KORD, the motor-control computer, to turn one engine off, opposing one that failed, to ensure my beast flew true. It did not work, not then – but I made it work just right, today. Turned Khan’s ship off its course by turning one entire side the N-1s’ motors off, turning off one-half the encircling, final-boosting second stages, to put the ship awry. Success, from failure of long ago. Success.
I could feel the ship resist. Feel her, the spaceship, the starship, yes, sight upon the stars and try and true its course, try to find its way again along the route that Khan had chosen. So many stars he looked at, trying to guess which, if any, might bear a world for him and his. Picked one, finally, as from a sack. Laid its place and speed and vector-towards into the ship’s controls, that its silly on-board brain correct the route if not quite right – but I bested that machine, set its tiny, spineless engines a task they could not serve. Think, Khan, on my N-1s! Can you, do you, dream of it? We are not on course your world, your never-land of future conquest. No. We are lost in space, the two of us, you and I and your band of vicious brothers, sisters, lost forever on this ship I made for you, ill-wrought just for you, smiling, finally, when laid to rest, aboard what you never knew you named precisely right –
– the ship I call the Flying Dutchman, which you, you vegetative thing, named Botany Bay.
Afterward
But for his death in 1966, and another universe’s events, this has been the story of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, Russian rocketry’s “Chief Designer,” anonymous when alive. Some dramatic liberties are taken with material from James Harford’s biography, and types of torture drawn from Solzhenitsyn (though Korolev’s jaw was indeed broken). The pseudonym “K” is a fabrication, but the OS-1 is not; its history may be found on Mark Wade’s “Encyclopedia Astronautica” website.
It is fashionable in certain circles to poke fun at the Russians’ Mir, whose continued maintenance NASA resents. Nor do we pay much respect to our own “conquests.” John Glenn’s first launch pad was dynamited some years back, for instance, for lack of money to protect it from salty ocean breezes. The launch pad where three men died bears but a simple plaque and stencils of “abandon in place” – the most fitting epitaph, perhaps, for Apollo. The last two Saturn Vs lay on their sides today, just one moved inside of late, repainted and refurbished. Skylab fell in 1979, Shuttle too late to save it, unmanned salvation shunned for fears of losing funding of a new station; the second Skylab is in the Smithsonian, a door cut into it for tourists.
All cosmonauts, though (save those given shuttle seats) ride the same rocket as launched Sputnik. Their Soyuz’s design dates to the 1960s, that of Mir’s core to the same years. An also-ran at moonflight, Russia has many times the man-and-woman-years in space than those amassed by astronauts, and looks at Mir not as an antique, but a proud reminder of triumphant days. Our shuttle flies today, as always, without means of launch escape for its crew, of whom seven perished back in ’86 not at the moment of explosion, but on impact with the sea (three recovered emergency air packs showed depletion by the time it took Challenger’s cabin to fall). Three men only of the those flown by Russia have so been hostages to fate – but our land’s post-disaster “redesign” left the shuttle flying solid rockets still (boosters incapable of being shut down), thoughts of fitting the cabin with escape motors (or barring those too-heavy things, a parachute) gone without trace.
If men and women are to live in space, to win the planets, let alone the stars, we must give them means to do so. We must look honestly at two nation’s records in opening the final frontier, and do all we can to make all future treks both practical and safe. We must accept that lives will still be lost, and prepare ourselves to bear the burden. Above all, though, we must do all we can to make use of our resources. There is no time to waste, no energy to squander. Just once we have stirred ourselves to the real frontier of space, lobbying our leaders to name the first true space shuttle Enterprise. This is not enough; indeed, it is a joke. That shuttle never went to space, was not designed to. Its name may soon adorn a little adjunct module to the International Space Station, made to broadcast television. To think that legacy shall send future generations of adventures to a world all but forsaking real spaceflight is ludicrous. Our beloved show, of late, has sent crews to Mars some thirty years hence, their spaceships mere tin cans – but once, three decades past, it was said the year of 1996 saw a three-hundred-foot ship star-bound. We do not think much that was possible, not any of us, not even we who dream of Kirk and Spock and all the rest – but it was. Our enemies could have done it. One day, maybe, someone shall. Let us not leave that time to fate or fancy. Let us fight to make it so.
